Color It True: Impressions of Cinema 9781501383113, 9781501383076, 9781501383090

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction A Map of Many Colors
Of Blue
Of Pink
Of White
Of Purple
Of Orange
Of Gray
Of Yellow
Of Black
Of Brown
Of Mauve
Of Red
Of Green
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Color It True

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Color It True Impressions of Cinema Murray Pomerance

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © Murray Pomerance, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Bloomsbury.pub/color-it-true Cover design by Eleanor Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pomerance, Murray, 1946– author. Title: Color it true : impressions of cinema / Murray Pomerance. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021029954 (print) | LCCN 2021029955 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501383113 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501383090 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501383106 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Colors in motion pictures. | Color motion pictures. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.C546 P66 2022 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.C546 (ebook) | DDC 791.4301–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029954 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029955 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-8311-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-8309-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-8310-6 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

to Linda and Mark

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The unravelling of a riddle is the purest and most basic act of the human mind. VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Tous les mauvais souvenirs, trente ou quarante ans après, deviennet des bons souvenirs. JEAN-LUC GODARD

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  xii

Introduction A Map of Many Colors  1 1 Of Blue  17 A Blue Parade: Irene • Honestly, Blue: Les parapluies de Cherbourg [The Umbrellas of Cherbourg] • Blue Narcissus: Anna Karenina (2012) • Blue Distance: The Thief of Bagdad • A Blue Provocation: Death in Venice • A Civil Blue: Shane • A Blue Tease: Psycho: I • Airless Blue: Le grand bleu [The Big Blue]

2 Of Pink  43 Marie et Marie: Marie Antoinette • Pink Again: Vertigo: I • A Blush: The Pink Panther • Drink Me: The Nutty Professor • Fitting Pink: Arizona Dream • Pink Fire: The Passenger [Professione: Reporter] • Pink World: Written on the Wind: I (1956) • The Pink Line: Fight Club

3 Of White  67 White Redemption: Fahrenheit 451 • Weisse: Marathon Man • Snow White: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams: I • Smashing!: The Bed Sitting Room • Grave White: Forbidden Planet • The Whitest Blood Around: Alien • The Prince: The Godfather: Part II • The White Butterfly: Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence [Senjo no Meri Kurisumasu] • White Presence: The Band Wagon

4 Of Purple  91 Disney Purple: Fantasia, Aladdin: I • The Purple Blade: The Fall of the Roman Empire • Grinning Purple: Batman • Verbal Purple: The Purple Rose of Cairo • Purple Fingers: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. • Purple Tensions: Magnificent Obsession

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CONTENTS

5 Of Orange  113 Mad Orange: Alice Through the Looking Glass • Modest Orange: Aladdin: II • An Orange Meow: The Long Goodbye • Orange for the Adventurer: Close Encounters of the Third Kind • An Orange Shield: Vertigo: II • Temptation Orange: Written on the Wind: II • Death of a Fruit: The Godfather • Burnt Orange: Jungle Book

6 Of Gray  137 Historical Gray: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; Lord of the Rings; The Hobbit • Gray Style: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit: I • Inert Gray: Donnie Darko • Gray Proportion: 2001: A Space Odyssey: I • The Gray Vigil: A Ghost Story • Screen Gray: Arrival • The Gray Gulag: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich • Schematic Gray: Red Desert [Il deserto rosso]

7 Of Yellow  161 Paved Yellow: The Wizard of Oz: I • Celestial Yellow: Little Buddha • Yellow and Tender: The Fugitive • Yellow Crust: Watchmen • Mother’s Yellow: Diary of a Mad Housewife • Reflective Yellow: To Catch a Thief, The Dreamers • Yellow Risk: Marnie: I

8 Of Black  185 A Tale of Horror and Imagination: The Fly • Black Faith: The Silver Chalice • Seeing Past Black: The Lone Ranger (1949–57); The Lone Ranger (1956); The Lone Ranger (2013) • Fate: Treasure Island • A Black Stream: Grease • The Black Father: Star Wars • Black Search: Psycho: II • Jocko: In the Heat of the Night

9 Of Brown  211 Continuous Brown: Lawrence of Arabia • Tyranny in Beige: Interiors • The Brown Frontier: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly • A Brown River: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory • A Brown Chagrin: L’heure d’été [Summer Hours] • Democratic Brown: North by Northwest • Brown Filth: The Magic Christian

CONTENTS

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10 Of Mauve  239 Sleight of Hand: Meet Me in St. Louis • Mauve in Rotation: The King and I • Natural Mauve: Amadeus • Hot Mauve: Blow-Up: I • Retreat: Splendor in the Grass: I

11 Of Red  259 Explode: Splendor in the Grass: II • Stench: The Ten Commandments • Fire Apple: Rebel Without a Cause • The Red Clue: Cries & Whispers • Red River: The Talented Mr. Ripley • Choose This Red: The Red Shoes • Rational Red: 2001: A Space Odyssey: II • Macula: Marnie: II

12 Of Green  287 The Green and Final Sea: Bonnie and Clyde • The Green Fire: Green Lantern • The Water Mill’s Green: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams: II • Spectacular Green: The Wizard of Oz: II • To Swim and Not to Swim: Leave Her to Heaven; Call Me by Your Name • Green Boy: The Boy with Green Hair; Bigger Than Life • Green Redemption: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit: II • Green of Dreams: How Green Was My Valley • Green Is the Wind: Blow-Up: II

Works Cited  311 Index  321

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is never really possible to properly thank all the myriad helpers who, along the way, have done something to make a book possible. And, as anyone who has written knows too well, it is alarming and wonderful how the very tiniest comment or reflection can inspire a voyage. Five great art directors shared their thought with me at various times. To listen to an art director talk is to reenvision not only a film but also a world. I am grateful to the late Robert Boyle, the late Henry Bumstead, the late Assheton Gorton, the late Lawrence Paull, and Dean Tavoularis. I was taught long ago by Abraham Kaplan (to whose memory I am grateful as well) that in making, the Creator uses both the “creative eye” and the “critical eye,” often in alternation; and these remarkable artists, in their way of being and in their work, offer perfect evidence. Numerous individuals have shown me extreme generosity. I am grateful to the late John Calvert (Hollywood), Alex Clayton (Bristol), Michael DeAngelis (Chicago), Peter Falconer (Bristol), Lester Friedman (Rochester), Cynthia Fuchs (Washington, DC), Richard W. Haines (New York), Barbara Hall (Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills), Tom Hemingway (Coventry), Louise Hilton (Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills), Jason Jacobs (Brisbane), Anastasia Kerameos (BFI Library, London), Bill Krohn (Long Beach), Narayan Khandekar (Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge), Lillian Michelson (Woodland Hills), Christopher Olsen (Orange County), Breeze Outhwaite (Surrey NanoSystems, Newhaven), Sean Redmond (Melbourne), Jenny Romero (Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills), William Rothman (Miami), Bob Rubin (Los Angeles), Steven Rybin (Mankato), Daniel Sacco (Toronto), Matthew Solomon (Ann Arbor), Sarah Street (Bristol), Peter Treherne (London), Nadine Turner (Special Research Collections, Davidson Library, University of California at Santa Barbara), Daniel Varndell (Southampton), Linda Ruth Williams (Exeter), and Joshua Yumibe (Lansing). Working with Bloomsbury to make this book has been a consummate pleasure. A smile of thanks to my colleagues there: Erin Duffy, Katie Gallof, Stephanie Grace-Petinos, Kalyani Kanekal, Jonathan Nash, Faye Robinson, Eleanor Rose.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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I have never for a moment had the least talent at rendering the world on paper or canvas. I love to dabble, but I just cannot make the transposition. My partner and friend Nellie Perret does, however, and has for decades opened my eyes to the possibilities of the visual world, for which gift no gratitude in my power is great enough. Her mother and father, the late Nell Perret and the late George Perret, lived in the art world and shared that world with me. Every day in their presence I learned something new. My late brother-in-law Gabriel Perret brought his knowledge, too, and enriched my experience of art. Yet, the person whose eyes invariably pick up details that I didn’t imagine one could see is my son Ariel Pomerance, whose contribution to this book is colored true.

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Introduction A Map of Many Colors

Dans le bleu cristal du matin Suivons le mirage lointain! BAUDELAIRE

Tracing When he writes of “that green evening when our death begins,” Philip Larkin goes beyond pointing to the particular plateau of inexperience when we took our first breath; beyond noting how, green as striplings, we started in a “green evening,” not knowing the world. Without the word “green” his temporal reference already holds strong: we all had what, looking back later on, we call a beginning. But the word “green,” that “green evening” goes far past pointing, adds more than a date on an autobiographical calendar. Lay away time, and concentrate on the “green” of that evening. See in your mind the mint green waters under Monet’s trudging coal carriers (c. 1875) as, also in a green evening, they move to-and-fro on gangplanks hooked to their barge. A “green evening” is fresh and unpresuming, boldly open to the future, enticing as no simple “evening” is, filled with hints. The word “green” in Larkin’s poetic line makes an impression. Not in the sense that it strikes one as significant or assumes importance, but that it presses into the soft surface of receptivity to leave a mark. We are marked by color: a physical act not a state of mind: impressed as in stamped, touched, affected upon the skin, and thence in being. Weighted and freighted. (Movie color has stunned, impressed me all my life.) Watching color onscreen goes beyond intelligence and appraisal, becomes a part of our embodied experience. Alchemy of a peculiar sort, screen color

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is substantially different from color as we see it “objectively” in the world,1 partly in that it is bounded off by enticing and dreadful darkness, partly in that it is founded by and stimulating by way of the passion of narrative moments, and partly in that it is magnified onscreen.2 It is in our lives—that is, in our bodies—that we watch films, not in abstraction. At their most significant, films affect our lives (as we understand them, and it is only to some degree that we can understand our lives). Film as experience is elusive. If it is a somewhat routine matter to consider cinema’s content, its aesthetic and/or historical form, and the politique and biases of its construction, still we have that rara avis, bird on the wing, the film in its motion, instigating, pushing, drawing out. The film as real. (Film is always real in itself.) Not: this film is showing us something real. That would be something different. On the reality, or “reality,” of what is shown in a film, there is no better resource, I think, than Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. But the phrase “film as real” also points to the film as we watch it as an experience that is real to us, just as we are real to ourselves having the experience of watching and being absorbed, just as the experience of watching and being absorbed is set in what we would call our reality. The sight of the film is a real sight. Ingrid Bergman climbing the hills of Stromboli (1950): a real woman, real geography, really seen. If it does not picture a reality potentially like our reality (Yves Montand driving a truck loaded with dynamite near a precipice in Le salaire de la peur [1953]), still it is seen (just as what we call realities are seen) and appreciated (just as what we call realities are appreciated) in a real seeing, thus invoking a real appreciation. Real, neither theoretical nor metaphorical. Real first, before evaluative, before we name it. A reality outside of language. “Sometimes patients with PCA [posterior cortical atrophy] may be able to recognize and match colors but unable to name them, a so-called color anomia” (Sacks, Eye 16). Recognize but not name. David Batchelor notes that color provokes us to run out of words. There is a delicious irony to the thought of being touched, pressed, impressed by film color. For almost its first fifty years, most cinema was projected in black and white, notwithstanding that some early films were

Aware that the question of whether or how we perceive an “objective” world has raised philosophical debate for centuries, I ask in these pages, nudging past Alfred Schutz and his many followers, how we experience the color of movies notwithstanding these debates, since I take it as fundamental that our experience of movies is special and different from other experience. Film watching is a unique voyage. 2 Screen size diminished radically only after the millennium. The screen of my childhood was often formatted for CinemaScope, but even in regular films showed the Academy ratio of 1.33:1 on screens twenty-five to thirty feet high—inside special auditoria that were notable for their darkness and set well apart from the routine spaces of everyday life. 1

A MAP OF MANY COLORS

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painted, tinted, and toned in color by hand and by stencil (on which, see Yumibe). When after the mid-1920s one saw a feature in a theater, that feature was almost invariably black and white, nor did the black-and-white effect come to audiences as any kind of surprise. William Rothman has suggested, in fact, that “the transition to color was much more momentous than is generally recognized … it was (at least) as consequential, for the way films are experienced, as the transition to sound” (personal communication, May 2019). Certainly in the 1950s, for me, film color in itself was a primary and thrilling part of going to the movies. (On the screen I saw colors I had never known before.) Technicolor, born around 1916 but existing in only rudimentary form until the mid-1930s (and lasting then, in its full camera-to-print form, until 1955), offered a specific operation whereby the black-and-white records of three primaries, red, green, and blue (all shot at once in a huge camera triply loaded), were transmitted to three strips of what was called “matrix stock” (matrix: mother; matrix: womb). The matrix stock was coated with a soft gelatin emulsion that would be etched by exposure to light, etched literally, as in “have an impression made upon.” Peaks and troughs were formed, as upon a rubber stamp. Then, in a machine with delicately controlled rollers, against these matrices, one after another, now soaked with dyes (cyan, magenta, or yellow3) that they thirstily drank up (under very specific control), and with the rinse temperature meticulously controlled, blank stock could be pressed (thrice pressed and true) so as to yield: color. Color as impression, both metaphorical and literal. The color moment as an impression of cinema. Even later, as negative film came into fashion, laboratory work was very frequently done at Technicolor, the original being converted to matrices that were dyed. (A naïve impression: one knew nothing then of what this magical Technicolor thing was but the name came to be synonymous with screen color: “Color by Technicolor.”) The color moment as an impression, yes. Not scene, not shot, not sequence, not story. All those tags for dividing film into “parts,” useful to those who collaborate to produce and fashion it, do not point to what we see. It is the color moment, which may be quite diffuse and complex, idiosyncratic, and resonating, that impresses the viewer. Edits and camera angles, lenses, performative tricks, scripted conversations—all these are fascinating to talk about afterward, but they are not the terms in which we entertain cinematic experience. Most viewers do not knowledgeably discern shots or see edits. For the (eager) viewer, the experience of color, in and out of film, is always and can only be momentary; and so is the experience of film altogether. It is moments we grasp, keep, and remember (in our fragile

3

The curious reader can find the exact recipes in Cornwell-Clyne.

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way). Cinematic color is thus always rising up from the past, the vault of our views, affecting the present moment of recollection as part of a hope for a future understanding and harmony. In this way, color perception is dreamy. And it is personally that we see color onscreen, drawing from the roots of our visual experience. All evocative color in film rises up from an actual, personal past, and while we can generally rationalize the past as history, broadly inclusive, when we experienced it then and as we experience the recollection of it now it was and is idiosyncratic. At the same time, cinematic color processes gave variant assurances of stability. Technicolor, working upward from refrigerable black-and-white separations, could execute matrices considerably later and effect fresh prints; but only presuming good storage over time.4 With Eastmancolor negative, there was discernable fading over time, especially after several passes through theater projectors or after decades of storage.5 The same kind of delicate vulnerability applies to oil paintings and other objets d’art. Santiago Cuellar et al. write, “The discourse in the Western world on color loss at the surface of art objects and attempts of reconstruction go [sic] back to the early 19th century,” citing as well contemporary restorations of sixteenth-century works (2). The color we see in museums and in movie theaters is momentary not only in our living experience as we see but also in the sense that time threatens it. The moment, I have written elsewhere, is the experiential atom of cinema, the foundation upon which stand both our feeling of being touched and our sense of order, aesthetic and rational. Because cinema is ever-flowing (Truffaut’s character Ferrand in La nuit américaine [1973] says, “Films advance as trains, you know. Like trains in the night”); because we are not free to truthfully objectify it, the moment once experienced is lost in the stores and can only be dreamed. Lost in the flow of moments; dreamed as a wish. The cinematic moment, profoundly visual, is unlike the textual moment to which it is unfortunately too often likened (and which can now, as it could centuries ago, be easily revisited). Cinema is made of shape, tone, color, position, centrality, marginality, density, movement, what is in the frame and what is outside, light, as well as sound heard in light. (Sound that is advancing, and visions that are advancing, too.) Story analysis, delightful as it may be, and rewarding as it may sometimes seem, is entirely insufficient to address the quality and endurance and pith of the cinematic moment. “Just click your heels three times and say, ‘There’s no place like home.’ ” Always we must try to break the boundaries of language in order to say, but in seeing the boundaries are never present.

Robert Harris told me of the difficulties he experienced with the badly warehoused yellow record of Vertigo when he and James Katz began the restoration project in 1996. 5 Kodak has just in 2021 announced plans to release a fade-resistant negative film. 4

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More than nominal, cinema is adjectival and adverbial—we take it as having qualities. It is in its adjectival, adverbial essence that cinema is personal, that in our persons we take the impression of colors. A color, its use and movement, reminds us of something outside of itself: adjectives and adverbs are always crossing borders. The [[[sweet]]] green of the [[[turbulent]]] waters in The Naked Spur (1953). The way his (Handschiegl-processed6) [[[secretive]]] red cloak makes the Phantom confront us [[[madly]]] in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Adjectives, adverbs penetrate the surface of the colored object—of color itself—and connect its depths to our depths. Only through the adjective and the adverb can color ever hope to become nominative and active. Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote, Why did the colour of the foaming waves, this abyss which opened and closed again; why did this thing which approached in heavy rain spattered by froth; why did this small discoloured ship (the customs tender it was) working its way towards us, this ship and the cave of water, the heaving wave rolling along with it—why did the colour of these things seem to me (seem! Seem! I knew very well that it was so!) to contain not only the whole world, but my whole life as well? This colour, which was a grey and a livid brown and a darkness and a foam, which held an abyss and a plunge, a death and a life, a dread and a lust—why here, before my gazing eye, my enchanted breast, was my whole life, past, future, rolling towards me, foaming up in inexhaustible presence? And why was this immense moment, this sacred enjoying of the Self and at the same time of the world, which widened out towards me as though its breast had opened, why was this twofoldness, this interwoven, this outer and inner, this intermingling You bound up with my gazing? Why—unless colour is a language in which the wordless, the everlasting, the immense, abandon themselves …? (152) We are surely not free to venture beyond the boundaries of the self. Who do I take myself to be, then, as I write these pages? (Who was I, watching the films of my childhood?) I am given no choice but to be thinking of cinema a peculiar way, as a person born in 1946 and raised in a city where there were two or three A-run theaters and half a dozen B’s, outside (but not far from) the United States and with uninterrupted commercial intercourse with Hollywood. For me, anticipation of film was either entirely nonexistent (while I was a child) or confined to whatever inspiration might flow from advertisements (strictly black and white) in the newspaper. Worth stress, perhaps: there were no advertisements for, or

6

On this film, see Fischer 42–6; on the Handschiegl Process, see Yumibe 135.

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warnings of, film available to me in any other venue, barring the immense vitrines of the theaters themselves, where “coming soon” photographs might occasionally appear. Ads, very often tiny and more than a dozen to a page, were graphic, not photographic, with characters and situations drawn by skilled artists and flowing from the domain of comic books or high art, not from photorealism. The only photographs of movie scenes one would see were publicity glossies, typically eight or so per film, inside locked window displays, but one came to know it would turn out that the moments revealed in them would be unlocatable in the film itself (because the photographs had been carefully posed for advertisement, not printed from excised frames); to these kinds of photographs7 one paid but cursory attention in any event: they could convey a sense of the setting—prairie, jungle, wet city streets—of the character types, of the sorts of key confrontational instances: a tough man pointing a gun at a soft-looking man and woman in one another’s arms; a (too silently) shrieking woman who stared offscreen with her eyes bugging out.8 These images aimed to lure the passing public were almost invariably in black and white, even if the films they referenced were in color and when, late in the 1950s, those images started showing up in color that color was warped, bleached, aggravated, unreal to the film moment itself—albeit the comparison could be made only afterward. With the very smallest number of exceptions—John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock come to mind—directorial identity and presence were missing altogether, surely for young viewers, so that when one looked at an advertisement one harvested, first, image and, secondly, star names. Nobody was heading off to watch “Nicholas Ray films” or “Robert Aldrich films” or “Martin Ritt films” or “Leo McCarey films” or “George Cukor films” the way one ran off to see the new Rory Calhoun or Robert Mitchum or John Wayne or Susan Hayward or Marilyn Monroe.9 Crucially, the run-zone-clearance distribution system still in place to a significant degree was ensuring that any film would play for a limited time (twelve weeks or more—the local booking for The Greatest Show on Earth [1952]—was an eternity) and then … disappear. Disappear entirely and utterly, into the graveyard. In the mid-1950s, W. S. Van Dyke’s 1932 classic, Tarzan the Ape Man was rereleased (those of us who, aged six or so, saw it then thought we were watching a new film), and here the hero visited, after a long trek, the Elephants’ Graveyard (inside a canyon, filled with skeletons

The exact sort that in Day for Night Ferrand dreams himself as a little boy stealing from a theater in Paris, reaching desperately through an iron grating to get them. The film Truffaut’s little boy wants to “own” this way is Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). 8 A classic example is Alix Talton in mid-shriek in The Deadly Mantis (1957). 9 Or, for viewers as young as I was, the new Guy Madison, Johnny Weissmuller, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Charlton Heston, and Betty Hutton. 7

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as far as the eye could see).10 That was like the place films went to, it seemed. A canyon that nobody would find (filmed in California). For recording and holding film, there existed no publicly available mechanisms until video recording became possible in the 1970s. Film reviews in newspapers were very largely plot synopses (drawn from press kits) and glib judgmental pronouncements to seduce the reader. The films one saw could therefore be treasured only as memories. They persisted as memories and were recollected as having been memories in the first place. And memory seized film not as story, not as a chain of dramatic events, but as bold and fleeting visions. It may be that today, with so many “library” platforms available, from DVD through Blu-Ray through downloads of one kind or another through streaming, no one troubles to remember anything much about the films they see. But as film is continuously unspooling, even while watching directly we are affected by the faculty of memory; all of what we see passes away as we see it, and our retention, for whatever length of time, is a trace.

Color Struck Colors have made their impressions through a long history, one that far antedates cinema and to which cinema has always paid homage. One could point to Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, with John the Baptist showing brilliant shocking streaks of red in his hair, and think of the flashing red of Moira Shearer’s hair in The Red Shoes, especially when her character Vicky Page is dancing. Or a “barbaric,” deep, splendid blue and red in the early stained glass of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Arnold 32), the “barbarism” being an aspect not only of the glass production but also of the color effect; the throbbing blue skies of three-strip Technicolor (as in His Majesty O’Keefe [1954]) had this barbarism. We could consider the disempowering green of The Arnolfini Marriage (see Truffaut’s La chambre verte [The Green Room (1978)]) and the forest in Vertigo (1958). Or the disarming yellow of Van Gogh’s sunflowers and the somehow yellower, alien atmosphere of Dijon yellow surrounding them and the golden gown Scarlett O’Hara wears in mourning, seen against the amber light of her salon, in Gone with the Wind (1939). Or, to plunge forthrightly into Romance, the legendary blue flower, as found in the 1800 novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). John Gage writes of how the hero there falls asleep and dreams of setting out on a quest for the flower, which takes him to a remote cave in a wild country filled with bluish light

Tarzan and Jane rode African elephants, as it seemed. One did not know that the animals were from India and wearing fake ears and tusks. 10

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reflected from a fountain. Later, he finds himself in a meadow surrounded by dark-blue rocks under a dark-blue sky, where he discovers the tall light-blue flower in whose centre he sees a face. The face turns out to be that of his beloved. (186) In the imagination of this text’s reader, the dark-blue rocks under a darkblue sky are ineffably enchanting in their mystery, perhaps seizing memories of bluestone or lapis, lapis lazuli expensive and perilous to trek for;11 yet not a mere blue, that thing to which we casually apply a name, but a darkblue upon a dark-blue, the two dark blues only slightly different so that discernment between them is possible, and both of them deeper than what we may suspect is found in nature (the blue-lit reconstructed murder scene in Murder on the Orient Express [1974]). Against this vibrating, mysterious blue ground is the “tall light-blue flower.” Not a mere blue, nor a lightblue, but tall and light-blue, gaining sunshine from the height, begging appreciation and a tender response (Paul Newman’s diamond blue eyes as, in Torn Curtain [1966], he stares at Prof. Lindt’s secret formulae spread across a blackboard soon to be covered up). In cinema, impressions are made upon not intelligence but taste: value, sense of proportion, sense of gravity, and—the so often denigrated treasure— sentiment. The picture is made to stun and charge. We ought not forget that cinema itself came about in 1890, just after the “Impressionists” had their eight shows in Paris, 1874–86.12 The “impression” is thus a telltale mark in the history of art. For the French Impressionists, the atelier (for the filmmaker, after the early 1930s, the sound stage) was a bounded cloister to be escaped, so that the outside world, full of fresh air and form, could reach out and impress both sensibility and canvas.13 “For the painter light does not exist,” Cézanne mysteriously said in 1904 (qtd. in Gage 191): paint, and paint only, was the painter’s concern, not the scientific calculation that to see the painterly effect one received light into the eye. In his work, Cézanne wasn’t transforming and representing light, he was moving with paint.14 For The mind of the Orientalist will quickly leap to say that the Afghani mountains are not such faraway locales for citizens of Afghanistan; and this is clearly correct. But I am not one of those, do not presume to speak for them, and actually do presume to speak for myself. I grew up in Canada, another exotic place for many. 12 For a discussion of how cinema’s beginnings were in 1890, not 1895 as often opined, see Gaudreault. 13 Narayan Khandekar suggested to me that only with the nineteenth-century invention of viridian, chrome green, and chrome yellow were the Impressionists really freed to their work. Pigment is at the basis of the form. I am grateful to Dr. Khandekar, Director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies and Senior Conservation Scientist at Harvard University for this and numerous other piquant observations about pigments. 14 An evocative example of how a painter “moves” with paint, especially noting the action of the movement, is in the close-ups of Chuck Connelly’s hand painting Lionel Dobie’s (Nick Nolte) canvases in Scorsese’s Life Lessons (1989). 11

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the filmmaker, light does not exist either, even though film registers only when light rays are received by stock. It is not that we see light when we watch film, but that we receive an impression, complex and variant: the admixture of density and color and rhythm and flow and memory and anticipation and shape and shapelessness. Light the means is not the effect. The cameraman does not, like the painter, directly employ pigments, but he or she films materials riddled with them; notwithstanding that on the soundstage, colored gels might be used (see Coppola’s One from the Heart [1982]). Pigments are everywhere, especially in filmmaking: coloring the costumes, the skin by way of make-up, and the sets including both backings15 and dyed-fabric upholsteries, painted walls, even the blackening of tires on the cars that glide by or of the roadway upon which they glide (as in Blow-Up [1966]). Over the past several centuries, while color pigments have generally improved in many cases, any one manufactory could have been involved in producing thousands of different ones, many, indeed, variants of a single color, as with alizarin crimson and vermilion. If we look hypothetically at the full range of manufactories in all countries, and at the entire listing of their products, we find a virtually innumerable supply of pigments; in any locality, at any time, thousands would have been available, some more effective than others (vermilion blackens over time); some more or less costly (pigments made from lapis lazuli being at the top of the list: there is an ultramarine blue, quite celebrated, an ultramarine pink, and an ultramarine green16). The array of pigments is akin to the multifarious array of creatures in nature, a plenitude that presents its own riddle, since although the eye is staggered by quantity, attractiveness, and variations gross and subtle at the same time, certain particular colors touch us deeply and we treasure seeing and remembering them. The Impressionists were breaking away. And the consideration of cinematic color as impression is breaking away, too: stepping aside from rationale, that vast and tightly structured mechanism for producing social order and social control, embedded in mythology, ritualized through sanctification, maintaining boundaries of class and power. (Think of the analogy of the Hollywood studio system, the rigid vertical power structure, the impediments to scriptwriting and performative innovation, which were eclipsed by only the most brilliant of workers.) These painters headed away from devotional subjects, portraits of the esteemed, classical landscapes, artful, arcane still lifes in order to arrive at the essential, not form but the world. Analogously, the filmmaker working in color from the mid-1930s onward was free to escape from formalities of the past in order to take the A discussion of the technicalities involved in rendering the painted backing generally, and in the signal case of Brigadoon (1954), is given in my The Eyes Have It, ch. 4. 16 Ultramarine = over (or beyond) the sea; the rock was to be found in an extraordinarily inaccessible mountainous area of Afghanistan, only. 15

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eye’s experience as paramount, show not what was there but how it could look. Gone with the Wind is an essay in this privileging of vision. Light did not make color. Color made light. As memory trembles, colors change, in both highlights and shadows. I am told that memory retains only the most cursory markers of color, that to see in the mind the precise color of past experience is beyond us. Color and color-memory are warped in certain neurological conditions, as Oliver Sacks tells us in detail. After surgery for an ocular melanoma, he himself noticed odd fluctuations, “not apparent if I used both eyes”: If I closed my good eye, I suddenly found myself in a different chromatic world. A field of yellow dandelions would suddenly become a field of white dandelions, while darker flowers would turn black. A bright green fern, a selaginella, turned a deep indigo when I scrutinized it through a lens with my right eye. … There were also curious suffusions or diffusions of color. When, for example, I looked with my right eye at a pale mauve flower surrounded by green leaves, the green surround took over and filled in, so that the whole flower appeared green. (Eye 170) And a head injury could be experientially, and professionally, debilitating: I was consulted in 1986 by Mr. I., an artist who became completely colorblind following a head injury. Mr. I. was distressed by his sudden inability to perceive colors, but even more by his total inability to evoke them in memory or imagery. Even his occasional visual migraines were now drained of color. (Eye 229)17

Color Talk As most of us were taught to acknowledge them by people professionally engaged in teaching, colors were words. “Red,” “Yellow,” “Blue,” “Black.” White is all the colors at once. And Black is the absence of color. And as was so conventional with words of any sort, color-words were fitted into grammar, quite as though they existed only to be fitted there. In order to fit they were grouped into families—families, I should emphasis, not of the blood. Nouns were one thing. Adjectives were another. Sometimes a noun can be a verb. And a verb a noun. And a color a hope. Principally, for the A full account is given by Sacks in An Anthropologist on Mars. After the vehicle in which the man was riding was hit by a truck: “My vision was such that everything appeared to me as viewing a black and white television screen. Within days, I could distinguish letters and my vision became that of an eagle—I can see a worm wriggling a block away. The sharpness of focus is incredible. BUT—I AM ABSOLUTELY COLOR BLIND” (Mars 3). 17

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most part, in most school usage … colors were adjectival. “The red ball.” “The purple sage.” “The blue sky.” I will leave here entirely untouched the way exceedingly simple nouns came early on for us to be connected with color names. “Blue sky” or “blue lagoon” but not “blue desire” or “blue becoming.” “The red apple” but not “the red enchantment.” Since nouns were one thing and adjectives (colors) another, surely as we were taught, the colors as we learned them were entirely (what we might later come to understand as Platonic) abstractions, essences that preceded existences. One would search in the invisible dictionary of all the words that point to all the aspects of every manner of existence, and find the word to describe this tree trunk. Is it “brown,” or “green,” or “green-brown,” or “brown-green,” or “blue-green-brown” or what? To say one had a “red ball” was to pronounce upon an object, the ball (assuming that there was such a thing), and then to claim that it could be called “red,” that a “redness” was intrinsically associated with it; that it “had” red; that it “was colored red” because red was its partner in some never-explained dance of intimacy. Of itself it had “ballness” as a refinement of its “sphericality.” One might have asked—though aside from Ludwig Wittgenstein not many people did ask— whether the redness of that ball, that apple, that sunset was a “redness” of itself: whether the “redness” we associated with the thing existed as “redness” or only as a “red ball.” In looking this way, we learned to think of a color as a roughly uniform quality or descriptor—red is red is red—and, because of its abstraction, a universal. A red is a red is a red, no matter where you are or what you are doing. There are on this earth different words for red, but there is, by this logic, only one red, the red that engendered all of these words or to which all of these words point; but if words point, they must point to something and what kind of something is “red”? Matrix red. Mother red. Parchment red. Scapula red. Brine red. Or take blue, a lovely challenge. How we came to know in science class that essentially the sky is not blue but that the effect of blueness, the apparence of blue, is a sort of delusion caused by diffusion of light rays in a certain way. All this in the face of the fact, the blunt fact, that those who looked up knew that the sky was blue. Knew, with Virginia Woolf, that “the sea was indistinguishable from the sky” (7). And then, too, there were many cultural tags for “blue,” depending on the epoch and the zone. Sea blue, mineral blue, delphinium blue, azure. “Winedark” was one of these, and in his celebrated translation of the Odyssey, Robert Fitzgerald picked up on this cannily:           Out on the winedark sea in the murmuring hulls again, he made Cape Malea, but Zeus who views the wide world sent a gloom over the ocean, and a howling gale came on with seas increasing, mountainous (Odyssey, Book III, trans. Fitzgerald)

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I do not think verbal cataloging is a very fruitful way to look at color, and indeed it is not the way I look at it in this book. I am not curious to find the consistent, international, uniform color essences popping or floating up here and there in the history of cinematic color (or, more accurately, cinematic full color). “Red is for passion”: a phrase meaningless to me. Because I am convinced that our experience of film is momentary, that we apprehend its moments not its full architecture (architecture is assembled retrospectively, as we recall our moments), I think no moment of color is precisely equivalent to any other, that every moment of color has its own life. While the doctrine was that all colors lived apart from things but required reference, association; that they approached, came closer, finally married things; that atop some arcane mountain they had bounded, solid, intelligible lives in readiness to be associated with things, just in the way that we think we see them associated; while all this, it seems to me that instead colors were already things themselves, every color in every moment of it. The red ball was not a ball that was associated with, tied to, imbued with redness and redness could be separate from the ball. The green grass was not grass that was green. And the green grass in one particular spot was not the green grass in another, so the grass really is greener on the other side, but the other side of what? In these pages I have arbitrarily chosen to write about some colorations, and abandoned others, sometimes very celebrated others, working only from desire or the absence of desire as I remember them momentarily. Take the chapter on red. It could have discussed the oozing blood in the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984), or the paralyzing red berries in Elvira Madigan (1967), or the creepy slo-mo red fire engine in Blue Velvet (1986), or the explosive dress Maureen Stapleton wears in Interiors (1978), and on and on, but it doesn’t. For only the reason that my memory didn’t race to find those at the time. Thus, nothing here is definitive. The idea was to mount, chapter by chapter, some interesting little études, not especially because I wanted to practice a technique I would employ later in a concerto, nor because I thought the reader should do the same, but because I think the étude a beautiful form in its own right. Étude—study— is a necessity, and I found études like these necessary in a vital way. That old rhyme “Roses are red/ violets are blue” is only easy to say; not easy to understand. Color is altogether not easy to understand.

Colorblind Unfathomable subjectivity. Studying the Island of Pingelap, Sacks observed a notable “strange condition” affecting as many as one in twelve of the inhabitants:

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Infants with the eye disease appeared normal at birth, but when two or three months old would start to squint or blink, to screw up their eyes or turn their heads away in the face of bright light; and when they were toddlers it became apparent that they could not see fine detail or small objects at a distance. By the time they reached four or five, it was clear they could not distinguish colors. The term maskun (“not-see”) was coined to describe this strange condition, which occurred with equal frequency in both male and female children, children otherwise normal, bright, and active in all ways. (Island 37) This is an extreme case of colorblindness in a population. Colorblindness, a great mystery, a chasm. And reading Sacks I am doubly struck: l

First, since I take now, and have always taken, immense and profound pleasure in seeing colors, I am boggled as I try to imagine what it would be to find myself unable to make color distinctions. My world would be as indiscriminable as it was visible, my red meshing with green, my yellow with blue. Darkness and brightness would make the most manifest distinctions. The world would become something of an elaborate black-and-white movie, largely etched in mid-tone grays, and one that surrounded me on all sides. Yet, deprived always of color vision I would not sense this blackand-white movie as deficient since it would be everything, now and forever. My navigation, my sense of meanings, interpretation of contingencies, and grasping of related social relations would be fluid and unimpeded only as long as no color issues were involved with navigation: as long as I didn’t bump into colors. I mean bump physically or conversationally or meditatively or geographically. Bump as in miss a key signal. In the modern world, wherever color signals are to be found they are accompanied by alternates posing in other sensual modes: the red light above the green light at traffic stops, at least in the countries where I drive18; the red stop sign notably octagonal.

Were I deprived this way but not know myself deprived, my missing color cues would be tangential or even negligible. Not knowing I didn’t have such cues, I wouldn’t know there were cues I didn’t have. I would find guidance when I needed it, in another mode. But beyond this, the thought of staring at a color film, or a painted canvas, and seeing only form, tone, shape, balance, I got a parking ticket in 1998 in La Jolla, California, for leaving my car in a red zone. I was culturally colorblind entirely, which is to say, unable at the time, because not knowing a reason, to discern the red curb as separate, important, declarative in a meaningful way: I did not “see” the red. (The local authorities decided to be merciful.) 18

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weight, and light confounds and twists me. Although the colorblind may not feel themselves cut off from a perceptual world, the world that is, I believe, accessible to me with my color vision, nevertheless I feel that they are cut off just as, were I colorblind, I would be cut off, too. Colorblind people may not think this way. But when I try to conceive colorblindness, there is a kind of abysm I cannot cross. An abysm that is the history of my life. l

And this raises a second—still more unsettling—thought. As I have never been clinically tested for colorblindness and have never been asked to describe the exact way I see colors---that is, I have never written or rehearsed writing the way I write in this book, until now---I cannot know whether, in a way as yet unimagined by me, I may not be colorblind in fact. Whether I see only a very few colors, compared with what a person who didn’t have my colorblindness could see, but don’t know this because what I see has been good enough (I’ve always thought) to get me by. I have a friend who has a colorblind relative who cannot distinguish red from green while my friend can; he thinks himself not colorblind; but I must ask, how can he be sure he can distinguish red from green if all he is doing is distinguishing something many people name red from something many people name green; and also, how can he be sure when what he knows, or seems to know, is that his color vision is different from that of his relative? The thing that binds together all of the instantiations of observers using the word “red” may be something other than the thing my friend is certain he sees, the thing he—in his own mind—appropriately calls “red.” As it is now, I think I see a difference between green and red, but what if it could be demonstrated through some—magical?—process that I do not: that this “difference” I think I see isn’t “actually” there?19 Regarding these questions about colorblindness, too: are they even questions worth asking? And what is it in a statement we would call a “question” that could make it “worth asking”?

I “know” what I see. Regarding fascination, Artaud wrote, “The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes” (27). I apprehend, recognize, remember having seen and considered color and color difference. I sense color as real. If I think I see a rather rich palette of colors, couldn’t a colorblind person think similarly, have a coherent way of relating to what she or he sees, of communicating aspects of it, apprehending, recognizing, remembering? What we cannot do we do not recognize ourselves not doing; The color system invented by Edwin H. Land for Polaroid worked with red only. Taken to one extreme it was yellow, to the other it was magenta; and the negations of red, yellow, and magenta were cyan, blue, and green. 19

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to ourselves we are not not doing. Because no other pathway has ever stretched before me than the pathway I have taken, my own strange yellow brick road, color perception, or what I think of as color perception, was not a choice I made, it was, in a way, obvious, and so, no road at all. I see, and am restricted to see, the color in color film in an autobiographical way. And since there is very little literature about people’s autobiographical response to film color (or to film anything!), there is no real way for me to fully know the shape of my idiosyncrasy. The Impressionists had a group, shifting in membership but at least present, while writing about the color in my eyes makes—or has made so far—for a lonely expedition. Yet I am, and I have been, impressed. And to digest that experience, to understand it somehow, I write—that is my mode, as making the films I discuss here was the way the filmmakers had of responding to their conditions, their impressions, their lived experience of the world. Why anyone should trouble to write at all, let alone write about color, is surely a perplexing wonderment, but for me, finally, the challenge is to express my experience in a way that is mine. I try to hand it over, so that it may possibly plague you. Between the person who shows and the eye is the playground, here as on the screen. In the end, always, as we cannot find the center point, we are lost. New Forest, Los Angeles, Toronto: August 2021.

A Note about Images This book is not a compendium of technical information regarding the production of color in cinema. For that, readers are better advised to consult Cornwell-Cline, Haines, Salt, and Yumibe. From its earliest days, involving toning, tinting, stenciling, and other hand techniques, color cinematography has been in continual development regarding one aspect or another, with artists making special demands that later became part of cinematography’s “everyday.” It is very helpful to know that the Technicolor Corporation remained a profitable enterprise after 1955, when, Kodak ceasing production of its black-and-white recording film, the three-strip camera was put out of service, since the laboratory could receive a camera negative shot on Eastmancolor or Agfacolor and make its own separations from that in order that the three-strip printing process, imbibition by way of color matrices, could proceed. Therefore, it is not at all strange to see “Color by Technicolor” as a main title credit on post-1955 films, even though they were not actually shot in Technicolor. The Kodak recording film was a very special material that made black-and-white separations with fine grain and high contrast where needed. With writing about cinema, one leaves certain chemical baths in one’s tracks and steps forward to words on the page, sometimes accompanied

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by printed images. Printing color images for book readers presents special problems, not least because even the most refined papers—such as would make a book like this acquirable only at very great expense—cannot reproduce motion picture color with enough saturation and radiance to be faithful. I made the decision to include black-and-white reproductions here, for quick reference only, relying on my partner the publisher, who has mounted full-scale color images for each chapter on the web (see link below). If the computer does not provide perfection, either, it is possible to get a much richer treatment there—what these pictures deserve.

Bloomsbury.pub/color-it-true

Of Blue

Many things are labeled blue, thought blue, made blue, merely because there’s a spot of the color here and there somewhere on them. WILLIAM GASS

I gazed at the sky once again, and suddenly a strange reversal or illusion occurred, so that instead of seeing the stars in the sky, I saw the sky, the night sky, hanging on the stars, and felt I was actually seeing Joyce’s vision of “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” And then, a second later, it was “normal” again. OLIVER SACKS

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A Blue Parade Irene (Herbert Wilcox, RKO, 1940) A breathtaking expectation of formality and composure explodes into the color of grace. In Herbert Wilcox’s black-and-white RKO production Irene (1940), the title character, a feisty and attractive Irish lass (Anna Neagle), is expected (by guests at a soirée) to make a dramatic appearance in her new gown.1 Many blithe socialites (Ray Milland, Roland Young, Alan Marshal, and Billie Burke among them) scuttle about worrying and wondering where she is—“She just didn’t show up, so the other girls had to come without her”— when, with a bravura double take from the butler (Arthur Treacher) and the surprising briskness of a slash cut, tada!!, she arrives on the staircase, then floods into the shot from screen left. Irene!!!! But as she enters, we are suddenly … in Technicolor!2 Three-strip Technicolor, that is. Earlier forms of the process, which was invented by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Comstock, and A. Burton Westcott in the mid-1910s, led by the mid-1930s to a three-strip capability, was officially introduced in 1934–5 (La Cucaracha; Becky Sharp). By the time of Irene, three-strip Technicolor was substantially refined. Neagle steps into the action clothed in a sumptuous and, because of its placement in the editing, stunning gown of starlight blue. The transform is magical in itself, notwithstanding the butler’s premonitory double take, since designer and decorator Lawrence P. Williams and Darrell Silvera arranged the scene in advance in arrays of white and cream, nicely matching the black-and-white effect up to this point (there is even a full-color cutaway to Treacher in his black butler outfit against a white ground: an almost perfect cheat), so that for a moment Irene seems to be the only nexus of color. Red hair, white world, gown of shimmering, mystifying blue. This transformation is purely cinematic, involving costumes, sets, film stock, scripted dialogue, and action, all in concert but all indispensable to cinema—and constitutes, as we see it, a kind of transfer from one world to

Three years after this production the star and director would marry. Recalling the transition-to-Munchkinland sequence in The Wizard of Oz (1939), yes, but only in a way, since in Oz the house interior shots had been tinted, thus readied to offer a soft transition. Herman Mankiewicz’s March 3, 1938, treatment of the Kansas sequence contained in underlining this: “This part of the picture—until the door is flung open after Dorothy has arrived in the land of the Munchkins—will be shot in black and white, but every effort should be made, through tinting, to emphasize the gray nature of the landscape and Dorothy’s daily life” (qtd. in Harmetz 27). For more on tinting and toning, see Yumibe. 1 2

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another. There is a 1946 Jules-Vernian theatrical endeavor of Orson Welles, that may well have been inspired by this. Vincent Longo describes it: Around the World combined theater and cinema to create stunning effects that pushed the already blurry boundaries between both media … in Around the World’s most magical displays of stagecraft and multimedia Welles had the actors onstage interact with characters and images in the projected films and seamlessly staged the transitions between film sequences and live theater. (152) Projecting onto a scrim (which, lit only from the front, would act as a screen) behind which, onstage, actors were hidden in readiness to assume the precise positions of the film actors at the end of the clip, Welles was able to “transpos[e]‌the last frame of the sequence directly onto the stage” (161) by shifting the lighting away from the front and onto the stage area. In this way he “[made] the live action onstage ‘cinematic,’ by creating an illusion that the film sequences were being projected, not onto the screen, but onto the entire stage” (152–3).3 The film characters morphed directly into living doppelgängers onstage. What we see in Irene doesn’t work in precisely the same way, but it is equally a stunning morph involving a swift, and deep, transformation of the mode in which we see. Some comments about Irene’s colorfully shocking moment:4 l

The blue of her blue dress had a power today’s audiences may have difficulty registering. In 1940, there was widespread and intense enthusiasm for color—here, the blue—in itself. Full-color motion pictures were novel thrills regardless of narrative content. Older viewers may have remembered the tinting and toning of early cinema5 and may have seen the elementary Technicolor processes of the teens, twenties, and early thirties,6 but most of their time they expected in the movie theater to see black-and-white images; threestrip was an overwhelming attraction, albeit viewers knew little or nothing about how the color was achieved in it. The presence of color was the entertainment. Three-strip Technicolor (sold to viewers only as “Technicolor”) posed stark and impenetrable blacks against flaming, deeply saturated reds and vivid blues, among other effects. On Irene’s body, blue protruded and throbbed, emphatically when

I am grateful to Vincent Longo for discussing this technique with me. Photographed by Russell Metty (1906–1978), who would shoot Touch of Evil (1958) and Spartacus (1960). 5 Monta Bell’s Torrent (1926) gives a particularly colorful example of early tinting and toning. (I am grateful to Joshua Yumibe for consulting on this.) 6 In such films as Chester Franklin’s The Toll of the Sea (1922) with Anna Mae Wong. 3 4

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she raised a gigantic ostrich-feather fan, colored still deeper blue (the blue of a lagoon) over her head. She is introduced as a blue being, in blue motion, promising a blue future. Here, color is very much an expression not a happenstantial realism: first, no one in the Hollywood studios was struggling in the early 1940s to achieve onscreen what we would today call realistic representation; but, however “real” it needed to seem, the soirée was already sufficiently so in black and white. This was a blue for remarking, and a blue that was a remark. Sumptuous blue, elevating blue.7 l

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If Irene’s radiant cornflower blue is a token of fashionable style, imposed upon the story to signify status and taste, a female “look” that should properly cause eyes to turn, it is also more than a narrative element; more than being present, it had to be radiating from her. Consider that, given their skill and training, the designer Williams (1905–1996; who would do Brief Encounter [1945] and, for Hitchcock, Mr. and Mrs. Smith [1941]) and the decorator Silvera (a fixture later on at Paramount) could easily, had they wished, infuse this special blue into the set design and could then work with Edward Stevenson to have Neagle emerge in some entirely contrasting color (white, contrasting yellow, or even contrasting red): the isolation of her figure in frame would have been achieved, and emphatically, but it would not have been a blue isolation. And it was not only solid colors that Technicolor could render so well but also color contrasts. By causing the color to spill into the gown (and the darker, more brilliant fan), but only there, the film designates this particular blue as a provocation. “Blue is here!” the dress proclaims, even sings. “Blue is here!” Blue: crest of the wave. Strident, glorious blue pointing to strident, glorious Irene. Imitation is the sincerest form of entrepreneurship. So bold is Irene’s use of blue that seeping through the tissue of the film it perdures through time: Michael Curtiz’s White Christmas (1954) offers a parodic song routine by Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, “Sisters,” in which, to cover up for two new girlfriends who have abandoned a nightclub routine to run from creditors, they have a disc played and lip-sync a (blue) carbon-copy dance routine with the girls’ enormous ostrich-feather fans (designed by Edith Head). If these are a softer substitute, being a true peacock blue, they nonetheless reinvoke and double Irene’s ostrich-fan gesture. Lots of play with the two huge fans, using them to touch each other, holding them with triumphant

Gown by Edith Head’s pupil Edward Stevenson (1906–1968).

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coyness above the head. For a special (and unrehearsed) indication, Kaye actually uses his to “swat” Crosby’s belly three times as they sing, causing Crosby to crack up on camera. (“Pssst!” Kaye’s gesture smirks. “You have seen these fans before!”) Narratively, Irene’s shimmery blue gown—she is as though clothed in liquid—is rationalized in the story: ruining the gown in which she intended to make a sublime entrance she fell destitute, then received this blue item from her mother as a substitute. But in the viewer’s experience, there is nothing substitutive, supportive, make-do about this blue thing at all; it dominates the screen’s display space and dominates the receptive audience. A sudden blue, an immediate blue, a blue for which one is entirely unprepared, just as Irene was. A blue out of the blue. It has only presence, as it races from our past-recalled to our future-imagined. “The dream originates from the past in every sense … By representing to us a wish as fulfilled the dream certainly leads us into the future; but this future, taken by the dreamer as present, has been formed into the likeness of that past by the indestructible wish” (Freud 396; emphasis added).

The actress’s movement and her brief hesitation make the blue a disturbance, a seduction, a reproach. Blue reproach, blue regrets. Yet how should such a color be named? “Alice Blue” it was called for marketing, through sheet music titled “The Girl in the Alice Blue Gown.” Better, perhaps, than some of Nabokov’s blue butterflies: Cyclargus, Echinargus, or his student Bálint’s: mashenka, lolita, or pnin (Johnson and Coates 158; 342–3). Alice as in Alice in Wonderland, often in a blue gingham pinafore. Yet Irene’s blue does not seem to refer to earlier sources. It is brazenly present, as though she has bled it. Plain quotidian democratic blue. The distinctness suggests a (transdiegetic) blue fabric color produced by aniline dye (developed first in the early 1850s), something relatively modern and akin to the kind of blue that was being produced by Technicolor, also chemically.8 Not being a natural blue, this one blares vividness, presence, insuperability, hardiness. One could point to other institutional uses of the same type of dye, as in cadets’ tunics or flags. Irene’s blue is not as dark as the blue of the French flag or the English but is a radiant, sparkly blue, a blue that produces thirst. The blue of delphiniums, that river running into the past, paint-by-numbers wintery snow shadow blue, “million dollar A fuller discussion of the process is to be found in Haines, but essentially Technicolor threestrip worked from three black-and-white negative “records” (separations) produced in camera on the set, these being transformed at the laboratory to matrices which could be dyed and then pressed to blank stock. The chemical dye solutions for cyan, magenta, and yellow (for printing out the red, green, and blue original records) were manufactured to patented formulae (on which, see Cornwell-Clyne). 8

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blue,” larkspur blue. When this blue waves through the air it seems to be alive, bluebird blue. The effect: a narrative and experiential stun hint not that Irene did something, is doing something, and will do something. Not that she was gazed at, is being gazed at, will be gazed at. But that, coming out of some dream past and heading into some dream future, she is. That she staggers our consciousness in a blue parade.

Honestly, Blue Les parapluies de Cherbourg [The Umbrellas of Cherbourg] (Jacques Demy, Parc/Madeleine, 1964) Elegant, simple, and elegiac, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is not only set in color that is notably rich, it harvests, sermonizes about, and lays open the color jewel box. The harbor town of Cherbourg, just before the French engagement with Algeria, around 1954. Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve), pretty young daughter of the proprietor of an umbrella shop (Anne Vernon), meets an auto mechanic, Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), and they fall swiftly in love. The story is now complicated from without. Geneviève’s widowed mother is overprotective and controlling, worries over her daughter’s precocious youth. Guy has swept her off her feet. He already has a girl, in a way: Madeleine (Ellen Farner)—who would like to think she is his special one, since it falls to her to take care of his aging Tante Élise (Mireille Perrey). A traveling businessman (Marc Michel) has a little too much interest in the umbrella shop and in the owner’s charming daughter. When at the end of the first act (the film is divided into four acts, operatically) Guy is called up to war, Geneviève is pregnant. The two lovers pledge eternal devotion and part in a somber gray mist that blots out the astonishing, vivid colors that have backgrounded their love so far. Cassard, the businessman, steps in as a proper gentleman, woos Geneviève, and with the mother’s blessing marries her. Guy returns. The ailing aunt dies. He finds himself left with the loving Madeleine, not the girl of his dreams but an estimable force in her own right. At the film’s end we see them, with their little child, at Christmastime in the little gasoline station he has acquired and now runs with alacrity. It is a dark night. Snow is dropping. An expensive car pulls up for gas, just as Madeleine and the child go off for a walk. From the car steps Geneviève, in a full-length fur coat. The lovers encounter one another, share a moment of painful recollection. He fills her tank. She drives off. And as the camera climbs into the air to look down on the snow covering the little gas station, the film ends. 78, Quai Alexandre 3, Cherbourg.

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Music by Michel Legrand (1932–2019). (The film is entirely sung.) Décor by Bernard Evein (1929–2006), who has concocted wall treatments and coverings of the most amazing coral pinks, lime greens, fuchsia purples, lagoon turquoises, searing magentas, sunny oranges and yellows all through the lover-discourse section and its aftermath. With warm lighting to establish optimism, the colors radiate hallucinatorily. With cold lighting to suggest sorrow, they become grayed, mealy, depressing: this in particular as Madeleine is tending to the last moments of Tante Élise in a chamber the color of dark moss. In the film’s final sequence that gas station is entirely whitewashed, decorated slimly with red and blue (outside is a white, red, and blue oval Esso sign). If red meagerly winks, blue is present in a signal fashion: navy blue, ship-shape blue, commanding blue, proper blue, blue as honest as the horizon, ocean blue: because the cinematographer, Jean Rabier (1927– 2016), who had shot, among other films, Les quatre cent coups (1960), in order to make plain the directness, harshness, and unaffectedness of the moment has lit the scene for daylight (that is, not with tungsten-based lights or with filters which would add warmth) and with nocturnal shadow. The illumination on the real garage set is by arc light (very intense, with a blue radiance), which makes for a light that floods the area with feelingless, remorseless truth. A blue honesty. A blue practicality. Blue facts. Yet also ready-steady blue, uncompromising, unyielding, a blue that has made up its mind. The true blue of Guy’s present. The provoking blue of Geneviève’s memory. In respect of this blue finale, the psychedelic rainbow of the film’s body— the meeting, the love, the passion, the sorrow—seems artificial, a dreamlife of hopes and yearnings, energies cast forward indiscriminately. But at the same time, for all its magnetic stress, this final scene also intrigues and affects us by virtue of its brevity, its having the quality of a window from which the curtains have abruptly been pulled back to reveal the real world. The message, evidently: no matter what we would dream our lives to be, the world relentlessly steps in and dictates what happens. “There is a destiny that shapes our ends/Rough-hew them though we may.” But that is only the sermon of the story. The film gives a deeper reading altogether, because like all films, but here in an exemplary manner, it is designed not for the story-hearing ear but for the eye. What lingers for viewers, rather than the events of this scene as they fit into the chain of happenings or any of the frank graphic attributes that help define the image, is the vividness and the amazing surprise of the multicolored romantic dream itself even—and especially—caught in blue retrospect … that, being a dream everlasting (as we do not catch until we are looking back), it will not fade. The persistent trace of that dream, the dream residue, is the tissue that binds and separates Guy and Geneviève as, in his gas-station office, they look into each other’s blue-tinted faces.

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That too-present too-exclusive blue, the blue that divides. But for a moment, they see past it to the pink-red umbrella shop, the turquoise-green of Guy’s place, the arbitrariness and thoroughness of a multicolored world. All that is visualized in memory now—only in memory and only because of the incitement of that regular blue—visualized conclusively by warming contrast against a snow-blue horizon. Color is made into time.

Blue Narcissus Anna Karenina (Joe Wright, Universal, 2012) Through the turquoise of his tunic, the persistent turquoise of his cap band, the turquoise mists out of which he emerges on horseback, and the startling turquoise flocked wallpaper of his private rooms, the character of Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina (2012) is a blue man. Blue vital. Blue seductive. Blue insatiable. Since we know he is passionate (he is Vronsky!), his blue is for passion. Flaring and momentary passion, however, the passion of the peacock’s blue fan. Blue passion, blue desire, unbridled unsatisfied unkenning blue desire. The Tolstoy story famously places Anna, a passionate, intelligent, and deprived woman (Keira Knightley), hungry for life, between two protagonists. She is successfully married to Alexey Alexandrovich Karenin (Jude Law), a prudish and prurient stiff-necked toady of a bureaucrat named to be a statesman, horridly conscious of his position in the hierarchy, hungry to climb, and supercilious to all those beneath him. He affords her a position in society, secure and achingly proper if not supremely elevated; legitimacy for her child of an honorable if palpably cold-hearted kind; sufficient comfort in her home, tidy if stuffy; and, of course, a name. These qualifications make her in every respect a proper woman of the nineteenth century (the novel appeared in 1877). On the other side, she is at first curious about, then infatuated with, then irreparably in love with Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky, an officer in the cavalry. Vronsky is young, glowing, daredevil, sparkling, if also something of a rake. Her affair with him not only offers no social benefits but also threatens to strip away her rank, remove her from the son she adores, cast her into Karenin’s zone of shadows. Tolstoy is marked by Vladimir Nabokov as “the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction” (Lectures 137). His Anna Karenin is “a tangle of ethical tentacles” (144). Any and all renditions of it on film—from Maurice Maître’s silent of 1911 to Karen Shakhnazarov’s series of 2017 at least twenty-seven cinematic or televisual versions have appeared, including Wright’s—are obliged to position this triangle centrally and to find adequate ways of depicting Karenin and Vronsky in differing lights.

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Karenin must seem austere, even emotionally empty; regulatory. Vronsky must seem hot and quick and hungry, of the moment, and overwhelmingly fleshy. We must feel the aching blue blood crawling back to his heart for revivification, the very warm skin underneath the blue garb. Whereas Karenin is colorless and made of stone. Wright’s tactic is to position Karenin mostly in serious black and to place him in scenes that are poorly lit, or lit by harsh window light, in general to turn him into a creature of paper and ink (the utensils of his political trade). As played by a (somewhat too) tidily bearded Jude Law, this man is upright (too upright), circumspect (always look around to see who is watching), clipped (as though only facts need utterance)—a perfect illustration of the character Tolstoy wrote: Karenin made it a rule to see his wife every day, so as not to give the servants any grounds for making conjectures, but he avoided dining at home. (319) The suggestion that he is more interested in the views of his servants than in the health of his wife is no exaggeration. Karenin is a modern man, that is, one who lives by means of a presentation of self. He scans for his audience. He puts on a mask. Nabokov notes that he is “cruel in his theoretical virtue, the ideal civil servant, the philistine bureaucrat who willingly accepts the pseudomorality of his friends, a hypocrite and a tyrant” (Lectures 146). Vronsky, by contrast, is a creature of lips, thighs, shoulders, and eyes, perhaps an elaborate sea creature, and he swims in a delicate tropical pond of seething blue. On first sight, Anna must have him; and having had him she must have him again. Every lovemaking leaves her only blue with starvation for the next, and Vronsky is nothing if not accomplished, diligent, and careful in currying her passion. As Tolstoy sees the young Count, Though he occasionally went into the highest Petersburg Society, all his love interests lay outside it. In Moscow … he experienced for the first time the delight of intimacy with a sweet, innocent Society girl who fell in love with him. (Lectures 51) This sweet girl is Kitty, Anna’s sister-in-law (that is, the younger sister of her sister-in-law), a thoroughgoing and entirely well-meaning naïve, through the agency of whom Anna gains access to the young man’s bed, or he to hers. A blue moment. It is the flesh they share, flaming blue flesh, he carving a pathway to her princess heart and she leading his buck into her forest. An indescribable delight for them, an unspeakable depravation as Karenin and those who fawn upon him would esteem it.9 The blue has two faces, then, one of them an outrageous Apollonian shadow. A fabulous discursion on Anna Karenina, less interested than the present discussion in its colors, is given by Vladimir Nabokov in Lectures on Russian Literature, 137–235. 9

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Let us say that to regard Anna’s and especially Vronsky’s sacrosanct, carnal blue from the outside—a point of reference thrilled readers may be loath to take up, lest the thrill evaporate with distance—is to find it alarming in one way or another, and this is one of the reasons Wright sees to it that the blue walls of Vronsky’s room are so lavish and so blatant. The blue alarms one’s desire, or it alarms one’s defense. Either way, it conveys sensibility all the way to a station of concentrated attention, where peculiarities abound (thrilling ones; problematic ones) and the atmosphere is rarefied (because perfumed; because malodorous). The blue has a shine, at times sapphire, and in this way attracts the eye, the hungry eye, the calculating eye. It is impossible to regard Vronsky without one’s eyes raising up to the spanky blue brim of his cap, or to see his blushing naked skin without regard to memory of the blue uniform he has urgently stripped off. (Nor, of course, the uniform without memory of his skin.) It is impossible to stand in his blue-flocked room without gazing intentfully (meditatively; evaluatively) at the daunting walls. Do these walls constitute a confinement or a confrontation? There is another, still external, value of the Vronskian blue, since it functions not only as a (Barthesian) punctum but also as a field, a studium (25ff.). Against the backing, the imagination or the memory of this sweating blue, this palpitating and stretching blue, this blue lagoon, the skin of the protagonist goes pink and fruitifies, ripens into a pure desire that, for Vronsky, brings exquisite release while for Karenin it signals icy demise. Every inkling of Vronsky’s torpor is a stripping, a vehicle bearing the lovers back to their private blue Eden. Vronsky, seen against this blue, need make little or no expression, since the peachy heat of his body reaches out from the rich and vibrant field to express him. Hesitant Anna, reflective Anna, careful Anna becomes lively in the presence of this animating blue. But seen as an inside topic, the blue is something else again. Bathed in blue light, the figure is protected from the glaring highlights and impenetrable shadows of Moscow and St. Petersburg reality, is encapsulated in an itchy bubble of warm and enduring feeling: warm because private, and a bubble because blue seems to permit transmission of, while not quite touching, the light. Time evaporates as desire breathes. The blue glow is both interminable and unsatisfying, so that one drinks and drinks it, this ocean of comfort and the self. It is narcissistic blue, self-regulating blue, mirroring blue, the blue of masturbation and perpetuity. And, as Wright sensibly would have it, this blue Vronsky is a selfdetermined and self-centered bloke, model of the man who feels only the surface of himself; just precisely as Karenin, the anti-blue crusader, is a Narcissus of another family, the man who thinks only of his self as perceived in the political world. Neither man can see, touch, truly love Anna—or anyone—across the abyss.

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Blue Distance The Thief of Bagdad (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Archers, 1940) Sometimes blue is an exceptional challenge to memory. It presents itself in a flash, or in a sudden efflorescence that fades almost as quickly as it appears, so that our experience, pierced and penetrated, must be at least as much recollection as perception. A view through the peephole. A view seized through the train window. In cinema, one might spy a blue setting intended to support the foregrounding of some narrative action, and that is eclipsed as soon as the action is complete or as soon as the shot is changed for another. There is considerable use of blue this way in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), the blue shining by contrast against yellows, bronzes, tawny apricot, and flesh tone. Indeed, part of the technique of watching film involves an ability we manage to develop, aimed at devouring one view while remaining willing, always, to surrender it for another; there is no other way to watch. This raises the fascinating—I would call it blue—question of how we “have” images in cinema. The Thief of Bagdad (1940) requires us to live for a while in the world of the Arabian Nights, which is to say, a zone of pure fable and invention (for a somewhat arbitrary view of the arbitrariness of which, see Said10). The turban, the scimitar, the djinn, the marketplace, the palace, the sultan, the evil wizard. A great deal of intensive color is used in this film (Vincent Korda designed it for Georges Périnal’s camera), rich and shimmering thanks finally to the facilities of Technicolour Britain (which began operations with Wings of the Morning in 1937 and was not as yet subjected to the perils of war): many of the colors rendered in this laboratory have a distinctive, shiny metallic quality because of the Thames water used in washing. In Thief, color is everywhere, seductive green, luscious magenta, preposterous and therefore overwhelming rose pink to describe the city of Basra. But there is one shot of Bagdad that stuns the viewer out of everyday consciousness, even rational consciousness of the narrative “everyday.” Blue Bagdad. We are on the proximal side of a long broad bridge spanning an invisible stream. The arc of the structure, leading to screen right, is majestic and drops off into an indiscernible blue vacuum. Foot and animal traffic scutters across—a hopping city, a rich economy, an energetic populace. And in the background, spanning the entire view from left to right, virtually holy in prospect and stance, spreads a blue mountain range. Ice blue, sky blue, And for a very brief address to the limits of that critique of arbitrariness, see the opening passage of my The Man Who Knew Too Much. 10

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jewel blue, mineral blue, tinged with violet. The eye goes instantly to these vast and trembling mountains, while the suddenly irrelevant moving traffic trickles beneath. To define the space technically: the background is a matte painting, by the great W. Percy Day (since 1919 a master of effects illusions, notably glass-painted mattes). The easiest (and, in this case, most probable) technique for effecting the illusion would have been for Day to paint the background, as well as any portions of the foreground that would not contain action (the right-side area below the bridge arc) on a large pane of glass, which would then be mounted on a stand in front of the lens, the remainder of the field being painted black. A reverse glass would have the earlier painted area blacked and the foreground, what had been black, clear—a clear space through which the bridge action could be photographed on a sound stage, with the film rewound in the camera.11 The composite would appear seamless if the colors of the design were appropriately arranged and lit, the costumes by Marcel Vertès and others suitably colored in relation to the blues of the background. Emphatically in the matte, the mountainous blue would seem a distant one, a blue that struck a distant chord, a chord of yearning. Distance makes for the itch to move, to draw forward, to cast the mind away and away. The blue mountains here are mountains of the dream. For a sharp contrast, examine the peaks of Wyoming in the background of the early farm shots in Shane (1953), which have a quite beautiful, majestic, though touristic, identity (and which were shot on location). What is this elusive otherwhere, indicated by the blue mountains of Bagdad, the mountains that, receding, increase our thirst? A territory of the purely fabular, where space is modified in accord—as wrote Michel Mourlet—with our desire. Blue, the mountains become ethereal, beyond the merely normal and the simply human. Blue, they are magical and insubstantial at once, gossamer phantoms of the imagination yet also reverberating as only blue can do. We fall into the blue; and it recedes so that falling we can never touch it. It is possible to picture landforms without seeming painterly in the way that this picturing does: witness the Mt. Rushmore sequence of North by Northwest (1959), that makes (undetectably) extensive use of painted backings. Bagdad’s blue mountains seem to have been dreamed by a blue painter, a painter for whom the world is made of blue, opal blue, malachite blue, sapphire blue, the vague snowy blue-white that is the opposite of blueblue. Quickly—because the shot is onscreen for only a few seconds—we are transported by this vehicular blue, taken away from ourselves. The eye Sometimes for glass shots instead of blacking out a portion, the artist simply leaves it untouched. Then on the sound stage with the painted glass held up before the camera and live action taking place behind it, if the lighting is good a single-take shot can blend foreground and painted background seamlessly. 11

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attaches to the mountain range. The eye voyages to the mountains, climbs, becomes part of the blue scene. Our eyes become blue. But of course, in the film the evil Jaffar’s eyes are blue, too. Stunning blue. The evil Jaffar (Conrad Veidt) has eyes as blue as lakes. We become like Jaffar who, gazing sternly at it, transposes the world. There is a clue to the optical blue in one of the first two or three shots in the film, as his seagoing ship swings close to view and we zoom into a gigantic blue eye painted on its prow. The signal: not merely that someone (Jaffar) will be watching; that every flicker of action will be weighed; but also that the watching will be a blue one. Blue sight. (Not that a blue-eyed person sees a blue-tinted world, only that we can with these visions associate blueness with sight; sight as a blue phenomenon.) Later, Jaffar will present the Sultan of Basra (Miles Malleson) with a toy horse, life-sized. (The Sultan boasts a huge toy collection.) When the plump potentate winds up the device, mounts into the saddle, and follows Jaffar’s sharp instruction to “Pull the reins!,” the horse comes alive and bears him up, up, up into the blue sky, which is for him also a blue nothingness. That the blue mountain range constitutes a horizon suggests blue as the limit of optical experience, the boundary across which one cannot go. Blue as a far point. More: blue as far altogether. The far blue, the blue yonder, the otherwhere that, blue, is not somewhere. Quite beyond mathematics, beyond physical theory, this is the conceit of the blue space that is not a place. Yi-Fu Tuan has indicated how we can recognize space by making it a place but this blue space is one we recognize by refraining to convert it to the everyday. One might even argue that conceptual space is blue in itself, blue because far from the city of life, blue because figural not real, blue lit for brilliance and blue shadowed for seduction. A blueprint. Hemmed in by the magical mountains, and with its blue bridge and blue mosque, this blue city radiates a sensibility that is not a meaning, a hint that is not language, a provocation that is not finality, a taste that is not an invocation. Not an invocation, but an evocation. We may think of this as an evocative blue. It calls out. That is, it not only calls with a “voice” that moves out into the airy space but also beckons, or commands, what is inside me to come out. It draws something out of me. And looking at the blue mountains I feel myself pulled, as if they have blue magnetism, as if they are blue beasts. Thankfully the shot is so brief, or who knows what might be emptied from the soul. I should say what this horizonal blue is not. It is not the universal, overwhelming blue. The blue cup of the heavens, the blue of reduction, the blue of expansion. In The Island of the Colorblind, Oliver Sacks reports flying at 27,000 feet

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over the trackless vastness of the Pacific. No ships, no planes, no land, no boundaries, nothing—only the limitless blue of sky and ocean, fusing at times into a single blue bowl. (16) Well, that bowl is a giant’s gigantism, bigger than bigness, and it speaks definitively the truth that I am small and hopeless to grow. “You,” it bellows, “are not what I am. You will never be what I am.” It is one’s humanity that is tickled and fostered when one gazes at the sky and ocean together. One feels one’s limits. The blue of The Thief of Bagdad’s mountains is not at all such a blue, not mathematically limitless, not either humanizing or humiliating. Wittgenstein wondered how he might manage to move directly from yellow to blue, without, say, passing through a particular “way station” composed of green. “Blue obliterates yellow,” but “greenish yellow” might also be called “bluish yellow.” And we might find a “yellowish blue.” To jump all the way to blue, to leap all the way across the bridge to those mountains, is to abandon the sunny comfort of yellow for the receding caress of blue. Searching the blue mountains for their elusive yellow, one can see it reduced to the slimmest tissue above nothingness. How quickly does color become invisible, routinized, expected, tedious. Even here, with this unspeakably fascinating mountain range, this symphony on metallic blues, our picture must contain, as well, the legion passers-by, barking their haggles, limping forward, thinking of some tomorrow with no regard at all for the blue universe in which they have the luck to live. I speak diegetically. Not the cast, who are of course intentionally oblivious to the scenery—even, in this case of shot doubling, the anticipated but currently absent scenery—but the people of legendary Bagdad, in their humdrum blue-tinted non-blueness. They live every day with these mountains, which for us are visible only as they fly away.

A Blue Provocation Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, Alfa Cinematografica/Warner Bros., 1971) Aschenbach rides the old lift down to the old lobby, or up, a tiny cubicle inside which the experience of persons and bodies will be so overwhelming that his aging sense of navigation will be quite lost. Fragile, sensitive, painfully poetic Aschenbach.12 And there suddenly, with his mouth vividly not speaking, is Tadzio, the Polish boy. The one who stepped off the launch

Modelled by Dirk Bogarde and filmmaker Luchino Visconti after Gustav Mahler (1860–1911).

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with his overprotective mother and little siblings. Every year to the Lido, for what?, to give mama some air?, to give the boy a chance to be free on the beach? To be frank, Aschenbach is far from well, is gray with the memory of grief and white with the pallor of oncoming plague fever, of which he is presently ignorant. Tadzio is about fourteen. Aschenbach has a good six decades on him. They must not achieve contact, of course, but the boy gives the man a look as though to say, “I have measured my surroundings and counted you in the measurement. I dare you.” Here and at other moments in this 1971 film, Tadzio wears a blue sailor’s outfit trimmed in white (or a white one trimmed in blue; or a blue/white striped maillot; or a blue officer’s suit, with double-breasted blazer adorned in gold braid and brass buttons). His clothing is beautifully pressed, starched, outstanding. He has leapt from a Delft plate, also from a Reynolds portrait. His blue trim says Order, Propriety, Vertical alignment, Obedience, Trust, Forthrightness, Skill, Endeavor; but also the Sea. As these are principles, not characteristics, we know Tadzio is not in or associated with the navy, is only playing at being a sailor. Boys do this, Tadzio is a normal boy for his time. In the eighteenth century, he would have fought alongside grown men in a man-o’-war, held a candle, shipped grog. But now, within the circle of his mother’s continuing oversight, he frolics or poses only, always conscious of proprieties, mannerisms, the very tiny modicum of liberty that is his to enjoy in the slippages as she glances away. Yet also, because he is a possessor of youth, he seems utterly and purely unbound, limitless. He has not imagined the constraint of social life or the range of opportunity any one person will spy from but a limited promontory. He is a faun, to be sure. But can we say Tadzio is a sexual being, though he seems to have a boyfriend-lover on the beach? Can we say it is something of sexuality to which Aschenbach responds, now frail and tiring to a fault? Has Aschenbach lost or forsworn opportunity, and does he now stare at this boy because youth is a repository of the plaguingly untouchable? A charge of temporal distance, certainly, but is this charge also eroticized?—because if not, why the glamorousness of Tadzio? “Amor, in sooth, is like the mathematician,” writes Thomas Mann in his novella, who in order to give children a knowledge of pure form must do so in the language of pictures; so, too, the god, in order to make visible the spirit, avails himself of the forms and colours of human youth, gilding it with all imaginable beauty that it may serve memory as a tool, the very sight of which then sets us afire with pain and longing. (44) The visible spirit. Setting us afire. Piero Tosi (1927–2019) has given Bjorn Andresen a suite of outfits to wear, but all of them call up the “light sailor suit of blue and white striped

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cotton, with a … simple white standing collar round the neck—a not very elegant effect” (Mann 28–9) permitting that the camera can show, above the collar, a head “poised like a flower, in incomparable loveliness. It was the head of Eros, with the yellowish bloom of Parian marble” (29). Blue cotton to blue a yellowish bloom. The blue attraction has, for Aschenbach, an intrinsic blue impossibility, a distance belied by every presence, a silence belied by every musical thought. In the lift after a luncheon, Mann tells us, the old man finds himself with “a group of young folk, Tadzio among them, pressed … into the little compartment. It was the first time Aschenbach had seen him close at hand, not merely in perspective, and could see and take account of the details of his humanity” (33). It is the blue separation of bodies that enjoins a cool and calculating approach when one is feeling “the rapture of [the] blood, the poignant pleasure” (39). Forced to pull one’s organs of sensation back, to bring them into retreat upon the redoubt, one is adopted into the society of those who only “see … close at hand” and “take account of the details.” The blue problem which is the grain of sand around which the pearl of Death in Venice has been formed is this: that taking account and seeing, wondrous as they may be, do not bring us close enough; that Aschenbach is trapped in time (as is the innocent Tadzio). To reach his own table [Tadzio] crossed the traveller’s path, and modestly cast down his eyes before the grey-haired man of the lofty-brows—only to lift them again in that sweet way he had and direct his full soft gaze upon Aschenbach’s face. Then he was past. “For the last time, Tadzio,” thought the elder man. “It was all too brief!” (36). When we examine the visual design of the film, we may be curious to note that Tadzio does not wear his blue on the beach, beside the gray-green waters, while, frolicking with his friend, he throws himself into the sand and is perceptible only at a distance. The blue is for proximity, for the hotel, for mother, for meals, for the old stranger’s eyes, for signaling at very close range the fervor in which closeness is forbidden by the laws of the universe. When Aschenbach can see the boy in detail, Tadzio is gently, almost unmovingly posed, a statue of possibilities. The blue that taunts does not fly off, does not reposition to accommodate itself. It is a stolid, a formal, a logical, a regulatory blue that draws the eye forward in a pain that is inexorable. But even more, it is a direct provocation, one that the boy has no need to make when he is on the sand or in the water. There, whatever it is that is going on between him and his friend is spontaneous and casual. In the hotel, formality reigns, which is to say status and mannerism. The curiosity of the young for the old seems natural enough, a boy looking to find the pathway between what he is and what he may become. For the old to be curious about the young seems considerably more self-indulgent, even profane.

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Yet Tadzio’s hotel blue is prodding, winking, daring. Here is my untouchable form, I dare you to taste it. While blue can be thought cool and remote, it is for Visconti dangerously proximate, horribly eye-catching. This is perhaps something of an invocation of the rebuke to Joshua Reynolds by Thomas Gainsborough known as “The Blue Boy” (1779). If the principal light is cold, Reynolds had warned, “it will be out of the power of art, even in the hands of Rubens and Titian, to make a picture splendid and harmonious” (Gower 78). But coldly as he is lit, one cannot take eyes away from the blue boy, and in this capture, one becomes again Aschenbach stunned by Tadzio. A certain shadow drops away from Tadzio, as though in his heart of hearts he feels sadness, loss, emptiness. Every glimpse of his blue conveys a propriety guarding a tomb.

A Civil Blue Shane (George Stevens, Paramount, 1953) The stranger rode in from the east under a boundless cupola of sky and in the fertile valley beneath a chain of purple-mountained majesties. A strange, exotic light reflects from his blue eyes, and he is adorned head to foot in pale buckskin. The farmer, Joe (Van Heflin), at first cautious and taciturn, and surrounded by umber loam and spring green vegetation, befriends him; the farmer’s wife Marion (Jean Arthur), perhaps curious, bakes two golden apple pies; the farmer’s son, a little cross-eyed and sweet (Brandon De Wilde), adores and observes him, every gesture, every move. After dinner, Shane (Alan Ladd) helps Joe uproot a stump that has bested him for all these many years, and now that the two of them are inseparably bonded in the wilderness, Shane agrees to become the hired hand. So is prepared the way toward a significant transformation. We are in Grafton’s general store/saloon, with the family on a routine shopping excursion. Shane goes over to the bar side to get himself a “sodey pop,” but not before having removed his buckskin and donned in its place a pair of jeans and a blue chambray shirt: pale blue, like his eyes. This outfit marks him as a local, a member of the homesteading community and thus potential antagonist to Ryker and his band of ranch hands, who would like to take over the land for grazing their steers. But the clothing also marks Shane in another, more deeply telltale, way. While he has stripped himself of his buckskin, the new outfit works to strip him of his wanderer personality, that characterological essence of the Stranger moving through territory rather than the Familiar establishing himself in it. The Stranger is a trader in motion, a passer-through from the start, whereas the drama of Shane lies in this ultimate commitment to transit not being discovered until the climax.

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A trader, Georg Simmel observed, was one with whom interactions involved distancing, not proximity: A trader is only required for products that originate outside the group [Shane will trade his peculiar skills, as we will see]. … [The] position of the stranger stands out more sharply if he settles down in the place of his activity, instead of leaving it again: in innumerable cases even this is possible only if he can live by intermediate trade … [he] intrudes as a supernumerary, so to speak, into a group in which the economic positions are actually occupied. (in Wolff 403) Shane is now affiliated with Joe Starrett; affiliated, perhaps related, certainly ideologically compatible. While earlier his commitment had been to temporary relationships only, his keenest devotion fixed upon the voyage, he is now landed, now communal. It will seem nothing but proper that he stands against those who move gracelessly through a space, trodding upon young vegetables, mucking up the prepared ground; even hiring a dark stranger to travel from an unnamed origin and gun down the homesteaders in cold blood. The abruptness of the killer’s appearance, his relentless (even nervous) movement betokens a modernity of which the new Shane and the farmers he has joined are not sharers. If as the film winds on Shane can appear to little Joey more and more like a second father, or an older brother, this sense of warmth and bonding only emphasizes the cowboy’s new identity as a member of the family, that is, someone whose roots are now here, now (if suddenly) deeply dug. A person, indeed, who has roots at all. All this in the blue shirt, the blue collar. All this to nourish the blue root. The blue shirt is a constant denial of Shane as stranger, Shane as traveler, Shane as modern icon himself. As long as he sports the blue shirt the questing, morally acute glow in his blue eyes is dimmed in favor of loyalty, blue loyalty, and in the name of a hope for the future, blue hope. The coarse ranchers’ thoughts of the future go only so far as cashing in their herds and procuring new ones for cashing in again, later. But Joe, Marion, and Joey are helping build a vegetative, forever growing world. Shane, who finds them as though by accident when the film begins, will turn himself to their service against the threat of Ryker and his hirelings but in this turning will at least for the duration of the story deny his true self. For Shane is only the moral equivalent, yet whole opposite, of the killer Wilson (Jack Palance). Shane in his buckskins is as sunny and glowing as Wilson is shady and dark. And it is only Shane who is equipped to outshoot Wilson, Shane whose past is unknown, Shane who is clearly something of a killer himself. Notwithstanding his beautiful eyes, the deepest truth about Shane is not blue. He stores it while wearing that blue shirt as Starrett’s helpful man, Amphitryon among the mortals.

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As the story progresses, we watch Shane in situation after situation in steadily growing anticipation that he will strip that blue shirt off and become himself again. As a citizen, he can only be as helpless as all the other citizens are in the face of the menace. The blue of the work shirt, bright and eye-catching, is an ongoing obstruction to the moral resolution the tale requires; a holding off of that resolution until the climactic moment when it will build catharsis. The shirt is blue as a distant river, yet at the same time a blue out of nature, a civil blue. The indigo dye has come from the far East, is a cultural import; and the shirt was manufactured on the east coast, the domain of European-born civilization. When he wears buckskin, Shane is derived from the forests and plains of the west. In blue, he is an eastern emigrant, only one more of those who, following the dictates of the Homestead Act (of 1862), moved across the Ohio to claim land of their own, free land so long as they did not abandon it. Ryker’s entire deep motive is to frighten the homesteaders enough that they will leave their claim, thus relinquishing ownership. He wishes to be identified with the land himself, not as its cultivator but as its owner, its expander, its capitalist, and would eradicate their identification so that this can happen. Even by the blue of moonlight, there is a ruddy glow to Ryker’s tough face, a coppering that brings desirous hints of the earth, of mountain passes, of the riverbed, all of which he fantasizes as his own. Ryker (Emile Meyer) seems always to have been here, at least in principle. But Shane seems to enter the Starrett province from advanced civilization; from a city that he abandoned, indeed; and at the film’s end he rides off into the west, one more hero heading off to the land of the setting sun, which is to say, finally, death.13 But when Shane dies, it will be as a figure of nature, in buckskin, not a man of the new American civilization. He will be what he already always is, an American before civilization, an original man. The blue shirt erases his originality, his spirit, his prolific knowledge, his secure experience, even his masculinity. Yet at the same time, in a strangely wonderful way, Alan Ladd plays the character as a man whose secret past may well have involved a strict eastern upbringing and education. He is mannered, gracious. He is at rest with his philosophy. Finally, we may come to wonder whether the blue shirt may not signal something deeply true, whether it may not have been that in donning the buckskin he was going into hiding. A civilized man who had to flee civilization, who became the forest through which he rode, and who, with the Starretts, happily (and secretly) finds his blue true self again. Is Shane’s blue not also a color without consequentiality? It is in buckskin that he finds this important, this iconic haven. It is in buckskin that he presents

On the west as mythological frontier, see Fiedler, Return.

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himself in challenge to Wilson and defeats the gunslinger. It is in buckskin that, having killed, he must now move on and that he heads away from the family, away from the familial, familiar place. Blue-eyed Joey: “Shane! Don’t go, Shane!” But in blue, Shane can only watch situations develop, conjure plans not now to be effected, recall in personal dreams his long unconcluded past. In Shane, consequence is all moral and all definitive, the black-hatted villain on his dark horse fighting the pale-hatted savior on his pale one, the pallor of Shane reflecting all the colors of nature and the darkness of Wilson blotting out the sun. But that blue shirt: labor, strength, stolidity, purpose, dignity, etiquette, cultural arrangement, and blue order imposed. A blue proposition in a blue syllogism. A blue moment, but the stranger’s strangeness will eclipse it.

A Blue Tease Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, Universal, 1960): I How fragrant, how haunting are the colors of memory. To encounter a color at removal, by recollecting something that had once presented itself to the eye but that is no longer available, not here, not now, yet it was pungent once: something lost. This is already unsatisfyingly challenging, taunting, elusive, jarring. But there is a worse condition. When she was younger, a woman saw a color once, and it struck her with great force. Why exactly, we will never know. Today, well past her middle age, she is brought by an unanticipated circumstance to think back on it, and presto, that color springs to mind with, evidently, the cleanest efficiency. And all of this is palpable to us only because she happens to be reminiscing not only to herself but also aloud, in the presence of two people who could not have witnessed the original presentation of color but who are now avidly listening to the recounting of what it was, as we watch. This is a recounted memory, then, doubly removed from experience. Afflicted and daunted, we must become mere recipients of some strangers’ reception of an old woman’s recall, as she speaks in their hearing. Was there anything originally there at all? One further twist: because the central material of the story within the story, that is, the woman’s recollection, is now of such pressing interest, we and the two listeners attend with keenly sharpened ears. We step around the receptive onscreen protagonists, as it were, in order to have the story as directly as possible. To taste, to penetrate, to peer at it. The two onscreen listeners are diminished in circumstance and status the more we lean in to hear the old raconteuse tell them what she remembers—hear her in our own hungry way. The old memory becomes dominant, frail as it might be. Still, if

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it is a frail memory, in one particular respect, which involves color, it is not frail—distinctly not frail. More than color: blue. A blue memory, recounted years afterward, to people we are watching as they listen. And the screen is actually doubled. A woman stands with her husband, to whom she has apparently been married forever. He frowns and nods as she speaks, accentuating her every word and giving it credibility. Since he is the local sheriff, officer of the law, with a badge to confirm this identity, we can take his nodding very seriously—at least with as much seriousness as we take any fictional being onscreen (with a small proviso I will shortly address). By virtue of his nodding assent, we take his wife to be telling her story accurately. These two, these doubles (the husband a silently nodding double of the gabby wife), are half of the scenic doubling. The listening couple forms a second or doubled double, this one unmarried: he runs a hardware store and is accompanied by a young woman who is the sister of his fiancée, a fiancée now completely vanished into thin air. Sam Loomis (John Gavin) and Lila Crane (Vera Miles) are the screen we pass through in order to hear the sheriff’s wife (Lurene Tuttle) with his assent (John McIntire) recount the tale of the funeral of Mrs. Bates. The film, of course, is Psycho (1960). Lila has made it plain that she has seen the son of the deceased, Norman (Anthony Perkins), conversing with his mother; and that in this conversational context she has definitely heard the mother’s voice. But this can’t be true, says Mrs. Chambers, this can’t be true at all, because the mother is dead. She remembers the body at the funeral. MRS. CHAMBERS: I helped Norman pick out the dress she was buried in. Periwinkle blue. A sonic punctum, tip of a spear, rising out of the narrative and pricking the eardrum almost with violence. Not the placid storyteller, not the nervous, eager listeners, not the mundane domesticity of the sheriff’s home in the middle of the night, not the bathrobes and pajamas (because Lila and Sam have awakened the authorities), not the dull voices giving over their information, not Mrs. Chambers’s mundane unexpressive face, but: periwinkle blue. “Blue” would have been sufficient: I saw the body. She was wearing blue. An affirmation like that would have nailed in its own terms the factuality of the account, attested to the power of the small revealing detail (of the kind that fascinated Henry James, one of Hitchcock’s mentors). The face of the dead woman, the circumstance of the funeral, the environment—all

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these have faded from recollection. But the blue persists in standing out. I remember the blue. The blue has traveled across time. This would have been sufficient. But for Mrs. Chambers even the color blue, on its own, generalized this way, would have been forgettable. What she remembers is something more poignant: periwinkle blue. The blue of myrtle flowers, racing over the dark loam of one’s garden. A peculiar, an enchanting blue, not quite violet, not quite pallid or intense, a blue that insists on suggesting, but only suggesting, yet also interminably suggesting. A suggestive blue. Fragrant. A fragrant blue of suggestion, vaguely sweet. (Not sweet but vaguely sweet.) The body wrapped in periwinkle blue, and then buried. She has been dead for years. Dead for years, periwinkle blue. Suggesting, interminably suggesting. Dead for years: the flesh is gone, the periwinkle blue garment is no doubt gone. But the periwinkle blueness of the periwinkle blue garment, the periwinkle blueness as an entity in itself, remains as a feature of memory. Not an entity, a reference to an entity—except that here we find a reference becoming an entity. Untraceable but also unforgettable. And one can begin to grasp, watching the Chamberses standing pacifically to confront the troubled Sam and Lila, not only the curiosity and confusion with which they apprehend Lila’s account but also the provocative intensity of that memory. Had it been the man’s memory we would have thought, “He could be off.” But a woman’s memory is uneditable. Also: the more equivocal the setting, the more pungent the memory. A funeral, the body to be garbed before vanishing. Periwinkle blue. But even this pungency is magnified when we calculate that it is more than Mrs. Chambers’s memory, it is a central note in the melody she sings. More still, it is a central note in the melody she is singing to us, since it is the viewer, far more than Sam or Lila, who must grasp the strangeness, the intractable bizarreness of the maternal voice emanating from that house on the hill in view of the certified fact that she has been dead for years, that she wore periwinkle blue. The periwinkle blue, indeed---the memory of it---as certification. This blue, as we imagine it—and we can do nothing but imagine (the film is in black and white!)—is somehow insubstantial, evanescent in itself. A blue that does not signal because it sings too much. A blue that does not stand because in the breeze it twists too much; or beneath which there is nothing standing, so that it is insubstantial. It seems to flutter and fly off even as we hear it announced, fly not only because the body that wore it is gone but also because it is essentially, always already, of the air. Winkling airiness, yet not even fully winkling because periwinkling. A blue that dissolves readily. A blue that does not linger, except as its own name. As it winkles it winks, it almost exists. Peri: “about” or “around.” It is a blue that is almost present;

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a blue that floats around the moment. Color extracted from the shell of a particular sea snail: wincel; vinkel; pervinca; pervenke. A blue that might be material and hefty were we to encounter it, here, there, or everywhere, but that is presently immaterial, presently weightless, being only a memory. Memory is outside of gravity. A clear and good memory? In Hitchcock, difficult, very difficult to say, since he did not from early days, or ever, favor the police, did not elevate them in his viewer’s regard because they were not elevated in his own, and even if this sheriff seems a decent and well-meaning man (if stern in manner, although, to give him credit, he has been awakened from his sleep by strangers), even if we have no evidence that his word or his attitude are questionable, so that when his wife recounts her memory and he assents we have no reason for doubting either of them; even so, there lingers over the woman’s telling the intimation that we might doubt, the smallest soupçon of suspicion we might add to, rather than subtracting from, the fleeting charm of periwinkle blue. Even as a story element the periwinkle blue is a hint. Even transmuted into a word, the color teases.

Airless Blue Le grand bleu [The Big Blue] (Luc Besson, Gaumont, 1988) As a hue blue is powerful, Goethe writes, “But it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.” (Somewhat simplistically, Goethe sees warm colors [yellow, red] as positive, cool ones as negative.) He goes on, bravely sensing energy: “We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it” (171). He envisions blue in flight, alluring flight; but we may also think of it as an open invitation, a seduction, indeed advancing toward us not with substance and weight but with the possibility of pleasure or the intimation of event. The offering of what we do not yet have. The blue of water: Since water only appears to be blue its blue is a phenomenal one, not physical. Yet to leap to the conclusion that as phenomenon it is a mere invention of the perceiver, in short an outgrowth of some momentary spasm of hope or need, an accident of radiation, is to presume an elevated, separate springboard position, a philosophical perch on which to dream oneself separated from actual conditions of experience in which water, the waters, the rivers and the seas all give the strong impression of being blue. As we look at them, they are blue for us in fact. Far beyond being the outcome of

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impressions, color is impression, one we take seriously as fact. Regardless of the operational truth that blue is in the looking, it is also not distinguishable from the looking, and therefore when we look at it we do truthfully see. Yes, water is often blue.14 Water in swimming pools (think of David Hockney): The Swimmer (1968); The Swimming Pool (1969); Swimming Pool (2003); A Bigger Splash (2015). Lake water (of Lago di Garda, Iain Sinclair informs us, Mussolini disapproved—lakes were unsatisfactory hybrids between rivers and the sea [Smoke 88]): Leave Her to Heaven (1945); Magnificent Obsession (1954); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004); The Lake House (2006). River water: The River (1951); The Ten Commandments (1952); Bend of the River (1952); Scene of the Crime [Le lieu du crime] (1986); Cape Fear (1991); The Butterfly Effect (2004); As I Lay Dying (2013). Falling water: Niagara (1953); Johnny Guitar (1953); The Fugitive (1993). Water in bays, inlets, and oceans: Easy to Love (1953); Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953); 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954); Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955); Tempest (1982); Titanic (1997). Water gushing out of faucets is for cleansing, purifying, renewing (Personal Shopper [2016]): it is colorless, not blue; or else, contaminated, it is brown. But blue water: pure blue, blue tinged with purple—Homer’s “wine dark”—purple-black-blue, blue tinted, stormy blue, pacific blue, rippling blue, evocative blue, redeeming blue, beneficent blue, healing blue, mortifying blue. Godly blue. “Blue is God’s color” (McKinley 25). Luc Besson’s Le grand bleu (1988) tells the story of Enzo and Jacques (Jean Reno; Jean-Marc Barr), a pair of friends from childhood—the 1960s—now morphed into internationally famous free divers. (Jacques Mayol and Enzo Maiorca are real-life models for these characters.) They travel to Sicily in order to test themselves with the deepest challenge known to man in a major international competition. We learn swiftly enough that when a person freedives far enough down, the experience becomes transcendental, the blue of the cold sea only an envelope of mortality. (In the film, both divers perish.) The contest is to see who can go further down than the other, who can stay under the longest. Whereas in films like Submergence (2017) or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), references to the undersea voyages of Jacques Cousteau and his crew, one witnesses underwater adventures through the veil of high technology (the ship in which divers travel is extraordinarily equipped), in Grand bleu there is no technology outside the human frame. The blue both advances and recedes, both beckons and warns, pointing to an end that is blue infinite. The deeper the divers go the more saturated, the more astonishing but also the more perilous is blue.

In Red Desert (1964), Michelangelo Antonioni offers some quite different, noxious possibilities. 14

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In the film the divers reach 400 feet, an astonishing depth. They have no oxygen tanks. As a story, the film is circumstantial. That is, the circumstance of the diving competition frames the career of athleticism that leads up to it; the competitive spirit it engenders; the dramatic suspense as to how the competition will go, who will triumph, what the triumph will do; and the attraction of the men to the sea, as well as to each other, not to mention their romantic attachments. All of these pieces, sketched and aligned for camera by Besson with Robert Garland, Marilyn Goldin, Jacques Mayol, and Marc Perrier, move viewers along a narrative chain that is essentially only a support framework for the real cinematic event here, which is the camera’s confrontation with the Big Blue. Cinematographer Carlo Varini has as his challenge not the deep dive as activity but the problem of deep composition. That we must be held to the presentation of a field of enchanting, but also threatening blueness, that the presence of the male bodies struggling downward is but pretext for our concentration on the blueness of it all.15 Varini goes beyond composition. The exposure makes for a color saturation that is all-encompassing (like the fabled International Klein Blue of Yves Klein, tainted with a drop: here of magenta, here of yellow). The solidity of the blue not only surrounds our consciousness, it penetrates, ultimately it whispers. There is suddenly no world aside from this blue, nothing but blue form, blue perspective, blue volume, blue truth. Regardless of whether Enzo and Jacques manage to achieve success or not, regardless of their attitudes and feelings, regardless of the game and its possible results, the blue extensivity holds us in an odd embrace, awards freedom and keeps freedom at arm’s length. Varini’s principal task is to ensure that the audience will sense that the blue into which Enzo and Jacques throw themselves is, just as the film’s title suggests, a very great blue, greater than oceans, greater than the planet as through our dainty configurations we know it, greater even than the meager universe, of which these two learned as children what we all learned, that it is insuperably large, and yet not so large that a schoolteacher cannot name it. The grand bleu is a blue volume in which they can believe only by pulling out of their present experience, only away from this little now and all their memories of earlier nows, so that in the event their belief is nonbelief. Every dive is transformative. They are entering—they are being bidden to enter—not mere water, not even the primeval Sea, but the Big Blue, a blue space (a space that exists only for blue), containing a color bluer than all blues, bluer even than the star-studded ceiling of the lower chapel

A not dissimilar cinematographic challenge is resolved through an invitation to the viewer’s psychology, or hunger for movement, in Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), where accompanying vocal narration by such performers as Tilda Swinton we see only a completely blue screen. 15

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at Sainte Chapelle, bluer than the long garment in Millais’s “Mariana and the Moated Grange” (1851), a grand, monumental, and also ephemeral blue that, for all its blatant presence, retreats in whispers; that, always when we try to reach it, backs further off. They can dive to any depth, the Big Blue will call them onward. It has no bottom. It has no container. Not what it is in geographical fact but what it is on the screen. The Big Blue stands in for film itself, a form without a boundary, a presence without a limit, and of which the perceiver takes account only through artificial (technical) reduction and the presumption of a view. In the truth of it, cinema is beyond any vision, beyond any coincidental framing, beyond the story it can tell or half-tell, beyond what we can even conceive as the “beyond.” What makes the dive perilous for Enzo and for Jacques is this endless vocation. “Come deeper. Deeper still. Having come this far, you can go on. Having searched, you can hope to find.” Besson’s textual strategy may be a perfunctory one, or at least very conventional: male competition, strength as valor, persistence as nobility. But his blue vision, his own penetration, which is the film itself, is from Beckett: VLADIMIR: Where do you go from here? POZZO: On.

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“What?” the dull report of a gun from the furtherest boat shook the air and suddenly the skyline was sliced in half by a new flight, rising more slowly and dividing earth from air in a pink travelling wound; like the heart of a pomegranate staring through its skin. Then, turning from pink to scarlet, flushed back into white and fell to the lake-level like a shower of snow to melt as it touched the water—“Flamingo” they both cried and laughed, and the darkness snapped upon them, extinguishing the visible world. LAWRENCE DURRELL, MOUNTOLIVE

VLADIMIR NABOKOV: “V” is a kind of pale, transparent pink: I think it’s called, technically, quartz pink: this is one of the closest colors that I can connect with the “V.” My son … sees letters in colors, too … one letter which he sees as purple, or perhaps mauve, is pink to me and blue to my wife. This is the letter “M.” So the combination of pink and blue makes lilac in his case. Which is as if his genes were painting in aquarelle. CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT GOLLA

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Marie et Marie Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, Columbia/ Tohokushinsha, 2006) Louis XVI’s queen, Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst), née Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna (1755–1793), and never elsewhere a fountain of energy, as far as she is shown onscreen by Sofia Coppola (2006), is caught reposing on a gilded fauteuil upholstered in pale aqua silk damask. Her head is thrown back, her arms are flopping at the side, her feet put up on a matching chair and one of them in the hand of her maid, who is removing a pink shoe. But the food spread on tables all around her is pink and unconsumed. She is satiated from a banquet now terminated, and all around her, the food sits on an array of tables. Satiation in one’s dreams. Satiated pink. Her petticoat is as pink as the cake on the table in front of her. As for this creation, it is an artifice of three layers, its sides piped with pink swags and ringed by chains of rose petals, paler at bottom and darker as one mounts. Can one taste the confiture inside this cake? Its liqueur flavoring? The sparkling, virginal whiteness? In Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau attributes to Marie Antoinette the expostulation, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” her response to learning the peasants of France had no bread. La brioche is often (mis)translated into English as “cake.” “Let them eat cake.” “So let them eat cake, then!” “Unfortunately,” writes Rousseau, I have never been able to drink without eating at the same time. But how was I to procure bread? I had nowhere to keep it. If I asked the servants to buy it for me, I would be giving myself away and, in effect, insulting the master of the house. As for buying it myself, I never dared do that. For would it do for a fine gentleman wearing a sword to go into the baker’s and buy a piece of bread? At last I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: “Then let them eat brioches.” I bought brioches. But what a business I had getting them! (262) A superior, disregarding, contemptuous tone revealed, or a totally ignorant one, and attributed to the “great princess” from without, too. A Royal Ignorance. Yet why would a monarch fail to be ignorant? There are plenty of retainers whose function it is to acknowledge the truths of the everyday, why should the Queen? Is this pink cake beside her the “cake” Marie Antoinette believes the peasants should eat, and has she, by deigning to touch it, left it aside for those who are hungrier and who spend their lives considering more than she does? (One seriously doubts this, but where does the doubt originate?)

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In her flaunted pink couture is this Marie pronouncing a certain availability, a certain loucheness? The pink tickles, invites dalliance at the precipice, the lip. Or is she, as the film suggested early on, with a splendid scene of her being dressed by courtesans, a mere entity laid over with sheaths and capsules, fruity envelopes and capes of glory? (The envelope, not the person inside it, is louche?) Behind her, a larger table with many cakes and tarts, pink or white, decorated in pink or with blossoms, remote, untouchable. The idea was, we are to imagine, that this Regal Being would be very hungry indeed, would possess a Regal Hunger, and would either devour entirely or supplement her appetite by tasting from each and every one of these pink confections, swathed in her pink tissue, with her pink shoes delicately removed, with her maid in black and white gazing on unfeelingly (that is, without presuming to feel). She would require to be offered choice, this pink or that one. That unfeeling, unresponsive, unindicative maid. A figure of machinelike capability in the uniform of a lithe human. Has the Queen not dropped back into a pink reverie? Of what does one dream in pink? In a pink transport … Marie-Antoine Carême (1784–1833), surely the most celebrated cook in France after the Revolution, was one of the men who made their careers on the basis of talent rather than ascribed position, in the spirit of the Enlightenment. “The French Revolution,” writes an unnamed contributor to the New Monthly in 1842, had its influence, not only on the art of cookery, but on the rank and condition of cooks. Before the revolution, a cook, however much his talents might progress, still remained a mere cook … that is to say, he was a domestic servant.… The revolution emancipated the cook from this degraded position, and elevated him from the rank of servant to that of artist; for cookery, in its present advanced stage of perfection, may truly be classed among the liberal arts. (6) But the new avatars, who broke with what Carême would call the “ancien cuisine”—such as Laguipière, Lasnes, Richaud, Robert, Riquette, Viart, and Fouret, as the contributor lists them—were already in their prime at the end of Louis XVI’s regime (1793), well prepared to develop new artistries and show themselves off. Carême and his post-Revolutionary cuisine built itself on their shoulders. Yet built it was, not found, since from childhood he had been fascinated by architectural constructions and now, with the materials of cooking, unwrapped ways to make constructions of his own (that entranced the court and royalty). The typical Carême dish—the contributor disparages him as a mere director of cuisine—was not only flavorful and substantial but flamboyantly spectacular in appearance, blazing with colors, impressing

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with elevated forms, towers, delicacies, ornamentations. “Too good to eat,” synopsizes the typical reaction to his preparations when they were revealed. It is in the style of Carême, ornate, fashionably colored pièces montées pretending to monumentality, and surrounded by respectful garland rings (flower petals, whole blossoms, piping), that the cakes around Marie Antoinette address the eye of the beholder, notwithstanding that such a creature as Carême himself could not have made them (he was but nine when Louis XVI and Marie lost their heads). The same year as the Monthly article appeared, he published The French Pastry Chef, following up from his Royal Parisian Pastry Chef of 1828. Carême would love to recreate “the ruined castles and hermitages, temples, pyramids and fountains he had seen in the Bibliothèque” in marzipan, sugar-paste, spun sugar, and pastry (Kelly 39). As to the coloration, it may well be that the pinking of pastry in this Coppola scene is a derivative of modern food-coloring practices, especially after the invention of aniline dyes late in the nineteenth century. In the middle ages, most food was not colored, although some cheese was reddened and some preparations used tea leaves. The elaborateness of Carême’s constructions was their form and ornament, and only through the addition of fruits and so on were the creams and whites of egg and dairy preparations made decorative. Our Marie here is ensconced in a pink suffusion, a dream of Regal Exclusion. (The food was “conceived” by Marc Meneau; flowers by Thierry Boutemy.) By force of convention and the ease with which in painting the effect can be achieved, pink is frequently thought an admixture of white and red: in fact, a whitened red or a red-tinctured white. But nature is full of pinks that have nothing to do with either red or white, colors authentic only to themselves: the Sweet William daisy, the primrose, the fuchsia, any number of classical roses, all are stunning pinks. Or the pink of cooked shrimps. Or paprika pink. The fleshy pink of heathy gums. The pink of sunset. Marie Antoinette’s cake—it reflects the pink of her garments, the pink ties in her hair, the pink blush laid upon her cheeks so dramatically, and another pink that may be neither seen nor mentioned—suggests to the modern sensibility “girlishness,” the pink of a teenaged girl’s bedroom (see Stockard Channing’s improbable lair in Grease [1978]), the pink of sherbets and fancy ice creams, cherry pink, blushy pink, pure pink. That is, the pink that guarantees purity, as in pink beef or pink virgins, as in feeling “in the pink.” This cake seems utterly appropriate for a girl’s tenth birthday party, and one can imagine a flock of the Queen’s female associates, all young, all pink-cheeked, all begowned in shades of mauve and pink, flustering around a pallid aqua chamber in syncopated giggles, fondling and devouring pink confections and bon-bons and meringues, pastry creams flooded with raspberry, and catching glances at each other’s shoes. An invocation of nature, harmony, innocence, and spontaneous delicacy. A pink charm that is not quite yet beguiling, a pink curiosity that is not yet prurient.

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This pink queen is a veritable princess, a girl who would grow into some arcane maturity that might match her station if only she had time. But as she is the fated Marie Antoinette, known to us from the film’s very beginning and with no shadow of doubt doomed from either birth or her marriage onward, doomed to eternal immaturity, she is but a Princess Queen. A queen of princesses; a princess of queens.

Pink Again Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount, 1958): I Very like a classical symphony, Vertigo (1958) is filled with, is built upon, recapitulations. The woman who is another woman. The tower that is another tower. The vehicle that is another vehicle. The journey that is another journey. And six times in the film, each one offering a discrete and unitary deployment, we find a little nosegay of pink noisette roses. Mixed in are some dark, tiny violets, and the entire bundle is caught at the stems, traditionally, in a frame of sculpted doilies, white as a priest’s collar. In the everyday, nosegays are typically sweet, honeyed, intoxicating, but these characteristics must be contained, on the only-visible screen, in the pinkness. The pinkness must suggest and then suggest again a delirious sweetness we can barely imagine. Vertigo is about such a delirium. l

When first we encounter the nosegay, it is being delivered by a saleswoman in dark blue to a customer in slate gray, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak), one of San Francisco’s upper uppers. A woman, in fact, who inherited her status rather than having it rubbed off on her by a puissant husband. The husband is the one rubbed here. She stands proudly and with expectation, spied upon by the film’s protagonist, Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), who has become a bloodhound at the husband’s request. Having followed her town car, her dark green sleek town car, as it glided in a twisting spiral down from Nob Hill into the Union Square district, he is watching carefully as she walks through a rear-alley door into Podesta Baldocchi, the premier florist of the area. The floor, black-and-white stone tiles, is laid in diamond patterns; she stands upon it calmly. It is evident the floral package has been pre-ordered for today’s pickup; or perhaps even that there is a constant order in place, to collect which she comes here routinely. The pinkness here is perfunctory, matter of fact. We do not get a close shot, but the fanciness of the nosegay, its sprightly brightness, shines out even in the sparkling store filled with flowers of every color. Madeleine is now associated for us with this nosegay. Pink noisette roses and the proud woman in gray.

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Madeleine has the nosegay securely in her hands when, next, she pays a visit to a strange grave in the cemetery of the Mission Dolores. Figuratively speaking, and while the flowers remain crisp and fresh, this is a voyage back in time, because the Mission Dolores (the Mission San Francisco de Asís) was (at the time of shooting), and remains today, the oldest surviving structure in San Francisco. The cemetery is small and, in its way, elegant, dotted with noble cypresses and sprinkled with brilliant flowers. Trailing her there, Scottie can be noticed wearing a magenta pink-striped necktie, and for several footsteps he marches beneath a splendid, gigantic pink bougainvillea stretched along an exterior wall. While bougainvillea are not exactly exotic to Californians, they do provide a sumptuous and often spectacular display, as here. Madeleine visits the grave then walks away, pausing momentarily very close to the spot where Scottie has secreted himself in the shade of a tree. We are given express presentation of the nosegay, perky and lonely-feeling in her tightly clasping hands. Did she bring it as tribute to the dead? Did she bring it because it is now her talisman and where she goes it must follow? Our third encounter with the little pink roses comes at a moment (that has been considerably and justly celebrated in both affectionate and critical remarks) in Gallery 6 of the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Scottie observes Madeleine seated on a bench and staring, as though entranced, at a rather large portrait oil that, as he learns from a guard, depicts Carlotta Valdes. “Portrait of Carlotta,” it is called. It becomes evident to the observant Scottie, then quickly to us, because Hitchcock’s camera pointedly alerts us, that the painted Carlotta, a woman of indeterminate late youth or early middle age, hauntingly looking out at the viewer, is holding a nosegay quite identical to Madeleine’s. We see the painted nosegay, then the live one on the bench beside the gazer, then the painted nosegay again. The painting has the effect not only of (apparently) transfixing Madeleine but also of intriguing, even stunning Scottie, since a claim made to him earlier by her husband, that Madeleine is more or less “possessed” by the spirit of Carlotta, and recalled when we saw that it was Carlotta’s grave she visited, seems now deeply and organically established. She must know this portrait intimately. She must have imbibed the vision of the nosegay and arranged for Podesta Baldocchi to make an exact duplicate. She carries the duplicate as though it is part of herself when she goes wandering, perhaps freshly every day (for all we know). Carlotta was as tightly linked to the pink of the little roses as Madeleine feels herself to be. Madeleine has, in fact, fully realized the image in the painting. If her roses

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flow unsoiled from the painted Carlotta’s painted roses, perhaps she herself flows unsoiled from the painted Carlotta. Many have concluded that the scene in some way verifies the husband’s claim of Madeleine’s affiliation with the now-dead Carlotta; and that this instant is the instant of most intense verification. A person bonded with a painted image.1 As central as the nosegay is for Madeleine here now—the tiny roses, the affecting binding, the charm and innocence—so was it central for another woman long gone. Pink for time travel. Pink for the liquid of memory. Carlotta’s pink and Madeleine’s: doubled pinks. A pink echo. Pink also for pose and stasis, since the optical balance shown here between the charming flowers in the picture and the imitations in reality suggests a comparison, a face-off, an almost military stance of attentiveness, in which the flowers on each side of the boundary wait and stare unendingly at each other. In the rosy pink aura, processual time has stopped. l

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But time comes vividly alive again in a scene very soon afterward. Madeleine has driven away from the Palace, and via the Lincoln Highway, El Camino Del Mar, Lincoln Boulevard, and Marine Drive to Fort Point, the old marine garrison at the very edge of the bay and beneath the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Scottie parks behind and watches her walk to the water’s edge, lower her head in contemplation, then pull the nosegay apart and drop the flowers into the water before letting herself fall in after them. Again, the direct bond between the pink nosegay and the fresh, pink self—Madeleine has the alabaster-pink skin of a Galatea. The flowers go into the Bay, she goes into the Bay. The flowers are beyond rescue. Is Madeleine? The next appearance: Scottie’s pal and one-time girlfriend Midge Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes) has been exasperated by his fixation on the ghost story of Madeleine and Carlotta, inasmuch as she has been confided it, and in order to pique his attention and, as she hopes, his rational consideration, she has painted (with admirable technique: she is a commercial artist) an oil portrait copy of the “Portrait of Carlotta,” with her own face subbing in. The painting does not go over well and is perhaps the cause of such consternation, disappointment, even anger that it works somewhat disruptively from a dramaturgical point of view. So very notable is living Midge sitting next to painted Midge that the painted nosegay in painted Midge’s hands eludes deep concentration. But it is there. It is what makes her portrait a telltale rendition. Now it is Midge claiming affiliation—as though an

My piece “Visit to a Gallery” examines the Legion of Honor scene.

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affiliation of this kind is not hard to claim. The painted face: her face. The painted nosegay: that other painted nosegay. Part of what makes the painted nosegay less optically engaging here is Midge’s vivid red cashmere sweater as she sits watching Scottie’s reaction. This is the only appearance of vivid red anywhere in the film. Blood red in a film that is otherwise “bloodless.” Finally, Madeleine loses her life on the high bell tower of the Mission San Juan Bautista (a little more than an hour south of San Francisco, and seventy-seven minutes into the film). Scottie goes into abject mourning, is indeed virtually catatonic for an extended period of time. When he comes back to reality, he is walking down Grant Avenue one afternoon when he passes the vitrine of Podesta Baldocchi, and there, centering the window display, calling out to him in the most riddling of “voices,” is the pink nosegay, yet one more perfect copy waiting for some tender hands to hold it. Did both Madeleine and Carlotta shop at Podesta Baldocchi for such a bouquet (the florist opened in 1871). He stops to gaze, and when he turns, a group of young women is heading his way on the pavement. One of them strikes his view.

What can we imagine this striking repetition—six pink nosegay moments—signifies in and of itself? The film is built upon repetitions, repetitive developments, doublings, reflections, memories; yet to position an object not two but six times is to triple the doubling, to state it, state it again, and then, for special emphasis, state it yet again. In every manifestation of the noisette nosegay, the scene is visualized so that the object will not be centralized or highlighted, not made the essential thing to view. Even in the Palace scene, where the nosegay gets its own close-up, it is subsumed under a broader view of the character in the painting and the woman watching her. The cemetery exhibits classic forms (cones, rectangles) and mysterious behavior: the nosegay is a mere prop. The flower shop is so explosively designed with floral color that the nosegay seems an afterthought. In the Bay, it is vanquished. In Midge’s painting, the humor and tension of the moment dwarf it. In the vitrine reprise, it seems powerful for a second but is quickly replaced in vivacity and centrality by the advancing women. The color pink is never a dominating color, in any shot, in any scene. Yet: Yet of all things in the film, this film which is so essentially about passage, about mortality, about transience, about the frailty of memory and thought, only one thing survives, continues, lasts through a chain of personal devastations, and that is the pink nosegay. The pink of rebirth. The pink of endlessness.

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A Blush The Pink Panther (Blake Edwards, Mirisch, 1963) I can recall to this day how profoundly disappointed I was more than fifty years ago to learn, after the opening credits had vanished, that The Pink Panther (1963) was not about a pink panther at all. Is this why my regard for even the boundlessly capable Peter Sellers in that film was so diminished, its shine worn off? Is it why the dilly-dallying between dignified David Niven and seductive Capucine left me cold, and the bumbling of Herbert Lom left me only wondering? Finally, at the end, as the credits came up again, there was my pink panther, hopping around to the music of Henry Mancini with all the coolness in the world. He was so much more engaging, not to say more important, than the “pink panther,” that fabulous jewel around which all the characters waltzed. Five facets of the panther seemed undeniable to seventeen-year-old me and continue to seem undeniable as I write this in 2021. First, he was a mover (and shaker), if not a dancer altogether. The credit sequence involves a series of poses and positions, crouches, extensions, creepings, and indications, no two exactly alike. A poseur, a photographer’s model (or a cat pretending to be one: funnier), a nervous wreck. He seems a nervous wreck, partly because of his difficulty controlling (a) his cigarette holder (already preposterous) and (b) his monocle (ditto) but also because he doesn’t appear to be aware of what the next move is supposed to be. This makes him truly hilarious, since cats in general are so much in command of their space. This one keeps shunting around as though searching for the right, the acceptable, spot. “Is it okay for me to be here?” A very unfeline cat, because cats are always in the lead. Where did he come from, this creature? A man in a turban is fitting a gigantic necklace around the neck of a little girl, and at the end of the necklace, dropping upon her chest, is a mammoth translucent stone. Camera zooms into this stone until it devours the screen, and a pink essence is fluttering there. That pink essence transforms into the cartoon panther. Next, he has popping, astonished, uncomprehending, and, because gigantic, freakish eyes. Not only eyes that see but also eyes that will be seen seeing, eyes that our eyes will not be able to miss. Eyes of puzzlement, querulous eyes, suspicious eyes, ravenous eyes that have no memory. Every sight a fresh sight, every instant a beginning. “Peek-a-boo!” in pink. The panther is encased, thirdly, in a hermetic rectangular bubble of textualities, since around him in various positions onscreen names are flashing, and he is noticing them. That is what a credit sequence is. The names are physical objects (words are things), he can pinkishly hop over them, stand atop them, peep out from behind. Evidently, he makes no sense out of the

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names at all: an illiterate pink panther. For some entirely inexplicable reason, this seemed in 1963 (and still seems) strange, although I am quite familiar with the fact that felines don’t read English text: at least, don’t indicate that they read English text. Yet one expects this one to be able to read, somehow. This one is a super-pink, and his postures seem so assertive. Yet apparently, he is not super-pink in terms of language. He is pinkly language deprived. It is charming and funny that the texts, so meaningful to us—if at all, since, like this panther, most viewers pay very little attention to the names of the people who made the film that is absorbing them—mean nothing to him except in their objective, material status: toys. Words onscreen appearing and disappearing as phantoms for the pink panther. (Does he go to a lot of movies?) As to encasement, fourthly: the entire area that is occupied by the panther and the credits is a receding, rosy pink ether, darker than he is. He is therefore a pinkness within a pinkness, an “ultimate” pink. Does he imbibe his pinkness from his surround; is this creature a “pink panther” only because he swims in pink? Or, as seems more likely (if inexplicably), does he export or exude pinkness to the situation, without depleting his private reservoir? The surround is pinked by his pinkness. Or: His Pinkness. (If he is not monarch of this space, no one is.) Finally, perhaps least obtrusively and yet in its depth most philosophically interesting is the apparent fact that the Pink Panther, albeit a creature who gazes outward at us and sees us appreciating him, does not realize that he is pink. Or: does not realize that his pinkness is something. That if he were a panther who was not pink, we might be less inclined to pay him attention, less inclined to remember him after fifty years. He is as blithely unaware of being pink as of being animated. His pinkness, then, is insouciant, carefree, unselfconscious, innocent. A panther tickling our sensibilities because he is pink and innocent. His pinkness is his animation; his animation is a pinkness. Since this opening title sequence is indeed animated rather than simply photographed, the pink panther results from artists’ collaboration and handiwork2 and could have been any color at all. The film could have been called “The Purple Panther,” “The Turquoise Panther.” Is the pink a blush? Is he not only innocent and carefree but at the same time somehow embarrassed? I can think of but few reasons why this astonishing Pinkness should feel embarrassment, modesty, self-criticism. He dimly recognizes—because although he cannot read he has been briefed—that he is going to be placed against the very famous and celebrated “David Niven”; the very famous and celebrated “Peter Sellers”; the very famous and celebrated “Capucine”; the very famous and celebrated “Claudia Cardinale”; the very famous and

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The artists were [Isadore] ‘Friz’ Freleng (1906–1995) and seventeen collaborators.

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celebrated “Herbert Lom”; and many others. Hmmn? They want me in that company???? Or, is it that he feels naked (and pinkly so)? Or that no one, least of all the filmmaker Blake Edwards, has told him what he is supposed to do here, and he is forced to wing it? Winging in pink? …

Drink Me The Nutty Professor (Jerry Lewis, Paramount, 1963) Robert Louis Stevenson published his Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, during the late Victorian era. Something in the story of a violent monster residing under the skin of a pacific scientific personality suited and tempted the public imagination in a culture not only supporting the flowering of science but filled with “civilized” beings who were not, in the dark recesses of their imaginations and bedrooms, nearly as civilized as all that. The story has had lasting influence, has become one of the bedrock myths of contemporary civilization by way of various transformations including the human/alien interface; the split personality; the superficially respectable but deeply dirty criminal mastermind (Dr. Mabuse; Ernst Stavro Blofeld). With philosophical roots that can be traced as least as far back as Hamlet, we can find in the story of surface and depth, mask and spirit, proposition and reality a reflection of profound worries of the soul. Notable are the celebrated actors who have labored to incarnate the twinned heroes of this tale onscreen. John Barrymore, gaunt and Rasputin-like; Fredric March, with swollen eyes; Spencer Tracy, his lips warping in shadow. Indeed, nothing has seemed strange to audiences about the fact that our best looking, most dignified of performers have taken delight in the transformations that made them hideous, deformed, utterly unappealing. Barrymore, March, Tracy were all matinée idols, performers whose screen appearances typically configured characters of great dignity and social value. One needed such a performer, because Dr. Jekyll had to be as respectable a London surgeon and student of medical practice as could be conceived. Handsome, estimable, dignified, tranquil, intelligent to an extreme: else the transformation to Hyde could never seem so magnificent and so terrible at once. As materiel of production, the story becomes an interesting conundrum for a screen actor like Jerry Lewis, who by the early 1960s was internationally established as a comic genius, a man who showed “disfigurement” openly, again and again, through acts of physical klutziness, social malformation, civil debility, and a certain kind of aesthetic ugliness—the mouth too open, the teeth too visible, the eyes too large and too unfocused, the body— producer of both form and sound—more or less out of control. If he were to perform the Jekyll–Hyde transformation in an updated version (to be called The Nutty Professor [1963]), how could his “Jekyll” type

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be dignified, resolute, and serious, since the unappealing monstrosity of Hyde would seem, with Jerry, automatic? After all, was he not always already a “Hyde” in appearance, even if inside he intimated himself to be innocent, simple, childish, soft, gentle, and sweet? Where could a “Jekyll-like” sincerity and straightforwardness be found in The Kid, as Jerry frequently called that character he played over and over in film? The Kid, who though never ignoble was physically immature, culturally uninformed, morally at odds and ends because untutored and untutorable; not to say physically inept. The (brilliant) solution was to make a persona called Julius Kelp, who would be bucktoothed, visually impaired, and incapable of combing his hair or fitting his clothes properly, and would be extraordinarily absentminded, in the charming and affecting stereotype of deeply convicted academic scholars too wrapped up in their books to have a mind for the everyday world (struck definitively in Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire [1941]). A perfect “Jekyll,” since Kelp would be at least nominally scientific, rational (or at least devoted to rationality), meekly peaceable, orderly (if at the same time unable to order his disordered classroom), beneficent, sweet-hearted, and guileless. Kelp stumbles around, walks into objects, sets off unintentional chemical explosions, speaks with stuttering repetition and hesitation, has trouble with the administrative bureaucracy, is mocked by his (ultra-cool) students. He has a laboratory in which he labors in his private hours. Test tubes rotating in a mechanical agitator, glass tubing, phials of liquids colored red, green, orange, purple; a Bunsen burner with the flame shooting up; and a pet bird who seems, at best, cruel and at worst a harbinger of evil. Julius is brewing a potion. And finally, shutting the blinds and turning off the light, staggering forward in his hapless white lab coat, he is ready to try a taste. He holds up a beaker, uses an eyedropper to plop in a little of this and a little of that, and holding the future up to his lips takes a long slow swig. Then we see the magical transform. First, stumbling, falling, twisting, turning in agony on his floor, colored liquids spilling all around him. Then, suddenly, out in the street the camera, simulating Kelp, moves slowly across, citizens stopping to gawk directly at him with shock. One gawker … another gawker … another … another … Then an entrance into The Purple Pit (the students’ hangout). Then a shot of the numerous young people gyrating to music there. Suddenly the music dying and the frozen dancers slowly turning to look toward the door (the camera). Bartender missing a glass as he pours. Cigarette seller dropping her cigarettes on the floor. And in a shocking reverse shot, the “Hyde” at whom they are all staring: A “lounge lizard,” as such were called at the time: handsome, slick, too slick in fact, snugly tuxedoed in aqua blue with a geranium pink shirt, a cigarette always dangling. He is the swankest being in the universe. Sits at the piano to play “That Old Black Magic.” Stuns the crowd, tattooing his suaveness into their skins.

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Our “Hyde,” Buddy Love, is the epitome of style and couth. Stylishly coldblooded; stylishly contemptuous; stylishly superior; stylishly insincere. A perfect figuration of a characteristic self-denial in the name of aggressive progress: The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future—in Keynes’ words, “a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today”; in Ruskin’s words, “bulb issuing in bulb, never in tulip.” (Brown 273) Because if Buddy is not an archetype of success, he is an archetype of promise, a living prediction, a climber, a racer after certitudes. There is something horridly monstrous about this overly assertive personality and its outcomes. Both Kelp’s laboratory experimentations and his final accomplishment, the transformative potion, are destructive, as we see when he is tormented on his floor with the detritus of the lab strewn around him. Love from Kelp by way of the potion. Kelp into Love. The magical potion. The potion of magic. Back to that vehicle. This concoction of concoctions—he has been working long and hard, trying every possible combination of chemicals the identity of which we will never know—this alchemical treasure, this bubbling spirit of transmutation, is nothing other than: Pink. Pink futurity. Pink alterity. Pink glamour and wealth, power and talent, gleam and brittle surface and mirroring shine. Pink revelation. At least we must take it as revelation to whatever degree we wish to consider The Nutty Professor a straight, uncontaminated transposition of Jekyll/Hyde. Revelation because Buddy Love can be known only as a creature who has long been imprisoned inside the bubble—under the skin—of Julius Kelp. A pinkly aggressive, pinkly successful slickster generating the university professor and his clumsiness either as a cover (and for what secret purpose would a slickster require a cover?) or a tactical camouflage: as professor he can scoot his way up the ladder without a soul detecting his moves. In the Stevenson, Jekyll’s experimental substance seems to erode or make transparent his everyday serious self and permit the emergence, by night, of some being who could originate nowhere but in that very self. The potion liberates, but does not germinate. The pink solution in Lewis’s film dissolves his professorial cover to reveal what lurks, what may always have lurked, below. The Kelp who seems modest is really brazen, but only the pink solution can make that evident; can help him know himself. Or—and because of his affection for Kelp as shown in the film’s conclusion, the reading I suspect Lewis would have wished us to make—the unfortunate, beleaguered, frustrated, forlorn academic is not the producer of the swinger, secretly or unknowingly, but instead his secret and unknown

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adversary, the Knight who will slay this repressed dragon. Kelp is thus Love’s mortal foe and must be pushed out of the way so that Love can live, or pretend to live. The pink drink invokes or materializes this Love, this false love, this Buddy who is no one’s buddy. That Julius and only Julius has manufactured the monstrous drink is evident because the pinkness of the first man’s potion transmutes into the second man’s shirt, the shirt that sets off the blue tuxedo. Buddy Love is of the potion, not only freed by it but also partaking of its essence, walking with essence of pink, as it were, as Hyde walks with Jekyll’s essence twisted and buried inside. When Julius drinks the pink potion, he has no idea what he will become, whither on the map of his internal self the pink road will lead. He has the innocence of Alice: Tied around the neck of the bottle was a paper label with the words, “DRINK ME” beautifully printed on it in large letters. It was all very well to say “Drink me,” but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry: “no, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked ‘poison’ or not.” (Carroll 9–10) Why, one might ask, given that Kelp is going to require such a thing and that it must eventuate from his experiments, should the magical potion be, of all possibilities, pink? The laboratory table has ingredients in every color. And no theorization of color provides for an additive mechanism through which any number of primary colors, added together, produce pink. The pinkness of the pink drink is magical in itself, as an inspiration; and then doubly magical when we see what it can do. In the same way, Jekyll has magic in concocting his substance just as the character of Hyde seems magical when he misbehaves. The potion—the final potion—must seem ineffably bright and mutational, vivid yet sufficiently indeterminate that it suggests—instead of form or placement—kinesis and energy. It must be an explosion of color, because it will have explosive effect yet we will see it only briefly. It must seem strange, unlike other forms: new, promising, exciting to the eye, so blatant, in fact, that with eyes however open we cannot see past it. Candy pink. Medicinal pink. Pink and wondrous. Pink and effective. Pink for transmutation. Pink to stuff the lounge lizard’s shirt.

Fitting Pink Arizona Dream (Emir Kusturica, Canal+/Centre National de la Cinématographie, 1993) Leap forward now, thirty years. Emir Kusturica, the Serbian filmmaker (and musician), has made a concoction of his own, a pink film, as it were.

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In Arizona Dream (1993), Axel Blackmar (Johnny Depp), a fishing hand working out of Brooklyn, is suddenly summoned by his cousin Paul (Vincent Gallo) to drive with him to Arizona and see his uncle Leo. Axel and Paul drive, a journey to the south of the south that is in many ways a phantasmagoria itself. Uncle Leo is going to get married, and Axel is just in time. The two of them can sit up watching home movies together, sad movies, bringing Leo to recollect how Axel’s parents died in a car accident because of him. The film will develop with Axel getting a job, as Paul did, at Leo’s Cadillac dealership, finally coming to live on a farm out of town with a strange woman who wants to fly, Elaine (Faye Dunaway), for whom he lovingly builds a “flying machine” that doesn’t really work, and her somewhat neurotic daughter Grace (Lili Taylor), a suicidal maniac. Leo dies and goes to heaven, but not without Axel having an extended dream of ice fishing with him as Inuit. Arizona Dream is a hyperrealist fantasy, cousin, perhaps, to the installation fantasies of Sandy Skoglund. Its configurations are both stark and vivid: a chain of Cadillacs buried in the sand with Axel’s dream image of Uncle Leo parading beside them and swinging a golf iron (filmed beside Ant Farm’s “Cadillac Ranch” in Amarillo Texas); the dry vegetation around Elaine’s farm; the transformational tree outside Elaine’s door; the Arctic wastes. Central to the dream imagery, imagination, logic, and energy of the film is Jerry Lewis’s performance as Uncle Leo. Stern but tender, nostalgic but capitalist, master of his territory but also completely lost in the universe. The ambulance bearing him, as he expires from a heart attack one night, heads away down the street and flies up into heaven. We meet Leo as he is being fitted for his wedding suit. Jacket, frilly shirt, cream white cowboy boots. No trousers. He could not be more gregarious. He could not, for Axel, be more confusing. And the wedding suit itself is shocking pink. Out he runs from his pink stucco house (decorated with white stone lions), yes yes, here I am, come to me, come to me, here I am! The pink of the stucco a duller pink, sandier than the electric pink of the suit, the raspberry sorbet pink. This is a rich man’s suit, its lapels and pocket are decorated with bands of pink silk. Leo is nothing if not a rich man, his dealership has a pale pink Cadillac on display out front. He plays what is for him a “proper” avuncular role in visiting Axel at Elaine’s farm, disparaging the arrangement there, effectively telling the young man to grow up and get a life. Rich man, exorbitant pink. A pink that would break the bank. A pink that will defy the imagination. There is no reason or rationale for a pink tuxedo, no sense in which it can be apprehended as anything but a come-on, an advertisement, a goad, a preparation for attack. (It is the costume of Reynaldo the Fox in Charles Walters’s Lili [1953]). If we invest attention in the pink, invest emotion, perhaps we will also invest a few thousand dollars …

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Jerry’s Leo paying for a tailor to make a suit infected by Buddy Love’s pink shirt, pink spreading all through it. Pink dignity. Pink formality. Pink in your face. And personified by Jerry, Uncle Leo is never anything but in Axel’s face. Perhaps because of the way he wears the color in meeting Axel; perhaps because of his glowingly carefree, effervescently pink selfmodeling; perhaps because he is, most deeply, Jerry Lewis; perhaps because Axel needs at the center of his shifting life a bright figure of this magnitude, our pink Leo (Leo the white lion blushing pink) seems unmistakably to be showing off, icing the cake, seems to have placed himself on a plinth (which is not the tailor’s little stand, fixed and laborious, but a majesterial moving plinth for showing off his form from every angle). Pink for celebration (he is marrying a much younger woman [Paula Porizkova]), pink for elation and delirium, pink for self-announcement. And pink for a you’re-notready-for-this freshness. Also pink for extremity. Because Axel has been hauling in fish, getting dirty. He is a healthy looking fellow, but not colorful. (Johnny Depp does a great deal to restrain his vivacity until Axel meets Elaine.) No one in the film is exactly colorful, except Leo: crazy, expressive, manic they are, but not colorful. Leo is the source of the stuff of life. The pink flesh. The pink organism. He must suffer an organic death. And Axel must be lost without him, although when the film began he was without Leo and didn’t feel it. Leo has touched him, tickled him pink, rubbed off. An old Hollywood trope: the good old man rubbing off on the callous boy. We found it reading Huckleberry Finn, we have found it since on the screen: Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper in The Champ (1931); John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River (1948); Paul Sorvino and Christopher Serrone in Goodfellas (1990); Bruce Willis and Justin Long in Live Free or Die Hard (2007). All Hollywood contagions are both serious and everlasting, but Arizona Dream’s is the only contagion that is pink. The florid pink freshness of youth, the pink weariness of age. What is it that draws Axel close? A pink tomorrow.

Pink Fire The Passenger [Professione: Reporter] (Michelangelo Antonioni, MGM, 1975) To begin, an ending. Pretending to be David Robertson the businessman, the reporter David Locke (Jack Nicholson) has been put to death at the Hotel de la Gloria on the outskirts of Algeciras. Killer(s) unknown. His girlfriend (Maria Schneider) (we are given good reason for thinking her Robertson’s wife Daisy) is at his side. Locke’s wife Rachel has come from London, chasing after him.

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INSPECTOR (turning to Rachel): Do you recognize him? RACHEL: I never knew him.   The tears stream silently down her face. INSPECTOR (turning to THE GIRL): Do you know him? GIRL (slowly nodding her head): Yes. The camera (the vehicle “within” which we have been passengers) quietly pulls away to the outside of the place, and from a distance, in a beautiful static shot, we see on the right the whitewashed hotel, colored light shining in its doorway because of a semicircular stained-glass transom, and at left the long distance, the long, long distance under the silver-gray sky and with a disarming streak of pink at sunset. Pink sunset, pink termination, pink which is as far as you can go on this ticket. Having pulled away from the people as characters, we are now left with the character of the place. Our world under the pink sky; every day leading to the pink sky. The place is the only thing that has staying power in the aura of this pink effusion. “The essence of the soul of the place: the soul’s estate” (Sinclair, Living 53). People come and go. The entire scene leading up to Locke’s finale was an orchestration of comings and goings in the bare plaza outside his hotel room, dog, car, trumpeter, kid with ball. We come and we go. But there in the west is the pinkness of eternity. Pink heaven. Has blood leaked into and diluted the sky? Antonioni waited patiently to make his final shots of this film. There is no accident to the pink sunset, the blaring magenta, yawning widely, screaming, calling. And the peaceful building, white but in shadow—blue white—and the gleaming, magical, take-me-back-to-childhood multicolors of light shining from the lobby: Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais,” as epigram to Amy Lowell’s volume, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass (1912). The little array of letters, HOTEL DE LA GLORIA, over the door, the colored light, the white stucco, the dirt plaza, the long road, the sky. “Hotel” is hostel, of course: sheltering place, harbor, embrace. “Gloria” meaning glory, which for most North Americans would point to effulgent splendor but the prime meaning of which, in the Latin from which it comes (and whose tone and meaning would have been known to the Italian Antonioni), is ambition. The ambitious may take shelter here, or do. Those who seek triumph. Those who strive to move ahead. This is where ambition comes to sleep. The famous David Locke has already sheltered inside the unknown, the hard-to-know David Robertson (Robertson runs guns), but is here doubly sheltered. He has hoped to have another life. To leave the shell of David Locke behind and take for himself

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the shell of a man who died of a heart attack, whose body he chanced to find. Found par hazard. The hazardous life. To become someone else. To be a passenger in someone else’s life circumstance. Quite an ambition, fit for the Hotel de la Gloria. As we watch this shot, we are listening to a lone Spanish ten-string guitar picking out the Catalan folksong “Canco del Llabre” in a setting by John Duarte. It raises hopes, it settles into calmness, over and over and magisterially over again, with a kind of assuring repetitiveness, the repetition of life, a typical day, another typical day, a song, another typical song, as things go, as things are, the peace of the real. The soul’s estate. There were premonitory flashes of the pink sky earlier in the film. When Locke first saw the girl in Bloomsbury, and later in Barcelona, she wore a skirt flecked with pink. Later, in Spain, Locke/Robertson and the girl sat in the green veranda of a quiet hotel, green tablecloths, green shadows, and on their table a bouquet of intensive magenta blooms. Locke in Africa, before he finds Robertson, is alone in the desert, sweating, hopeless, unable to dig out his Land Rover; he wears a pink plaid shirt, now sopping with moisture. At home in London’s Notting Hill district, Rachel stands in an upstairs room with pink shadows. Is this David Locke perhaps not only a reporter (an internationally celebrated political reporter) but a harbinger of finalities, too? Does he always stand for the end of the line, pressing an argument as far as one can go? (Although his wife complains he has “no real dialogue.”) Has he pushed his questions all the way, until “David Locke” has no further function in this world, can contribute no further value, and can therefore be sloughed off and left behind as a sheath of scales? The pink finale is always his flag, as he follows the instructions in Robertson’s (now his) date book without having any idea what they mean. He is heading to a precipice, rushing there, in fact, although to our eye, and no matter who eagerly dogs his tail, the progress seems measured, routine, unpressured. After the precipice, the final sky. The pink fire. Is there some yearning, some incompletion, in this sunset? That no life sums up Life, that no presence sums up Presence? And that even when the story is done, all its events foretold, told, and remembered, there is still an unfinished phrase, a pronouncement never made. As with the equivocal final comments by Rachel and the Girl, each one telling truth but only part of a truth, the pink sky beckons us to keep trying to understand, to keep moving forward. “I awaken you,” it proclaims, “now that the day is done.” And it speaks for Antonioni, who once claimed, “I say what I can say, not what I want to say” (Shepard 191).

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Pink World Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, Universal, 1956): I The luscious pink of plain desire. Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), who, we will surely learn, is probably impotent, has his eye on Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), a graphic designer working in New York. He fêtes her at the elite 21, along with his boyhood chum Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), and then flies her off, in his private aircraft, to Miami. (That he adroitly flies this plane indicates that Kyle had previous flight experience, maybe as a pilot in the Second World War where—are we to suspect?—his manhood was wounded.3) From a distance, we see the blue-lit beach hotels, the blue-whitecapped surf rolling in, then, swiftly inside, the two men escorting Lucy down a long corridor to the suite of rooms Kyle has had Mitch jump ahead of them to arrange. Down the long corridor. This particular set serves no function at all in the film, beyond giving a passageway for Kyle, Mitch, and the slightly hesitant Lucy to move from the lobby to her room. Had we been brought directly to the room, we could take it as read that they moved there from a lobby rather than materializing out of thin air. Nevertheless, for the most minimal dynamic usage a set has been built. It will appear only once more, soon later, when, discovering that Lucy has left, Kyle quickly heads back down the corridor to race after her. Going in and coming out the corridor is the same. The road up and the road down are the same road. But this corridor is painted a blazing, ferocious, ravenous pink. The pink of tropical blossoms, borrowing from fuchsia, frangipane, amaranth, red ginger, konjac, and uncountable other blooms, but blaring, singing, pronouncing the words Caution and Hunger. Hunger, Caution, Caution, Hunger. Pink of interiority. A pink of hungry hesitation. Kyle’s pink blush reflected in the walls as he walks, Lucy’s pink nervousness, the pinkness of the flesh around her nerves jumping outward to the limit. Precisely because of the dramatic arbitrariness of this corridor set, it is the pinkness not the corridor that speaks here, unmistakably serious. Lucy will marry Kyle, but will be associated with gray: sanity, groundedness. Kyle will show himself more interested in making money than in making love, Lucy is important to him because she can inspire his true desire and decorate his palace, not because she is that desire or belongs where he has put her. That they walk A trope not far from Hollywood writers’ consciousness in this early postwar era. Written was released just a little more than two years after Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa (1954) in which a key protagonist suffered a similar wounding. 3

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down a corridor on that first night, a substantial corridor, a corridor of pink, shows that they have a transition to make, each of them, but also that the secret suite is removed to a private zone, past pink. The long walk away from society to a bubble. The long pink walk to … As though passing through a circulatory system toward a heart. Corridor: a place for running. Indeed, there is no other moment in this film as brazenly colorful, as randy, as tumescent, as sinful as this pink one—no moment that is so fully colorful in any way. The film has spots of brilliant, shining, intensive color—Kyle speeding forward down an empty twilit road in his cadmium yellow roadster, the oil refinery dipping back behind him, for example—but no full space is made so flooded, so overflowing, so screamingly what it is. The magenta pink here flows from, as it delineates, not an object but a screen world: for the moment that the trio move down that corridor, that corridor is their entire world. The world is pink, scathing pink, cutting pink, interrupting pink, distracting pink. If we watch the walls, we might have an instant’s respite from the torments these people are enduring, Lucy afraid of the uncertainty she feels for her future, Mitch babysitting the pathetic Kyle and harboring his feeling for Lucy, Kyle trying once again (as, we fathom, he has done many times in his life, fruitlessly) to show that he is a man. A panning camera through the lobby, the green plants, and that pink wall. Kyle perhaps knows the spot well, has been here before, because he moves ahead without the least hesitation. Mitch has learned to step beside him into every circumstance. Lucy is the stranger, the one for whom this particular pink is a horror.

The Pink Line Fight Club (David Fincher, Fox 2000/Regency, 1999) Late night in a vacant, industrial zone of downtown Los Angeles. Two young men are scampering over some wire fencing into an enclosure where rest a dozen or so enormous garbage dumpsters. They have brought a huge bag with them. A security guard is searching the premises with his flashlight, so they duck down and converse in (stage) whispers: TYLER [Brad Pitt] (pedagogical): Tonight, we make soap. NARRATOR [Edward Norton] (unbelieving):  Really? TYLER (pedantic): To make soap, first we render fat.   He looks behind him to check that the coast is clear.

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  The salt balance has to be just right, so the best bet for making soap comes from humans. NARRATOR:  Wait, what is this place? TYLER (matter-of-fact): Liposuction Clinic.   He climbs into one of the bins and begins throwing out large translucent plastic bags filled with fat. The fat is semi-liquid, like an alien plasm. NARRATOR:   Wow! TYLER (busy at work):  Later. Richest creamiest fat in the world!   As they try to flee, one of the bags of fat catches on the barbed wire at the top of the fence and the adipose liquid oozes down onto the Narrator, covering him with its abysmal essence. The fat in the bags is pink. Shining pink, reflective pink, deeply organic pink, the pink of genitals in action, visceral, essential. The Narrator, having fallen under the influence of the mysterious pugilist soap-maker Tyler Durden, is taking an ongoing lesson in life, Tyler teaching him not only the recipe for soap-making but also, in a vivid practical philosophy, the material aspect of the natural world. Tyler is professorial, but also violent: unremittingly violent. The Narrator is intelligent but somehow utterly uninformed. The practicalities he is learning at Tyler’s side are simple ones, simple as pink, and supremely variegated—the nature of God, the nature of flesh. The spilling fat is unspeakably vital and galvanizing: so abhorrent that the touch of it brings, we must imagine, an electric thrill of retraction; and it is so primordially formless, once it has escaped the containment of the plastic, that it threatens to flow and drip endlessly and everywhere, to overrun the universe. In a momentary observational withdrawal, we may conclude that if there are six or eight or ten bags of fat in this one dumpster, probably even more, there must be more than a hundred bags in this garbage enclosure altogether, and this is only one or two days’ extraction. There must be a lot of pink fat “out there.” Spreading away from this dark pen—the scene is all blue-green-tinted, almost black and white, except for the fat—is an uncountable population of what we are to imagine Tyler imagines and teaches the Narrator to imagine: indolent, selfindulgent, unreflective, hedonistic cattle (Tyler uses the word “human” as though he is not human speaking it), bulging with undetected fat just like this, waiting to be caught out, waiting for their turn in the long lineup at the Clinic doors. Fatty pink from too many Big Macs. Fatty pink from too much reality television. The clinic is a metaphorical slaughterhouse. We can freely imagine—imagine Tyler imagining and teaching the Narrator to imagine—what goes on there: pipes inserted, vacuum pumps sucking away, plastic bags being filled, pink formless and sticky material, pink contamination, collected and dispatched, dispatched and sold, sold and reused: essence of the soap we use every day to wash our

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skins. “Richest creamiest fat in the world.” This pinkness is voluminous, almost everlasting, undying, a deeply human and deeply shameful pinkness. Pink we would gladly be rid of, even as, like the hapless Narrator, we are collecting it. Jogging, Tai-chi, weightlifting, cross-country skiing, calisthenics, aerobics, shooting hoops … our little rituals for eliminating this pink. The rituals that, in the end, bring us to this Clinic because we will not fail to surrender … What is in the bags, the material of the theft, constitutes one of the two salient pinks in the scene. The other, less obvious because the bags of fat are photographed to seem utterly obvious, is more enchanting. This is the pink presence, the skin, the companionable attitude of the two young men. For they are both distinctly young, muscular, sharp-witted, convicted, and virtually the same age, the teacher and his pupil almost interchangeable twins except that the teacher is so very blunt and matter-of-fact and the pupil so perduringly astonished. This relationship has an erotic inwardness: erotic because of the flesh and the leaning toward union. Tyler and the Narrator desire one another, one another’s presence, one another’s physicality, this last given away by the arcane Ritual of the Lipids, where the pink blubbery substance, quintessence of flesh, is arranged and shared between them. There is a sense of veritable contact here, albeit by way of the pink substance, as though Tyler is touching the Narrator’s skin, rubbing his knowledge of fat and social truth into the pink pores. The young, pink pores. Fat upon the surface of a fatty interior, because the human interior has fat: in the fight scenes, the pink skin will be broken and some limited view of that fatty interior offered. Yes, the clinic is for all of us. We are all standing in line, waiting to be “rendered.”4 The dumpsters full of human fat, Human Pink, are Nirvana. By couching his motives under the pretext of soapmaking, the phenomenal Tyler Durden directs attention—the Narrator’s attention, our attention—to exteriors, the washable surface, the presentation of selves in the everyday world, when in truth he is offering an invitation to the Interior. The organic, magical, and at the same time mesmerizing reality of the body as such. So profuse a pink interiority exists and is derived here that Tyler and the Narrator are finally revealed to each other as a single flesh, the ultimate profuseness: pink upon pink. To grasp this to a depth, we must return ever so briefly to the huge plastic sacs of quivering pink fat. Lined up for processing in this “clinic,” we are to conceive not just a gathering but a veritable multitude of strangers: fat is removed from one body and from another, from another and yet another, on and on until the end of time, and all the fat manifests as fat, and only that, in these bags. Here, yes, is the utile substance (soap from flesh: the flesh of those who are officially not perfect On rendering, this echoes Soylent Green (1973), released when David Fincher was ten and a half. 4

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until they are reduced: an echo of the concentration camps) but also the universe we do not normally see in one another. Finally, in this accounting, the fat of one person is the fat of another: there are no divisions, labelings, separations, or identifications related to the stolen bags. We are all one body. Ryoko Yasutani: “The fundamental delusion of reality is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.”

Of White

And the cascades sang, because the night and the snow allowed the mountains to meet. D. M. THOMAS

The precious stone isolated in the sky turns its chalky steppes toward us and during the coldness of night sheds on the earth a white light which kills the thing it illuminates. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

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White Redemption Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, Enterprise Vineyard, 1966) Probably because it is a story of fire engines, from its earliest moments François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) seems destined to be engorged in red. The concluding sequence, essentially a poem in white, therefore comes as a refreshment and improbable surprise. White spotting the red pictorial ground: the very opposite of the premise of “Snow White,” where the queen, at her loom, cuts her finger and a drop of blood falls onto the white snow upon the windowsill. Montag (Oskar Werner), having grabbed the departmental flame thrower and used it not only on his marital bed (his wife, Linda [Julie Christie] reported him for committing the crime of reading) but also on the fire chief (Cyril Cusack), is forced to take flight. A pathway was confided to him: follow the train line to its end, then keep walking into the forest, where he will find the Book People. Book People? Yes, a book each one. They have chosen tomes to memorize, every one of them. After the process is complete, they burn the book, burn it themselves, so that no force can fall upon them for criminality. The book lives on in the body and spirit of its possessor. Wandering among these folk, Montag meets Pilgrim’s Progress, Waiting for Godot, The Pickwick Papers, The Martian Chronicles (a red-headed boy), The Jewish Question (a pert blonde girl), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Part I and Pride and Prejudice Part II (a pair of chubby twins: his host, an owlish sort with a smooth radio voice [Alex Scott] lets him know, “We call the first one Pride. The other’s Prejudice. I don’t think they like it much”). It is a little utopian community filled with devotedly serious, comfortable, deeply joyful souls who treat one another with kindness and respect, in general evincing a tone we have not seen in the film before: It so happened that a man here and a man there loved some book. And rather than lose it, he learned it. And we came together. We’re a minority of undesirables crying out in the wilderness. The dystopia from which Montag has escaped with his life was harsh, burning cold, brutally demanding, and repressive, our retrospective gaze an important note to strike at this concluding moment because when we inhabited the fireman’s world earlier, everything must have seemed just odd enough, just quirky enough to be slightly humorous. Now, with the Book People strolling through the trees, it is plain that there was nothing funny, and all the ironies of construction were far too easy.

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Snow is beginning to fall. Montag sees a tiny rivulet running blue-gray under the sky, with the denuded trees all around and a snow-white blanket upon the ground. Across the water, in a makeshift lean-to, an old man lies dying, finishing with his last breaths the arduous task of reciting his own book to his grandson, who must now inherit it. The text is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Weir of Hermiston (1896). As Montag patiently watches and listens, we eagerly join him: “I will be very quiet,” replied Archie, “and I will be boldly frank. I do not love my father; I wonder sometimes if I do not hate him. There’s my shame; perhaps my sin; at least, and in the sight of God, not my fault. How was I to love him? He has never spoken to me, never smiled upon me; I do not think he ever touched me.” (84)— (Note the word “boldly” substituted for Stevenson’s “baldly”: bold frankness is different from bald frankness.) The boy’s passage concludes with these lines, that echo what the viewer sees—the viewer who does not want this film to end—as the young voice stumbles ahead (word and picture fusing): He was more afraid of death than of anything else. And he died as he thought he would, while the first snows of winter fell. The old man has silently departed. And the boy is alive with the book. And the first snows of winter are indeed silently falling. A white veil from heaven. The film concludes with a magical shot of Book People by the dozens, moving left to right; and also right to left; patiently, peaceably crossing paths and heading, each, into a verbal future, while the large white snowflakes drop behind, around, and in front of them, coating, we calmly note, even the sacrosanct territory of the camera. The musical score for this “Finale,” dated in London, June 25, 1966, has one of Bernard Herrmann’s typical (and painfully unresolved) compound chords, G minor combined with D major, triple forte in the strings; then G major; then the compound chord again to end.1 The little tableau of the boy and his grandfather is set in what almost seems a crèche; it must be taken very seriously, here with the snowfall and with their patient duet, a cracked, elderly voice and a chirrupy young one, saying and repeating, stumbling and repeating, with Herrmann’s evocative G-major adagio soft in the background. A still graver hint lies in that concluding pair of sentences, because they are not to be found in the Stevenson but were written expressly for the film.2 The little boy is looking I am grateful to Christopher Husted for consultation about the Herrmann chord. Some claim by Truffaut and his screenwriting partner Jean-Louis Richard. But Truffaut’s own journal of the filming offers different light. The text excerpt to be used in the boy-and-grandfather 1 2

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up and away, into the filing cabinet of his mind, as he tries to get the phrase “And he died as he thought he would” to come out correctly, and so he does not see that at this instant his grandfather has gone. And that painfully pacific final line, a prelude to the murmuring shots of passing Book People, “as the first snows of winter fell,” seems especially touching here in the snowfall. The first snows of winter, the winter of us all. White, pristine, and unearthly. Rapt silence. A blanket for the dying world. The trees are white etchings against a white ground, gracefully extending their white branches over the gentle murmuring people-books. Is this a vision of the apocalypse? “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” Montag has been freed. In a tight-fitting fireman’s uniform for a great deal of the film—the military part—and calling up the Wehrmacht, with jack boots and flared metal helmet adding to the effect, he has now, in the forest, become only the civil European, loose trousers, baggy sweater, tousled blond hair. With his sharp blue eyes, he seems primed and ready for an invigorating hike, the journey to tomorrow. Literature will flood over him now, rather than occupying the darkest shadows of his mental attic. Books in the trees, but paperless. His burdens are lifted. The woods are deep, but not so dark. And the air has that unmistakable smell of snow coming down, clean and piney. When the Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe, his own identity choice, is securely implanted Montag will settle into peace. The end of the future is the past.

Weisse Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, Paramount, 1976) In an important sense the Holocaust is not over, historians, cultural critics, and philosophers all agree. Philip Roth reports Primo Levi taking him to a paint factory where he had worked before the Event: “He said he believed that nearly everybody once working with him was now retired or dead, and, indeed, those few still there whom he ran into seemed to strike him as specters” (Roth 175–6). Turning still in the minds of those who were tortured and survived, in the minds of those whose families were tortured and did not survive, in the minds of those who have read and listened and learned enough not to forget—-not to be the dupes to whom George Santayana was sequence was originally taken from Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale (1889). But Helen Scott, Truffaut’s close friend and later collaborator, found a better text (a trouvé un texte plus adéquat) in Weir of Hermiston. Scott was generally regarded highly by Truffaut for her literacy, and this intervention of hers suggests at least the possibility that the additional language was written by her (Journal 175).

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alluding when he said, “Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it”—turning without cease and never giving rest are the sights of faces and the memories of voices, actions and geographies recalled, and the repeated confrontation with impenetrable darkness. Walking shadows. The Mussulmen. In John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976), set in the present day, a Nazi war criminal visiting New York is caught up with the lives of “Babe” Levy (Dustin Hoffman), a sprinting enthusiast and doctoral candidate at Columbia, and his brother “Doc” (Roy Scheider), on the face of it an oil company executive but in truth an operative of the CIA. The Nazi, Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier), is by trade a dentist and by inclination and commitment a torturer. Babe falls into his power and, in a sequence of scenes famous among fans of grisly movie horror—“Is it safe?”—is “examined” by the excessively polite Szell, who uses a dentist’s drill with excruciatingly precise effect. The Nazi is searching for a cache of purloined diamonds in the City and Babe’s key role is to foil him. As many raconteurs and scholars have repeated, Olivier and Hoffman enjoyed a somewhat peculiar working relationship on this film, one being RADA-trained and celebrated worldwide for his vast storehold of actorial techniques and the other being a New York–trained method actor whose deep belief it was to embed himself psychologically and physically in the skin of his character. Young Hoffman made himself ragged sprinting and avoiding sleep in order to convey the delirious and frenzied anxiety Babe experiences in the dentist’s chair. At the same time, the methodological differences between these actors accentuate and refine their characters, help us grasp the unbridgeable moral chasm between Szell’s reactionary rigidity and Babe’s hip and feelingful sense of presence. Szell has located his diamonds. Pacing down West 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, New York’s diamond district, he hopes for an appraisal. The ruling elite in this part of town are all Orthodox Jews, running businesses that have been thriving for decades on West 47th (embedded among these businesses, its own kind of diamond inside this rarefied diamond setting but not visible in the film—and no longer to be found there but blossoming at the time of filming—was the Gotham Book Mart, one of the truly preeminent bookstores in Manhattan since 1920). Szell paces along the sidewalk from shop to shop, numerous pedestrians passing him by or heading in his direction and shuffling around him. From close on, we see the look of mounting distress and panic on his face, his darting sharp feral eyes, his pursed blade-thin lips. Suddenly from the other side of the street, the voice of a woman, shrill, panicking: “Look! Look! He is there! The White Angel! Der weisse Engel!” She is tracking him, step for step, chanting unrelentingly. “Der weisse Engel!” She seems to be living a nightmare. An old man walks too close to Szell, peering into his face, and with a stiletto secreted near his wrist the Nazi cuts the stranger’s throat in one

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swift move. Keep walking. On and on. Don’t change your pace. Don’t run. Whatever you do, don’t run. “There! Der weisse Engel!!” An epithet, of course. Nor one so crude. What could have inspired inmates of the camps to call this man this thing? Is it that for them the Angel of Death is somehow white? Does death remove all tint of life’s inscription, leaving only the white page behind, as blank as it was at the start, “second childishness and mere oblivion”? Is he an “Angel,” perhaps: einer Engel, because of his all too horrifically demonstrated powers, unsurpassed and (seemingly) unearthly? Is this erudite thug not one of numerous obsequious and profane practitioners in Nazi service who, in one concentration camp after another, experimented upon prisoners in a fashion that was tantamount to abject murder? Was he not one of those, and did he not, this monster—as they will never be able to forget—prance around a torture chamber in a spanking clean white lab coat? White for sterility, for purity, for hermetic perfection? Grim, abysmally objective white. Potential white, since with this white all things are possible: all hitherto unimaginable things. Is he the Aryan Angel? And was it clean science that he was performing, a black ritual he chose to call science, cleansed, sterilized, and of insuperable power, albeit infernal? Der weisse Engel. Or—and here is a rub, because this is far less symbolic and less mythic, thus by far the more devastating possibility—did he merely give off the striking appearance of whiteness? Broadcast it, perform it, wear it on his sleeve? A white beyond cold, beyond parchment, beyond all but the terribly fastidious. The bloodless look of his skin. His grinning teeth—a good dentist shows off good teeth, professional standards! His calm, gemutlich, too white etiquette. Worse still, the way he presents himself as body in space (the key issue for a movie camera). Because here on the street there are three things from which we cannot take our eyes as, through Schlesinger’s dollies, we follow him: l

The metallic half-rims of his eyeglasses, sucking in the gray afternoon light that filters through the skyscrapers down to the Manhattan streets, and pitching it back with ferocity. The lenses, now made emphatic, give him to see all things, all angles, all possible pathways: in short, give him command. He sees better than we do. The incessantly probing eyes, whitened themselves because of the eyeglasses. A furtive animal being hunted is especially sensitive to optical stimulation.3

A recall here of the odd device James Wong Howe suggested for Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a tiny bit of Vaseline on his eyeglass lenses that would hurl light back into the lens. 3

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Then, the twin streamlined waves of shock-white hair at the sides of his head, beautifully combed back to act as blinding proscenium for the bald head. Bald, like a piece of white paper on which everything and anything can be inscribed, but as yet without character, without inscription. Anonymous. And the white epaulettes, signs of age and sophistication. Because Der weisse Engel is an old man, he has seen many things—not to mention what his experimentation has brought to his attention—and has watched the making and dissolution of history. White hair: show me respect. A bald pate: wisdom; or at least calculation. Regarding “his” diamonds, Szell has of course been relentlessly calculating (and it need hardly be said they were all stolen from Jewish families). And then, lastly, one of those little touches a great actor takes pains to arrange for, a little fillip that isolates and illuminates the character conclusively. He wears a freshly laundered, wellpressed white shirt with a long-pointed collar. The collar’s wings are angel’s wings. He could be readying for flight from pursuers (as well as flight out of the country). The habiliment is precious, meticulous, practiced, habitual, elevating, yet also—here in the gabby diamond district—strangely formal and upright, too formal, too upright. The face is besmirched by an ugly grimace, but the white pointed collar, the long collar, the starched collar, cleans Szell up, bleaches him. Bleaches even his questionable humanity away.

Snow White Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, Warner Bros., 1990): I A four-man team is climbing high, in a blinding snowstorm. We see them in slow motion and in telephoto shots showing head and shoulders principally. Snow all around, so that they float in a white field. Snow on their caps and shoulders and packs. Placing their poles with care and stepping ever so slowly, as though with leaden feet. Inhabitants of another planet. Our world estranged from itself. Weariness to the point of collapse. Roped together. Falling. Standing again and pressing on. And falling. The very last ounces of strength. So much snow that the figures are visible only as dim shadows of themselves. They have been climbing here … forever. Three men falling to their knees, and the leader moving among them, exhorting them onward. He shakes them, grabs them by the pack harness. No

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good. He drags himself on, deluded, hopeless, and soon himself collapses into the snow. Only a face emerging from the white. He dreams himself in a tunnel. Then we see a gentle hand wrapping him in a thick mohair blanket running over with twinkling sparks of snow. He sleeps. But then his eyes open and slowly he looks up. A young woman covered in a shawl kneeling at his side, the wind blowing her astonishingly long dark hair. Hair long enough to go around the world. His eyes open wide and he tries to rise. She is smiling at him, moving her lips. She lays a second tinseled blanket. The wind is very, very strong, and she leans into it to fetch yet another shred of blanketing. Snow whipping fiercely across the screen. He lies back, closes his eyes, and dreams a waterwheel in the spring. He dreams green trees against a blue sky. The snow wind is vortical now and is making the long dark hair of the woman swirl around her face so that she is hidden in it. Younger, he is walking beside a river with three waterwheels. We see the river grasses rippling in the river current. The young woman’s hair is blowing above her head now, and her face shows concern. Her two eyebrows are one. Something of Lafcadio Hearn and Masaki Kobayashi’s “Woman of the Snow”4 but this is one of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990). The restless white, the moving white, the blinding white, the disabling white. Disabling unto nothingness. But then emerges, as though in birth or sudden magical manifestation, that saving figure, whose clothing seems slight. She is unaffected by the snow and the wind that, disorienting her hair, merely distracts her. She is neither cold nor exhausted, in fact seems inexhaustible. Her blankets are interwoven with material shiny as stars. Is the climber dying in the snow, and has she come to escort him across the boundary? Are his three companions, half-buried in the snow now, being tended by three similar maidens, or is salvation for this one man only, the one who would not voluntarily give up? To shoot at, say, forty-eight frames a second (so that, projected at twentyfour, the movement will be slowed to half) requires considerable light, since each frame is before the aperture for only half the time. The snow effect assists this, so that there is a tight integration here between cinematic vision and narrative moment. Slow movement, exhausted movement, slow motion, intensive light from the white blizzard, emphasis of facial expression and body posture by use of the long lens that both gives the impression of putting us close and gives the impression of only giving the impression of putting us close. Thus, a kind of stasis in the story, a participation and withdrawal at once. Is the young woman coextensive with the snowstorm? Has the storm borrowed her form? From, respectively, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1903) and Kwaidan (1965). 4

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Is it her, beckoning to this man with images of the spring, images of his younger days? If he seems at peace under her gaze, resting with both the storm and his daydreams, this is only because his exhaustion is so very deep, so devouring, that even a shudder of fear is beyond his strength. This white event circles, swallows, engorges, penetrates him. When I encounter a blizzard in the everyday, trudging ahead with each step a potential hazard, the snow deep, ice chips hitting my cheeks, my eyes shut except for the narrowest slits, I always have the feeling of this Dream, a feeling not a thought. I always have the same feeling: that the whiteness has no limit. That everything is a storm. Moving ahead through blinding snow, the thought, “This is the place to collapse” and also, “This is everywhere.” The snow will blanket me, and everyone, and when it stops, at midnight, under the light of the moon, a billion billion snow diamonds will sparkle in it. All the world I know, blanketed by the diamond white of the snow.

Smashing! The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, Oscar Lewenstein Productions, 1969) At the end of the world, one might like a cuppa. In The Bed Sitting Room (1965), there is a remarkable moment in which Michael Crawford and Rita Tushingham are cavorting together in what might at first resemble a rubbish pile but turns out to be a hill coated over with broken pottery, all of it white (kilned but as yet unpainted). Since so much of the terrain of the film is bleached, acidified, “irradiated,” or otherwise telltale of the apocalyptic— the setting is a post-nuclear London—it is at first glance difficult to make out the dishes, teacups, saucers, and bowls, thousands and thousands of them, smashed and tossed and crumbling and slippery and wild. White dystopia. The English tea is dismantled. Not only does the future portend chinaware that is neither decorated nor glazed, the cheapest of the cheap for the lowest of the low, but it’s impossible to find a teapot let alone a saucer. The ceremony of innocence is broken, the contemplation of Empire is crushed to bits. But white bits, every shard as yet undesigned with some rhetoric of loss or renewal. Looking at this, we must think of pottery as we know it, as we would expect to find it in a world presented for the Always Already Understood, the wholeheartedly Received. There on our plates is the Queen in her regalia, surrounded by flowers and ponies, rosebushes and curlicues and the Lion and the Unicorn. There is monarchy, the vertical hierarchy, the class structure, all this hobnobbing and kowtowing, the dutiful deference to them as were in

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control, them as is educated, and ’ere’s a teapo’ wiff de crest of Oxferd and dere’s one wiff Cimebridge, an’ teacups gilded ’round de lip, very very dinety ’andles, keep de pinkie out, let de bunting be red, white, an’ blue, the white whiteness to drive emphasis against the red and the blue, and here’s a saucer with a Beefeater and there’s one with the Tower of London. A coffee service with the race course at Ascot faithfully rendered, and emmmmm, you could have a good cream cake or some ginger biscuits, would you like?—or for that matter something very special indeed, oh my, a Christmas pudding such as would have filled the belly of the plumpest Dickensian. The whole tall, tightly erected shebang, bowler hats and black leather shoes, brollies in the sunshine shouting predictions of rain, readers of The Times crammed into Bentleys, the whole puzzle of it. And Charles Hawtrey, “How’s yer mother off for dripping?” And Lily Langtree and the Prince of Wales. And Pablo Fanque’s fair. And Big Ben preaching midnight. Betty’s night tonight. Pleasant stroll along Piccadilly, ’fy’don’t moynd. A snicker of Gentleman’s Relish from Fortnum, slab of quince paste with it, that’ll be very nice, and here we go to Bognor Regis, the bathing is marvelous. What will we do without Norman Wisdom, golly! And Britannia rules the waves, and I’d like two rashers, please if you would, and a little porridge with jam but no jam on me crumpet, but if it’s riding to hounds you want the best would be to enquire at Lady Waltham’s Guildford way. The railwaymen are up in arms. All this, and Cheshire cheese, too. The whole monumental stiffening of the collar. The cheek by jowl. The don’t-have-your-feet-on-the-road-when-theroyal-carriage-is-passing-by. And don’t think you won’t see Ralph Richardson and Michael Hordern and Mona Washbourne and Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and Harry Secombe and Arthur Lowe and Roy Kinnear and Spike Milligan, the entire club is standing for the crowd, every last member, each one staring at white emptiness. They’re all present for the end of this world. Because it’s all gone, the bomb took it in one wash, the Queen is on horseback under an arch made of white washing machines, and now we have a road with empty cars and a hillock with broken pottery, white white white white, and all the pottery has no England on it, not a single piece has a by your leave. White erasure, each and every smashed plate a signal of what came before and an announcement of the moment of desiccation. All hoisted on its own petard. White, white, not a cuppa to save your soul.

Grave White Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox, MGM, 1956) Fans of adventure and science-fiction films have become so inured to screen explosions large and small, conventional and beyond conventional, in stories however dissimilar about characters in every imaginable walk

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of life, that the history of the screen explosion has passed largely without examination. As early as 1903, in Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, we see the device as the robbers dynamite their way into the sealed treasure chest. Prints of the film were available for rental in which this, and other explosive moments in the story–bursts of gunfire in a noble chase, for example—were hand-tinted, an add-on that made the otherwise black-and-white dramatic moment shocking and marvelous. Explosive effects to produce sudden disappearance were used in The Wizard of Oz (1939), mostly with colored smoke indexing a presumable explosion that wasn’t seen. But surely the first radiant, haunting, and dramatically culminating explosion in American film was the one that terminated Fred McLeod Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956). A radical alternation of the conclusion of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, upon which the film was based, this terminus not only alarms the eye but perdures, and startles the memory. Sometime in the twenty-third century, Commander John Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and his interstellar crew (including, notably, Richard Anderson, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly, and Earl Holliman) from the starship C-57D visit the distant planet Altair-4 in order to trace the fate of the missing ship Bellerophon. There they meet an aging scientist, Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his beautiful young daughter Altaira (Anne Francis), settled together into a comfortable “pioneer” existence with the slavish (and charming) assistance of (ineffably chummy) Robbie the Robot, built by Morbius to perform difficult physical tasks. Soon, the guests are introduced to the secret laboratory of the Krell, an extinct race of giant genius creatures who had tapped the planet’s deepest resources as a power source (Morbius’s escorted tour of the tunnels and deep caverns is a tour de force of matte animation5). And there is a profound and horrible secret, that Morbius goes to great lengths to conceal: a violent and rapacious monster inhabits the “island,” too, and dispatched the Bellerophon and all its crew. It turns out that the darkest recesses of Morbius’s advanced consciousness are fueling this beast, Caliban of the future, a “monster from the id” largely invisible except that at one point, thanks to an electric fence built around the ship, it manifests as a crackling fire-red outline (animated by the Disney studios for MGM). Morbius realizes that the dangers of Altair-4 are fundamentally products of his own dark soul and perishes in a battle with the monster. Before dying, he causes the initiation of the Krell’s auto-destruct sequence, calculated to vaporize the planet and everything on it, “leaving not a rack behind.” To save themselves, he warns, Adams, Altaira, and the crew must be far off, a hundred million miles. While in The Tempest the drama ends with a magnificent and complex reconciliation, man with man, man with nature, man with himself, and Copied for George Lucas and Gary Kurtz’s Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980) as Luke battles Vader. 5

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Prospero’s evocative “Our revels now are ended” soliloquy—which analogizes all of the beings of the drama to what they actually are, characters in a performance now to be brought down—Forbidden Planet can find a way to resolve the dark tension between scientific progress and psychological trauma only through an explosive flash. The Krell mechanism will particularize the planet. All Krell knowledge, retained in their databases; their equipment; their laboratory; their deep caverns; the delicious atmosphere that produces a mint green sky (shown in a fabulous painted backing by George Gibson): all of this, in a brief gasp, will vanish and be no more. We are in the ship, receding from the planet at great speed. There is a monitor showing a vision of deep space, with the planet glowing in its center (forerunner of a major design feature of the Star Trek universe, not long later to follow). As the timer counts down, we gaze more and more intently at the glowing star, sweet Altaira more than anyone else because the star represents her beloved father. And then, a spreading flash, instantly reverberating magnesium white (whitest of whites), and evaporating into total darkness through which the surrounding stars are now, somehow, too clearly visible in their unrelenting shine. Altaira and Adams will find a way to unite offscreen, after the credits have rolled, Robbie with them (as we know he must be) as their tech wiz and prophet if not their undeclared child. But that white explosion and invisible grave: First, the discreet luminosity as both feature and accomplishment. In order to shoot film in general, considerable light is required. The stock does not record anything that is not lit to be recorded (including shadows). With color cinematography, the problems are compounded because for the greatest saturation in results the film should have a relatively low ASA; to get a good picture, more and more light is used. Shooting Forbidden Planet involved Eastmancolor negative (the film was shot after the days in which Technicolor filming was possible) and CinemaScope lenses. Some color negative work of this period was actually dye-transfer processed at the Technicolor laboratory (see Haines 99–100), but this film was given normal Eastmancolor processing in MGM’s Metrocolor lab. I am told there is a possibility that the British-made 35 mm IB/Scope prints were made at the British Technicolour plant, since in succeeding years MGM did use Technicolour Britain this way (Haines communication). The cinematographer, George Folsey, and the designers Arthur Lonergan and Cedric Gibbons would have been concerned with lighting various elements individually so as to obtain maximal colorization in the final print: Altaira’s gowns, the laboratory equipment of the Krell, the deep caverns in matte painting, the painted backing behind the ship, and so on. All of this by way of saying that to watch Forbidden Planet is to gain instruction on film lighting, because the film is a cinematographic masterpiece. If the experience of watching film, especially on a large screen, is largely a rhapsody on light: brightness,

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reflection, intensity, and variation: then the finale explosion in this film had to work in such a way as to “outshine” all of that, to optically explode what came before, even for the briefest of instants. In effect, the starburst had to erase the film as it had been, had to eclipse the knowledge compounded as Forbidden Planet even as it vaporized the cumulative knowledge of the Krell; the film as it had been was the fated Altair-4. The white light first emerges substantially brighter, weightier than that of any surrounding stars, and then quickly spreads outward, as though all of space within millions of miles is being irradiated as well. For an instant, all space and all time seem, at once, expanded, flattened, shattered, unified. And the white is empty, the emptiest of whites possible onscreen. As the explosion is an animated effect, it is possible for the very slightest tint of blue to be infused, to make the explosion cold and forbidding. It is in its demise by way of this explosion that the Forbidden Planet becomes a forbidden planet and that an aura of the forbidden attaches in retrospect to Forbidden Planet, too. But beyond luminosity, metaphorical depth: Normally in cinema, a closing credit crawl of some length and detail removes the viewer from the engaged experience. The withdrawal is gradual, because the embers of belief die out only slowly, indeed not altogether, so that traces are left behind. The filmmaker here wishes to play with this arrangement much as Shakespeare does, but he is forced to act more swiftly. Prospero actually regales us with the way in which our belief has been pinioned to constructs, constructs now pulled away, now artfully withdrawn, to leave us only ourselves. To leave us only our selves eager for belief: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. (IV.1.1879–89) The characters only actors, the actors but spirits. A baseless fabric of vision. An insubstantial pageant in truth. Dreams. All this Wilcox must do in a single, perfect, glowing instant, so that standing on the ship next to Adams and Altaira, watching that screen (configured proportionately like a screen/window but smaller than the CinemaScope

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screen which we are actually watching), we see the world of the fiction evaporate entirely. We see the cloak of the story torn away and discomposed to the limits of discomposition. Only the space ship is left, the vehicle that made possible our voyage. The cinematic world of the tale vanishes, but cinema is left behind to carry us away (and soon bring us back again).

The Whitest Blood Around Alien (Ridley Scott, Brandywine Productions/ Twentieth Century Fox, 1979) Perhaps it will eventually be shown significant that David Cronenberg and Ridley Scott both released uterine horror films the year Margaret Thatcher was elected in England. The Brood and Alien both explore the idea of emergence as horror, Cronenberg’s film, because of its relatively mundane setting, in a somewhat philosophical way; and Scott’s, because the troubles take place far from earth, more eerily, with more commercial glitz, and with the philosophical tints more buried in the scenery. Alien is a kind of haunted-house tale, with the setting transposed to the Nostromo, a mammoth intergalactic cargo vessel manned by a ragtag team of mercenary “sailors.” When having received an unidentified radio transmission they make an unscheduled stop at a strange moon and boldly prowl there, what they discover is an alien ship, entirely derelict. They enter. Huge cavernous spaces, an eternity of design (by H. R. Giger). And below, a vast field of half buried gigantic eggs. When Kane (John Hurt), the Executive Officer, peers too closely at one of these a hideous mucoid creature springs out and, puncturing the glass of his helmet, attaches itself to his face. This is by far the most benign and pacific confrontation in the film. The crew are denied permission to reenter the ship by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the Warrant Officer, but the Science Officer, Ash (Ian Holm), overriding her command, lets them in. Kane soon revives and regains his jolly composure. We sigh with relief that all’s well that ends well. Except this is not the ending. While they are dining, Kane spontaneously convulses and twists onto his back. With him writhing in unspeakable agony—in his nicely contrasting white uniform (the pack of them in their sanitized white jumpsuits are military-bureaucratic inversions of Kubrick’s Droogs from A Clockwork Orange [1971])—his chest is punctured from within and out of a bloody fountain a hideous sharp-toothed half-worm sticks out its head, looks at them all, shrieks, and darts away to hide. Kane obviously perishes. But the thing is now present. And we may realize for the first time how cramped the ship is, how many nooks and tubes, cabinets and ducts, dark passages and darker chambers it contains. A diabolical hide-and-seek.

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How could Ash have permitted Kane to reenter the ship with the embryo of this thing attached to his face? He has been communicating secretly with the crew’s “parent company” and has received a definitive order to bring the alien back alive. Ripley fights with him about this, and he strikes her, at which point one of the crew retaliates by smiting him on the head and … his head comes off. (Like the head of a snowman struck by a broom.) Ash does not collapse to the ground. His headless body—his body from which the head is just dangling—twists and jerks around the control space, arms akimbo, throwing itself here and there spasmodically. When finally he is down we focus on his head: fluid is spouting from the mouth. White fluid. Milk white. And enough to virtually bathe the face. And now for the first time, the surviving crew members come to the realization that … Ash is a robot, not a human being, and this is his hydraulic “blood.” They are able to rewire his head just long enough for him to mutter admiration for the creature and sarcastically wish them good luck before permanently shutting down. The cybernetic conceit was hardly new to cinema at this point. It is invoked in Lang’s Metropolis (1927), in Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), even, comically, in The Wizard of Oz (1939), but narrative’s verisimilar robotic presence was still “young,” after Westworld in 1973 and The Stepford Wives in 1974—in the latter, it is not even conclusive that the wife clones are robotic. Scott’s Ash doesn’t merely look human, he behaves with human grace and etiquette in every aspect, including his capacity for wryness.6 He is civil, even at moments gentle, until this disturbing death scene. The unannounced gushing of white fluid from within him, precisely as he archly wishes the crew good luck, is thus a visual and psychological shock, for them and for us, a picture without rationale. The disembodied head (photographed in close-up), the eyes closed, the mouth burbling, the milky effusion streaming out invoke together thoughts of corruption, erosion, leakage, dismantling, perversion, threat, and incomprehensibility. For whom was Ash working, this thing; and what is the meaning of the command he received? Why does he keep flailing and not expire? Even when the mouth clamps and the head stills, liquid comes out and we wonder if “he” will come back to “life.” Mixed in this awesome yet horrific white moment are more complex themes normally treated as mutually incompatible. Ash’s terse and methodical linguistic expression calls up images of laboratories, technologies, precision, A miniature comic turn from the classically trained Holm (1931–2020; he entered RADA in 1949 and after a military and acting tour graduated in 1953, then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company), who could easily, too, invince coldness and mechanism. He had played Himmler on television (1978), the malevolent King John in Robin and Marian (1976), a television Napoléon (1974), and the ugly Riccio in Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) before making this film. 6

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abstraction, and objectivity, but the flailing uncoordinated “body” is anything but objective. The whiteness of the fluid suggests—and not vaguely— seminal fluid, as though the robot is a gigantic organ out of control, and yet the emergency conditions, the fearfulness of the hidden alien monster, and the spasmodic shapelessness of Ash’s movement all contradict any sexual reading. Until now if Ash has been gracile, he has also not been warm and receptive, has seemed the perfect Science Officer “behaving” like precisely the robot everyone now knows he is. The stereotyped science officer is a human who behaves like a machine, hardly a machine got up to seem like a human behaving like a machine. If we imagine Ash to possess a storehold of knowledge, it is inaccessible, sunk in a river of white. An oral river because he “bleeds” as humans drool. Ash speaks liquid, the white essence of truth. Liquid, unshaped and unformed. Liquid, undammable. Liquid, always moving, always becoming history. And unadulterated, unsullied white, inscrutable, uninscribed, the pure stuff of ambiguity.

The Prince The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, Paramount, 1974) It can happen that an act of moral repugnance, political instability, and aesthetic disorder might be hilarious. In The Godfather: Part II (1974), we have the case of Don Fanucci (Gaston Moschin). Fanucci, Emperor of a ghetto, parades down Mulberry Street. Screen right to screen left. Step and-a-step and-a-step and-a-step. Proud, pompous, pontifical in his porcelain white suit, his far too flamboyant white, longbrimmed fedora, and a full-length overcoat tossed upon his shoulders like a landowner’s cape. “I am Fanucci!,” his every step proclaims. “Do you think I am one of you peasants? Do you imagine that I originated in the same Egg? I speak from … above.” Smiles that are neither polite nor joyous nor encouraging nor sweet. Bitter white supercilious smiles. Don Fanucci this is!—the one of whom people whisper and dare not speak aloud. Signior Fanucci. The Fanucci who is Fanucci. He is weaving a path through the Fete de San Gennaro, the crowd swirling around him like a turbulent river, the milling revelers, the respectful serfs, contadini, who come to kiss his footsteps. Respect for Lord Fanucci. Respect for Fanucci, and obedience. All of you, look at the cleanliness and beautiful cut of my white suit: Tutti voi, guardate la pulizia e il bel taglio del mio abito bianco!, his stride calls out like a clarion. Look at me, clean as a virgin, pulito come vergine. Look, I glow! Do not touch me lest you leave a mark. Keep your

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hands to yourselves. Do not spill your Zibibbo on me, your Marsala, or your stains will bring me down, and if I fall, you fall with me. If I fall, you will become dust. Fanucci! A portly one, too portly. A swagger, a ridiculous smile, a heathen white gaze of hauteur. I am Fanucci! I am the Don Fanucci! (The protector. The one whose thugs collect from all the small business owners. The one who controls the racket. The one whose umbrella will cover you. If he permits it to be open.) Yes, yes, you have beautiful children. Don Fanucci, the white virgin, parading through the crowd. And on the rooftops, following along block by block by leaping from building to building, keeping a hawk eye on Fanucci, is young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro), a poor man in a woolen cap, and never, not for a breath taking that eye off Fanucci, never turning away, not from Fanucci the white virgin who is parading, holding court in motion, letting his people kiss his footsteps in the Fete, loud, raucous, wonderful. I am perfection in my white. I am nobility: the closest thing you will see to nobility, here in this forsaken New York. (The 1910s: this is a flashback.) In the cramped wooden rooms of your meager tenements you can dream about me, Fanucci. Look at my white suit! The proud, fat footsteps. Quanto è bello per me vedere i contadini ballare la loro tarantella con tanta gioia. Domani lavorerai bene! Vito following, hawk’s eyes eyeing, following, eyeing like a renegade. Fanucci will be home soon, away from this mob. Home in his lair, safe and sound, sitting back with a bottle of Donnafugata, but you, contadini—do not dare to spill wine on the suit, do not make a macula. Look at that false smile, that bloated chest, that filthy smile, that smile of possession. I miei contadini! You work for me! Everybody works for me! He enters his apartment building, Don Fanucci. He climbs up the stairwell. Slowly, lethargically, lifting his heavy body with more and more effort the further up he goes. Ah yes, it is a labor to be Fanucci! We see him crawling up a last flight to his landing. He sighs, ah yes. He thinks he is in Palermo, fingering the keyhole of his door. White Fanucci, the too portly, seen from behind. But what? The lamp on the wall has gone out. Something with the bulb? He reachs up and turns the bulb and the light comes on. But what? Is that something he hears? Abruptly he turns to the camera, and a look of horror flows over his face. We cut to his point of view. (Too late!) It is Vito, with his pistol wrapped in a towel halfway up his arm, firing into Don Fanucci. Back to the reverse. Fanucci bang! Bang! BANG! dropping back into darkness, all the blood in his basin gushing out and staining the white suit now and forever. Making the immaculate maculate.

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Instead of fingerprints or a little wine or marinara from a meatball, Fanucci has been awarded the Stain of Everything. His insides flowing out. The stain of completeness itself. And that … that was Fanucci. White suit, linen, glorious, on a plane above: a figure to kiss in your dreams. But here is what must be asked: There is no trouble in any of the three Godfather films showing brutal killing, spontaneous, unanticipated by the viewer, blunt. Fanucci can be a man in white who walks in a door and ascends a few flights of stairs, tiring near the top, catching his breath. A young man can step out of the shadows and without apparent motive shoot him in the chest. The scene could have been produced this way, and we can easily imagine the production. What is gained, then, in Fanucci’s long parade and Vito’s rooftop surveilling? How is the comedy of the scene constructed and improved by having a proud man showing off his pride, a boastful man boasting of himself, a violent overfed clown displaying his massive appetite for condescension before he is turned into a corpse? The character Fanucci, let us say, Fanucci in white, is intentionally puffed up in this sequence. Does the film also enact a gesture of puffing up, in some way? Here is what eventuates: l

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The larger the beast, the more skillful or tragic seems the marksman who brings it down or fails to (Moby Dick). The more Fanucci preens, bloats, and magnifies himself the more young Vito, just learning the territory, becomes aggrandized in the murder. This development is important to the structure of the narrative, because we are in flashback, working to learn how the quintessentially important and influential Don Vito Corleone came to be the person he (Marlon Brando) is. He built his height upon the white shoulders of a giant, Fanucci. Of course, this exact arrangement is also a way of indicating that at the time of the Fanucci assassination, Vito is not such a big fish in the Mulberry Street pond; it will help him to become a bigger fish if he is the one who dirties the white suit. Yet while the Fanucci killing is magnified, it is also reduced in size. We recognize suddenly that Fanucci was nothing (just as Vito shows). To puff oneself up is to begin by being small, else why puff? Fanucci is a small-time local grifter playing Big Man. In the killing, Vito makes more publicity for himself than he brings upon Fanucci. Fanucci has no other presence in what follows. He was a brute ruining local businessmens’ lives: that is all. Little Fanucci, Prince of Nothing. But more: The longer and longer Fanucci marches in our sight, parades his white suit, step and-a-step and-a-step and-a-step, when we are also watching Vito watching him invisibly from above, the more

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and more we can fantasize the act Vito has in mind. There is a kind of pornographic pre-alignment and expectation. And, just as in pornography, our imagination of the violent action we are not seeing is far greater than anything that can happen in diegetic fact. The whiteness of the white suit helps magnify this. In the fact of it, Vito will be cold, abrupt, and violent, the act will be ugly, Fanucci will have a stain; but as it will happen and be over quickly it will be nothing grandiose. The ugliness and the stain will be all the more visible because of that handsome white suit, but finally diminished if not in magnitude then in meaning. In this way, some of the violence of the film is actually shrunk: shrunk at least in comparison with our expectation of it. We will see the (flashback) killing of Fanucci as Don Vito’s first great act. But in order that Don Vito may convincingly seem as great a man as would merit a tribe of acolytes and a capacity for powerful gesture (and a flashback), we must also see the substantial territory of which Fanucci, in pretense or reality, is controller. Fanucci the Emperor may have an empire less than grand, but by letting him walk through the Fete, and showing the massive population all around, the filmmaker gives a clue to the magnitude of Italian society in New York, and with the clue a hint as to the power of the leader there. We can easily guess how that society has grown by the time Vito Corleone is at the top of it, and guess, too, at its size and complexity as an index to his power. Fanucci’s gestures are, as I facetiously hinted above, very broad and buffoonish, even operatic, expressed histrionically to an enormous audience, each member of which must be given to appreciate all the nuances and all the moments. The setting of this extensive gesturing (given the flashback mode, the film stock is artfully tinted as a signal) associates it with an historical period. We will be able to note that a great deal of the gesturing in and around this sequence matches Fanucci’s in size and intensity; but also that “later” in the story the characters we meet express themselves, by comparison, far more quietly, with more reservation. Vito was not then, and surely is not now, a bloated Fanucci. He would keep his origin a secret (a flashback only for us), his plans even moreso. The gestural variations allow for an intrinsic age-grading in the tale, so that just by watching the way in which characters speak and move their bodies we can place them in historical groups.

White Fanucci aids in building Vito’s power and augurs, by the vast area in which his white frame paces, the magnitude of Vito’s domain later on. He establishes himself periodically. And he hints at white imposture.

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The stain on the white suit must be huge, because we must be done with Fanucci, here and forever. Fanucci and his white magnificence were all before …

The White Butterfly Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence [Senjo no Meri Kurisumasu] (Nagisa Ôshima, National Film Trustee Company/Cineventure, 1983) To grasp Ôshima’s vision of the stalemate of war in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), it is necessary only to observe the tension between two guilt-ridden men. “Rafer” Jack Celliers (David Bowie) is a white Afrikaner overcome by guilt for having betrayed a club-footed younger brother years before. He has failed his blood, failed the human condition, failed at trust. Capt. Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto [also the composer of the score]) is a highstrung but horridly misplaced soldier, now commanding a prisoner-of-war camp in Southeast Asia but earlier in his life, in 1936, a young man posted to Manchuria and thus unable to join his friends who carried off Tokyo’s February 26 “Shining Young Officers” attempted coup d’état.7 They were all executed, while he lived. His guilt concerns the failure of loyalty, too: to his generation and his convictions, to his proper place in history. Celliers is delivered to Yonoi’s camp, where he first antagonizes, then terrifies, then, as they see it, supernaturally curses the commandant. (At one point, Yonoi arranges for Celliers to undergo a fake execution.) Both men are extraordinarily beautiful, two paragons of possibility. The commandant is attracted to Celliers strongly, perhaps even in a way that brings him an extra flood of guilt. For his part, Celliers is a prankster, one of those marvels who move the machine of history by doing what is not to be done, saying what is not to be said. Yonoi is dark, repressedly silent, deeply meditative. Celliers has flaming hair, gleaming eyes: he is like William Blake’s tyger. At film’s climax, there is a major confrontation. Having marched the entire British contingent, manifestly including all of the severely wounded, onto the sun-drenched parade field, Yonoi demands of the commanding British officer information about the Army’s weapons strength and is firmly denied it. He pulls his sword, ready for a beheading. Celliers breaks rank, marches across the field and up to Yonoi’s face. He seizes the man by the arms and, leaning forward gently, places what can only appear to be a gentle and loving kiss on his enemy’s cheek. “One has said,” wrote Laurens van

7

I am grateful to the late Jesse Nishihata for conferring about this.

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der Post, “that there is ‘no greater love than that a man should lay down his life for his friends.’ Yet is it not, perhaps, as great a love that a man should live his life for his enemies” (54). Yonoi blanches, falls back quivering and cataleptic, then collapses to the ground. The surrounding soldiers believe Celliers has put a dark magic upon their leader, and lock him away. Both the film and the Van der Post source novel, The Seed and the Sower (1963), from which Ôshima and Paul Mayersberg wrote the screenplay, are rooted in the unbridgeable cultural differences between East and West, metaphorized and embodied in Celliers and Yonoi and made notably emphatic in the film through the presence of a captive British soldier, Col. John Lawrence (Tom Conti), fluent in both Japanese and English (and effectively the narrator of the tale). He is sensitive to the inherent cultural anxiety of Japan, and the failure among the English to appreciate it. He knows, too, how betrayal is a central life experience for each of the two men, and that for the Japanese commandant Celliers is, more than anything, a thorn. “As one recognizes the nature of the seed from the tree, the tree by its fruit, and the fruit from the taste on the tongue, so I know the betrayal from its consequences and the tyrannical flavour it left behind it in my emotions. This is one of the fundamental things about betrayal” (48). Yonoi’s collapse in humiliation and dishonor and Celliers’s brave sacrifice of self are the consequences of two companionate, but incompatible, betrayals: as this war, the setting in which the two men meet, is a consequence of betrayal, too. Yonoi is replaced as camp commander by a far less sensitive, less aesthetic man, who has Celliers buried alive. The body is stood vertically in a deep pit and covered with sand until only the head rests above ground. Celliers must remain this way, through the heat of the day and the chill of the night. We see the head in the man’s final moments, when death is preparing to take him. A sharp moonlight flows down, irradiating the hair and the face, so that the head is alien-pale in the shadows of the ground, and a tiny white butterfly lands on the victim’s forehead. Yonoi silently marches up and, as though in clandestine privacy, snips a small piece of his enemy’s hair to preserve and to honor. Respect. Equality. Difference. “Of course, none of us will ever know what went on in Yonoi’s mind” (170). The white butterfly alighting on the glowing white head that lies still in the pool of brushed white sand. Mythologically, the Japanese culture favors the choco butterfly, a tiny white creature with astonishing powers of transformation. In legend, an old man named Takahana was visited by such a creature near the end of his life. As he fell asleep, the butterfly circled his face. People tried to shoo it off, but the butterfly seemed determined to stay. And when Takahana breathed his last, the white butterfly flew away. The scene is shot in such a way—flooded with blue-white moonlight—that marked emphasis is given to the bounded execution enclosure, the smoothed sand all around, and the solitary head resting in the center, radiant. The head has not been severed from the body, nor has Celliers been treated with

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any formal disrespect, save that his life is forfeit. Because the performer is David Bowie, aged thirty-six then (and at his commercial peak), the moment is lent a special frisson. He has an intrinsic, universal appeal as magically transformative, an “untellable” creature (as was evident in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth [1976]). The mop of hair on his head is not only bravely red, it is virtually electric in this lighting. And of course Bowie has a face of completely stunning innocence and trust, so that here one feels a genuine sacrifice, an inverted crucifixion. The white butterfly is witness.

White Presence The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, MGM, 1953) What many observers think the very greatest of all film dance routines is “Dancing in the Dark” from The Band Wagon (1953). The feuding Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire) and Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse) have retreated by night to a copse in Central Park, there to attempt to discover whether or not they can dance together. It is important they know, since both are contracted to star in a Broadway musical that looks as though it is going to fall apart before opening night. Tony allows Gaby to make the first move, a foot extension leading into a quiet pirouette; and then dutifully copies, the student taking instruction from a diligent choreographer. They hold hands. They are swept into a flow, together. The music, in tranquil, feelingful orchestration, is Cole Porter’s eponymous song, a melody that has promises built upon promises built upon promises. The routine uses the open space, as well as a stone bench there; and reflects upon the background, which is a line of trees behind which are the lit apartment towers of the West Side (all this built in studio). The movement angles forward and back, slides left and right again, moves to the back of the area, retreats ahead. Clearly as the number progresses both of the dancers are being carried away by feeling, thinking less and less, then not at all, of what their feet are so capably doing. And both dancers are clothed in white. Tony’s suit is white-cream linen. Unlike in other numbers in this show, he refrains from making demonstrations with his shoes, hands, socks. This is diligent restraint, a modern ballet. Gaby is in an alluring white shirt dress, falling just near the knee, with an open collar. It is clearly a summer’s evening. The lit green trees and the dark blue of the sky collaborate. The dance is an essay on pure form, Tony elegant and swift, always Gaby’s support. Gaby carefree and expansive in her movements, letting go. She is learning that she can trust him, but with dancers this is not a matter of thought or dispensation, it is entirely physical. She must know in her nerves that he will

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be under her if she goes into the air. He must express himself through his movements without—for even the tiniest fragment of a second—taking his attention from her. Much of the movement toward the end of the routine is synchronized unison dancing, the two different bodies in action just the same way. White upon white. White whiteness. Choreography by Michael Kidd. The number is both intensively satisfying and horribly disappointing, because one wishes for it to continue endlessly. The only way to see more dance like this is to watch the show these two are about to star in, which means, to see the rest of the film. Will they dance together again? A question intentionally raised by their dancing now, so that the present moves forward, a quintessential element of film. One curiosity, however. It is the pith of summer in New York, a hot evening. Tony could very well be garbed in a nappy pale blue seersucker suit (from, say, Brooks Bros.) and Gaby’s outfit could be a matching pale blue. Pale blue for coolness, the fabric to suit the heat. That would have given an entirely realistic flavor to the number. As it plays now, even though there is nothing unreal about the clothing, the whiteness has the effect of separating the body as motivating substance and the surface as visually apparent form. The two whitenesses are dancing, but even more: since the white on each body works in brilliance, both as style and as reflector of light, it is doubly perfect. Yes, Tony and Gaby can dance together: dance as though they have never been apart.

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God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration. … I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. ALICE WALKER

Indeed she had been keeping guard over the dish of fruit (without realising it) jealously, hoping that nobody would touch it. Her eyes had been going in and out among the curves and shadows of the fruit, among the rich purples of the lowland grapes, then over the horny ridge of the shell, putting a yellow against a purple, a curved shape against a round shape, without knowing why she did it, or why, every time she did it, she felt more and more serene. VIRGINIA WOOLF

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Disney Purple Fantasia (Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, et al., Disney, 1940); Aladdin (Ron Clements, John Musker, Disney, 1992): I Not until the second half of the 1950s did I have opportunity for the first time to see Fantasia (1940), widely admired already and not long afterward to be recognized formally, by scholars who chose to actually study him, as one of the great achievements of Disney animation. See it, indeed, again and again and again, because I had been deposited in a movie theater in a city not my own, my mother having gone off shopping for an afternoon and having left me obliged to sit and watch as Bach ran up to Tchaikowsky over and over and little Mickey ran up to the podium to shake Mr. Stokowski’s hand. Occasionally, I darted out to the lobby to look for her during a musical phrase I already knew quite well, the hippopotamuses dancing the hours. It’s quite an experience to be overwhelmed by the ocean of Disney’s figures and settings, blazing out of a huge screen in vivid, impossible colors, and all of this in a dark room. Ocean because at a certain point of involvement, if one sees this in repetition, the plotting dissolves away and the colorations come to a rollicking life of their own. The most eerie color effect in Fantasia, for me—and the film has a seemingly endless chain of color effects—is the great purple Beast-God in the Mussorgsky Night on Bald Mountain sequence, the one sequence, I should say, that touched me least, because I was not then (nor would I now claim to be) a fan of that piece of music (or, frankly, of Mussorgsky—whose much vaunted “Pictures at an Exhibition” always fails to thrill me half as much as pictures at an exhibition). Pompous, bombastic, overstated, pointlessly dark, that Bald Mountain (or Bare Mountain, as it is sometimes called). Perhaps at the time I was merely one more child who didn’t like the dark. I think not: I loved being in movie theaters, and this Disney dark was part of the movie for which the movie theater was pretext, not an actual space. But, however one cast it, one was looking up at a thunderous horned growling man-animal towering far into the heavens and colored a dark, lucid, and disturbing purple. Purple of agony. Purple of termination. Purple of disillumination. The Disney colorists in the early 1940s, and still fifty years later when by a wholly different team Aladdin (1992) was made, possessed and showed a distinct fondness for purple as a conveyor of strangeness, odd distance, queer chilling interrogation, ethnic alienation, fear. If their purple does not always give these signals—it is sometimes part of the body of some innocent creature, or the color of a sunset sky or a flower—the signals of immensity, instability, and inky doubt are almost always given by purple. Regal purple but also alien purple. Serious purple but also evanescent purple.

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The color purple seems to quiver when we gaze at it, so as to mobilize our uncertainty. It seems an impossibly rich and fulgent proposition, something offered to us that we surely do not merit, a glow that is reserved, emanating from a deeply buried fire. Purple must be stared at, but quickly we avert the gaze, not at all as though the purple would fail to withstand it but as though the gaze cannot withstand the purple, cannot take in too much purple without somehow giving way to sight itself being challenged. Blinding purple. But also cloying, heavenly, mysterious purple, as in grape must. As a very small child, roughly five or six years old, I was taken to visit my dear grandmother who lived at the time in the far, far Canadian north, in a large wooden house on a snow-filled street next to a railway track that smelled of wood fires and a few hundred yards from the largest gold mine in the world. She would be making wine, and in the pantry outside her kitchen were a dozen or more huge wooden boxes stuffed with purple grapes gleamy in a window’s sunshine. What an odor! A perfume of perfect exoticism. Deep, dark, rich, wavy, alluring. Purple, as we stare it down, calls up the promise of a memory of a longlost pleasure, a long-lost world; calls up the promise of this memory, but does not go so far as to call up the memory, which is held back. Reticent, brave purple. A robe, perhaps, of astonishing velvet. Or the color of certain wines held up to firelight, not the rather thick monarch of the Rhone, blackpurple Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but some glorious jewel of the Bourgogne, a Côte de Beaune, which mystifies as much as it radiates, deflects the gaze as much as it seduces focus. The memory of amethysts. The Disney team also used purple in Fantasia’s Rite of Spring sequence (I was too young to appreciate the joy of Stravinsky’s unfettered rhythm) for filling in, or shadowing the figures of immense bellicose dinosaurs, the Tyrannosaur with his gaping mouth all dark purple and his teeth shining white. Any color could have functioned here, done dark and saturated enough, but purple gave the creature an unfamiliar cast that balanced our too-tamed “familiarities.” Or lavender purple Brontosaurs. All of these beasts in some far distant yet potent zone, purple not present, purple not here. Displaced purple, purple long gone yet recounted here now as being long gone. And also unstable purple, purple the hallmark of instability, because even as my opened eyes center on it I feel impending change, the bleaching toward mauve or white or to a cousin purple, or the darkening to black, the horrible sense that this rich and velvety purple cannot sustain itself exactly this way for more than a breath, cannot rest. A living purple, breathing and changing with the clock. This is no claim that purple changes color naturally, only that looking at it one feels the insecurity of development, that as music purple is a key that must modulate or it falls into silence. Even the abrupt roar of Disney’s giant Mussorgskian devil-beast, the flash of his teeth, yields just enough respite from the saturating bath of purple, gives us air, so that we can return and gorge ourselves further. The open mouth, the

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all-seeing eyes, the upraised pair of purple wings, organic, relieve us from the vapid purple category in which first they exist and then we find them again. A purple accusation. A purple dictate. In the deep purple demon is a certain slow liquidity, not so much through viscosity as through a curious facilitation of this color, which causes the viewer to glimpse artificial restraint, imposed lethargy, a tease to patience. Not the actions of the demon, which are in real (that is animation-real) time, but the action of the purple itself, the sense of it surviving against time. It ages by way of a special, spectral motion. Can we speak of purple aside from the purple thing of which it is the color? Well, when I ask, “Can we speak of purple” what is that purple I wonder if we may speak of? The purple thing has one existence; the purple that we can imagine the thing possesses has another. Only view the Cave of Wonder in Aladdin (1992) to grasp the palpable strangeness of Disney purple, because while here the gigantic lion, who sees and knows all and whose mouth is the mouth of the cave, is as purple as can be, adamant purple, still, running away in all directions “to the ends of the earth” is nothing less than a purple desert. This is a desert not quite like any other desert you can have imagined, the film seems to indicate: foreign, distant, part of an alien land where no matter the fierceness of your efforts you will never be at home. Foreign the cave, foreign the sands, foreign the people who venture here. “Foreign”: not relating to the place or body where found; not being the watcher’s; being, indeed, not-the-watcher’s. From the Latin, foras: outside. To see this purple, we are outside it. As we see this purple, it is outside of us. We have no intimacy, no immediate familiarity. Purple is continually, forbiddingly fascinating but unlearned. The “foreignness” or “outsideness” of purple, certainly Disney purple, provokes. We hear an indistinct voice, definite but undefinable, its source invisible: look again, keep looking, look and you may find the treasure, look once again and you may succeed, look again. However much you look and have looked, look again. And with every thrill of inspection, every devotion of sight, one plunges beneath the purple wave not to reach a bottom, not to grasp. Plunging and plunging again, into purple. As to this unseen voice calling us, this purple voice, here is Michel Chion, poetic and inscrutable: When this voice has not yet been visualized—that is, when we cannot yet connect it to a face—we get a special being, a kind of talking and acting shadow to which we attach the name acousmêtre. (21) And then: It’s as if the voice were wandering along the surface, at once inside and outside, seeking a place to settle. (23; emphasis original)

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And then: The acousmêtre is everywhere, its voice comes from an immaterial and non-localized body, and it seems that no obstacle can stop it … The acousmêtre is all-seeing, its word is like the word of God: “No creature can hide from it.” (24; emphasis original) A purple voice that beckons to us but never offers fulfillment, a voice from everywhere, a voice all-seeing and wandering, inside and outside at the same time, unconnected and unconnectable to a face. Important in Aladdin: it is not the face of the great lion speaking with the purple tongue that lures and challenges us but the voice of purple itself. Purple, not the purple thing. Purple as thing.

The Purple Blade The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, Samuel Bronston Productions, 1964) A purple blade. Dividing, dis/connecting, dis/placing. In Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), Christopher Plummer sits as the Emperor Commodus upon his pink marble throne. Gilded sandals are on his feet, a golden crown rests upon his head, gold bracelets adorn his wrists. From his shoulders a gilded purple sash of immense length hangs down. And upon his body he wears a dark purple imperial garment. To round out the portrait, he sits with his commanding hands adangle from the elbows, his head lifted regally, his proud little goatee impetuous and charged. Behind him in bronze: Romulus and Remus’s she-wolf, with ribs protruding and eight heavy nipples. But that purple garment, sharply creased, sharper in its effect: The more we stare at the color of it, the color and only the color, because as a robe it could not be more conventional for its time (or ours), we see the oceanic depth of purple, a purple that will imprison if we stare too long. We will not escape from our own gaze. And the body of Commodus seems cut off from the garment he wears. The man apart from the State. It is as though through coming alive the purple itself has made the severance between uniform and wearer, so that Commodus is visible both as a mere citizen who has become celebrated and as the uplifted, transformed center of the celebration; and the purple of this garment announces that celebration and that splitting. In terms of coloration and style (a current fascination now), we can say that purple does not suit him. Purple does not suit any of us. Not as we are. Don it and we are transformed. And if the

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purple is this particular regal, sumptuous, deep purple the transformation may lead, like his, to empire. Since aside from his purple and what it means and commands Commodus is but a human being, he is subject to a human being’s passions, the limitations of human thought, the puzzle of human experience with its conundra. But the purple of the garment, spontaneously arrived, seizes him and lifts him up, puts him on this throne where his speech gains resonance. Formally attired regal persons always wear insignia of some kind to spread the fact of the regality (and verify it, so ravenous are others to question high power), but unlike the sash, the brooch, the glittering tiara, the purple garment functions at a great distance: it is bold enough, bright and alluring enough, confoundingly delicious enough to be appreciated by people very far away, while also operating through—being somewhat subjected under—the prevailing sumptuary laws, which strictly forbid that anyone else should wear it. As much as the purple severs the man wearing it from the garment upon him, it severs this gowned man from the people. He cannot even quite manage to say, “Purple is mine,” because the only truth is that purple is on the throne. The emperor wears purple. His people see only the purple cloth. Philip Ball informs us, regarding the ancient Phoenician method for extracting fluid from the “bloom” of particular shellfish native to the Mediterranean area, then allowing this to change color from milky white through pale yellow, green, and blue to purple, that the manufacture was extraordinarily expensive: “One ounce of the dye required the sacrifice of around 250,000 shellfish. The shell piles of the Phoenicians still litter the eastern shore of the Mediterranean” (199–200). If, as Ball comments, “this glorious color was reserved in Republican Rome strictly for individuals of high rank” (200), it may have been the case, as well, that only people whose rank supported their acquisition of great wealth would have been in a position even to dream of possessing—of wearing—purple as emperor. Blond Richard Burton will wear this exotic, shocking purple in Alexander the Great (1956), a purple also sporting gold, and will stand proudly in it and will die in it. The purple of eternity, the purple of peace. As Pontius Pilate in Ben-Hur (1959), the Australian actor Frank Thring, richly laid over in purple, will bestow honor on a Jewish prince (Charlton Heston); and the Emperor Tiberius Caesar, the Northumbrian George Relph, will carry purple upon his slender shoulder. These purples all separate the plainness of the wearer, the fragility of the bodies, the mediocrity of the spirits, from the imperial glory. Joaquin Phoenix is perhaps less fragile than brutal, less demeaned than depraved in Gladiator (2000), but here, too, the purple of his garment separates him away, diminishes him to the degree that we concentrate in fascination on that color, only that color. Independent purple. Michael Sheen in Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2006) a petulant and desperate Nero swamped in reconstituting purple. In 1951,

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Peter Ustinov’s Nero (in Quo Vadis), a besotted fool, slovenly in his regal purple, the purple that outlasts his moments, outshines him; renders him pathetic. Nero the Purple. Imperator, posed in a long line of torturers, flaggelators, sycophants, narcissists, and maniacs, his taste for gore could never find satiation: By way of foretaste for better things, a handful of criminals, local desperadoes, an impertinent slave, a machinist, who in a theatre the night before had missed an effect—these, together with a negligent usher, were tossed one after the other naked into the ring, and bound to a scaffold that surmounted a miniature hill. At a signal the scaffold fell, the hill crumbled, and from it a few hyenas issued, who indolently devoured their prey. (Saltus 82) The imperial purple is neither dreamt of nor planned for, neither sought— power is sought; purple is elusive—nor hunted, neither the cause of hunger nor the fruit of meditation; it is only suddenly, miraculously, undeniably present upon one’s shoulders, and one’s breath is suddenly, miraculously, undeniably the imperial breath. When one becomes, one no longer thinks of becoming. Purple itself, however, does not become but merely is. The purple deep within which—at an ultimate depth within which—we might find the secret of distinction, the purple ego. In Spartacus (1960), Crassus (Laurence Olivier) has the ego of an emperor while not being an emperor. He travels in a full-length brazen purple cloak, that flutters with his steps. But his rocky presumptuous face always juts ahead of the robe, always strains to establish identity through insistence and dominance. In Fall, Plummer, relaxed upon his marble seat, need not insist upon his august emperorship, need not jut the chin ahead to announce imperial approach, nor can he shed the august, yet also plainly human, fate: it sits upon him, purple skin, and he only rests, waits, sniffs the purple air into his now unknown self.

Grinning Purple Batman (Tim Burton, Warner Bros., 1989) Because there is a fairly wide understanding that purple is inordinately difficult to create and inordinately costly to acquire, there has spread widely in popular and historical lore the idea that figures garbed in purple may more easily than others seem elevated in status and opportunity. Purple has a quality of specialness, distinctiveness, apartness; the purple garment ennobles, enriches the personality of the wearer, and elevates his thoughts

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and concerns above the merely quotidian. Even in the territory of crime and evil, the antisocial and ideologically oppositional, the purple spirit reigns, the purple figure stands as iconic and astounding. Kings, and kings of crime. When Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson introduced their new archvillain the Joker in 1940, it could be sensible for them to clothe him in nothing other than purple and, having set him up this way, to reflect nothing but pale purple light onto his pallid face when “illumination” bounced upward from his suit. The Joker in purple, the purple joke. How it was that he (né Jack Napier) came to be such an extremity, his hair vivid contrasty cupric green, his mouth in a permanent rictus, his eyes bulging, was never made extremely clear. His own account was entirely unreliable: “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another …” A vat of chemicals, possibly, but only possibly. Through all his numerous metamorphoses, from the comic book page to television (Cesar Romero) to motion pictures (Jack Nicholson, Jim Carrey, Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix), the Joker figure leans toward purple with a perplexing perversity (Romero dressed in fuchsia; Phoenix splits purple’s red into his suit and its blue into his shirt and made-up eyebrows). To place a mirror before the formula: not only is this villainous madman configured in purple but through him purple itself becomes mad. Purple off the charts. Purple unpredictable and incalculable. That the Joker face is garishly made up has narrative more than aesthetic significance: it may account for the accident of the character’s birth and certainly prepares an ironic reading of his every syllable and tic. But the purple is another matter. It casts him out of the City of Truth, makes him swell like a festering inflammation. The Joker character grows from at least two significant roots. A first originary vision, although the three creators argued some about ownership and precise inspiration, came from Paul Leni’s film The Man Who Laughs (1928), in which Conrad Veidt plays Gwynplaine, a figure with a permanent rictus.1 The film is of course an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s long novel L’Homme qui rit [The Man Who Laughs] published originally in 1869 (the year of Courbet’s “The Wave,” both Renoir and Monet’s versions of “The Frog Pond,” Cézanne’s “Picnic”). Here is born at least the central iconic combination: a warped and tortured face, a permanently opened maw, thick mute lips, glazed eyes, and an overall quality of nearness to a lethal moral precipice. It would have been natural to think that such a man as this would have tumbled to the “wrong” side of the law. Second would have been the Fool, taken generally as a literary and social type with a pronounced history but found quite explicitly in Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606). In this figure, whose facial and sartorial aspects are not It is difficult if not impossible to imagine that Bob Kane (né Kahn), who studied at New York’s Cooper Union and beginning in 1934 worked at the Max Fleischer Studio, could have been ignorant of the Hugo character. 1

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specified and who is thus performed in legion ways in productions around the world, lies the habit of oppositional truth-telling, thwarting power by confronting it with itself, mocking the world by holding up the untainted mirror: “He is mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath” (III.vi.19–21). When in a fallen world of deceits, manipulations, sanctimonies, and depredations a figure opens the mouth to speak the truth, he is generally shunned. But Fool gets away with it; can say anything to anyone, especially to Power, and be regarded with calmness, deliberation, even philosophy, since Fool does not merely prefer veracity, does not simply elect it out of taste or will, but is Called. When Lear moans, “My poor fool is hanged,” it is with the voice of despair, only partly because a familiar and friend is dead but more because the true friend’s vision is gone, his way of seeing forward a long way, of noting the true features of the landscape geographical and political. The Joker has a way of keeping Batman honest, often obnoxiously or mockingly but always usefully: showing not only the line where the superpowers drain off but also, from within it, the questionability of Batman’s policing a dark territory with his special, but perhaps far too modern, surely too capitalist, skills. The Joker is no Moriarty, necessary as a challenge to supreme calculation: it is presumption he challenges, the effortless claim of moral supremacy. In Shakespeare, it is quite clear the Fool is no priest but indeed, as Leslie Fiedler has pointed out wisely, an instrument for the “celebration of the sanity of madness and the wisdom of folly” (160). Fool/fowl: the bird with purple plumes. Fool/foul: the mean and vulgar purple, purple of rainwater carrying stench away. The foul Fool is obsessed with the underbelly of experience, the tourism of the birth canal, the spasmodic urgency of muscles, the equivocal strains of pleasure, the tragedy of immortality. He wallows. He plays with the world’s waste. And if he is chemically maimed, the Joker is still surely proximate to the deep chemistry of transformation, a diabolical alchemist. His unruly purple has been laundered with detrital muck. Finger, Kane, and Robinson have combined these two types, the laughing man and the Fool, into a hybrid monster whose grin is pure malice, whose eyes are pure stony hopelessness, whose every comment is purely a taunt. Played by Nicholson—as many fans believe, in the epitome of performances, notwithstanding Romero’s indelible work in the television series (1966–68, and in the 1966 movie spin-off)—the Joker is wildly gestural (Carrey, Ledger, and Phoenix would pick up this trait and exaggerate it choreographically); vocally unpredictable; and the bearer of a unique and horribly attractive personality, quite over and above his manifest hideousness. We cannot wait for his next appearance, his next pronouncement or threat. We cannot stop thrilling at his colorful movements. Especially, it must be noted, his purple movements, because properly (his only propriety) the purple in which he is clothed is stunningly floral, a purple that radiates, a purple that never stops

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announcing his malevolent intentions in the same way that the open mouth never stops announcing a desire to eat the world if not despise it through mockery. The Joker’s perpetually open mouth is like the entrance to a forbidden cave. No password is required but presence, since the Joker always automatically offers that gaping darkness. Always ready for visitors, the much too hospitable purple. And, without reservation, a great purple incongruity, because its color escapes the garment, rushes into the viewer’s precinct, announces itself more boldly and more irrevocably than any personality could. If once a purple sat upon a king, now it has faded in hue and in dignity, become only a joke itself, so that the Joker is inside a purple joke, even rejecting and laughing at the regular world in abject silence. (In the original comic book frames, the silence is thorough, always and always present, horribly chilling unless we fill it in by singing in our heads what the bubble texts dictate.) Is it because the garment is too loud or because the character’s face is swathed in makeup that he becomes not a king but a clown, the perfect Fool, and is his clownery not only the inversion of convention but also its reassertion? When we look at the Joker’s behavior, can we not find it absolutely grounded in a conservative moral system of its own? (Else how would we concoct an understanding of what he is, what he means?) Is the Joker not regal authority in a realm that, at Batman’s side, we find—are intended to find—incomprehensible? Hugo is blunt about the appearance of his character Gwynplaine, and word for word this pronouncement applies to Nicholson’s Joker as well: No woman who saw your mouth would consent to your kiss; and that mouth which has made your fortune, and that face which has given you riches, are not your own. You were not born with that countenance. It was borrowed from the grimace which is at the bottom of the infinite. You have stolen your mask from the devil. You are hideous; be satisfied with having drawn that prize in the lottery. (394) The purple prize, to be sure. He had not himself placed the laugh on his brow, Hugo writes. “It had been stamped for ever on his face.” Perpetual purple: It was automatic, and the more irresistible because it seemed petrified. No one could escape from this rictus. The laugh which he had not placed, himself, on his brow, on his eyelids, on his mouth, he could not remove. It had been stamped for ever on his face. It was automatic, and the more irresistible because it seemed petrified. No one could escape from this rictus … It was like a head of Medusa, but Medusa hilarious. (343)

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What, beside his queer name, gives us to suspect that the Joker is laughing with his opened mouth? That somehow the machine of time—time, actually, as a nefarious machine—has stopped and frozen him just in the middle of a response to some profound joke: his joke or another figure’s. Because the purple costume is surmounted by a mouth, the corners of which are upturned, we presume to surmise he must be laughing, not shrieking; laughing, not sermonizing. The purple suit is intended to seduce and confuse, to throw us off guard, certainly to throw the confirmed enemy Batman off guard, and in his portrayal for Christopher Nolan, Ledger actually plays upon the tension between the purple clothing and the disfigured face by posing back to camera at one point and then swiveling to face us. From behind, in his purple, the Joker looks like royalty. But that is the fate of the Fool, too. To be a double for the king. To be doppelgänger to the only one in the realm permitted to wear purple, but with every comment to strip the purple away (for himself, as it were). “One corner of the mouth was raised, in mockery of the human race; the other side, in blasphemy of the gods. One might almost have said that Gwynplaine was that dark, dead mask of ancient comedy adjusted to the body of a living man” (Hugo 344). What can be the link between mockery, blasphemy, dark death, and purple, except that purple leads us into forbidden terrain, invokes forces we cannot be permitted to know. It transcends the everyday, just in the way that, with his enormous stardom in 1989 (this film followed The Witches of Eastwick, Heartburn, Prizzi’s Honor, Terms of Endearment, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Shining, The Missouri Breaks, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, not to mention The Passenger), Nicholson transcends with his Joker even the screen on which he moves. He moves like a brilliant phantom, leaving a purple trail.

Verbal Purple The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, Jack Rollins and Charles H. Joffe Productions/Orion, 1985) What of the purple that is never enunciated? Inward, withheld, secret, phantasmal, the object of a serene and devoted quest, the prize glimmering in the deepest cavern beyond all deep caverns? Perhaps the purple of which we dream is the most elaborate and intoxicating of purples, the one whose glow surpasses language and understanding. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen [When one cannot speak of something, one must be silent] (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 188). Wittgenstein circulated in silence. Afterward, his students saw him into print.

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Tom Baxter, an eager archaeologist (Gil Shepherd), has come to Egypt in search of the Purple Rose of Cairo. Woody Allen has placed him securely inside, and as the star of, a Hollywood movie called, predictably enough, The Purple Rose of Cairo (principal object of concern in his own movie The Purple Rose of Cairo [1985]), and this film is playing on the screen of a theater where Allen’s protagonist Cecilia (Mia Farrow) sits hypnotically watching. The world for Cecilia has collapsed entirely onto this rectangle, her colored multidimensionality now become a universe spread and flattened upon this black and white rectangle. Everything within the rectangle has been taken up enthusiastically. She is an inhabitant there. And everything within her received world of invention is real to her. Real: as real as a table and a chair, which are the table and chair that, watching, she can perhaps remember. Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels), the Hollywood actor who was cast as Tom, and whose body is now incarnating the character in front of Cecilia’s unkenning eyes, is both present and absent, like every actor in every screen role. Unkenning: to Cecilia and other members of the audience on the screen, Gil would seem completely to have taken over, but not as himself; also, where else could Tom’s living presence be but inside Gil’s spectral form. A critical moment: noticing Cecilia watching him out there in the theater’s gloom, Tom reacts (see, for intense discussion of how cinema can watch us, Dixon2) and, with verve and purpose, leaps off the screen into the theatrical space. This leap is the beginning of the grand adventure of the film, which will lead Cecilia into love and show the previously two-dimensional Tom how it is to live in a three-dimensional—and, compared with his diegetic home, cozier and less sterile—world. Discussing the notable coldness of the settings in the film-within-the-film, Morris Dickstein notes, “For Woody Allen, Mia Farrow is a Depression housewife with a low-paying job who goes to the movies for escape and fantasy. But Jeff Daniels comes down off the screen for warmth and human contact, which sometimes were in short supply even in voluptuous Deco settings” (436). But even beyond warmth and contact is sanity, as we see in Edwin Abbott’s late Victorian novel Flatland: I—alas, I alone in Flatland—know now only too well the true solution of this mysterious problem; but my knowledge cannot be made intelligible to a single one of my countrymen; and I am mocked at—I, the sole possessor of the truths of Space and of the theory of the introduction of Light from the world of three Dimensions—as if I were the maddest of the mad! (6)

And, for an intriguing cinematic rendition of the knowing, responsive screen image, see François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966). 2

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As to Tom’s emerging from the screen: what a delicious and what a horrific fantasy, of course. The figures who join him there are much larger than we are. But Wittgenstein strikes the vital chord: “In the cinema we can sometimes see the events in the film as if they lay behind the screen and it were transparent, rather like a pane of glass. The glass would be taking the colour away from things [I take him to be referring to black and white film] and allowing only white, grey and black to come through” (Remarks 32; and this Wittgensteinian aperçu addresses my own very first experience of the cinema screen with precision). Behind the screen, the purple of the purple rose is an experience, an experience for Tom (who, in his diegetic universe, must have experiences). But once we recognize that transparency, through which he can eagerly pass, that color becomes only a target for the release of language. All this fascinating recursion—and recursion of recursion— notwithstanding, what about that initial proposition: Tom Baxter’s search? What about that Purple Rose of Cairo? And here is the wine of true mystery resting in the crystal goblet of serious consideration: There is no purple rose shown in the film. In fact, there is no distinctive purple at all. The purple of The Purple Rose of Cairo inheres vivaciously and entirely, but without visibility as such, only in the word “purple” inside the phrase “purple rose” inside the title “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” which refers, of course, only to a film-within-the-film. That the container of that is also called The Purple Rose of Cairo invokes, confounds, directs, but also waylays our attention. Purple here is a verbal purple. The intense, saturated, monolithic, and fabular purple of our conceits when we see and hear the word “purple.” Purple prose. The epithet purple prose is a condemnation of descriptive writing that the eager critic thinks is carried on, carried away, awash; it is a comment on overwroughtness, on what is labeled verbosity, upon a text’s ostensibly too slavish reliance upon adjectival and adverbial description. “Ugh, purple prose!” (Be careful that in using this epithet the glory of linguistic truth, that is, exactness is not smeared or lost.) But the phrase can also mean, as I hope it to mean here, a purple that is not only a referent of language but that exists exclusively in, and only by virtue of, language. That thing of thought which raises in us the inspiration, wherever and in whatever modification we find it, to accord it the name of “purple.” That purple and everything of its being. Not fabric with a tag; not even the dye in fabric; not even the chemical within the dye; not even the molecular arrangement within the chemical. That of which all this partakes in order to merit such a tag. Wittgenstein thinks of a great deal of language, certainly color, this way—“What is it that inheres here so that we call it ‘purple’?” he could have asked—and we shall return to him.

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Is that “rose of Cairo” nothing more than a purple configured in and inspired by the look on Ted Baxter’s earnest face, because he has devoted his “life” to searching it out? Yet why would not such a look on the face be profound? Do we imagine—in order to accompany Ted—a purple equivalent (we would hope identical) to the one he desires, so that we desire one, too? Is the purple of the purple rose one that transcends desire, so that in attempting to align our yearning with that of the fictional character (who looks as human as we are, albeit that he inhabits a different time frame [the 1930s]) we stretch ourselves into engagement with, entrapment in, a makebelieve like his. All screen fiction—all fiction, in fact—requires a tangible hook, something that will draw us away from our day-to-day experience, be it any “once upon a time” posed on a gentle lap, a shovel digging into the ground. Here the ding (“ding”: German, thing; as in the Kantian ding-ansich, the thing in itself) is a rose that is purple. And we have all seen, perhaps in delirium smelled, such a flower. And this one is a particular rose, one rose, one token rose, The purple rose of Cairo; or else one of a species of roses that are indigenous to Cairo. Or something/someone that/who connects enough with such a flower that it/he/she can be named “The Purple Rose.” How amazing that we can see our way through Allen’s picture without worrying any of these questions! Makes no difference to Cecilia or to us. We are entranced by the imagination of a “Purple Rose of Cairo,” and however we conceive it, only in our conception is that entity purple. The purple idea. Let us think it a subjunctive purple: what the rose would be like if perchance it purply existed. The purple of possibility, extending in all directions. The purple that says, “No, thank you” to the cell of present experience.

Purple Fingers The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (Roy Rowland, Columbia/ Stanley Kramer Productions, 1953) Nothing ordinary lies on the surface of Roy Rowland’s The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953). Written by Theodore Geisel (as Dr. Seuss) and Allan Scott, and designed with extravagance by Rudolph Sternad, whose credits include It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), On the Beach (1959), and The Defiant Ones (1958), the film has shapes, designed by Dr. Seuss, that pay homage to Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig’s twisted, labyrinthine city in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920); and colors that speak to the magical inking of comic books, the bold saturated colors of American abstract expressionism, and the unpredictable combinations of op art. Play the piano with a beanie on your head. Play next to other children with beanies on theirs. Never take off your purple-and-red-striped t-shirt.

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Little Bartholomew Collins (Tommy Rettig), a piano student, is sent to the academy of Dr. Terwilliger (Hans Conried) where, inconceivably, at an extended keyboard that snakes away to what seems like infinity, five hundred little boys and girls sit tinkling the keys. Dr. T. is clearly a megalomaniac, but one of the subtle designs of this strange film is to make the viewer appreciate, even enjoy the man’s quirks (Conried is an expert mimic). On Do-Mi-Do Day, occasion for a unique celebration, we are given the treat of visiting Dr. T.’s private space and watching as, with the minutely choreographed assistance of a team of factota clothed in gray tuxedoes, he is fitted into his uniform. As he prances, halts, swivels, bends; swivels, bends, marches, halts; sitting, preening, spinning, chirping; preening, chirping, sitting, spinning (all this choreographed by Eugene Loring), Dr. T. is obliged to regale his “audience” (we are the only audience, beside himself) with “Do-Mi-Do Duds” (by Frederick Hollander), a brisk ditty with a chain of those endless, elaborate, Seussian lyrics that escape the confines of earthly grammar and vocabulary. A revealing excerpt: I want my undulating undies with the marabou frills; I want my beautiful bolero with the porcupine quills; I want my purple nylon girdle with the orange blossom buds; ’Cause I’m going do-mi-do-ing in my do-mi-do duds! * Come on and dress me! Dress me! Dress me in my peekaboo blouse, With the lovely interlining made of Chesapeake mouse; I want my polka-dotted dickie with the crinoline fringe; For I’m going do-mi-do-ing on a do-mi-do binge! From his flamboyant boxers up, he is being squeezed into a quasimilitary, quasi-circus, quasi-surrealist, quasi-rive droit getup (designed by Jean Louis!), at once preposterous and splendid: lime green, royal blue, canary yellow, blazing magenta, virtually a whole warped rainbow; ribbons, medals; a fabulous sash; spats. But far more than what is on Dr. T., the pièce de résistance is a bizarre purple cube in which he lives, its carpet purple, its gilded fauteuils upholstered in purple, and, covering the French doors that lead to the balcony where he will address his arpeggiochallenged minions, massive purple curtains that scream, “Paradise! Death!” A purple fiend! In purple nirvana, with a purple cadenza: Dr. T. seems not to notice this purple—this purple which is so bold it slaps the eye—since for him it is nothing but the neutral background against which the vivid colors of his garments will stand out. The purple curtains threaten to open onto a world of monstrosity, agony, torturous delight, in which forms contort in a thick atmosphere and colors bleed. The very purple of the curtains is an

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announcement before there is anything to announce. When Dr. T. sits in his purple fauteuil, he cannot rest comfortably there but must spring up into action, quite as though the furniture were expelling him (this is Conried’s litheness). To leave purple behind is his great strategy, because fully costumed he will march out of this chamber, away from those curtains, away from the purple confinement they intimate. Should he let the purple curtains part, a gleeful theatricality, or keep them as they are, in decorative closure? There is something reassuring if they remain as they are, pregnant with seeming, yet impossibly vague. Nothing is reticent about purple, so this background, resting behind our singer, is anything but a mere background. He himself becomes background to his curtains. The purple is victorious. The purple here is diegetically decorative, an element of the madman’s décor. Dr. T. becomes—as he stands proudly adjacent—a doctor/designer, or perhaps more authentically a designer who calls himself a doctor. Is he a doctor of musicology or a doctor of design? Did he doctor this room purple? Is the purple design of the place an aid of some kind to his musical taste and sensitivity? How would a person, any person, hear music differently, specially, in a purple room? Or how think about music? Could one call the purple passionate, and is Dr. T. passionate about music? Or is there some decisive incongruence, so that, reflecting his multicolored self, his music is fragmented, put together like an acoustic quilt? It is easy to see the superlative grand piano as a feature of design, an instrument for a little army, a fingering horde, and the château in which all this takes place an express design for accommodating that piano (a canted prison). Everything here is here by design, design, not will or logic. The purple of Dr. T.’s sanctum even seems a little revolting, too strong, too bright, so that one struggles with the thought of finding comfort there. Since it is only Dr. T. who actually seems to find comfort, in his quirky way, one must wonder what sacrifices he made, what transformations he endured, settling inside this fuchsia non-paradise. In the back of the mind is a little boy named Terwilliger long long ago, playing scales under the administration of a martinet. “No! No! No! Do it again! Again! Again!” Submission, humiliation, discipline. Discipline, humiliation, submission. A set of rote routines, to which little boys must accustom themselves: a body with fingers, each finger under control, all the fingers laboring in concert. The piano lesson: the Grand Piano: the army of pianists: the purple chamber. It is not difficult to conceive that Dr. T. came as a child to detest the piano and detest music, so that his adulthood, a resentful journey, would be dedicated to forcing other children to endure the tortures he endured, and this in an environment designed expressly for such a purpose. The purple of the purple sanctum is to remind him every morning, as he prepares

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himself for the day, of the vital link between passion and enforced order. A repressive anti-dreamwork. There is no doubt that in Conried’s hands, Dr. T. is a pompous screw. Purple for pomposity. Thick, muffling purple. Purple fingers for shutting off the valve that every night leads to the dream.

Purple Tensions Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, Universal, 1954) And what a purple it must be that is exposed to the blind. A visionary purple beyond vision. In Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1954), Helen Philips (Jane Wyman) is widowed suddenly as the film begins and soon comes to resent the man responsible (as she sees it), Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson), blithe playboy whose speedboat accident was cause for summoning the only ambulance and resuscitation equipment in the vicinity, so that Dr. Phillips, having had a coronary, died. But soon Helen, too, is afflicted. Fleeing from Merrick’s advances, she runs in front of a car and is struck, losing her eyesight. Merrick tries valiantly to help her, overcome as he is with guilt, first making huge donations to a scholarship fund for her husband and then becoming, unbeknownst to her, a confidant and friend. Finally, he devotes himself to studying medicine: perhaps a recompense, expiation of the heavy guilt he feels. It becomes dimly possible that consultation with some European specialists might lead to a treatment that would restore the sight. Merrick secretly arranges it. Helen flies off with Nancy Ashford (Agnes Moorehead), her nurse/companion. They settle in an Austrian inn, discovering, as they enter their room, a veritable carpet of floral bouquets. It is a moment of optimism, for Helen a fully interior vision of a brighter future. But sadly, the consultation is to no avail, the three experts pronouncing kindly but firmly that there is nothing to be done. When Merrick arrives to comfort her, eventually to propose, Helen, who now knows his true identity, secretly packs up and flies away. Merrick is left alone in the room. I want to focus on only those flowers. They represent, in a way, the summation of Merrick’s devotion, affiliation, concern, indeed love for Helen. They enrich the tranquil aerie of the high room overlooking the town, in a faraway land, where everyone is a stranger and all of life is, in a way, incomprehensible. Merrick wishes to soothe Helen, wrap her in a blanket of delight and odor, because he has ordered bouquet after bouquet after bouquet. These are settled all around the little

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room, turning it into a floral bower of springtime rebirth:3 rebirth of Helen’s body and psyche, her transitioning through medical diagnosis and treatment to a new, revivified, reawakened self (a self Merrick would choose to give to her). And the flowers are profusion itself, because as a statement they echo and reverberate, restate and emphasize, make bold for all who can see that the sender is showing love. Helen cannot see. What makes this moment stunning and tragic is that the flowers are all: lilacs. With their simultaneously lush and delicate purple spread, the variegated depths of their intimate color, their profusion—because Merrick has paid for not only many but enormous bouquets—they turn this quite decent, but modest, room into a purple heaven. It is certainly converted into a sacred space, a retreat in nature, an escape from all the demands of the everyday including Helen’s anxiety about her eyes and her future. And she can share in none of this beauty, none of this tranquility. Nor, really, can Merrick, who learns with chagrin that the woman he loves has vanished. The room is now hollow for him. And the gorgeous flowers only stress the hollowness, ironically darken it and darken his world. The lilacs are at first tokens of optimistic joy and later tokens of vague and hopeless sadness. The selfsame lilacs. What accounts for the transformation? Simply the private consultation, a value in itself regardless of outcome, into which Helen proceeds with an intimidated modesty and hope and out of which she moves in a kind of hellish trance. Three European (read Austrian) experts, outsiders, strangers, sophisticates, using, in order to make a diagnosis, the entire hidden armature of science. Although he has become a medical man himself, regarding Helen Phillips is only emotional for Merrick. The three wise men cannot muster emotion, beyond the exquisitely polished polite regret expected by postwar audiences of the European cultural elite. Küss die hand. The opening and closing parentheses of the film must mutually reflect. As Carlyle wrote, “The Beginning holds in it the End, and all that leads thereto; as the acorn does the oak and its fortunes” (332). Helen is embroiled at first in a painful and tightly contained family melodrama: regrettable, emotional, introspective experience. Finally, she encounters the unforgiving reality of the professional world, unforgiving and cold even if gracile. Earlier the bluntness of that reality was not apparent to her, though she was the wife of a doctor and though after her husband’s abrupt death she spent time receiving donations in his name. Still she was encased in and defined by her family relations, Merrick being in that perspective nothing but a poisonous outsider, bringer of tragedy. In Austria, she is exposed to a wellorganized scientific practice that, skirting all close relation, finally condemns

It must now be spring, else such blooms would be unavailable: this is the mid-1950s, when there is no full-year availability of botanical and vegetable goods. 3

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her to perduring blindness. In order that the final act of Sirk’s film should be both logically readable and emotionally palpable, it is necessary that Helen’s reshaping from a warm (warmly loving; warmly grieving) familial figure to a lonely, isolated, hopeless stranger should be made distinct, even pronounced. Thus the ambiguous lilacs: their functioning to first brighten space, evoke melody and scent, and import, literally, fresh air; and later their brittle impotence, their reduction to a mere gathering of stems, stems sliced from bushes and arranged together for effect. Warmth, then artifice. Here, then, is ambiguous purple, the purple that can mean contradictory things. The ambiguity stated this floral way must be resolved, since at every moment of helplessness Helen invokes recollection of an earlier moment of warmth. And it will be resolved in the finale, in the southwest United States, and without lilacs. What we have in this case is an example of William Empson’s ambiguity of the third type: An ambiguity of the third type, considered as a verbal matter, occurs when two ideas, which are connected only by being both relevant in the context, can be given in one word simultaneously. … Or [the ambiguity] may name two entirely different things, two ways of judging a situation, for instance, which the reader has already been brought to see are relevant, has already been prepared to hold together in his mind; their clash in a single word will mirror the tension of the whole situation. (102, 104) A verbal matter: a pictorial (cinematic) matter. One word: one image or image-object. May name: may invoke or illustrate. The reader: the viewer. The two contradictory ideas here are (a) that the appreciation of the beautiful purple flowers can bring hope for the future and (b) that the traumatized inability to appreciate the beautiful flowers, their emptiness, brings no hope for the future. The ambiguity rests in an object and here that object is the purple lilacs. The context here is doubled: it is the charming room at the inn; and it is the film as a whole; both hold the lilacs, and both appearances of the lilacs occur in this room, the lilacs standing, indeed, in the same places. Different things, different ways of judging a situation: this empurpled room is the site of an impending rebirth (a positive situation); this empurpled room is the site from which all love and hope have fled (a negative situation). Which the reader has already been brought to see are relevant: Oh yes! This relevance demands that Helen Phillips begin the film by loathing Robert Merrick, having what we would deem proper cause (her daughter approves of, shares the loathing). Thus Helen separates herself from Rob, at first ritually out of hatred, later out of the fear of love. But the Austrian separation has been prepared by the idea of these two being separate, an idea stated almost immediately once the film has begun. Yet another condition also has truth:

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We have already been prepared to hold the contradictions together in our mind, because this is not a verbal argument, it is not a graceful story (by Lloyd C. Douglas [1929]) read by firelight: it is a movie, and it has movie stars. Helen and Rob are Wyman and Hudson, both of them glamorous, very very well known and appreciated, and ideal as mutually attractive love objects. We see the film—one sees all melodrama—through the veil of our desire that characters should unite. In the Austrian inn we cannot see Rob’s despair before the altar of cold lilacs without keeping thought of his triumph in bringing Helen to this safe bower of enchanting lilacs. As though in finale as his philosophical curtain rings down, Empson gives us the glorious purple truth: a single word will mirror the tension of the whole situation. A single vision of the lilac bouquets. The word purple. The purple mirror. Purple for spring approaching; purple for spring lost. Purple rolling over space, rolling hopefully then helplessly off the edge of the tongue. Here is Vladimir Nabokov: French poets in their use of pourpre drove the Tyrian idea to a point where sight ceased to be of any moment; and an abstract sunburst replaced the perception of any specific hue; they were followed by the Russians, whose purpur is merely the conventional crimson of a heavy curtain in an allegory of an apotheosis; but the once woaded English, with their Saxon cult of color, turned to the plum, and the Purple Emperor butterfly, and the heather in bloom, and remote hills—in short, to “amethyst” and “violet” for their conception of purple. “You violets …/By your pure purple mantles known,” writes Sir Henry Worton (1568–1639) in a poem addressed to Elizabeth of Bohemia. (522) If purple is in essence a linguistic variant culture by culture, can it not also be a visual one? Do the eyes of the French poets, of the Russians, of the “once woaded English, with their Saxon cult of color” see, perhaps, wholly unlike purples, purples of different strains, ethnicities? Tribal purples. And is the American purple—Helen Phillips, Bob Merrick: both Americans in Europe—a noteworthy one, a purple of a peculiar tribe, in the eyes of a Danish filmmaker, expatriate from Germany? An unspeakable purple, a purple beyond language. Because we must recall that in Magnificent Obsession, although these truest of purple lilacs are nothing but a magnificent obsession, the word “purple” is not once heard. No one speaks the word or reads it, but the vision is the word. The vision is the word.

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There is in man a veritable will to intellectuality. GASTON BACHELARD

Orange is like a man, convinced of his own powers. WASSILY KANDINSKY

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Mad Orange Alice Through the Looking Glass (James Bobin, Disney, 2016) Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter is younger and, if possible, madder than Lewis Carroll’s (as figured by John Tenniel). His skin is chalky paranoid, his eyes are absinthe green. And his hair is more orange than a Spanish tangerine. From beneath his broad-brimmed hat, it springs out on both sides like a pair of fiery explosions frozen in time. We know that in both Alice in Wonderland ([1865]; Tim Burton [2010]) and Alice Through the Looking-Glass ([1871]; James Bobin [2016]), the Hatter plays a dramatic role, largely offering characterological spice to situations that threaten unraveling without him, but no speculation about his dramatic function explains the orange hair. Sloppy strands flying out of the bottom of the hat can be found in the original illustration, but this was in black ink printed on white paper. What says the orangeness of the DeppHatter’s hair beyond asserting the graphic construction of hat and hairline and the plastic grotesque form of the character face? The most obvious leap regarding the color orange: because in clear skies it is often the coloration of sunset, with the atmosphere turned coppery and a sensational blush coming across human skin, adobe, skyscraper glass, it is easy enough to think of fading, withering, dying, terminating half-obscurity and melancholic darkness coming on. The orange sunset is a “last” burst of solar glory, apocalypse, sinking like cosmic pith into the waters of oblivion. One of those horrifically spectacular deaths, off in the west. A repeatable, a seasonal death. “What glory! Die again!” This way of thinking about orange positions it somewhere between the golden yellow of full enriching warmth—daffodils, bread—and the brilliant red of terminal blood. Somewhere between but not an admixture of. The orange sun is one which is no longer happy yellow, giddy yellow, and will too soon be morbid red. It was and it will be, but what is it? Conceived as no more than an admixture, the color orange is reduced to hybrid status. Neither a borrower nor a lender. “Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow,” opined Kandinsky (Harvard 55). Let us see if by some trick of mental concentration and relaxation we can manage to appreciate orange for its solid, its pure, its unadulterated, its unapologetic orangeness. (After all, we do not query Kandinsky of what “red” is an admixture; or of what “yellow.”) What is in that Hatter’s hair fully and simply—not as resolution of something that has faded away from what was and heads toward what is yet to come? Or, how can we see this orange for what it is, not what it is not? Orange in orangeness. This is the problem and the challenge with all popular things.

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And with all colors. Always, everywhere with color. It is a shocking, vivifying sight, orange. If, as so often happens in the bustle of modern life, we have dropped into a quasi-slumber, if we have fallen out of touch or withdrawn from the race in order to catch our breath, this orange jolts us awake, opens us to sensation. We are charged with orange’s realistic presence, invigorated and activated by its urgency, its informal lack of introduction. “I have come into your presence,” the color announces with real bravura. “I have entered the chamber, I am fully at your feet, and I am engaged already in the very action to perform which I have made my approach.” And the Hatter’s orange hair goes further in also proclaiming, indeed screaming, “I leap upon you even before you can have dreamed of me.” In this sense of urgent spontaneity is an orange that warns and gives pause: the substance is not only here now but engaged already in action, and we have been caught unawares. Awakened into a maelstrom of realities. This is why, for all his tenderness, inanity, and plastic stretch this Mad Hatter is an aggressive one, a monster who would kill us with his giddy conundra. Shape can combine with color to make what seems an organism. In shape, the Hatter’s is clown hair, or one could argue that because of the hair he becomes a clown. An antic personality, capable of defying gravity and containment. No formula will hold him, no rationale explain his presence and being, no monument preserve him. This is an orange quickness, a being of the moment. But also a being before the moment, an essence that, springing toward our perception, announces that its previous placement and poise were a springboard. Yes, this orange-headed Hatter, this creature who needs the hat to keep his orange hair from flying away, seems at each instant to have materialized from a springboard, like a stunt man in mid-trajectory, body splintering away from a bomb. He springs now because he was already poised to spring. And the orange springing arouses a kind of spontaneity in the viewing eye. The eye springs to catch the springing. One sees the orange before one knows oneself seeing it. It’s unavoidable to recognize the fact of already having seen this orange, instantly when one opens the eyes to it. Orange as orange already. And the shock of the sight is owed to the color’s vibration, its hum. It is here, but it is in motion, it has placement but no placement. Goodbye, Heisenberg. Orange is forever emerging and leaning forward into our field of view, not merely existing but presenting itself. It has a theatrical quality, a coming toward, a showing off. Part of this is emphasis, a leaning into activity so as to be recognized more certainly and more fully; but in part the action is pride, a revelation of quality for quality’s sake, a confession of identity. Optically, the advancement of orange works most unequivocally when the color is seen as direct, itself as presence rather than modification of an object. When we associate orange with the bounded and identifiable—orange juice, an orange off the tree from Florida, a pot of orange paint—it recedes again into

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mere intelligibility. But direct orange is unintelligible, it leaps into, occupies, remodels the present. So as to avoid contradicting, obstructing, waylaying, warping, or transmuting this orange, Depp must keep his gestural movements to a minimum. As the brazen facial makeup and unholy costume will already say a lot, and as the hair must be given its space, he must hold the body back, hold the voice in, shrink himself to the size of a tiny mannekin. But this orange, because it comes forward so boldly, because it penetrates our (Freudian) stimulus shield and shows itself to have invaded our consciousness before we are conscious, is also mad. Mad provocative, mad hilarious, mad inexplicable, mad deranged, mad outside of the boundary, trespassing mad, delirious mad, terrifying mad. Nothing of its presence suggests plan or arrangement on the Hatter’s part. It is neither a speculation nor a thought. It does not harbor a treasury of energy, a storehouse, but expends itself utterly and is fully refilled. It cannot promise a future. It cannot even give full reassurance that it is fully present so enthusiastically is it present. If orange were rational, it might hypothesize a group of bright and promising relations, but instead it affirms its own affirmation, without pause, without decorum. It seems a presence with no awareness of other presence, a performative self aimed at an audience it does not recognize as being there. Does not recognize: yet at the same time addresses forthrightly, face to face. Contact without recognition. Orange is a soliloquy. And every soliloquy is a madness, because the speaker turns away from his “friends” in the fictional world and makes offer to a “listener” who is only impossibly there. In theatrical or cinematic terms, the madly orange presence faces a fourth wall that has never been constructed; addresses a witness who hides behind a secret arras. And, madly, it is impetuous and urgent: “I cannot hold myself back. I cannot wait. I cannot refrain from touch.” Orange is charged, affected. It would be conceptually possible for some neutral presence to emerge and dominate the scene, swell in the frame, threaten proximity—yet only as a bulk. Orange does not develop this way, does not use proportionate size to take over. It reaches by stimulating, and that can happen only when an electro-neural transfer occurs. The charge is indisputably negative, emerging in our direction from a font of electron surplus. The charge comes from the orange into the viewing eye. Orange does not solicit our attention, does not ask us to commit to its presence. Instead, it occupies the temple, flows into the sacred chamber of the self the way a leak flows into a favorite room. Yet the electrical charge of the Hatter’s hair is unprovocative, it does neither harm nor damage, instigates no need for backing away toward selfprotection. We open the gates of perception, and orange floods through, the orange channel by which nourishing fulfillment is sent now and again and again and still again. The movement of orange neither burns nor wounds,

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it opens us to being opened, it parts the gates, and without limit. It flows outwardly uncapped. Yet for all its expressiveness, this orange does not signal. It points to a perduring absence of signal, an empty well or outscooping, some forthcoming clarification of meaning that is now incoherent, fused and confused, unfocused. Useless orange hair, by the way. It cannot be applied, modified, truncated, attached. There is no magic by contagion here, so that, when we see the Hatter’s hat touching the Hatter’s hair, we do not sense that the hat picks up a charge from the hair. That hat is not even greeted by the hair. To touch that hair … to become orange! A peculiar feature of the orange hair is that it seems metallic, though of course we can recognize without difficulty that if it is organic to the Hatter it cannot be made of metal unless he is made of metal himself. This possibility, given the familiar quirkiness of so many Depp performances (from Scissorhands through The Libertine to The Chocolate Factory), is not beyond consideration, yet nothing in the film leads us further down that path. The organicism of the Hatter is a question, at least; not definitively a fact, since if he appears to be vivaciously (or energetically) present and made of some kind of real flesh he is also, in a sense, absent, a wholesale construction. If he were a construction (recall that Scissorhands and Wonka were also Tim Burton inventions), he would be sporting a head of ersatz “hair” made of some suitable substance as could lend it the springy, wiry essence we detect; a scrubbing pad on the head. If he were real—“real”; as real as any other of these characters in Wonderland—he would be containing some unknown biological substance, some chemistry beyond imagination that could produce this strange, almost illuminated tint. A chemistry that came from roots, stamens, bark. However the brilliant orange of the metallicism would seem to show that Tim Burton’s Hatter is an alien, whereas Tenniel’s Hatter was a freak of dreams. To grasp his orange, one must journey past the substance of the hair to mine in the far depths (yet again, as so many times before, a deep Depp), because the orange has a strange chthonic radiance emanating from deposits that lie beneath soil and rock. A subterranean orange. David P. Billington writes of the age of iron construction, that began in the late nineteenth century: “A nonrenewable resource replaced a renewable one; that is the primary ecological fact of the Industrial Revolution. Society thus began to mine its geological capital rather than fell its agricultural income” (29). Before they built with iron architects had built with wood, culling vegetative outgrowth for use; but now they wanted the metals that came from more elemental zones. A deep zone of this kind is the point of origin; one digs past the narrative surface into the strata of production design and performative myth, hidden all. One mines the capital to get to this orange.

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Modest Orange Aladdin (Ron Clements and John Musker, Disney, 1992): II Aladdin and Jasmine meet at twilight, a balcony scene. He looks up from the left, she gazes down from the right, face on face. As this is an animated film, every aspect of the image has been drawn and painted at will, that is, there are no accidental nuances. Ontologically the image derives not from the world we know and live in but from construction by artists who, if they are familiar with their characters may or may not be familiar with the sorts of beings on whom the characters are based: to animate skillfully, it is not cultural experience one would require. Let us say the images flow from an imagined world. His skin is tawny, his clothing adorned with a dull orange to contrast with the lagoon blue of the sky. But she has skin that is a dark, dark, dark orange color. Orange cast in shadow. This permits a contrasting illumination flowing from her amazed eyes, and helps us grasp that we are watching (the image of) a moment of passionate engagement. Graphic lines in love. Lines keeping and treasuring the bubble of orange. But we are told by Merleau-Ponty, “The contour of an object conceived as a line encircling the object belongs not to the visible world but to geometry” (Sense 14). The Disney team is careful, while making strict use of lines, never to show their lines, and in this way to lend the oranges of Aladdin and Jasmine bulk. The balcony setting, cuing a (too-)familiar Shakespeare, makes the love pretext immediately apparent, allowing for a bypass of specific character details. The setting acts already, making the mutually directed facial excitement, emphasized by the density of the coloration, something of a redundancy. In direct sunlight, her face would be an apricot. But in the present light—again: the “light” in the picture is painted—it is a dried apricot, a sun-dried apricot harvested in the warmest, most delicious climes. Dark orange, a designer’s accent. Dark orange, a token of age. Is this Jasmine in one breath a young beauty and an old hag? Has handsome young Aladdin come upon more than he knows? She is “older than the rocks among which she sits,” Pater wrote of his Mona Lisa: full of wisdom, full of experience, overwhelmed by fantasy, always voyaging to, and around, the islands of her youth; and so she looks upon this would-be lover with a certain pity, a certain thrill. Yet Jasmine is also as young as he, a complete innocent who is seeing everything for the first time. “How beauteous mankind is/That hath such creatures in it.” The orange of freshness, now tanned, subjected to the Agraban wind and the Arab sun. The freshness is retained by the color with unconscious effort, against the tide.

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This strange shadow in which Jasmine lingers, that is subtly and effectively darkening her, but that also applies only to her: where does it come from? what does it mean? It has an effect and also a side effect, and the side effect is so pronounced that it dominates our perception. This is the enrichment of romantic possibility, the turning of the female protagonist into a mystery slightly more difficult to see, implying a veiling modesty, a marginal withdrawal that tempers her obvious curiosity and hunger. She would be devoured by him, but she must not permit it. She lingers as it were in the wings of the spotlit stage on which he exhibits himself. She must remain in the wings, lest she seem too available, too open a resource. Is this an American attempt at verisimilar rendition of the Arabic princess, in short, an Orientalized understanding of Arab gender protocols; which is to say a reflection of the gender protocols hegemonic to America, where most of the audiences for the film were in 1992? He is hungry to taste; she wants only to swoon. Seeing this fable swirl and dance out, one might easily forget that its source is the Disney studio in Burbank—a key forgetting, like the opening of the trap that allowed us to fall into the conviction—at least momentarily— that we are in another land. But even by way of Western conceits, Jasmine can seem properly Victorian if she is covered, if not in garments, then in semidarkness. While the boy reaches for her, the girl teases: the “reaching he,” the “teasing she”—not willful beings acting through conscious devotion but wholesale constructs open to the presumptuous readings of a (questionable) cultural convention, a convention in which every beautiful maiden hides herself before giving herself over, every beautiful boy strives to catch and possess a beautiful girl. Thus, every dried apricot is a reminder of the fresh fruit that dangled, once, from the tree, ready for the plucking. Jasmine’s face is a retiring orange, a tantalizing orange. But there is a more direct effect of the orange darkness, and that is to differentiate the female from the male protagonist here. Partly this is due to Aladdin’s physical beauty, a feature conservative viewers would need to see compromised or at least counterposed, his prettiness arising at least in part because the limits of artistic style required for visual integration have forced a certain similarity between the faces; a feminizing of the male and a masculinizing of the female. The darkness of Jasmine’s orange helps make her discrete. But when we fully see the color of her, we must fully see the color of Aladdin, and it becomes apparent that he is little other than a well-tanned white boy. This magically Arabian Aladdin is a white conceit, even a white boy’s dream, and is configured onscreen as such. Dark orange Jasmine, therefore, is the alienable Other, the “true” Arab in this picture. But also, precisely in her alien duskiness, Pocahontas the Indian princess reborn, “the first symbol of the United States,” as Leslie Fiedler observes (American 65). Being the Arab as Other, she is also the Arab as Indian. Fiedler quotes a Herman Melville scoundrel from The Confidence Man:

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Indians I have always heard to be one of the finest of primitive races, possessed of many heroic virtues. Some noble women, too. When I think of Pocahontas, I am ready to love Indians. (qtd. in Fiedler 81) Agrabanian as Aladdin’s dusky princess would claim to be, she is produced as an “Arab” mirroring the Pocahontas myth of early American settlement. Her darkness is yet one more manifestation of the standard Hollywood convention of darkening the remote, the other, the strange, the morally different, the unknown. The shadow that is falling upon orange Jasmine is Western innocence. Aladdin’s innocence, finally. Aladdin is, perforce, a source of light, and when he gazes at Jasmine leaning from her balcony, in her alluring blue halter top, he enshadows her presence with the glare of his fascination.

An Orange Meow The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, Lion’s Gate, 1973) Orange as in marmalade. Tangy: no nonsense. Orange down-to-earth and orange I-give-you-a-challenge. A delightful early scene in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) when a sleepy Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is aroused far too early in the morning by a hungry marmalade cat. Orange cats (they are almost always male; this one could be none other) are of a piece: smarter than the humans who serve them, insistent until they get what they want, wily when necessary, adorably affectionate, never to be fooled. This one wants his food, I want it now, I want it, I want it, my food. But unfortunately, bleary Marlowe has run out of the favorite’s favorite brand. Don’t say a word. The local market is open all night, quiet under fluorescence. Prowl and prowl. Oops, there’s only some other brand. Hoodwink is the only way out. Hoodwink the marmalade cat. Back in the white, white kitchen, Marlowe scoops the stuff into one of the regular cans, retrieved from the trash with true prestidigitation. Now make a splendid show of emptying it into the cat’s bowl. A command performance, show-within-the-show, not only Gould performing Marlowe here for us but Marlowe fashioning a performance for a very particular audience, one orange cat, a critic’s critic. Chat with the cat quietly, reassuringly (con man), the cat of course understanding every word, every word and every space between words. You’re gonna love this. Mmmm! Nope—the cat isn’t fooled. Inveterate theater-going cat this one, fully apprised of the character-actor formula. You can almost hear him sneering, “It’s an act.” A look of graceful disdain.

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The strange sophistication of an orange audience. Altman’s little scene functions dramatically to establish the beast as a “cool cat” and to show unmistakably the tight bond of affiliation between Marlowe and him, a bond of mutual identification. The cat sneaks out to get a bird because this supermarket stuff is unspeakable (and Marlowe will soon sneak out on a hunt, too). Because this is a cool cat, orange epitome, his sheister-chum Marlowe is tagged as a cool cat, too: wily when necessary, graceful, always poised (the cat does acrobatics all around the kitchen counter area), direct but never rude in his communication. This cat, and by virtue of the compatibility Marlowe too, is ineluctable, untouchable, continually but gently skeptical, one step ahead. A real meditator, case study in savvy orange. Savvier than savvy even, but: not making a show of that. The savviness is natural to the creature, like lungs. Making a show would be overcooking and of course, this stupid guy doesn’t know how to cook at all. The cat does not make notable further appearances in the film. Marlowe is never offscreen. Diegetically speaking, there is no link between this nocturnal kitchen scene and the plot of the mystery contained in the film, the scene being dramatically irrelevant except in its positioning the central character for us, a task it accomplishes quietly but securely, with the same kind of sweet repetition we can hear from a marmalade cat’s musical meows. As we are hungry for the film, the film is hungry to reveal itself to us. As the story slowly unwinds through the puzzling streets of LA,1 Marlowe becomes the human embodiment of this orange cat in a marvelous, uncanny, unplottable dance; having been established as the cat’s human avatar he can do nothing else. A cool cat. A cool orange cat. Marlowe is orange-charged, orangealert. An operator in condition Orange. But also, a riffer. Slow, long, lazy, meditative riffs, but don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s out of touch. (In this detective’s head, one can imagine the sound of Ben Webster.) Orange cats draw the hand forward to touch, like jewels. Evocative but insistent. Cloistered orange, too, because this fellow lives secretly in the cozy spaces of this little apartment and beyond, in the cozy spaces of LA. Orange feline Angeleno. And, as long as you feed it, heartfelt, loyal orange, almost fully independent: almost because it doesn’t (deign to) open tin cans but does know how to read their labels. Marlowe isn’t fully independent either. His scenes are conversations, and always—if not overtly—he is reliant on his interlocutor. Conversation that brings Marlowe light, pulls back the curtains. Why an orange cat, since there are so many varieties the filmmaker could have chosen from? This is meant as an interpretive, not a production,

Marlowe is living in High Tower in the Camrose Drive district, in a cul-de-sac off one of countless charming beflowered tiny ways leading up into the hills. 1

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question: not why was this particular cat available to Altman, or who trained it, or where did it come from, but why, in order to frame the film properly, was the interaction between Marlowe and his orange cat a requirement? How does watching the orange cat help me grasp The Long Goodbye? The orange cat is, as a type, a sweetie-pie tough guy. No bullshit. Scratch my ears scratch my ears. Marlowe, too. Moves with grace, reasons with sharpness. And in two particular ways he mirrors the orange cat’s style. First, in that relentless, keen observation that cannot be fooled. Always knows the path, always sure of foot, even when in precarious circumstances, but at the same time always an orange cutie, scratch my ear why don’t you. This is no subservient cat, this is a personality (ergo Altman’s brilliant casting of one of the truly prodigious screen personalities of the time). Never coy, either. The emergence of the orange, its frontality and directness of presence, announces him in every posture. Many critics who have written comparing Gould’s Marlowe to Humphrey Bogart’s have failed to notice how with Bogart one has the clear impression of Marlowe continually thinking: thinking and puzzling, thinking and decoding, thinking and mapping, thinking and strategizing. It’s the way he clenches his mouth. With Gould, Marlowe thinks without giving the impression of thinking. One could say he thinks with his whole body, just as the cat does. An observant cat, then. And also balance. Balance “hopping on the shoulders of” his old friend Terry (Jim Bouton) or the “shoulders” of Roger and Eileen Wade (Sterling Hayden, Nina van Pallandt) at their Malibu home, or being interrogated by Detective Farmer (Steve Colt), or confronting the hood Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell), or questioning the patent quack Dr. Verringer (Henry Gibson), or having his ears scratched by the giggling girls in the adjacent apartment— at least, dreaming of having his ears scratched, just as good. During the police interrogation with Farmer, he behaves exactly like an orange cat when the wrong food is shoved at him. Marlowe goes orange: takes poses: strikes a disgruntled face. “You think you’re telling me what I’m going to do?” says the look on his face. Orange rhetoric. And orange in your face. He keeps coming at you even when he’s walking away.

Orange for the Adventurer Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, MGM/Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips Productions, 1977) The aliens have landed at a makeshift port on the dark side of Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, in a blue-black night, out of a biblical silver cloud. To meet them,

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we have sent a rather large team of military-scientific types, spiced with a keyboard musician and assorted others. All but the young musician are uniformed in sunglasses. And all are looking up in awe. The scene is suffused with the apocalyptic dread of a John Martin canvas mixed with the playful innocence of Mr. Rogers. One man rushes urgently to the porta-potty to throw up. Behind all this, or surrounding it, is John Williams’s score based on the Zoltan Kódaly communication system, here enunciating five notes in hypnotic repetition. This is a very long visit, far longer than one ever sees in film. We begin to fathom that the extraterrestrials are interested in having earthling visitors as we cut quite sharply to a makeshift on-site chapel where a team of cosmonauts are receiving last-minute benediction. In the ensuing shot, they will march in a straight line toward the blinding slit of white light that is the gateway onto the mother ship. Our hero Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), having been silently marked by the alien presence, then gently confounded, then thrown into a state of what others regard as madness (his wife takes the children and leaves him), and finally changed into an obsessive who is (magnetically) drawn to the rendezvous point, has been accepted by the military-scientific team as genuine—“Monsieur Neary, please, one more question. Have you recently had a close encounter?”—and now he is the final human in the marching line. “Is there any history of liver disease in your family?” Counting him, there are thirteen. They are all dressed in orange. Saturated, deep-toned, dark-sunset burnt tangerine, glowing, transcendental, radiant, thoroughly exciting to the eye, a graphic touch without rationale and an orange that both promises a future and abandons a past. An orange in motion flickers on the surface of the sea, the thrill of a moment leading to something. Little American flags stitched onto the upper arms. Erect posture. Brave faces. Adams and Eves going into what they believe will be a Second Eden. An Eden where the sacred Apple is a sacred Tangerine. The whole little ceremonial is hermetic, antiseptic, chillingly eugenic because each body, male or female, is a proud, athletic, perfect specimen of humanity (if Western humanity) ready if called upon to play the proper part in regenerating the species (a part of the species) in another galaxy far, far away. As they parade past the camera, we check off the cosmonaut faces very swiftly, tabulating racial mix, ages, genders—most of them are male and white and in their thirties. They are moving too fast for real consideration as individual persons. What persists in afterimage is the deep orange that both sucks our attention and radiates profundity, one neatly fitting tangerine jumpsuit after another, cut for style and efficiency both, made of a material that will preserve body heat without being weighty (we are to imagine a new scientific advancement in fabric design): all-temperature orange, and thin-skinned if protective. There seems no lack of confidence

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that the earthlings will be safe and sound as they voyage on the starship. As we cannot yet fathom protection from the aliens’ hospitality, it must be the orange dress-up that will guard them, the radiant cladding. They are as sure, as wholesome, as unbruised inside these suits as the soft pulp of a citrus inside its gleamy peel. March, march, but not to the music of John Philip Sousa. It is the orange we see, not the characters, orange not character, orange not character, orange not character, orange, orange, orange, flooding perception, then memory. Neary is the only one who is more than a mannikin. In a long film (all the versions run more than 130 minutes) shot in Eastmancolor negative (and processed at MGM), the cosmonauts’ tangerine orange is the only intense and palpable color, the only color trace once the story has dissipated, save for the pink-orange burn on Neary’s too-orange face, on one half of Neary’s face, because he was exposed to the radiation from a hovering alien ship one night. Orangey red, blushing orange: the orange of eccentricity and embarrassment. The orange that dares to step near the border, that presses itself as far as it can go but is never transformed into red. All the other colorations in Close Encounters are indicative and sensible—I have elsewhere called such color “perfunctory” (“Color of Our Eyes”)—but lack dramatic power as colors. At the landing spot all is gray, white, burning white, dull white, facial pink. There is a huge callboard where musical notes appear as colored rectangles once they are sounded (the interstellar communication is by music) but the rectangles are in pastels: pale yellow, pale pink, pale green. Even though one can be delighted by the Pez-colored mix of lights, more and more thrillingly as the musical tones increase in tempo, nevertheless once the “song” is done there is no remaining trace of these pastels. The same for the sparkling myriad of lights on the multicolored mother ship, which finally lifts off into the night sky and disappears while the credits roll. The mothership colors leave earth, are gone until the day the aliens might return. What pronounces itself, endures, assures it will travel through time without aging (“They haven’t aged a day!” an official says, of airmen “captured” years before and now released from the ship, whole and healthy), is orange. Dark and delicious, mysterious and uninforming, readied to face the abyss of the unknown. An orange only the surface of which we can see, that we see only as surface, an orange caching an alien world. Blood orange. Back to the passing parade of cosmonauts in their shiny tangerine. What they look like marching, what they are, is soldiers in the field. Roy’s name has found its way onto the list, the list sits on an official clipboard. His personality, his quirkiness (Dreyfuss plays the character with endearing quirkiness), his habits, his predilections, his fears—all of these to some notable degree personal and idiosyncratic even as to a notable degree they are common and cultural—are packaged and relegated now to a back channel, a data file beneath the sheathed body. The body is transformed into

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a State utensil. The utensil is blushing with orange. Roy’s initial rash has spread over him, solidified and turned supple as a second skin. It will be his itinerary. As it impacts earthlings, the alien encounter is an orange sheet laid over the body and what the body knows. It is no big step to imagine that each of these adventurers entertained, and dispensed with, a moment before the mirror—“Look at me”—as the new beguiling orange self gained appraisal and acceptance. “Orange is my color.” Each being designated an official representative, orange has become the morphing formula to typify the species. “Orange is us.”

An Orange Shield Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount, 1958): II One of the most celebrated, and surely most repeated, images in twentiethcentury cinema is Kim Novak standing far away, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. There is an actual shot in Vertigo (1958) that shows her plunge into the Bay there, but it is brief and a mere passing shot in a sequence wherein the hero is following a young woman and sees her park at Fort Point, then walk up to the quay, toss some flowers ahead of her, and drop in. As a monument to vertigo-the-condition-and-possibility, the Golden Gate Bridge is spectacular and true, but it is not used in the film itself as iconically as it is in the advertising. In the film, we see it arching over a particular spot where a girl almost drowns and a man rescues her. We do not go onto the bridge; we do not explore it from beneath; and we do not see it again. This bridge is not called the Golden Gate because it is golden. In fact, as the second longest suspension bridge in America, it stretches over a strait called, since 1846, the Golden Gate: thus named because it spanned the pathway to golden riches, in the eyes of those awakened by the California Gold Rush. Ships sailing from San Francisco Bay to Asia pass through this strait and under this bridge. The bridge is, in truth, orange. Indeed, a color officially named International Orange. A special orange designed for aeronautical and military use, so as to cause objects to stand out against their background. Astronauts’ safety suits are in a variant of this color. When seen against a vivid blue (such as a clear sky, not so very frequent in the San Francisco area), the orange stands out sharply and precisely: it objectifies and clarifies. Seen as a swatch on its own, International Orange is duller, more retiring, more modest than one might suppose, part of the bridge’s sunny shine coming from the use of acrylic, rather than oil-based, paint. International Orange is not the color speckling a green grove in Florida, not the orange of even a Crayola crayon. Formal, standardized, officially sanctioned, metrical, thoroughly unamusing orange. Orange built to be seen, as in detected.

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To be seen and also to be repaired, the bridge existing in a constant state of being touched up, so large is it that by the time one end is finished already chipping and wearing have begun at the other. The painting requires ongoing repainting, the orange is always becoming a newer, cleaner, sharper orange. As a constructional element in Hitchcock’s framing, the bridge makes a great deal of sense for two central reasons. First, here, as in so many other films that he shot partially on exotic locations, he was able to use a token symbol of San Francisco to stand in for the city as a whole; to key the setting; to remind viewers of the particular territory in which is laid the story that is engaging them. Legion scholars have picked out numerous other instances: the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen’s Nyhavn in Torn Curtain (1966); the British Library in Blackmail (1929); the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur (1942); the Forth Bridge in Edinburgh in The 39 Steps (1935); Dutch windmills in Foreign Correspondent (1940). Next is a purely graphic detail: against the blue sky (for which the production team would have patiently waited [see Pomerance, “Talking”]) and with the central character very tiny, even barely perceptible in the shot, the bridge offers a graphic line that swoops overhead, both protective and encapsulating, so that a very elegant—and powerfully augmenting—composition can be made of the plunge. Hitchcock always makes elegant compositions, being a classical “composer.” Worth noting: when brave Scottie (James Stewart) jumps in to save Madeleine (Novak), we are virtually in the water with him, actually hovering only two or so feet above his head as he fetches her and drags her back; and though this is happening in the shadow cast by the bridge, we do not for a moment look up to see the structure up close. The shot of Scottie’s plunge and lifesaving was made on a Paramount water stage. Orange becomes something of a superimposition by virtue of this shot and this sequence, not only at the moment, hovering over the fated Madeleine as she attempts suicide but more generally, over the entire arc of her story, as lovers of the film would think it “Madeleine’s story.” There is a sense from the moment we meet her, indeed from the moment we are prepared to meet her by her husband’s careful and private introduction that she is tender, fragile, subject to forces beyond her control, in need of protection. Elster importunes his old pal Scottie for help because he is worried about a frail wife who travels without remembering where she has been. Scottie follows her at first out of simple aesthetic attraction and curiosity, but then out of a growing sense of morbidity, to redeem her from the threat from which he designates himself her guardian. The overspanning orange bridge metaphorizes this sociable safekeeping, this solicitous concern for a possibly already wounded but certainly easily woundable human being. That the bridge’s vast orange span is also a distinct feat of engineering does not escape attention. Is the film engineered, too? Is Elster’s story?

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The entire line of action that involves Scottie’s watching after this woman, keeping her in check, following her every slightest move, trying desperately to come to terms with her condition and her self-proclamation is one in which we sense his presence as an overriding protective shield, a cast-iron will and strength keeping the heavens from falling on her. As splashing in the Bay she is safe under the orange arc of this bridge, elsewhere she is protected by Scottie; his rendering her safe comes, after the bridge moment, as a reprise. The bridge in its majesty, culminating a long chain of development concerned with Madeleine’s safety, provides a startling orange symbol, an orange shield, as it were, that in reflection might seem to cast backward into the story a blue-green shadow that is, of course, the color of water. She is always, everywhere, “under the sign of orange.” When Scottie first converses with her, softly, gently—first really meets her—it is by the orange light of his fireplace, with the orange flames heartily burning. The orange flames: no person in this film has their vivacity. But then he learns the truth that all the protection in the world cannot keep this person from her fate. Later, he will have opportunity for a second chance, where instead of looming over to protect he will loom over to control. The orange will disappear. The orange bridge and the fateful maiden are very close in age. When work began, Kim Novak was in her young twenties and the Golden Gate had been opened in 1937, precisely twenty years before the principal photography began.

Temptation Orange Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, Universal, 1956): II Sometime after 1923, when the Popsicle was first marketed, but before the late 1950s, when I was frequently devouring them, the Creamsicle made its appearance in Western popular culture. This confection is a bar of vanilla ice cream perched upon a birchwood stick and coated with an orange-flavored hard coating. Because as one eats it the white vanilla-flavored ice cream mixes with the orange of the coating, the result is a creamy orange, slightly tangy, its flavor both fruity and non-fruity at once. I always think of pallid orange as Creamsicle orange.2 The Creamsicle orange very closely mocks the slightly less pink orange color of poached Atlantic salmon, pale (Atlantic) salmon orange (which is sometimes called salmon pink). As to color alone, and in both cases, we have Subsequently other flavored coverings were instituted as well. The Joe Lowe Co. of New York owned Popsicle and the derivative Creamsicle in the 1950s. 2

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white with just a swift tinting of orange, just enough orange to make the white disappear. Another way of putting this: just enough passion to make the purity impure. Procure this Creamsicle/salmon orange—it seems unreal!—then move it past the eyes in a quick, twisting, urgent, even frenzied way to produce a fluttering that fills the optical field and you would arrive at roughly the experience of watching Dorothy Malone dancing in her peignoir in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956). Thomas Elsaesser is stunned: “In one of the most paroxysmic montage sequences that the American cinema has known, Sirk has Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind dance on her own, like some doomed goddess from a Dionysian mystery” (60). The garment is of a sheer fabric, possibly nylon, and draped in layers, with what surely seems an extensive trail, so that as she races around her room to the bopping jazz (she has turned her record player up to full volume) the garment flies out and spins around her, a spasmodic garment, catching the eye.3 Jettisoned matter in deep space. A giant koi in an elaborate modernist tank. Malone has a mother lode of blonde hair which is also in motion as she dances. The effect is of some kind of highly energized, even possessed spirit caught in the confines of a bourgeois bedroom (decorated with spanky red anthuria), spinning and whirling in order to find an escape route: escape the self, escape the family, escape reality, escape the present. Cinema is forever escaping the present. The tightly edited sequence offering this frenzied veil dance, being spectacular in itself, makes the excited, unsatiated movement and the Creamsicle orange especially flashy to the eye. Old Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith), ailing of heart and sickened by the moral weakness of his heir Kyle (Robert Stack) and his pleasure-hungry daughter Marylee (Malone), has been confronted in his study by police who, late at night, are returning Marylee home along with the garage mechanic she has picked up for the night’s entertainment (Grant Williams). Hadley pulls out his gun to deal with the Lothario, but Kyle’s boyhood friend Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), who has been acting as the old man’s aide, calms the situation and takes the gun away. The boy is escorted away, sullen but consenting to silence: the public dignity of this family is central to their own, and to the area’s, prosperity. Marylee, petulant and unfulfilled, climbs upstairs with her unscratched itch. Now we are in her bedroom: 1. She stands behind a moderne glass shelving unit unzipping her pearlwhite tight-fitting dress and fingering a framed photograph. 2. Behind her are tall windows flooded with moonlight blue.

The historical reference is to Annabelle Moore’s serpentine dances filmed by William K. L. Dixon in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The films were often gaudily tinted. 3

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3. Still holding the photograph (we do not see it), she bends to the fireplace and lights her cigarette from the flames with a footlong match. 4. She strolls past the red anthuria (in two vases) splashing the air, and at the record player puts on Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed’s “Temptation,” a raucous jazz-band version with pronounced trumpeting. The music is loud enough to drown out the world. 5. Twisting her hips she gyrates around, with the photograph substituting for her young man, but now, behind that shelving unit again, and apparently feeling constrained, she strips to a black undergarment. 6. Cut to Jasper downstairs. Hearing the music, he slowly gets up from the chair behind his desk, his eyes closed in the deepest weariness. Mitch stands calmly looking on. 7. Jasper moves past Mitch toward the door but pauses there. Touches Mitch’s arm affectionately. Mitch touches and holds his, for support. Jasper pats Mitch, and exits. Mitch walks slowly toward the camera and on the proximal side of the desk deposits Jasper’s pistol into a drawer and shuts the drawer. 8. As the drawer shuts, we cut to Marylee upstairs in the orange peignoir, the music blaring noxiously (the peignoir blaring and jerking noxiously in the frame). 9. Cut to Jasper hoisting himself up the stairs (carpeted in red). 10. Cut to Marylee twisting emphatically, the music swelling. An unfurling of orange. 11. Cut to a shot of Jasper from above as he mounts with the last drops of his energy. The world is too much with him, late and soon. Certainly his children. 12. Cut to Marylee gyrating in frenzy, sallying past the camera right to left. 13. Cut to Jasper at the top of the stairs now, grabbing the railing in desperation. 14. Marylee’s body in that orange gown, the pale, flowering, overflowing, intoxicating gown that is flying in the air, fluttering, waving, sweeping, and now filling the frame. Creamy orange. Orange cream. 15. Trumpets blaring as Jasper’s hand loses grip of the railing and he falls: all the way down to the bottom, the body rolling down the vortex of the staircase as seen from above. 16. Cut to a shot from below as the body rolls onto the floor. Music still rolling loudly.

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17. Music continuing. Orange Marylee gyrating with orange fever, orange hunger. 18. Music continuing. Darkly, Mitch stepping quickly to the body. 19. Music continuing. At the second-floor railing Lucy (Lauren Bacall), Kyle’s new bride, rushing to look down aghast in a gray suit. 20. Music continuing, loudly. Mitch reaching Jasper’s corpse. 21. Music continuing. Marylee twisting, kicking, out of control. Orange pandemonium. 22. Music continuing, louder. Mitch turning Jasper over. 23. Music continuing, still louder. Lucy pivoting away from the sight, covering her face with her hands. 24. Music climaxing. Marylee falling into a soft chair, lifting and kicking her legs in the air as the music swells out. Kicking something away? Kicking off her few remaining inhibitions? The orange gown is a delirium, a nightmare, an explosion. 25. Music in finale. Lucy pulls hands away, looks down. Fade to black. (film editing by Russell F. Schoengarth) That orange cloud: provocation and delicacy antagonized, jarring comfort, the orange in stark reverberation against the red flowers as limned emphatically against the blue windows. The old man’s brown cardigan and weary face. The green chair and table lamp in the all-brown study. Mitch in pale gray. Lucy in pale gray. That orange provocation. The blaring music. That Creamsicle screaming, “Lick me, lick me!” The old man falling from a height, his universe wholly rocked. That orange provocation to climax. Creamy pallor of orange: a little girl’s sweet innocence. The little girl who is given, given, given everything everything everything she wants by Daddy, but who grows up to disappoint. Far too full a body now to be a little girl’s. A big girl dancing with an adult’s abandon but in the shifting cocoon of childish simplicity, transforming the Creamsicle pallor into insatiable peevishness of hunger both imposed and undeserved. With the garage attendant all she wanted was a few moments in the back seat of a car, after all. Who denies a fully grown adult that? Marylee in her adult form could not more precisely be an icon of consumerist, masculinist desire, the shapely body, the stark blonde hair, the petulant face, the contorted positions of desire, the infatuation with a framed image, the riddling presence of that horribly rhythmic song in her ears. Not only does Malone play the character with sympathy and attention to detail, but she also already constitutes the glamor icon even outside the diegesis. The old man has made his money (his vast fortune) from oil, so his

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feet are on the ground, both metaphorically and actually. Marylee exists as a creature he cannot possibly understand, wholly mediated, seeking nothing but the moment’s delight. In this scene she is methodically killing her father, and the choreography ends up with all the characters spinning before the camera just as Marylee has been doing in her room, Mitch rushing forward in what seems an arc, Lucy curving toward the stairwell, rotating her body, Jasper tumbling down the stairs in a pair of shots that take him through a hundred and eighty degrees. And constant through all this, persisting, poking itself through the veil of gravity, that flamboyantly twitching orange, orange in motion, Temptation Orange. Marylee tempts us orange, and she is also tempted orange. At film’s end she will inherit Hadley Oil, sit at her father’s desk with a picture of an oil derrick (as so many observers have already noted, a phallic oil derrick) behind her back. She wears orange no longer. But contained in that orange peignoir was all the floral frivolity her capitalist father rejected to build his empire, all the efflorescent, wafer-thin, excitable, explosive energy of youthful form in the promising—too promising—mid-1950s. She will control Hadley Oil, but in her memory she will be dancing in orange, murderous orange. Dancing and dancing, flying, gyrating, desiring, forgetting. Conscious or unconscious, could the scene in Ang Lee’s Hero (2002) where, in a Creamsickle orange gown of gauzy lustre, Mistress Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) twists her way through the air to neutralize the uncountable arrows from the Qin Emperor’s army, be something of an homage?

Death of a Fruit The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, Paramount, 1972) Kassia St Clair speculates that the fruit we know as an “orange” originated in China, and passed through the Middle East, the Persian narang becoming, finally, the French orange. Further, the word “orange as a name for a color only emerged during the sixteenth century; before the English speakers had used the cumbersome portmanteau giolureade or yellow-red. One of the world’s first-recorded adjectival outings was in 1502, when Elizabeth of York bought ‘slevys of orange color sarsenet’ for Margaret Tudor” (St Clair 93, 94), although the word was in Middle English from about 1300. Speaking technically—but only technically—the orange “orange,” typically looking quite edible, is a color of a particular wavelength on the visible spectrum; and in painting it is formed by various combinations of reds and yellows: orange is thus sometimes thought of as a reddish yellow and sometimes as a yellowish red, but is almost never considered as anything

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but a hybrid of these primes. That is, when people think about orange, they are thinking about something else, most of the time. But things are different when we regard orange. The considerations I am framing here attempt what should not be relegated to the Planet of Impossibilities, seeing orange as only itself. Seeing orange without red; seeing it without yellow. Neither a blushing yellow nor a sunny red. A color that does not know yellow or red, but knows only itself, its fruity, agonizing self. In many European tongues, the tart-sweet, segmented, ascorbic-acid-laden fruit we call “orange” takes its name as an “orange apple,” a pomme orange, whence, by way of the Spanish arancia, the Medieval Latin pomarancia, the Middle High German pomeranz and the later German pomeranze, and then, via a French douanier at Montreal very early in the twentieth century, me: the “I” who insists on looking past the fruit to a truth. The “me” who is always, as seems, mistaken (in thought) for one thing or the other. Sometimes a moment of truth centers on fruit. Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone is considerably more tender and sympathetic than his younger self (played by the gelid Robert De Niro, as we have seen). Brando is corpulent, thoughtful, slow-acting, deliberate, compassionate, wounded. He enters Little Italy’s Mulberry Street and heads across the roadway to a fruit seller, specifically requesting a pair of oranges which the man carefully, respectfully, expertly selects and places in a paper bag. (Not just any two of the objects that are all equally categorized as “oranges” but two very special, at this instant very perfect types.) While the Don is looking at other fruit, he sees two men approach far too quickly, and tries to flee, but they have already begun shooting, and soon he lies crumpled on the pavement, blood thickly streaming out of his back. A high shot gives the topography: fruit stand outside a store, cars parked by the roadside, the dark pessimistic pavement, bodies racing in panic, a dozen or more oranges spilled and running amok onto the road (each one a personality). Vito will identify with the orange. He will survive this, but in his very last moments, much later in the film, as he plays in the garden with his grandson, he will slice open an orange and put a segment in his mouth to simulate a monster maw (this gesture was Brando’s spontaneous invention). A man with a tough and unmistakable exterior, yet soft, pulpy, juicy inside. A man who gives plenteous nourishment (if at a price). The oranges in the shooting scene play a role in the design, because most of the clothing and décor of the street are cast in neutral browns, grays, taupes. The oranges give a splash of lively color. But they also blatantly suggest freshness and vulnerability, since to puncture an orange (or any fruit, though oranges are the most spectacularly colored of fruit) with a bullet is the easiest thing in the world. We gain a special sense of the fragility of the human corpse, how swiftly and carelessly a man may be wounded or dispatched with guns: guns which, through the story

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so far, we have seen in multiple uses, while many men have been slain. “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.” Until this moment of closure, slayings in the Godfather saga are moral lessons (as they would become for Martin Scorsese in his chain of mafia films). There is a ledger, and the commission of a threatening or defamatory or disloyal act brings retribution: retribution that “balances the books.” We see death produced almost mathematically; and surely economically; but not passionately, until Don Vito falls among the oranges. Until the orange skin of orange Vito is punctured. His helpless son Fredo (John Cazale), hopeless to use his own gun effectively, now sits at the curb weeping uncontrollably, another member of the family (the orange family) whose juice runs as freely as his father’s.

Burnt Orange Jungle Book (Zoltán Korda, Alexander Korda Films, 1942) In his 1894 Jungle Book stories, Rudyard Kipling has many of his beastly creatures refer to fire as The Red Flower, being also swift to inform his readers that “no creature in the jungle will call fire by its proper name. Every beast lives in deadly fear of it, and invents a hundred ways of describing it” (16). Beasts being possessed of a color vision different from ours, what any wolf or tiger might mean by “red” is up for grabs; but in any event fire is not red, it is orange. The flames are orange, they produce an orange heat. We are taught early on the salutary convention of staying clear of fire. The “respect” shown for flame is reported by Gaston Bachelard: If the child brings his hand close to the fire his father raps him over the knuckles with a ruler. Fire, then, can strike without having to burn. Whether this fire be flame or heat, lamp or stove, the parents’ vigilance is the same. Thus fire is initially the object of a general prohibition; hence this conclusion: the social interdiction is our first general knowledge of fire. What we first learn about fire is that we must not touch it. As the child grows up, the prohibitions become intellectual rather than physical. (11) But, notes Bachelard, the prohibition brings with it a desire to, as it were, fight back, to set the fire afire, to surmount the deficiency of experience produced through caution and observance. In general, to avoid touching— fire or anything—is to shirk from knowledge, and this withdrawal is an inspiration, in Bachelard’s thought, for the Prometheus complex:

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Since the prohibitions are primarily social interdictions, the problem of obtaining a personal knowledge of fire is the problem of clever disobedience. The child wishes to do what his father does, but far away from his father’s presence, and so like a little Prometheus he steals some matches. … We propose, then, to place together under the name of the Prometheus complex all those tendencies which impel us to know as much as our fathers, more than our fathers, as much as our teachers, more than our teachers. (12) Kipling’s animals are far more prudent, if also less intellectual. They merely flee from flames, and do not presume to ascend to a position superior to their kind. Fire in the jungle keeps the beasts and the humans separate in a way; divides the population into two groups, one knowing its place and the other perpetually wishing to climb. The filmmaking trio of Alexander, Zoltán, and Vincent Korda (né Kellner) were separated by two years each, and emigrated from Hungary to the United Kingdom then Hollywood to make films. Jungle Book (1942) was directed by Zoltán, produced by Alexander, and art-directed by Vincent. The film had three-strip Technicolor cinematography by Lee Garmes and W. Howard Greene and was shot in Hollywood in 1940 (the UK being at that time insufferably dangerous for much filmmaking, as for life4). The film is notable for its lush colorations and authentic footage of various jungle beasts, including a python, a panther, a tiger, a herd of elephants, and others. While in 1932, with W. S. Van Dyke’s Tarzan the Ape Man, animal action was integrated into the story continuation through insertion of stock footage, the quality of which differed notably from that of the principal material, the scenes in Jungle Book are all integral to the film. The wolf-boy Mowgli (Sabu), having befriended most of the beasts and having entered the jungle to find and kill Shere-Khan, a man-eating tiger, is accompanied by a young woman named Mahala (Patricia O’Rourke), daughter of the cupidinous and scheming Buldeo (Joseph Calleia). When Mahala and Mowgli discover a fabulous treasure, Buldeo connives to steal it, and through the outplaying of this story of greed and violence the man takes the step of setting the forest on fire. A lengthy passage in the film’s climax involves depiction of this fire, of Mowgli’s desperate attempts to save the animals, of the animals’ own skillful flight, and of the wind turning the blaze toward the little village where Mowgli’s mother (Gloria De Haven) is held in bondage. The problem for the cameraman was to obtain two colorations in meaningful contrast, and simultaneously: the brilliant and overpowering orange of the flames; and the lush green of the forest The London blitz took place from September 7, 1940, through May 11, 1941, the first eight weeks being particularly intensive. Citizens were herded into tube stations. Many children had been evacuated to the countryside. 4

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being destroyed. The fire could not have the exceptional depth of meaning implied in the story unless, more than merely a fire, even a great fire, it was a fire devouring the vegetative world.5 The screen had to be filled with the consumption, but not to such a degree that the magnified flames began to seem artificial, the screen a mere screen, since the audience’s full engagement required the illusion of presence—thus the illusion of danger. Deep engagement is shattered by consciousness of the projection itself. Composition was thus a vital need, and part of Vincent Korda’s design involves the way images of the forest fire are framed, both from a distance and up close. We are able to see enormous swaths of forest burning with high fires, and also to drop to the ground or water level to see animals racing in the smoke with flames above and behind them. To convey the fire as an intensive emanation of heat requires precisely the kind of conventional training on the viewer’s part of which Bachelard discourses. Convention, not Promethean subversion. From having been slapped early on in life, we have learned the peril of flames, and thus the realistic sight of flames brings on the thought of that peril. Thus the orange screen signifies danger, does this, in fact, in place of actually posing danger.6 We must derive a thought of heat from the picture, without feeling heat. A viewer experiencing the heat that is being pictured would be unable to appreciate the picturing. The same goes for the human and animal actors being depicted in flight, since in the filming process no person or creature could be subjected to actual danger, yet the threat of danger had to seem omnipresent. The fire is thus entirely pictorial, entirely symbolic. But as symbol it articulates closure, trap, and finality, since the flight of all the characters and their nervous activation all logically flow from fear of horrible death by flame (a fear learned at a parent’s side). An analogy is drawn between creature death and vegetative death; if with such speed and ease the forest can be devoured, cannot animal life also be speedily lost? Orange as a final

A similarly overpowering fire sequence, in which a vivid, saturated orange sky backgrounds considerable silhouetted foreground action and in which expensive live-action/incendiary shots are used, climaxes the first part of Gone with the Wind (1939). While the Atlanta fire sequence is lengthy, and was shot at great expense using numerous meticulous rear projections and extremes of theatrical lighting on the characters, it manages to be enthralling and captivating without giving the sense of proximity and danger that we find in Jungle Book. If the Wind sequence is a study in orange, it is also true that orange washes it out. 6 A distinction between an image of a situated experience and a situated experience itself, regarding fire, was gravely impossible at the Laurier Palace Theater, 3215 rue Ste Catherine East in Montreal, January 9, 1927, when during a projection a discarded cigarette started a fire that killed seventy-eight people. More than two hundred children were in the audience, many unguarded by adults. Until 1961, children under the age of sixteen were not permitted entrance to movie theaters under any conditions, in the Province de Québec. 5

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color, a gateway to the Beyond. But also, orange as warning, as reminder of warning. Orange pedagogy. Bachelard is right in supposing that we will never stop returning to that slap on the wrist the first time we stretched our fingers toward the flame—one flame or another. Orange fire: do not touch. Orange fire: do not let it touch you. Orange altogether: to be approached with care. As touch is forbidden so is knowledge forbidden, and the entire forest-fire scene becomes one in which characters not only flee to save themselves but also “flee for their lives” from the temptation to know the world better. Retaining innocence, they escape orange. Except that the wise elephants know fire. When Mowgli gathers them and directs them forward through the fire to save the village the elephants are trumpeting, but they do not flee. And because he is with them, because he is the Elephant Boy, their leader and their companion, their human friend to whom they can speak and also their honored mascot, Mowgli can know fire, too. The vast intimidations of fire and the climb to overcome them represent something charged and significant for Bachelard: the attempt to advance and expand knowledge. Only through what he calls the Prometheus complex does human knowledge grow. But at the same time, the beasts who do not presume to knowledge maintain a daunted sense of mystery about the orange universe that is around them but unknowable, a universe they can be familiar with yet never quite touch. To surmount the orange threat, or to be taunted with orange impenetrability? … Finally, Bachelard brings his question to a much broader, even cosmic plateau: Is the fire which will set the world ablaze at the Last Judgment, is the fire of Hell, the same or not the same as terrestrial fire? (102) Is the fabulous terrestrial fire of Jungle Book, that sets the world ablaze, a harbinger of the Last Judgment? Here is a question that carries the Prometheus complex upward in a wholesale transposition: the punishing parent is the final Father, the smiting of the hand a blow from On High because the child has come too close to The Flame. Do we continue our lives searching for the Deep Knowledge, testing ourselves against it, reaching, stretching, even injuring ourselves in the process—what hath science wrought!—or do we, like Bagheera the panther, Kaa the serpent, and all the others with scales and fur, keep the Great but unendingly Burning Orange a mystery from which to take flight?

Of Gray

How can someone who is warm understand what it is to be cold? ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

In all ways when one is walking about with a camera, one has almost a duty to be attentive. JULIO CORTÁZAR

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Historical Gray Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Chris Columbus, Warner Bros., 2001), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, Warner Bros., 2004), Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema/WingNut Films, 2001–3), The Hobbit (Peter Jackson, New Line Cinema/MGM, 2012–14) I have written elsewhere of the uncanny postmortem transformation of Albus Dumbledore (see “Doing Dumbledore”): how the wise and brilliant Richard Harris, having originated the role in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) and succumbing in 2002 to Hodgkin’s disease was replaced by the wise and brilliant Michael Gambon beginning with the series’ third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). Dumbledore: a wise and brilliant old man, chief wizard at Hogwarts, headmaster, confidant, mentor, truthteller, box-office attraction. A man who knows everything. Has been everywhere. For all time. In another dimension, wise and brilliant Ian McKellen, who turned down the role of Dumbledore when Harris died, was already playing Gandalf the Gray in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Gandalf, a wise and brilliant old man, great wizard, confidant, mentor, truthteller, hero, box-office attraction. Wise old men, Harris of Limerick, Gambon of Dublin, McKellen of Lancashire. With long, ever so long, pale gray beards. Beards like waterfalls. Beards untouched for, as it would seem, generations. Beards that confound order, defy measure and control, decline to bow to the etiquettes of the tea party. Beside them there is always to be found, as though in a recipe carved on the Rosetta Stone, a sweet young face, etched with optimism and promise, wide-eyed, pretty to look at because it has not yet matured into the wise, bearded face we may seek tomorrow. Between the youth and the old sage is worked a kind of apprenticeship. Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe), beginning at about age ten and moving upward into his lusty teens; and the putatively adult but apparently youthful Frodo (Elijah Wood), symbol of hope and the quest. Teachers and pupils. Strategic maturity; untested youth. The hairy and the smooth. The blushing and the grayed. This pose, the “wise old graybeard” and the eager innocent: a marriage of spirits entirely engaging, to be sure. Engaging how, however? Engaging why? Beyond that it resides in the cycle of time, what education is it that comes from the gray beard? How is a vision of Albus Dumbledore modified and confirmed when we see young (or younger) faces surrounding him: the

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hundreds of bright-eyed Hogwartniks, the comparatively young faculty looking energetic, even the grisly but vigorous groundskeeper Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane). What becomes of old Dumbledore as youthful eyes gaze up at him, say, in the Hogwarts dining room? At the high table he stands to address the student body, a nouveau Mr. Chips, and as he intones rapt silence falls. Who is he for his listeners, by virtue of that gray beard? What does he think of his own grayness? (We can know easily what such children should think, respectfully, of such a sage. But as he stands prating, voice weakened, limbs frail, what do they think?) Gandalf, for his part, seems to lapse into a daydream when he is not called to action, riding along in a stream of mumbles and self-inspections. What can he be dreaming of? By contrast, Dumbledore is perennially alert, on guard at the parapet, as though some vile and debasing force is always everywhere readying to zone in on the school and render impotent all the adolescent magic that brews there. Since such a threat is, in essence, the heart of the Potter story, Dumbledore with his kenning oversight is the story, or at least the key to its solution. Notwithstanding the minor variations in their beards—Gambon’s is the bushier and scragglier, with less white; Harris’s is very long and pointy, as white-gray as parchment—the two Dumbledores are configured, scripted, photographed, and directed to be the same, which is to say, one a direct (an unblemished) continuity of the other: a standing in for death, in a manner which obfuscates death’s presence. The character is tall and proud, selfconfident and unselfconscious, something of an ancient tree in an ancient forest, Robin Hood’s oak (and without the groaning support beams one will find in Sherwood Forest at Nottingham). When they gaze at the headmaster, what can we imagine they see, young knights of Gryffindor, young knights of Slytherin, since watching them watching we gaze into an abyss? What is there to be seen in that Graybeard, his fullness, his antiquity? Because there is a kind of obedience through which they regard him, a kind of self-consciousness of the young, they are not having a direct experience. Or their experience is thoroughly Platonic; they relate to a person by way of a form. Do they pick up the phrasing of his song, his long breaths, his articulation, the way he allows certain syllables to ring more than others? If they are close enough for a portrait view, do they see his face as a human face, textured, or is it merely a collection of identifying symbols? Surely some indication of incalculable distance from the past is in Old Graybeard, since the figure has been on earth longer than young adepts know how to remember and thus, in their view, forever. He addresses them as novitiates but he has seen novitiates before, countless times. Everything for Dumbledore is familiar and repetitive. And because that gray beard— the very grayness of his beard—bespeaks an experience the young cannot quite comprehend, albeit his language is no more elaborate than theirs they

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must regard the man as alien, here and always. As their tutor, and as the arranger of the orchestration of their many other tutorings in Hogwarts, he has a plan they would not grasp. Historical gray. The gray that indicates an uncrossable river: the river of time. Or is there a secret bridge, and does he know the path that brings one there? Gravity is lent to Dumbledore’s every comment by that gray beard, and by reflection what we hear the children say, however earnestly, seems light enough to float away. The gray beard signs that in this school (as in other age-graded circumstances) the young imbibe from the old with no sympathy. Dumbledore’s many riddles do not help the situation. He is a riddle already, before opening the tiny mouth hidden inside the gray beard. In Lord of the Rings, Gandalf’s white-gray beard makes him a riddle, too: arcane, learnèd, extraordinarily perceptive, wily if beneficent, but a navigator along pathways other people cannot see. Pathways that are “not there.” He makes movements ineffable with charges immeasurable. More generally, gray beards indicate masculinity advanced, matured in a turn to philosophy. The more hair growing out of a face, the more likely the bearer of that face seems a thinker, a meditator, a calculator, a repository of knowledge. Dumbledore as library. The gray library. Thus, his perpetual habit of pointing young Harry to books. In this paradigm, the smooth unblemished face on which hair has not yet begun to show proclaims, “illiterate, in need of direction.” Direction as textual. Harry is a reader, to be sure, but he has not read much (functioning in this way as a stand-in for the user of the book, the watcher of the film). Unbearded young Harry is also, of course, a full equal of his friend, young, unbearded Hermione just as of his other friend, young, unbearded Ron. All three of the young protagonists, and the legion students surrounding them, indicate readiness for text but not possession of it. (When the Harry Potter books came into print, these young heroes were metaphorized in the gangs of young people who lined up overnight at bookstores to get their hands on these “sacred” texts.) In the first few of the movies, the ones that show preadolescent Harry, the gender equality between Harry and Hermione is a major dramatic force (a force dissipated once Harry and Ron can both, and apparently at once, see Hermione as a girl). Old Graybeard is beyond romance, beyond the pleasures of the body not that he regards them as lost or ever thinks of the body except as part of a magical formula to be invoked and shared. Harry’s bodily innocence is as though invisible to Dumbledore, and Dumbledore’s bodily transcendence is invisible to Harry. Invisibility and invisibility face-à-face. In the Biblical style, Dumbledore’s hair is brother to his beard: exceedingly long (perhaps never ever trimmed), similarly pale gray, dropping down over the sides of his face and melding inseparably from the beard that hangs from his chin. Dumbledore is thus in effect a maned lion, an Aslan,

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bearer of peace, wisdom, justice, sanctity; God’s child. Inside this hefty hairiness, the face diminishes in proportion, the fleshy tone contrasts—only as décor—against the profusion of gray. The main effect is a suggestion of strength (preserved virility of Samson) but also of accreted thought, idea perched upon idea, formula on formula, hint on hint, just as the hair grows out in layers, stratum on stratum: he is a living archaeology. Dumbledore’s substantial knowledge, signed by the gray beard, makes him a precious nonrenewable resource—are we seriously to imagine Harry will someday become a new Dumbledore, who in his advancing age seems more and more fragile? At the same time, the numerous young people we see at Hogwarts, by whom Dumbledore (and his staff) seem so content to be surrounded, Graybeard’s defenders, esteem themselves vital and capable. In the Potter films and the Rings films, if it finally comes to the old man to protect the young this climactic act contradicts the proposition repeated throughout the narratives, that he is the one who needs protection because the armies of time are upon him. When he steps forward as guardian, then, Old Graybeard contradicts the flow of time. He becomes self-avowedly fictional. The corpse is Dumbledore’s shadow. That growth of hair and beard, unstoppable, undirected, unintended suggests a postmortem condition, making him a living cadaver. Dumbledore is both alive and deceased at once, a creature who lives in death and dies in life. Thus, his teachings seem immortal, beyond the shallow range of everyday practicalities. (You don’t ask Dumbledore to help you douse a taper in a sconce.) Yet as we gaze intently, we can make out that beneath that gray mane is a face still young. A face not unlike the faces looking up at him, a spirit uneroded. A face hinting that Dumbledore represents the grand cycle of the universe. Can the students see this? By convention, they see an icon of their own future, of the future, and fear as much as respect it. On the first Potter film alone, there were ten people working on hairstyling and hair effects for the old man.

Gray Style The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Nunnally Johnson, Twentieth Century Fox, 1956): I David Halberstam writes knowingly of attitude, culture, and sensibility in the 1950s. Especially pertinent was the initially vague but increasingly crisp idea of alienation, a word that floated in all kinds of circles and with all kinds of variably negative meaning. The Believing Man was a creature of the past. Halberstam finds a piercing memoir:

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If Dean had learned from Brando, now others would copy Dean. Elvis Presley, for one, wanted to be known as the James Dean of rock and roll. A line was beginning to run through the generations. Suddenly, alienation was a word that was falling lightly from his own lips and those of his friends, noted the writer Richard Schickel1 in an essay on the importance of Marlon Brando as a cultural figure: “The Lonely Crowd [by David Riesman] was anatomized in 1950, and the fear of drifting into its clutches was lively in us. White Collar [by C. Wright Mills] was on our brick and board bookshelves,2 and we saw how the eponymous object seemed to be choking the life out of earlier generations. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit stalked our nightmares and soon enough The Organization Man [by William H. Whyte] would join him there.” (486) Those brick and board bookshelves lingered, for my generation at least, until the late 1960s, and it is true that we had Mills, Riesman (with Glazer and Denney), and William H. Whyte upon them, as well as Herbert Marcuse, Eric Hoffer, Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, Paul Goodman, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, and a packet of fiction writers including Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (as he was known then) and Richard Fariña and Richard Brautigan and Hermann Hesse. Kenneth Keniston’s The Uncommitted was a crucial volume, addressing ways in which young people could fall off the social barge. In the late 1950s, that theme was sung most stridently and poetically by Paul Goodman in Growing Up Absurd. As to youth and its place in culture, especially the way youth looked, the young and notably pretty teenaged actor, very familiar to audiences today,3 was almost entirely absent from the screen, except in a very small number of particularly typified or cameo roles.4 It was the slightly older young man who took the light: Halberstam quotes Pauline Kael: “There is a new image in American films, the young boy as beautiful, disturbed animal, so full of love he’s defenseless. Maybe the father doesn’t love him, but the camera does” (qtd. in Halberstam 483). This was Dean filming Rebel (1955), twenty-three years old. This was Clift filming A Place in the Sun (1950), thirty. The 1950s was the age of the skyrocketing of the middle class, of postwar consumerism, of popularization in culture, of the ascendency of image over Eventually film critic for Time magazine. This is a rare and accurate detail. Those who collected numerous books but did not already own, or have funds for purchasing, ready-made bookshelves improvised by laying 1 × 6 or 1 × 8 pine planks, sometimes of extreme length, upon cinder blocks (which were cheap, or easy to scavenge). 3 I write at a point when such actors as Timothée Chalamet, Lucas Hedges, Thomasina MacKenzie, Jaden Smith, Kristen Stewart, and Brenton Thwaites are in the limelight. Somewhat earlier we had types like Mackenzie Culkin, Dakota Fanning, and Haley Joel Osment. 4 Johnny Crawford, Gerry Mathers, Patty McCormack, Christopher Olsen, and Tommy Rettig being some notable cases. 1 2

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product. Advertising exploded. “In new middle-class occupations men work for someone else on someone else’s property,” Mills writes (71), emphasizing how property was being replaced by occupation as a primary source of income and how, therefore, class, status, and occupation were linked. Born in many ways from the flooding return of veterans after the Second World War, the urban middle class swelled with eager, devoted, but also alienated men who strove to bring their families up the ladder. No more frenetic display of male passive-aggressive business practice, conformity, confusion, and depression coupled with the quest for gold could be seen anywhere in America than in midtown New York, to which mecca men by the hundreds of thousands migrated every morning from Connecticut and Long Island and New Jersey, only to slave in fluorescent-lit caverns. They would be vitiated training home by night to their wives,5 who waited for them bored in purring cars at the station parking lot. This male crowd, augmented by an everyday increasing, though still unequal, contingent of females, is visible today still. Instead of being gowned in the gray flannel suit typical of the 1950s, snagged from Brooks Bros. or Howard’s,6 they are dressed from Barney’s or Saks or Paul Stuart and their leather cases are Hugo Boss. Pose yourself at Grand Central Station between 8:30 and 8:50 on a weekday morning, or between 5:00 and 6:00 in the afternoon, and they will flood past you in a tidal wave: each fleeing or heading for a particular train, yesterday and tomorrow, the train of habit and pattern. Trapped in habit and pattern and masquerade. Trapped (but sensing, instead of entrapment, the regulated speed of their own movement through time and space). Also trapped in anxiety. Riesman notes a structured dissipation of delight in work: “The sphere of pleasures has itself become a sphere of cares. Many of the hardships of the older frontiers of production and land use have survived in altered, psychological form on the newer one of consumption” (141). It is hardly a wonder that the man in the gray flannel suit, pressing against the crowd to climb on a narrow ladder—some “succeed,” but most can’t—is worried and self-doubting, desperate to win the approval

Whose state was not addressed in America until 1963, with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. 6 Or Ransohoff’s. A ticklish Hollywood conceit in the mid-1950s was the man’s or woman’s gray suit, the very normativeness referenced (and parodied) in the train commuter sequences of Gray Flannel Suit as well as those of The Apartment (1960), in which we see literally dozens and dozens of male commuters dressed almost identically (this is reprised for period effect in Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road [2008]). A cheeky take is offered in the Ransohoff’s sequences of Vertigo (1958) where a seemingly inexhaustible supply of gray suits, linen or silk and of many compatible designs, with the slightest variations in cut, beckons to the female appetite. In a brief earlier moment at Ernie’s, we saw a room filled with happy (and wealthy) diners, where almost every single woman in the picture is wearing gray this way. Edith Head’s gray suit designed for Kim Novak is one of the indelible fashion icons of Hollywood history. 5

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of important others, forced to negotiate his personal values against the demands of big business, which has got him. Sloan Wilson’s 1955 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit did not exaggerate the look of New York City’s lonely crowd: Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined.7 … As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn’t matter. (7) Applying for a public relations position at United Broadcasting, Tom Rath finds another member of his species: Mr. Everett’s office was a cubicle with walls of opaque glass brick, only about three times as big as a priest’s confessional. Everett himself was a man about Tom’s age and was also dressed in a gray flannel suit. The uniform of the day, Tom thought. Somebody must have put out an order. (8) Yet what so many critical observers of social life in the 1950s found worthy of remark was that nobody had put out an order at all, while the worker bees in the advertising firms, the broadcasting networks, and the financial houses—the white collars—kept acting as though someone had. Flannel was comfortable, but the idea of the “gray flannel suit” was nothing short of obsessive.8 As depicted in Nunnally Johnson’s 1956 film of the book, commuters gathering in clusters to play cards, to discuss the day’s Times, or to jabber on the morning train were all—or mostly all—dressed in it; fashion gone epidemic; the scene looked vaguely military. In men’s sartorial style of the day, gray was a compromise. A navy blue suit suggested propriety, stiff regularity, formality; the board room. A brown suit suggested a rich man yielding to comfort, feeling leisurely (say, at the club). But the slaving minions could not seem superior and could not compete with the rich: gray worked handsomely to make them look clean, efficient,

Men’s leather shoes were shined to facilitate impression management. So-called shoe-shine boys, usually adult African American men, could be found in railway station battalions, in hotels, in the lobbies of most Manhattan office towers, more plentifully than they are now. A shine cost about a dollar and many commuters had their favorite spot and shoe shiner, much as with a barber (but shoe-shining happened in barber shops, too). 8 Gray flannel became a rage in North America in 1924, after the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) wore trousers of that material on a visit. The New York Times Style Magazine suggests that the trend was kept alive through the 1940s thanks to the influence of Cary Grant and Fred Astaire. 7

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neutral (neutral so that in any negotiation they could triumph and not give away the side). The more power one had, the darker, the more charcoal, could be the gray of one’s suit. Tom Rath, hero of the film, wears a slightly pale mid-tone gray. He is a middle-class man but also a man in the middle (in the middle, too, between his wife and an Italian woman he met during the war), a man whose opinion sways to neither one side nor another but finds passage in a moderate, compromising path. And with mid-tone gray, a necktie of any color will look spanking, constitute superlative fledging. Gray gives colors contrast, sets them out, harmonizes, brings enemies to the table. Gray is the moderator. And in Flannel Suit, Rath is exemplified by a moderation of tone (a Gregory Peck trademark), an amicably soft gentility and forthright simplicity of attitude. But that gray suit tones down personality, makes one part of a desperate if quiet army aligned to please the general eye. A model on display, the man in the gray suit, modest and polite, is also under strain. “They cannot help but show their children, by their own anxiety, how little they depend on themselves and how much on others. Whatever they may seem to be teaching the child in terms of content, they are passing on to him their own contagious, highly diffuse anxiety” (Riesman 47–8). Anxious, if gracefully submissive. Is the gray suit the ultimate sign of surrender to the organization? Gray to blend in with others in gray. Gray to disappear on the gray pavement, striding to the office. Gray to blend in with the office building itself, shining neutral against the sky. “How much a man thinks himself a conformist tells a lot about how much spiritual fealty he feels for The Organization,” William H. Whyte writes: There is a discernible difference between older and younger men. The younger men are sanguine. They are well aware that organization work demands a measure of conformity—as a matter of fact, half their energies are devoted to finding out the right pattern to conform to. But the younger executive likes to explain that conforming is a kind of phase, a purgatory that he must suffer before he emerges into the area where he can do as he damn well pleases. (155) While Tom Rath backs away from taking on a project that would increase the demand on him, so that he can spend time with his family, he’s less idiosyncratic than this film (with its focus on star personality) would suggest, since, as Whyte observes of a whole stratum of men, “they want to work hard, but not too hard; the good, equable life is paramount and they see no conflict between enjoying it and getting ahead” (131): in short, there is a preexisting tribe of young executives who think just as Tom does, and in saying no to his boss he is hardly standing out from the lonely crowd.

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Paul Goodman came very early to recognize “the rat race of the organized system” (10), an epithet later used by many. Those who are not absorbed by that system, he proclaimed, were distinct individuals, whole individuals, who “have no style at all” (61), proudly so, whereas the man in the gray flannel suit needed not fear any diminishment of style, for he already has all the servile style of the willing multitudes. They are gray in their flannel, but systematically gray. A different, nobler gray is dreamt and cried by the poet in Homespun of Oatmeal Gray (1970)— Brothers, I am sorry As I get older and wiser A deepening confusion Is my only proposition —the wan gray of sunrise.

Inert Gray Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, Pandora Cinema, 2001) Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) has travelled some distance from Elwood P. Dowd. Dowd (James Stewart) is accompanied wherever he goes by a gigantic invisible rabbit, a pooka, named Harvey, to whom he speaks on amicable terms but whose “presence” gives almost everyone with whom the man comes in contact the distinct impression he is out of his mind. Donnie’s rabbit is not invisible, to us, that is. The boy is the only one nearby who can see the thing that we see, and because we see it, its garishness, its unimagined amicability, we must not at any moment in this delirious and very eccentric film come to the conclusion that Donnie’s mentality is afflicted. He is, and can only be, the rejected, alienated, lost American youth of his time. And because the gigantic rabbit-vacuum has found him, smothered him with proximity, he is a child enisled in loneliness. If one could locate Donnie, one would wish to embrace him with friendliness, but there bicycling the Pacific-coast hills of the northwest he is remote, stolen away, locked into himself. The rabbit is a confusing being, both hideous and comforting, both creepy and mundane. He is shiny slate gray. Slate gray, bleachwood gray, sky gray. But what are the journeys we take with Donnie in seeing the rabbit, in tasting that gray optically! Here, it is too easy to think, is an oversized, baggy gray bunny suit that could not be anything but a covering over some slighter human being who decided to do dress-up (mimicking, perhaps, one of the large number of unheralded stunt performers who live their work

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lives inside an attractive costume and never emerge, as with the Alien, as with Godzilla, as with R2-D2, as with the Creature from the Black Lagoon and onward). But now there is a truly disturbing silver-gray face mask, with huge erect ears, exceedingly bulging eyes, and a mouthful of grimacing bold teeth. This rabbit does not speak with a voice, but Donnie feels clearly that he is being communicated with. The bunny joins him in surprising moments, unanticipated, unrationalized. It is difficult not to wonder whether the bunny is intended to be taken as a manifestation of Donnie’s troubled spirit, his disjointed consciousness. A monster from the id. It is certainly not, diegetically speaking, a person in masquerade. Has it immigrated from some dangerous gray otherwhere? The flat gray of the bunny masks indication, because it resembles so closely a “flat gray” quality of affect that we discern in this boy. His anger is held in and is monstrous in itself (justifiably, given the way he is casually and amicably abused at home and in school). His love is confused and as yet unblooming. His analysis is too penetrating, informed by far too much observation to be congruent with his family’s tepid middle-class values. He may be a philosopher at heart, possibly even a poet—the poetic quality of the film’s images and progression all imply this; he surely won’t be successful in bourgeois enterprise (and so, of course, he must die). Is the gray bunny, visiting again and again, the Angel of Death come to meet his next victim—Philip Larkin’s “stranger who will never show his face/ But asks admittance” (5)? Is the presence of the bunny a hint of the End?, because the creature is jarring and frightening albeit politely unaggressive. Gray affect, gray mortality, gray withdrawal, gray youth waiting to be cut off. Gray—instead of vibrantly colorful—youth. A sad boy, swimming in gray funk, wrapped into himself, dwelling peaceably in his own gray matter. Unable to find the happy vortex. If Donnie is not already on mood-controlling drugs, we feel he perhaps may be soon, and perhaps the rabbit symbolizes the (psychological) cure he is self-administering by calling it up. For it does seem that Donnie has somehow summoned this creature. In its every manifestation, it approaches and regards him as though responding to a call. The gray servant bunny, the amanuensis, the valet. Silent and calm, calm and silent. The assistant with the hidden dagger. Very large ears because, this bunny being a symbolic double of Donnie, we must see with our eyes that he hears. We must engage ourselves newly with the vocalities of the film, start hearing the world as this kid does, every nuance, every syllable, all the syntax, all the empty spaces. This is the way a poet would hear the world, every sound a syllable, every tone part of an assemblage. Does not the bunny overtake Donnie, indeed? He has such a prominent, jarring appearance (the facial mask seems altered from scene to scene) that the teenager seems to melt at his side, and this,

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of course, is a way to show a boy’s sense of being too small to be visible in his world; the gray rabbit makes him less visible still. And the rodent silence is indicative: like the rabbit Donnie is unable to express himself, articulate as he is. With a poet’s heart, he has not yet found the magical language for making his teachers, parents, and friends understand how he experiences life. Since for the film to work narratively Donnie must speak, the method for showing us his impotence to speak is a partner rabbit who is preternaturally silent. The rabbit’s enormous teeth suggest an orality that could be expressly effective—a Bugs Bunny orality—yet it is also true that the rabbit’s great mouth comes to appear stitched or glued shut. All of the expressive apparatus of the gray creature is inert. A giant Gray to undo our conceptions: that rabbits are cute; that they are exceptionally fecund, nervous yet tender. This rabbit does not seem tender (the too briefly visible teeth) and is as calm as a rock, and, like Donnie, impotent. It will not bring forth babies, an early clue to Donnie, too precious, too sacred for common reproduction. Something about this kid is connected to the spheres, pushed by forces we will never understand. He dies when an engine drops off a jet flying far overhead, plunges through the ceiling of his bedroom, and lands on top of him. A silver gray engine, the screaming rabbit out of hiding.

Gray Proportion 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, MGM, 1968): I Indecisive wisps of gray cloud in a papery sky. Clumps, clusters, walls, and overhangs of gray igneous rock, populated by apes. And the relic or interference, the frozen formula that is capturing their attention: a monolithic slab, some twelve or more feet in height and six feet in width, possibly a foot thick, made of … We will never know what. It is the Apotheosis of the Unknown. Graphite gray, but it is not graphite. Iron gray, but it is not iron. In the blackness of space, where there is nothing, it will seem like black nothing. On earth, on the moon in arc light, it seems metallic and gray. No one who sees 2001 fails to detect the monolith as its center, thematically, visually, dramatically. It can emit a deafening high-pitched whine without rhythm or interruption. It can rest in turgid silence, as though it has been in place for a thousand thousand years. We may think it an alien presence, residue of a long-forgotten voyage. We may think it is communicating to the apes, just as, millennia later, when it is found again

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on the moon, we may expect that it is communicating with human beings. To say this object is perfect in its form and its elemental simplicity is a great understatement: it is the Golden Mean made real, a quintessential rectangle, the basic building block of our architecture and the basic compositional element of our geometry and mathematics. It is intelligence as we know it, compacted, rendered, made explicit and without development or ornament. Gray perfection. Gray: not blinding white, explosion of the sun. Gray: not devouring black, space-time anomaly. Gray for pensivity, moderation, patience, estimation, reflection, proportion. Proportionate gray. The lines of its exterior, so sharply etched, so polished (by whose intent, and what kind of intent?) define a limit, define the idea of limit, as though every and any instance or materialization goes and can go only so far before ceasing. Statement and silence; silence and then statement. “There is only so much I can say …” And the tongue relaxes where the boundary presents itself. The surface and then the pit. This special, elegantly rectangular object breaks off into the universe; it is subtended by the universe. The universe is what this Thing is not, what lies around. And as to what it is, its essence, its name: we may say only, “It is not what is outside it.” (It is insubstantial.) Because its proportion is so calculated, the slab is everything it can be and should be, it is gray fulsomeness, polished, eternal, and momentary. A marker of even the idea of marking. All this until it reaches the edge of appearance, and then it can be only a “thing” creatures gaze at. As to those gazers, both ape and human, they lack a theory, an explanation, a clue in the labyrinth. They take readings (humans use instruments; the braver apes creep up and touch with the hand), but the readings are entirely, perfectly inconclusive. Gray as in sedate. With too much facility and familiarity we proclaim gray intermediate between black and white, a noncolor, an absence, a formal property. Form as pure logic, color as emotional and outside purpose. Gray of mathematics, computational gray, synoptic gray. Gray formula, gray predictability, gray eventfulness. Gray abstraction, the gray fundament, gray provocation—touch me, color me. Yet when we think of gray as noncolor, are we not mistaken; have we not fallen prey to an unsupported proposition or to a sudden attack of feeling? Conventional positing of gray as an intermediate stage in a tonal array is a structural conceit. One can derive gray from black and white, and one can modulate that derivation (lighter and darker shades of gray). This is construction but not experience. When gray is examined, not theorized, when the eye opens to light reflected from gray objects, there is no extending tonal array that by surrounding defines, that allows for labeling a midpoint topical “gray.” Something distinct presents to the vision, a fact itself. Through tonal construction, one would look at a gray thing and think of two contradictory absences: total black, total white, but to see gray in itself is to experience a direct radiation, a manifest presence. In a way, the slab was born from Kubrick’s liaison with a technician:

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The director wanted an alien object made of an absolutely clear material, a transparent tetrahedron that would materialize in Africa … “I’d like you to make a large piece of Perspex [Plexiglas] for me, please,” [Production Designer Anthony] Masters said. “Oh yes, sure,” said the gentleman. “How big would you like it?” “I’d like a sort of pyramid made in Perspex,” said Masters. “Oh yeah, fine,” said the gent. “I want it to be about twelve feet high … What’s the biggest piece you can make?” … “For various reasons, we can make it best in the shape of a pack of cigarettes, like a big slab.” … “Well, okay,” said the director, rapidly reevaluating his position. “Let’s make it that shape.” But the finished, cooled, severely polished piece of Perspex, two feet thick, looked like glass, greenish, repulsive as far as Kubrick was concerned. “So, let’s just make a black one, because then we won’t know what it is.” “Okay, make a black one,” said Kubrick. (Benson 112–14) The slab is black only when lit to appear that way, as are all things in film. Harshly lit, accompanying the apes or resting on the moon, it yields an anthracite gray sheen, dark, darkest objectivity possible before all the light has gone. Unmarked, a perfect wash, a spread of gray obscurity that proceeds fluidly and at a uniform rate until abruptly, instantaneously, it stops. Gray of infinitude, measureless, a prod and then a pond, a spark and then a limit to the imagination (ergo the light-show voyage to infinity at the film’s conclusion). Gray of potentiality, gray reporting all eventuality, gray whispering an encyclopedia. Gray of stone, which is to say, planetary gray, deep and foundational, dredged up from the universal pits, yet also, as here, polished until it not only shines its nothingness but radiates it, not only attracts attention but disperses concentration. The gray that is consciousness.

The Gray Vigil A Ghost Story (David Lowery, Sailor Bear/Zero Trans Fat Productions, 2017) An affable young man (Casey Affleck) is wedded to an affable young woman (Rooney Mara), and they live in a pleasant house in the pretty countryside.

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Typical, middle-class, modern, American, and hip. No frills, no unnecessary decorations, no apparent neuroses, no battles, no anxieties. Calm, nicely contained within themselves, peaceable, loving. An ideal situation? The best of friends. One day, he is killed in a car accident on the road just near the house. (A few minutes into the film.) She mourns inconsolably. She is emptied with grief. She is a walking wraith. One night we see that a ghost has entered the house—a long, supple pale sheet with two eyeholes. Looking at the face—the two black eyeholes— we know with a certainty that it is him. Not a logical “Who else could it be?” followed by a hunt through the bare forest, but a quick, instantaneous, certain knowledge, in the way that staring at a glass of milk one thinks, “A glass of milk.” He is present, he is surveilling. He can see what we can see. And he is as invisible to her, and to other characters, as we are. She cannot see this ghost in exactly the way that she cannot see us watching her not seeing this ghost. He circumambulates, checks things out, makes sure the house is in order. He watches her sleeping. There is nothing he can do to cross The Interface, to send off a clue, and so she cannot have awareness of him. He is always standing in a corner of the room she is occupying, peaceable, surveilling. He is in a shadowy corner of the room, and instead of being snowy and crisp his “garment,” flowing like so much water over stones, is soft and gray. Very pale gray, gray that is just out of the light. He does not move, but takes up a position in the room and becomes a kind of statue. Being with her. Being near. Watching to keep her safe. Vigilant. The black eyeholes. Stilled, imploring, fully perceptive somehow. And … times goes by. She spends some time with friends as he watches, a patient gray thing. She has people over for dinner, he watches, a banished gray. Time goes by, he stands and watches, a persistence of gray. Time goes by. The house is emptied as she moves on, he stands and watches gray morose. Time goes by. The house decays, falls apart, he watches without a gray tear. We move through ages, backward in Time, to the middle of the nineteenth century when some white settlers are slain by natives at this very spot, and he watches like a gray historian. The omniscient black eyeholes. Back in the present, he is sure he sees something through one of the windows, a flicker in a neighboring house. He stands to look, keeping a gray watch. One day it becomes apparent another ghost is over there, standing and watching him. Watching the watcher. We have the odd sense of a ghostly romance. But without warning the other disappears and he is left alone again. Gray and alone in the gray emptiness of gray space. An industrial facility is constructed, with

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him watching, gray overseer, and one day his widow returns to the empty house that had been their home. Does she still hunt for his presence? Does she still believe? And is there something a little odd about a just off-white paint chip falling from a just off-white lintel? Might it be that he has left a pale, pale, pale gray clue for her? He is there, watching carefully now. Gray sentry. Does he hope she will see? Do we hope that she will be redeemed by seeing what it is that we think we have seen? This extraordinarily quiet little film—chamber music, entirely—is an essay on ambiguity, on memory, on feeling, on the ravages of time. It reflects a deep concern with the act of looking, the viewer’s act, the constant tranquil receptive watch-keeping, a tabulation, a recording, a serious way of being in the world. Being in the world regardless of one’s status, high or low, wise or ignorant, living or dead. The world as haven. The film’s presumption, one the viewer buys instantaneously without the least hesitation or guarantee, is that the ghost is present in the way that all present things onscreen are present, present as the bed is, as the walls are, as the table and chairs, and also just in the way that the wife is present, and that she, like all other materializations, the bed, the walls, the table and chairs, cannot find him: no physical evidence is offered her to attest to his presence. Given that in every shot, like a lodestone, his presence is the salient fact for us (he seems never to not be on the screen), we gain exceptional access to her condition of lacking proof; and through her to our own condition, here in the theater, of either believing or not believing in what one cannot—or can only superficially— see. It is only through the miracle of film that sight has been offered to us now, and perhaps also that sight has been offered to him. Nor, for a single breath, do we hesitate to believe that he, the husband, is the ghost; that the ghost is him, although no evidence is given for that either. A performance (a mime performance) of extraordinary quality from Casey Affleck. The vigil was kept at Christ’s tomb, the one locked over with gray rock, through the night and into the dawn, the gray dawn, that span of the sun’s ascent in which colors seem not yet discernable on earth. Vigil, vigilance, veil, surveil. To watch over. But here, instead of a living person keeping watch over the tomb of a dead one, we have the reverse. A step further: so carefully is the ghost costume worked to not merely resemble but even duplicate the cheap, silly “ghost” costumes people wear on Halloween—albeit that here we can discern a much more exotic fabric— that the ante is raised on our commitment of belief. If the ghost is to appear to us, he must look as we would expect a ghost to look, as we have learned, largely from films, to expect ghosts to look. (Notwithstanding that cinema is full of ghosts. Not characters deemed by the narrative to be ghostly, Blithe Spirit [1945], Always [1989], Ghost [1990], but characters played by actors who are there and not there at once, just in the way that these characters are there and not there.)

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We always see what we know how to see. In A Ghost Story’s first scenes, Affleck looks exactly as we would expect a happily married young man to look; Mara looks exactly like his happy partner. What we notice resembles what we expect to notice. “Seek and ye shall find” also means, “If you find you will remember that you sought, and that you sought this.” What we do not seek we will not find, though it serve us and protect us, though it keep watch over our time.

Screen Gray Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, Lava Bear Films/ FilmNation, 2016) Logical in some way that if aliens ever arrived, if a ship landed silently in a field, this would be in Canada. Canada where there is always room, Canada the vast, Canada the uncorrupted.9 And a very good hiding place, in the shadow of the United States of America, the very long shadow, where it’s eminently possible to be invisible. Invisible like Glenn Gould, Christopher Plummer, Marie Dressler, Mary Pickford, Walter Pidgeon, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Greenwood, Michael J. Fox, Ryan Reynolds, Elliot Page, Jim Carrey, and a legion more who were not quite seen until they were “discovered” in America. Here now is Québecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, filming an alien visitation story in and around Montréal. Arrival (2016). As in: they have made an arrival. They have come. They are here. They are here even now. Bravery needed. Bravery and intelligence. The very brave military/ scientific/linguistic/feminist hero(ine) Louise Banks (Amy Adams) stepping into their craft, allowing herself to be elevated into the control space with a partner, Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), elevated and mystified. (Control spaces always up, in the skull of things, where the gray cells are.) Bravery, intelligence: female intelligence, which, on earth at least, means special, even elevated intelligence. Elevated intelligence here elevated. She will find gray in the control chamber. Her gray cells will find gray. For this voyage into the workings of an alien craft, we have certainly been prepared. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Invaders from Mars (1953). This Island Earth (1955). Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). Independence Day (1996). Prepared, too, for aliens who are gray: those gaunt, suddenly appearing, many times out of focus, long-headed big-eyed myrmidons from the other side of the universe who are uniformly gray top to bottom—they are called This film was made, and this discussion written, before the residential schools scandal of 2021, but even that foul blemish has been, as publicists like to say, made over. 9

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“grays”—each as though squeezed into a sock: we’ve seen them. But we have not been prepared for the very particular gray Louise will find. Find through face-à-face. But first, eleven other ships have landed, Moscow, Tokyo, and so on; the “capitals of Earth.” Attach the whole planet at once. The control center. A high and resonating chamber of the darkest gray, in which is to be found what looks very much like a movie screen, very tall, floor to ceiling, a very good screen for VistaVision in 70 mm projection, but that is long gone. On the pallid gray surface, from behind, the two aliens in this ship, each appearing vaguely to have seven hands, project inky glyphs that show up immense and dark against the pale field. Mostly circular, with prolix variations. If at first the projection is dark, squiddish, it dilutes, smears, spreads, transforms, and grays out as soon as it hits the screen. Can the brilliant linguist decipher these? Should they be taken as letters, as words, as poems, as ideograms? Can Louise “read” the haunting, repetitive circularities? Glyphs in confounding charcoal, an ineffable and unknown gray. And appearing only as answers to Louise’s questions. “Why are you here?” elicits something that, after considerable time slaving at translation, Louise and Donnelly take as “offer weapon.” Gray offer. Gray weapon. But soon she begins to note that only part of the screen is being used, one-twelfth in fact, and surmises that the other ships have other parts of a more complex, more sophisticated message. (Studio system logic: divide the labor.) Considerable international tension about the politics of sharing. Louise wracked with anxiety, the fever of urgency, and dense gray sadness, first because her only daughter died before the aliens came and secondly because something about the inner chamber of the ship, the two morose creatures, their ineffectively swinging arms, the vague gray codes they implant has been leading her to grayest regret. Regret already. Regret as a state of being. Depression, sadness, regret, and now doubt. Why is it all so sad? Louise has visions, some of them involving, unsurprisingly, a little girl. The puzzle pieces are assembled, gray, gray, gray, gray. It turns out that the complex message is not “Offer weapon.” And that the reason the aliens have come to earth involves survival, eradication, foresight: time travel. Louise is able to use the aliens’ help to see the birth of the daughter who will grow up and die. She will not, in the course of the film, escape the gray circle of time. They have come for beneficent reasons, to help, and gain help, with something in the gray tomorrow. “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” The appearance of the alien messages as screen images inside a screen image suggests the vital importance, here and beyond, of screens: screen as gray separation, screen as tablet, screen as lure, screen as defining space. Learning the language, Louise can project images that the aliens can see: conversation

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through a screen (confession). The aliens mean well, although the humans of earth do not. Tender Louise is an anomaly. Remarkable for the aliens that she is the one they meet, yet of course without her there is no film. The aliens are coming face to face with film, then. Arrival exists so that the aliens can meet Louise, their translator of gray. Something to do with the aliens’ future … Something of a future need to rely upon a future earth … Louise confronted with the boundless gray of futurity. We are shown how her deftness in translation depends on her sensitivity to ambiguity—gray areas—her quick grasp that every symbol can have numerous meanings and that this partial message does not necessarily mean what she originally thought. Poetic analysis. The aliens are poetic, using language so that the reader will seek past the lines, neither in one very definitive space, black on white, nor in another, white on black, but in a wholly separate gray zone, a no man’s land, where every nuance shades away toward the boundary of another, every essence is and also is not itself. Vague call-back to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled “Darmok,” where two beings must find a way to communicate across an abysm, and the solution is the poem. The alien warning will have its own circular resonance, not on the screen but in the history of screenings. It recalls Klaatu’s (Michael Rennie) address to the people of Earth in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Those who watch that alien’s speech, assembled on the Mall in Washington, are but the avatars of their children and their children’s children, caught in a circle of time, gray-handed: “Work together.” Well, that message has a history, too, perhaps becoming a future. It invokes what many different workmen tried to do building a high tower in Babel. A tower never finished. A tower that would have reached the heavens (or at least the planet from which our aliens took off). If only … If only it had not been designed to reach the heavens. Understanding is waiting.

The Gray Gulag One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Caspar Wrede, Group W/Leontes, 1970) In a cold gray place, surrounded by an imperceptible gray nowhere, beginning before the sun is up and ending after the sun comes down, an étude in gray, one single day as lived by the men of a single barracks in a Russian gulag in the Stalinist days. Here is our protagonist, Ivan Denisovich (Tom Courtenay), imprisoned for stealing a piece of bread, riding out a

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very long sentence. All the men are dressed in gray, there is gray in their complexions. Dour gray, gray of acquiescence. The daily routine, to the minute, minute by minute, the inspections, the secondary inspections, the marching, the filing in and filing out, the routines, the inspections, the travel to the work site, the brick carrying, the bricklaying, bricks coated with rime, the wind blowing chill, gray mortar slapped onto the stones, gray mortar and more gray mortar, mortar slopped into a barrow and wheeled up a graying board to the gray hand holding the gray trowel, the march back, night, the long line, body checks, dinner, bed. The gray of unending patience, of gentleness, of sacrifice. Ivan sits with his cronies at a frigid gray wooden table to eat his morning meal. It is a “soup” of sorts: unquestionably liquid, with the addition of the season, as Ivan’s voiceover tells us—this season it is boiled grass. He uses his battered spoon with skill, bends over, shovels the stuff into himself as much as he can, because this and only this is the nourishment for his miserable day out in the Siberian cold. The battered gray tin bowl, clasping it, hurrying into line for the soup, hurrying to the table, bending to make a little tent of privacy in which one’s food and one’s being converse. Was Courtenay cast because of his unfailing dignity, even in deprivation? Ivan seems to think it his duty to offer us information, and here and there he breaks into a cloud hovering over the action to illuminate some details that the complacent viewer might be prone to overlook. Here, for instance, he tells us how important it is to chew your food quite a lot before swallowing, in order to extract the maximum amount of energy. Extract and store because energy sources are in short supply for prisoners in this camp. There is little food. Ivan and his compatriots are gaunt in their gray rags, gray-eyed. This little dining moment is a sanctuary. Salvation in gray. He is looking at his soup in the gray metal bowl, moving his gray metal spoon in it. The soup itself is a creamy gray color, there are some pathetic fish bones, the concoction is entirely unremittingly unappealing if not patently revolting. And as he stirs and we watch his intentful face, there is suddenly a querulous look. Cutting back to the bowl we note that inside his portion of soup, now surfacing with the action of his gray spoon, is an eyeball. Not a small eyeball. Not even definitively an eyeball at all, until he looks twice. Yes, an eyeball. Gray: Detail, under the magnifying glass, of the body: this body … is treated like a wall … As Stendhal might say: the missing painting is what subsists in these “little memories,” these little islands, still quite close together that float upon blackness. Or, in reverse, these black scales, mounted, tossed, are like “eyes” floating upon a kind of soup. (Schefer 51)

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Might it be a fish eye, the head tossed into the soup pot, the substance cooked and overcooked on a low flame while the men responsible for preparing the meal go out and have a smoke in the early morning darkness? Or not an eye from a fish, a gray fish, but a disturbingly different kind of eye, something decorticated and fresh, almost fresh, fresh gray, lurking under the surface of the gray broth in the gray bowl. The gray soup will ensure that the prisoner’s inside is also gray. He will be a gray spirit in a gray fog, a fog that will yawn forward and backward in time until it takes up the knowable universe—unless some method of counting can be devised, some calendar against the tide. In this entire film there is no single moment revealing, or object displaying, saturated, bright color. The film is like the soup, watery, gray, diluted to the point of being insubstantial, with only the occasional floating eye. The very least amount of color, like the very least amount of flavor lingering in that soup. The soup with a hunk of bread. Part of the bread being stowed inside Ivan’s jacket, gray jacket, because he will need it during the bricklaying. Hauling up the hods of gray-brown mortar. Off to lay bricks, the long day, a cigarette carefully broken in half and half-saved, the darkness when the prisoners return. Always darkness, and when the sun comes up, gray. Darkness with a memory of only gray, as at film’s end—that is, after we have passed a full day with Ivan—the camera withdraws, outside the shack, the collection of shacks under the blaring lamps, the barbed wire, the snow, the snow, the vast snow and the tiny glowing camp, the tiny camp in the sea of darkness. From the screen we are offered these words, taken directly from Solzhenitsyn: Nothing had spoiled the day and it had been almost happy. There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like this in his sentence, from reveille to lights out. The three extra ones were because of the leap years.

Schematic Gray Red Desert [Il deserto rosso] (Michelangelo Antonioni, Film Duemila, 1964) Corrado (Richard Harris), in Ravenna as a technical expert to check on a factory there, briefly explores a location for an exclusive boutique soon to be opened by Giuliana (Monica Vitti), in Red Desert (1964). She has “not been well”—the cold, horrible, unilluminating epithet—and we have some sense that the boutique will be not only lucrative but also therapeutic. At

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the moment, she is trying to decide a color scheme. The walls have been whitewashed cleanly—any color at all will assert itself with bold frankness. What is it to be searching for a color scheme, a scheme or schema that is derived through color? Scheme: a plan. Scheme: a plot. Scheme: impossible thought. Schema: form. The space is rectangular. She is pacing, looking up at the daylight that is flooding down, seeking the elusive form. The place is now only a ground upon which a form can be mounted. This part of that wall she will paint ochre, that part of this wall something else. One color will rebound against another (conflict) or will harmonize (wedding). Placement, spatiality, and freedom will be born in Giuliana’s form. She wants to see color, at any rate. Want. She has been bereft of seeing color. But Corrado, never, perhaps, overly interested in her whilst being entirely polite—because he must have business dealings with her husband—wearies of the empty space and the empty talk, the talk born of the space, the space emptied by the talk, and wanders outside to the street for whatever it is that people wander outside to procure: fresh … air. The very narrow little street, a side street, the air doesn’t seem exactly fresh. From the doorway she watches him in the street, then makes approach. And this is what Corrado is seeing: A wooden cart, stationary as in a painting by Constable, fully loaded up. At one end, on his chair, the owner sits: a gray sweater and a gray coat with a gray cap and gray shadow on his cheek. At the other end, Giuliana sitting in a gray wooden chair, with a stylish long gray coat over a black sweater. A black scarf and black purse. Behind is the stucco wall, painted entirely gray. And the cart—it has two wheels—painted entirely gray as well. Soft inviting gray. Stage designer’s gray. The cobblestones beneath the wheels are gray. The cart is heavy with gray materials, balls of different sizes in containers, lumps of clay, everything totally and unrelentingly gray. Soft inviting gray. Stage designer’s gray. She has her hand raised toward the cart but is looking away, not happily. She has “been unwell.” That cold epithet. The wall has a pale gray strip at the bottom, matching the cart, and a darker strip at the top, matching Giuliana. Gray meditation. Also gray surrender. A cart wanting color, like Giuliana’s space (that is somewhere behind this wall)? The idea of seeking color, hungering for color, being bereft of color. Hunger: Giuliana recently had a car accident and is “not herself.” (a) What kind of car accident? Was she driving or hit by a driver? Is the phrase “car accident” a reality or a euphemism? (b) In regard to Giuliana, who exactly is meant by that word, “herself,” as in “not herself,” because we never see any other, any prior Giuliana, anyone who could be said to have been more … more what? Happy? More of whatever makes Giuliana

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Giuliana—if we could notice it. Men—her husband—say, in whispers, “She is not herself,” which could mean she is not what they would wish her to be. Antonioni frequently shows women stifled under men’s control. (c) Although she does seem generally withdrawn, this Giuliana of ours who is “not herself,” even sadly so, this may be her normality, yet we are given to think: possibly she’ll become buoyant. This flair for gray that is draped over her like a tarpaulin—it may float away. She and Corrado (Vitti and Harris) both have stunning red hair. Stunning red hair. Perhaps they will catch fire with each other. Perhaps out of this stasis something will happen, something good, at least; because to our Giuliana something already has happened, that cold epithet. A car accident, a self that is not herself. Corrado makes a confession. His life is restless. Restless: without sleep, exhausted, vitiated. How flat, stale, and unprofitable seem to him all the uses of this world. Restless: urgently desirous. Desirous for urgency; desirous with urgency. No matter. Nothing will happen on the gray street with the gray cart, nor will we return to this setting at any point in the film. Is the gray here Giuliana’s painful neutrality, and will she paint her walls? Or is gray an authentic state of her consciousness, the character and color that all the world will not cure? Is Giuliana gray like this, when she is “herself”? He is restless, wants to get moving. She stands. They are, together, spirits of running and standing water (Ravenna, the pools; the canal, the gliding ship). The gray cart has forever been here, its owner dozing. It will be here as long as there is time and, like the Red King, this one will not awaken. Here, weighted by gravity. Grayest gravity. Not the gay, multicolored materiel of the nineteenth century, fabric from the Indies, but the morbid cementinfused culture of modernity (Ravenna, the canal). In Giuliana, writes Seymour Chatman, “Antonioni and Monica Vitti have created a marvel of interpretation—perhaps the most accurate portrayal on film of what Karen Horney calls ‘the neurotic personality of our time.’ The film shows with almost clinical precision how to the deeply neurotic mind everything in life is leveled to the problem” (84). Leveled to gray. The various colors Giuliana is considering reach for her and withdraw arbitrarily, promise to elicit feeling but then self-repress, and her ballet in the space, while she tells Corrado her design plan, animates her color thoughts. Inside she has a vivid world. But the gray cart is Chatman’s neurotic reduction: all things one thing, tutte le cose una cosa. The gray of languishing pensivity, of fruitless consideration. But Antonioni does not include this gray scene in order to lecture us on emotional flatness, Giuliana’s or modernity’s; he is not working to provide the critic with hay. Or to offer Giuliana’s fraught consciousness as victim; or to pose an abstract (indeterminate) background behind his characters. That Giuliana is depressed and morose we know directly from Vitti’s brilliant, utterly clear performance, and know already. Using gray

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as descriptor for Giuliana’s state of mind would be uncharacteristically excessive for Antonioni. The gray cart is not her state of mind. Yet it is a lesson. Antonioni is showing composition in its simplest, most linear form. The division of screen space (the division of Giuliana’s consciousness), the balancing of weights (Giuliana’s incapacity to achieve emotional balance, or to balance Corrado against her husband, or to balance her son against her husband), the invocation of angle (because the cart is tilting leftward) as a preview of views to come, the complex arrangement of surfaces flat and broken, textured and smooth (Giuliana’s movement through a complex world, a zone where simple formulae are not enough). Soon he inspires reflection about color, the color we may imagine (with Giuliana) or the color we see (in the factory, in her home, in her son’s fantasy as she tells him a dream tale, in an abandoned red room or a friend’s apartment). Colored surfaces, thrown or juxtaposed, make serious—not background—claims upon vision here, thwart our bent for identifying abstraction. Here on this little street the filmmaker seems to call out: I give you form as play. Play, in formal gray. Gray is the color I use to make form, and I use form to give you color. Once we have learned this lesson, which is not an easy lesson to learn, once we have stopped seeing arbitrary constructions and begun to appreciate all the myriad colors of the film not as symbols for something else but as themselves, we can see riddles often elaborate and mysterious. And, having seen the riddles, prepared to accept color as the donor of mystery, we are ready, I think, to find and revel in color everywhere. And once we see color everywhere we are ready without neurosis to experience the color gray.

Of Yellow

In my yellow room, sunflowers with purple eyes stand out on a yellow background; they bathe their stems in a yellow pot on a yellow table. … And the yellow sun that passes through the yellow curtains of my room floods all this fluorescence with gold; and in the morning upon awakening from my bed, I imagine that all this smells very good. VINCENT VAN GOGH

Merde! Merde! Everything is yellow! I don’t know what painting is any longer! PAUL GAUGUIN

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Paved Yellow The Wizard of Oz: I (Victor Fleming, MGM, 1939) When, somewhere in Chicago and very late in the nineteenth century, Lyman Frank Baum composed his story about a little Kansas girl blown by tornado to the wonderful land of Oz, this was his description of the curious path she was to follow once she got there: “ ‘The road to the City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick,’ said the Witch; ‘so you cannot miss it’ ” (11). Later, when little Dorothy has met the Scarecrow, Baum has him very hopefully say, “We cannot be far from the road of yellow brick, now” (47), and later still, when she has picked up the man made of tin, venturing off the road to find the Lion, she feels urgent: “We must journey on until we find the road of yellow brick, again … and then we can keep on to the Emerald City” (52). The road … of yellow … brick. As adults and children around the world will smilingly remember, in the 1939 MGM film—now a pop cultural icon—the phrase “road of yellow brick” does not appear at all, and from its very first mention in the village of the Munchkins this special route is referred to as the Yellow Brick Road: Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Follow the Yellow Brick Road,     Follow the rainbow over the stream     Follow the fellow who follows a dream     Follow follow follow follow     Follow the Yellow Brick Road We’re off to see the Wizard, … etc. Just as Baum’s “City of Emeralds” is casually transmuted by the filmmakers to “the Emerald City,” so his “road of yellow brick” also morphs, into what in the song at least is a chain of far more convenient, bouncy beats, perfect for metrical lyricizing. “Following the Yellow Brick Road” has become an adage. As though every one of us is a Dorothy, a Scarecrow, a Tin Man, or a Cowardly Lion. (None of us is the Wizard, apparently; he does not follow the Yellow Brick Road, he is what comes from following.) It is not only in the magical land of Oz that a yellow brick road can be followed; it originates in something more humdrum. Relatives of Baum insisted for some time that he had been inspired by a yellow stone road in Holland, Michigan, where he vacationed frequently. And in many other locales, inside and outside America, there are roads built of yellow stone. Formally, a “yellow brick” is one made from buff glacial shale, and with a low or nonexistent iron content (iron-based bricks are red). The pallid

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yellow is soft and unemphatic, not very dissimilar in color from that of building stones made from limestone. Fans of the film need no reminding that Dorothy’s road is sharply and intensively yellow, Cadmium yellow, and shining as though struck of gold. It gives considerable opportunity to Jack Martin Smith for making matte paintings, to George Gibson and Leo Atkinson for painting backings, and to Harold Rosson for composing shots in which the “river” of yellow trickles away into optical depth. What we see in MGM’s film (directed by Victor Fleming) is a flamboyant, definitive, blazingly apparent design, one that occasioned particular difficulties: Finding a paint that would not make the Yellow Brick Road look green was Randall Duell’s responsibility, and it took him nearly a week. “Color film wasn’t perfected then,” says Duell. “We had to do a lot of testing and experimenting with the film to get the colors to reproduce properly. We’d start filming a set a week or two before it was going to be used. We had to color-test each set not only for the paints on the set but for the background. Part of the Yellow Brick Road was a painted backing, a backdrop. If that backdrop wasn’t painted and lit properly, it would look like a painted backdrop. (qtd. in Harmetz 221; emphasis mine) The recipe for scenic paint, variable and demanding, affected the set construction both in the ground portion and in the backing hanging from the battens, light reflectivity being only one of many problems to be overcome. The color (as registered in three-strip Technicolor printing) of the road-yellow and the backing-yellow had to match properly, though the prepared canvas material on which the backing was painted was different from the soundstage floor. “Working with color for the first time,” write Richard Isackes and Karen Maness, “required extended conversations with the art department. For example, it took over a week to decide on the exact shade of yellow for the yellow brick road” (116; emphasis mine). Over a week … nearly a week … time becomes plastic in Munchkinland and on MGM’s Stage 27, too, but whether it was nearly a week or more than a week it was apparently more like a week than a day, more like a week than a month, whatever a day and a month are—both in Munchkinland and at MGM once one is in the throes of doing a set like that. Some potential troubles lay in color preservation—how long would a saturated effect be available under the sky-pans—“neutral or cold fixtures embedded in dish-shaped reflectors that spread the light evenly across a [backdrop] surface” (Pomerance, Eyes 211)—that were used for illumination? (Beverly Heisner reveals that MGM’s general policy was to make very bright films lit for high-key, so that even in theaters with poor projection facilities they would show well onscreen [211]). In addition, George Gibson warned his supervisor Cedric Gibbons that “the paints

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they had been using until then were far from suitable for backdrop work” (211). How durable would the paint be during transportation, as, typically, backings were not painted in place but were made in a separate facility and transported to the soundstage by grips who hoisted them.1 What might one think of that Road that happens to be Yellow? Of the particular yellow that has become embedded, locked, tamed in a road? The Yellow Brick Road begins, as in regalement we discover, at a particular point (in the extreme northwestern corner of Stage 27 [then and now the largest sound stage in Hollywood]). It is not a line or splotch of territory but an actual point, that shows as the first, the original mark upon which little Dorothy will place her toe (ensheathed already in delightfully contrasty ruby red) to begin the journey. Now she must wind around and around, because the origin of the Road is nothing but a vortex, spinning ever outward until the arc of it is so shallow that we can see it only as a straight line. As she starts out in her own yellow whirlpool, with each musical beat bringing her forward she must suddenly head backward, round and round this way toward the future and the past. The Yellow Brick Road thus starts out as time fused, leading one way while appearing to move the other: appearing to regress while progressing. Yellow puzzle. And then the slow drift into that ultimate straightness, which is in the end only an appearance of straightness. Summarily, the City of Emeralds would appear to be in one direction and also in another, and, too (as we know, because that city is in our heart) already here while at the same time not being here. Dorothy will do a yellow orbit. She will do space travel. The road also conveys a kind of delirious hopelessness, a feeling that swells and ebbs at once. “It is no more ridiculous that a person should receive or convey an emotion by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colours, than that they should receive or convey such emotion by an arrangement of musical notes,” wrote Ezra Pound (461). Emotion by means of an arrangement of shapes, or planes, or colours. On a single plane here is an arrangement of shapes and colors that is evocative before it is meaningful. To wend the way forward on this road is to lean into an unknown, an unknowable, which is a powerful gravitational force. Two related cultural experiences come to mind as associations: the childhood game of spinning around until one loses one’s stability and balance, and the revolving door, which originated in the 1880s in Germany and America and gives one person the opportunity to move into a building while watching another person moving out in the same place at the same time: in and out conjoined just as with that child’s spinning game “here” and “there” are magically but confoundingly the same place.

For more on George Gibson, who painted the backing, and his techniques, see my Eyes 193– 200; 206–218. 1

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Writing of the ilinx, Roger Caillois reminds us of what, as children, we all thrilled to learn, games based on the pursuit of vertigo and which consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness. … The child engages in this activity playfully and finds pleasure thereby. (23; emphasis mine) The child … finds pleasure: Dorothy, it is so easy to forget once one has seen the film repeatedly all through one’s childhood and even later on, once one has rehearsed the Judy Garland contribution, is but a child. Her dance around the spiral is a pleasurable loss of stability, a simultaneous yellow here and there, a procedure and an undoing. Voluptuous panic: the panic is delirium, delight, excitement, loss of bearings, a relinquishing of the known world (just as Dorothy was forced to do during the tornado), a giving oneself over to the structure of a place, the forms and colors that in themselves build and bind a feeling of the momentarily real. As to her starting out in a revolution, a kind of “revolving door,” it is not that Munchkinland has provided an airtight enclosure around the source of the Yellow Brick Road—notwithstanding that the specialness of the spot is intensely felt—and that Dorothy is therefore inside a device; but that in order to undertake the essential voyage she must move by way of the circular path both hither and thither at once. James Buzard notes that this bidirectional facilitator was regularly evoked through images of rotation—Yeats’s “gyres,” Wyndham Lewis’s “Vorticism,” the chocolate grinder and orbiting bachelors of Duchamp’s La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, and so forth; and going to and fro is the simple business of its use; … it safeguards [the] boundary [between in and out; read “this way” and “that way”], … giving movement across it a fluidity no other door can. … The moment of exit now comes as a release. (567, 571) A yellow release. A yellow freedom, the Munchkins dropping away behind, the vast horizon looming ahead with all the promise that tomorrow brings to the young, who imagine the future before living it and conceive, always, that it will be a better place. Might the Yellow Brick Road have a strange and powerful energy? It is never referred to as the route to the Emerald City, that is, the best way to get there assuming there are other ways. It is not the ideal highway on the map. It is the way. It partakes of the nature of a conviction, a set of beliefs, but also of an infallible vehicle in itself, as though to place one’s feet

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on the Road and take steps there is to be moved progressively toward the City. Yellow momentum. Yellow power. Power yet also, as everyone knows, dance. This particular yellow path tickles the feet. It energizes such prolific song. “Because because because because because …”

Celestial Yellow Little Buddha (Bernardo Bertolucci, Recorded Picture Company, 1993) While publicity stories about Keanu Reeves have never shirked the opportunity to write about his mixed-race background—born in Beirut to a British-born mother and a Hawaiian father with Chinese, Portuguese, British, and native Hawaiian ancestry—his typical screen work has posed (camouflaged) him as a good-looking, muscularly heroic (if far from genius) white boy, latterly white man. A significant amount of criticism has been levelled at his acting, owing not a little to his early (wholly believable) career hijinks as Ted Logan in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and what little he was asked to do (gracefully) in the Wachowskis’ Matrix films (1999 onward), yet his performances in Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge (1986), Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), and Perry Lyman’s Thumbsucker (2005) should cause snipers to look twice. For Reeves onscreen, exoticism has tended to be associated with eerie sci-fi unrealities (Johnny Mnemonic [1995]; The Day the Earth Stood Still [2008]), myth (Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1992]; Constantine [2005]), and fearsome challenge (Speed [1994]; 47 Ronin [2013]): the eerie and the strange, the abnormal and the excessive, but not explicit ethnicity of the flesh, nothing that would hail, “Look at my color!” Therefore, his casting as Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993), a splendid invention, may come as something of a revelation, certainly a relief. Keanu Reeves as Buddha, what an alarming, what a marvelous idea! As the meditating Buddha, under the great tree, greatest tree in the world, abandoning all desire. Abandoning desire, Keanu Reeves, object of so much desire. Michael DeAngelis quotes Newsweek’s David Ansen’s surprised pleasure in noting that Reeves in Little Buddha differed markedly from his performance in Bill & Ted, inspiring a “breathy earnestness” (191); and wisely goes further to suggest that much discourse about Reeves in this film “transforms the actor’s blank-slate persona into an emblem of spiritual harmony, revelation, and enlightenment” (196). Bertolucci is astute in his conviction that Siddhartha must seem Asian, not North American; tranquil and spiritual, not jivey and hip. Prepared for his

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work on the film by reading about Buddhism and working to abandon both ego and self (an actor’s exercise if ever there was), Reeves here makes up with an application of bronze-yellow to his skin (in the way, curiously, that actors were made up during the days of early three-strip Technicolor filming, because they were being shot under blue-filtered, and very intensive, light) and is lit, sometimes filter-lit (by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro), to emphasize the burnished yellow-bronze color and supply a glow radiating around it. As Siddhartha sits in sacred meditation, he becomes, if not a model of harmony, a golden sun. All truth comes into him, and he radiates in yellowing beams. This raises the peak of the audience’s desire, and then flies beyond it toward the infinitudes. What is the peculiarly striking burnished yellowness of that beautiful, that serene presence? “ ‘On the first day of autumn,’ she was told,” writes Maxine Hong Kingston, “New Yorkers stomp on one another’s straw hats. I wear my gray felt one as soon as summer’s over. I save the straw for spring. I’m not extravagant. You ought to put your earrings in the safe deposit box at the bank. Pierced ears look a little primitive in this country.” He also told her to buy makeup at a drugstore. “American people don’t like oily faces. So you ought to use some powder. It’s the custom. Also buy some rouge. These foreigners dislike yellow skin.” (70; emphasis mine) Could not the actor and the character here be merging entirely, the yellowed presence a feature of Keanu as much as of Siddhartha; could Keanu not fully be inhabiting the character in a vital, even unheralded way? The yellow atmosphere that travels with Keanu/Siddhartha seems to memorialize the “golden boy” of youth, he who is proclaimed extraordinary, cherished from birth, in Siddhartha’s case taken off and shown a path (in Keanu’s case, discovered and rapidly escorted to the path of stardom). But a question lingers. Do Keanu’s exceptionally good looks, his salutary movement, and the patient face that has always sat upon him provoke the viewer to more hunger, now for something unnameable that transcends transcendent vision? Early in his screen career, he was touted as stunning (River’s Edge, Bill & Ted, Point Break [1991], Idaho), and this carried considerable resentment: with so finely polished a shell he must surely have an empty interior. As a person, and personable character, he must be vacant. Therefore, above all discount the misleading, sweet good looks. And abandon any serious conceit of Keanu as the Yellow God of Wisdom. Yet we are in the hands of Bernardo Bertolucci. Why, when we think of cinema, should looks be discounted? Here or ever? The way an actor looks in every shot he makes is a part of the screen composition, lends form, quite beyond what it will accomplish for the distribution of his image at box offices around the world. The form in this case is golden yellow, the suffusion, even

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radiation of enlightening warmth: not something that is sufficiently yellow as to seem golden but a yellow-as-thing in itself, that is finally gold. As Bertolucci must have intuited he would, with Keanu he found recognition that the surface is its own depth. No other actor could have accomplished this very peculiar radiance. The picture of golden Keanu is a deeply urgent, religious statement of its kind, the hollow face garnished in golden purity, the tranquil posture burnished with confidence, the sweet, turmeric-robed skin a yellowing warmth that transcends action, pronouncement, biography. A classic image, one could say, an image without an ontology. This “classic” elaboration focuses on the ideal subject for an enlightenment story: Young Man long self-possessed and regarded with awe, but who lacks, and must quest for, wisdom: more or less exactly the person the actor had been thought to be, and that he in some ways still was. And now: the quest is all. The quest is the wisdom. Surely, an argument will run, this representation of an Asian figure by an Italian filmmaker using an essentially American actor is nothing but a misappropriation, the craven maneuver discussed by Gina Marchetti in her consideration of Eurasian characters: These roles allow white performers to create their own conception of an Asian character, to produce their own fantasy of the Orient, without totally donning what has been called “yellow face” or “Asian drag.” Eurasian characters (as a rule played by Caucasian performers) appear in virtually every sort of interracial romantic narrative Hollywood has produced. (68) Why could not Kumar Gaurav (born just slightly before Keanu) have played Siddhartha, for example? More authentic! Yet of course the central conundrum is authentic to what? First, Keanu is more than American in style (in fact, he was reared and educated early on in Canada—racially a somewhat indeterminate spot to be sure—to some degree by one of my late friends, who described him as a “nice boy”), and in his multiracial being there is always a taste of something global in his carriage and noble presentation. Noble, I should add, intrinsically: he cannot seem otherwise. More confoundingly, Siddhartha the work never was an Asian story in the first place but was written in German by a German-born author, Hermann Hesse, published in 1951. It could never be claimed a record of the enlightenment of any young Siddhartha who, standing near Govinda, dedicated himself to a spiritual voyage (in the romantic manner): In the evening, after the hour of contemplation, Siddhartha said to Govinda: “Tomorrow morning, my friend, Siddhartha is going to join the Samanas. He is going to become a Samana.”

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Govinda blanched as he heard these words and read the decision in his friend’s determined face, undeviating as the released arrow from the bow. Govinda realized from the first glance at his friend’s face that now it was beginning. Siddhartha was going his own way; his destiny was beginning to unfold itself, and with his destiny, his own. And he became as pale as a dried banana skin. “Oh, Siddhartha,” he cried, “will your father permit it?” Siddhartha looked at him like one who had just awakened. As quick as lightning he read Govinda’s soul, read the anxiety, the resignation. (9; emphasis mine) Here is the hapless Govinda, prone to being looked at “from the outside” and prone, too, to looking from the outside at others. Reading others by their appearance (just as we read Keanu). When Hesse says he blanched, the meaning is not that Govinda felt the effect of blanching but that anyone standing there and watching his face would have seen it go pale: watching his face as he watches faces. As to blanched: not became white but traveled in the direction of whiteness, lost the power of darkness. Then Govinda became as pale as a dried banana skin, which I take to mean, less yellowed than he already was, but again, as would appear from the outside. Siddhartha is very different. While Govinda effected a glance at his friend’s face, the future Samana by contrast sees directly into Govinda’s soul: bypasses the skin, bypasses the face. But all this artful penetration is a German conceit about the Indian mystery, thought of and written by a young man who in the 1890s had suffered a breakdown, who had struggled in marriage, who had visited the East without great pleasure. It is a European fantasy, which is to say a white conception of the bronzed yellows of India. Who better to embody this fabular India than a handsome—an exceptionally handsome—young man whose origins are from both Europe and Oceania, who is seen by the multitudes only as a face to be recognized and considered by filmmakers a resource to be deployed but whose soul does not unreservedly come forth? Yes, now it was beginning. Reeves’s Siddhartha will filmically emulate the Buddha, who has been seen to “walk through the streets, silently, in a yellow cloak” (26) by wearing yellow himself. He will appear in golden light to shine through a universe, to become one with the stars. Celestial yellow. At one point, he dreams that Govinda is in front of him, “in the yellow robe of the ascetic” (48). Govinda, who has studied with the Buddha and learned much, is observed in his old age by Siddhartha as a “monk in a yellow gown.” Yellow as the color of restraint and purity, the color of abstraction from the everyday, the color of peace and meditation, the color of trees as they grow and as they decay. Siddhartha’s body will be the yellow of bark. And a curious expression,

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neither inward- nor outward-turning but somehow suspending time, will emanate from his golden face.

Yellow and Tender The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, Warner Bros., 1993) Wrongfully arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for the brutal murder of his wife, Richard Kimball (Harrison Ford) is aboard a convict-transport bus early in The Fugitive (1993). There is a horrific accident, the vehicle flips and suffers major damage, he escapes the carnage with body swathed in a jumpsuit, now dirtied. He has a full growth of beard, is generally unkempt except that a strange and fierce fire burns in his eyes. Running from the scene along a river embankment he approaches the camera in a cocoon of electric yellow. King’s Yellow, yellow sulphide of arsenic in early times. “The smell cannot be confined” (Baty 66). Electric and ironic, pastel, appropriate for serviettes at a tea party or for the pale hint of cream inside a proper English biscuit from Sainsbury’s. Delicate yellow, frail yellow, impeccable and innocent yellow. An unpicked daisy. Important that the untrammeled innocence of Kimball should be conveyed to the audience directly and unambiguously: that his imprisonment is false; that his nature, leaking into and staining his garment, is unimpeachable. Officially (according to the State of Illinois), yellow indicates the telltale identity of a convict, every fold of it labels the wearer a man on the other side of the law, but we are to find these significations all wrong. This man in yellow is on the other side of the other side of the law. And it is an idiosyncratic irony that is conveyed in this pallid, glowing yellowness so visible in the low light. Kimball is no longer young, his rich growth of beard, the knowing desperation in his eyes all give away unequivocal maturity; but the yellow is playpen yellow, calm yellow, genteel yellow, withdrawn and observant yellow, the yellow of the grass upon which the hunter shoots Babar’s sweet mother dead. It is a yellow of infantile innocence challenged, sported now by someone who, personally and professionally, is anything but young and, in his kenning manipulation of social reality toward justice, anything but innocent. Kimball is unblameworthy; but he is no innocent. As we watch the prison bus careening along the road, after the escape attempt has begun and the driver has been shot; as we see the panicked look on Kimball’s face; as the bus flips over and then goes rolling down the embankment toward the river and stops abruptly; as Kimball is called upon by the guard to tend to a wounded prisoner and has his hands uncuffed to do so; as the guard notices a train approaching and we discern for the first time that the bus has landed directly across the railway tracks; as the guard

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cravenly flees leaving Kimball to save the other man single-handedly; as Kimball hoists the victim and gets him out through a broken window; and as Kimball struggles to get himself out of the window, too, all this action intercut with shots of the approaching train,2 its yellow-white head lamp blaring in the night,3 so that finally he must leap like spray from a fountain precisely at the moment of impact; as the train pushes the bus along the tracks in a sparking explosion;4 as the train’s engine comes pummeling toward the racing Kimball (whose legs are still shackled);5 as Kimball manages to tuck himself away in the underbrush just as the engine crashes within inches of him,6 two elements of the sequence continually counterpose. The brutal, muscular, barely declarative, thrusting, and wounding pride of the men: all of the men, regardless of their statuses. And the floral quality of that yellow on Kimball’s person, that potentilla yellow, the bell-ringing yellow of rose petals—there is a rose named Arthur Bell—a yellow that betrays tenderness, softness, modesty, subtlety, nuance. And because that tender yellow is such a powerful one, a yellow that seduces the eye by its unpresuming pallor, a yellow that does not beckon but whispers, a natural, fresh, uneducated yellow, it dominates entirely, it centers and composes the bouquet of each shot, so that the fact of the imprisonment linked to the darkness—the muscularity, the deviousness implicit in the escape plan, the guard’s viciousness with his shotgun, the glaring beacon of the train’s approach—is dwarfed by Kimball’s incessant yellow, untouched (if dirtied) yellow, tender yellow. The yellow that reminds us he’s a man of delicate sensibilities, that is, a surgeon, whose fingers have the surgeon’s touch. Structurally this diegetic imbalance, which is framed exactly in the counterplay between grim darkness and the brilliant yellow of sunlit narcissi, is critical for establishing our affiliation with the escaping Kimball, even though we know rationally that he has never for a moment been guilty of slaying his wife. (The film’s publicity is based in Ford’s star identity, sustainably unstainable.) Knowing his civility is one thing, seeing it is another. This scene permits us to see the innocent civilian typified in color. Institutionalized in the rationale of the story, his particular yellow transcends its utility for making prisoners visible by making this particular prisoner as unthreatening as a blanketed baby and especially visible as such. But this yellow is also crème yellow, the yellow of a banana cream pie. Kimball must be made into a screen object we could delight to taste, albeit

In conventional parallel editing. An homage to the train crash in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). 4 The sparks pay homage to the road accident scene in David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone (1983). 5 Homage to the tractor-trailer scene in North by Northwest (1959). 6 Homage to John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964), especially a close proximity shot made by Lionel Lindon. 2 3

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just narratively. He is written to be “to our taste,” exactly as so many of the characters with whom he interacts are carefully written not to be. As a whole The Fugitive can be understood as a composition of variably yummy characters, with Kimball and the categorically sincere detective who is on his trail (Tommy Lee Jones) at the top of the list and the actual killer (Andreas Katsoulas) down at the bottom along with another nefarious man whose filthy schemes have motored the plot. The famed Harrison Ford’s uprightness is bent over. His strength of character and wholesomeness are all smartly compromised, made pallid. His is a weak yellow, intimidated yellow, a yellow that needs help, just as it is gentle and reassuring. Richard Kimball sheds this yellow just as soon as he can, begins moving through the world in normal if awkward-fitting clothes, and in this way, he might seem newly empowered to those following the story—the story but not the film. The film, however, is something else. His filmic yellow, the yellow of his confinement, has jaundiced him for good. He will never stand more proudly or with more dignity than he stood in the sweet yellow, the yellow that marked him for his detractors and for us. This is why even in his final, adventurous, action-packed race against villainy he remains not a muscular hero but our private, sentimental treasure.

Yellow Crust Watchmen (Zack Snyder, Warner Bros./Paramount, 2009) The ontology of the comic book movie bears its own strangeness. We are watching actors hard at work in roles, as with other dramatic films, but the roles are actually only “roles,” or imprints, struck from not models in the real world of fact or imagination but drawn and printed figures, or at least a universe originally “inhabited” by such types in commercial comic books. The colors of the comic books world itself are limited to what commercial printing can manage on a controlled budget aimed at huge profit—we are not turning the pages between Van Gogh paintings. On film the color palette is instantly expanded, brightened, saturated, given something of a life of its own. The stories we are told, for all their action-packed adventure, are perforce thin, since the drawn characters have at best emphatically limned psychological traits and not psychologies. They were never people to start with. Superheroes grow old, like everyone else, so we should feel no surprise to discover one lounging in his penthouse with an erotic advertisement playing on his high-definition television and Nat King Cole crooning, “Unforgettable.” This one is “Comedian,” aka Edward Blake (Jeffrey

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Dean Morgan): burly, unshaven, gone gloriously to flab, the perfect sanctimonious, world-weary American. A strange creature comes to visit, Ozymandias (Matthew Goode): one of the new young breed, sleek in a body suit, snarky, superior, entitled. This is the End, and after a ferocious fight, with kitchen knives winging hopelessly off target, Comedian is lifted up by a quite overwhelming young strength and hurled, in a fluid pitch, straight through his plate glass window. So much for you and your whole generation. Note how the philosophy here, such as it is, has been sharpened and abbreviated, since every breath—like every frame of comics in print— must contain an event. Outside, meanwhile: black night. The twinkling city. Or: the city whose nature it is to twinkle. As to the broken window: a myriad shards of diamond fly out in megaslow motion7 while Irving Gordon’s haunting song keeps playing, the array of tiny gleaming fragments becoming jewels in the darkness and flickering entirely antithetical to Nat’s legato phrasings. Comedian’s helpless body, now only a thing, moves gracefully away from us, as though generating its own gravity. He was a burly one and is out of control now, an astronaut in zero gravity. Slo-mo.8 A long, long, long way to his terminus on the sidewalk far below. A long way, an eternity. We shift to a very tight shot of the dead head on the pave, eyes glazed, blood streaming away (across the world). And then, tumbling down just after him, a perfect factotum, also lighter and more undirected, the button he always wore, his signal, now clinking on the pave nearby and dropping to stillness inside the swelling dark scarlet pool of blood. It is a round button with a happy face drawn in vivid black. The button itself, now taking over the screen, is flaming yellow. Birthday yellow. Yellow and happy and commanding. A jiggling giggling face, reposeful after its journey, the simplistic smile prodding the viewer’s attention quite as though inside some tiny flat yellow circular atmosphere a sentient creature still lives, now with what could be rueful sadness but is instead an enigmatic smile. Smiling for the past. So much for you and your whole generation. This is the yellow of nostalgia. Smiling and not smiling. Staring with pointy eyes but with no eyes. Knowing yet no longer knowing. Seeing and seeing nothing. Dead but looking vivacious.

Regarding the CGI work required for glass explosions, Lisa Purse notes how “the contemporary exploded view emphasises process and positionality, using slow motion to foreground both movement in depth and the graphic qualities of elements occupying the x-axis” (161). I am grateful to Lisa Purse for consultation on this. 8 The brief pause before the plummet is a direct homage to Warner Bros. cartoons, most famously involving Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. 7

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The yellow button, simulating animation, is as empty and lifeless (as unanimated) as the man who wore it, a mere object now thrown to the ground. While with Comedian, recognized already as a once vital being, the stillness of termination seems shocking, impossible, incredible, horrific (Comedian, the much-loved superhero, alas!), for this yellow fetish, which carried some of his life, the transformation into a mere object seems to ring hilarious (partly because the button keeps smiling), an open re-invocation and also inversion of the Bergsonian dictum that laughter comes from “the momentary transformation of a person into a thing” (28) since now we have a thing that has come “alive.” Alive and “conscious.” But also “stupid,” “out of touch,” since manifestly the time for smiling is over. The smile is only a drawing, however, so it is beyond time. With Comedian, the transformation we have seen effected here is swift and irrevocable while with the button, always and forever only an entity into which “life” has been injected through our imagination, transformation seems interminable, because as the seconds pass (the hero’s blood flows out) the smile on that mouth neither loosens nor fades. The button will always be smiling, whether it falls to the ground haplessly or shines proudly on someone’s breast. A sign that always has meaning, but that always negates its situation. The yellow of utter negation. In its intense, saturated yellowness the button is a tiny sun, shining in a universe of depravity, grime, desperation, shadow, and horror. Is this truly not a real sun? In comics, what looks like a sun is a sun. A sunny face here, Happy Face, sunny disposition. (The comic book artist was expert at bringing a simple line to express intense “emotion.”) A yellow cause for optimism because, as we love to say and think, “the sun is shining and all is right with the world.” The yellow of utter negation and nostalgia. Yet yellow of utter necessity, a yellow required, even genetic: in order to be, or to simulate, an ironically blazing sun, in order to shine forth bravely and insouciantly at this critical moment of Comedian’s pathetic demise, the button has to be this color, not only bright but sunshine bright. The color of animation itself, as we would love to believe it, since sunlight is the eternal internal energy of animation. As the button fills the screen (macroclose-up), we can imagine swinging close to the center of a living universe, feel the radiance nourishing forests and beasts alike, glimmering on streams, bringing a smile (the smile mimicked on this “face”) to people’s faces. Smile of hope? This trinket is so sunny a trinket, is it a replacement for the sun? Is it the only sun left for Comedian? A curious yellow sun that shines even in the depth of night, even in a puddle of blood. The yellow of utter negation. And if this yellow is round, perfect, geometrical—it is also artificial, since buttons are just commercial products, like comic books---not the things they picture. There is no smiling face here, only a black line, and Comedian’s dumbstruck empty gaze. He has become a thing. There seems

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at this moment no reason for a smile, except that the button, with its insane grin, so oblivious to the reality around, will not stop grinning in a dimension cut off from the real while present inside the real, looking at but never seeing what is in front of its face. Yellow face, idiotic face, the blithe face of formality. Utter negation. Or is this yellow button a kind of punctuation? A simple, declarative, culminating period, falling to the street to conclude the sentence of Comedian’s presence. Now, we have just reached one of these mental crossways. Something mechanical encrusted on the living will represent a cross at which we must halt. (Bergson 18) “Something mechanical encrusted on the living.” A punctum, glowing bright, to show the forests of the night.

Mother’s Yellow Diary of a Mad Housewife (Frank Perry, Frank Perry Films, 1970) Or a quintessential yellow of pure conception, familiarity, recognition, clairvoyance. Not confronted optically with a color, we are given instead a color clue that brings instant—but only conceptual—sight, the color in the mind implanted long ago, retained against all erosions, clasped into the necklace of wholly accepteds, calmly carried against all phalanxes of change and aggression. This is lemon yellow, the yellow of lemons. Lemons of Corsica, of Corfu, of the Greek islands, of the south of France. Lemons of Spain. Mediterranean lemons, to be sure, dangling like topazes from the modest lemon tree, lemons for donkeys to pass by, lemons for stewing and jelling, lemons to juggle by moonlight. One need but utter the magical word “lemon” to call up this distinct, odorous yellow of the south, a nourishing yellow, healthy yellow, fresh and unsullied and invigorating, auspicious and delirious yellow. Yellow of sleep. Yellow of bliss. Frank Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970; from the novel by Sue Kaufman) recounts episodes in the strange and unhappy marriage of Tina (Carrie Snodgress) and Jonathan (Richard Benjamin) Balser. (Their very large apartment on Central Park West.) It would be a gross understatement to say she is an angel of patience and he is cravenly demanding, from morning until night. Demanding, cajoling, insisting, wheedling, whining, begging, compelling, commanding. Yet—and this is Benjamin’s great genius—the

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character is so fascinating and entertaining to watch from without, to spy from the safety of our clandestine peephole (that, happily, is removed from this marriage), we cannot abide the idea of parting from him; not, at least, until the film’s finale, when he brings the circus tent of the marriage crashing down. In general Jonathan, stentorian and forever unsatisfied, a climber among climbers, is in the doldrums, wounded, afflicted, and so he gains our sympathy and Tina’s. He is home from work one day, sick in bed with a head cold (the same head cold every adult gets without noticing, but that every child lies abed whining about). She is seated in the dining room, a corridor away, hand-writing invitations to a party he has decided they should give (where yellow omelets will be served by Monsieur Henri’s staff [but, they discover only too late, not by Monsieur Henri]: “Monsieur Henri does not appear unless special arrangements have been made”). Tina hears his voice, trembling down the hallway. “Teeen?” His very personal, helplessly needy, persistent, (noxiously) high-pitched voice, a good imitation of a six-year-old. He calls her all the time. Wolf, wolf, wolf. Let it rest. “Teeeen!” Just keep diligently working. “Ti-NA!!!!” “Yes, Jonathan?” “Teeeen? Teeeeeeeeen?” “What can I do for you, Jonathan?” “Teeen:—Could you make me some lemonade, Teen? You know, the real kind! Like you used to? With fresh lemons!” Let us give credit where credit is due: when Richard Benjamin utters the word fresh, we actually taste the lemonade. To make it will take no effort, after all. Crisp icy water tinted slightly with yellow, small flecks of pulp floating, teaspoon of sugar, ice cubes, tall glass, tall frosted glass, perhaps some soda water for zest. It will be sufficiently sweet, though not sucrose. Jonathan will gulp it down and want more. And more. In the kitchen trash, we can picture the vivid rinds of four, five, six lemons, lemons cut in half and pressed on a hand juicer, a juicer made of glass, with the pulp wrung out to the last drop by a hand the muscles of which are now strained, all these brilliant lemons, tart, cheek-scrunching. “The real thing, Teen!” But in the film, we do not see Jonathan drink his lemonade, or Tina making it, or the lemons, or even a glass of water. The entire concoction is in the imagination of the viewer only, a yellow conjured by the coupling of what looks like illness and what sounds like “lemonade.” Lemonade from childhood. The lemonade you found soothing when mom made it, expressly, originally, for you. Historic yellow, with the brilliant committed rinds (now corpses in the trash)—historical to the drink—just as the drink in

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our private visions anticipates an image … but is never fulfilled in an image itself. Lemonade from untold yesterdays ago, the real thing. But also lemonade made from lemons that are perfect and sour, a sacredly sour yellow. The sour yellowness makes the cheeks contract, just as does the screeching of Jonathan’s unstoppable voice. A vocal yellow. A pestering yellow. The real thing. Is the authenticity of the lemonade’s yellow a maternal gift? What makes the yellow of the lemonade, and more, the yellow of the lemons squeezed to get the lemonade, so pure and so vital to Jonathan (to all of us)? (In short, why is he asking for this?) How has he learned to give high regard to, to hold credible, this exact yellow, except through its connection, in childhood, to his own mother? Maternal yellow, believable yellow: a yellow that can hold our faith. This lemonade Jonathan now desires is the lemonade that mother made long ago; made long ago and remakes today, today and tomorrow and for a countless number of days, because Tina has learned to play mother, and if one plays mother perfectly one is mother, ultimate mother not transcendable, mother never laid aside. The serving up of the lemonade will be a pietà.

Reflective Yellow To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount, 1955); The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, Recorded Picture Company, 2003) The yellow yolk. In To Catch a Thief (1955), Cary Grant’s John Robie, a denizen of the Riviera, is in the Carlton Hotel, Cannes with chic, canny, playful, somewhat unrepressed hyper-American Mrs. Stevens (Jessie Royce Landis), the mother of supremely attractive, young, witty, seductive, vivacious Francie (Grace Kelly), capable of boldly stretching out and kissing him. Accompanying is Hughson (John Williams), insurance agent for Lloyds of London, down in Cannes to protect the expensive baubles of the superrich, that are progressively being stolen. Mrs. Stevens has breakfasted and is now engaged with the men in a discussion of last night’s heist and the peril that faces her own rather costly stones. Hughson is begging her for prudence: “Mrs. Stevens, would you kindly keep your jewelry in the hotel safe?” Cigarette in hand, she walks past him reposting slyly, “What do I do when I go out, wear the safe around my neck?” In a gesture so telltale it merits a macro-close-up from Hitchcock, she stubs out the cigarette in the middle of her fried egg yolk. A beautiful composition. Mrs. Steven’s manicured hand and her lavender shirt are at top, screen left. Below stretches the table setting: coffee cup

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at left, a little glass dish of raspberry jam, the egg plate, a little glass dish of marmalade, half a bowl of wrapped sugar cubes. The egg has hardly been touched, and the same goes for the bacon strips in military formation beside it. In this color array, the yellow of the yolk functions as a contrast, disharmonious because of the play between the two confitures. The verticality of the cigarette breaking the pristine surface of the yolk (phallic cigarette, “ovarian” yolk); the red fingernail pushing it down. Echo here of an earlier moment when, at Bertolli’s chic restaurant on the plage at Nice, Robie stared through a plate glass window at the chefs busily working in the kitchen—many of them members of the French Underground during the War—and suddenly an egg smashed against the glass, exactly in front of his face. Hitchcock cuts there to a reverse shot showing the yellow yolk oozing down the glass, with Grant’s stolid face staring out behind. The egg yolk is linked to Robie, Robie the good egg? Robie with “egg on his face”? Nineteenth-century audiences would pelt unsatisfying performers with raw eggs, leave them “egg on the face” as a signal that they deserved being embarrassed. The kitchen workers are manifestly striving but, because of the glass, failing to embarrass Robie. This “old lady” whose eggs are so dispensable (Royce and Grant were roughly the same age, he, in fact, slightly older) has been around. And what we are intended to recognize about her at this moment is her blasé worldliness, this sense that she has met plenty of men and plenty of sheisters, has had one leg pulled and then the other, and knows how to tag folks. She knows her jewels are a prize. And she can see quite plainly what anybody (that is, what the viewer) can see, namely, that Robie knows, too; and that, calmly suave as he is, as well as anyone else’s in town his might be the itchy fingers scrambling to get hold of them. She is “egging him on.” Or, by partially cooking that yolk with the lit end of her cigarette, by ruining that yolk’s purity, she dispenses with egg and egg metaphor together. Yellow yolks disrupted, punctured, exploded. A yellow mess. Are the chefs telling Robie they think he is yellow? Is Mrs. Stevens proclaiming her own derring-do and claiming openly, “Yellowness (cowardliness) is nothing”? (Is it a comment on femaleness and reproduction, her own menopause or her daughter’s holding back from marriage?) Two themes are latent in this pair of eggy moments. First: at a restaurant in France, especially a highly rated (probably Michelin two-star) place, foodstuffs are sacred. The chef is a prima donna when he goes shopping at the market, selecting only what seem to be the very best ingredients for the dishes he will brilliantly prepare. Anywhere one might see a ruffian or delinquent throw an egg as a form of social protest or deprecation, but the very idea of throwing food around in a restaurant kitchen is taboo. Invoked when that egg splatters upon “Robie’s face” is a state of unruliness or profound disregard: that the victim here is not only disrespected but loathed by someone in this kitchen, perhaps by everyone in this kitchen. Are

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they suggesting that during the War he was a Nazi collaborator? Is this very extreme violation of propriety, in this particular place, index of an animus felt with special intensity? Anywhere else, an egg hurled at Robie would be insulting and perhaps humiliating if an audience were there to witness; here there is no real audience, but the intent of the insult is magnified by the overriding dignity of the culinary operation as a whole. Yet how could such an impropriety be committed with such nonchalance? Has behavior in this kitchen gone off the rails before? Have eggs flown at other people, or have other foodstuffs? We see the egg targeting Robie only because it happens to be Robie we are following. Is this kitchen exactly and wholly what it appears to be, a place where kitchen proprieties go casually unobserved, and thus, finally, not really a restaurant kitchen? Posing inside a restaurant, and even, perhaps, containing a corner in which one or two people do the real cooking (the room is filled with “chefs”), could this place be a “kitchen” rather than a kitchen, a meeting place in which, to camouflage their real intent, people dress like cooks? Hitchcock need not be suggesting that the kitchen setting is fake, only that it could be, might be, might be thought to be, as a way of invoking the proposition that fakery is all over this film, actually or potentially. Robie may be a fake (as the egg suggests), as may everyone else we see. With her cigarette Mrs. Stevens is re-invoking that egg on the face, subtly bringing to the fore the idea that fakery resides at Cannes. Egg-as-ashtray, as in Duchamp’s readymades or his Fountain (1917), as in Méret Oppenheim’s fur teacup. This matron may be some kind of fake herself, as might her daughter, and of course in the film’s finale, a gay costumed soirée, the very idea of fakery is articulated expressly and powerfully, notably in a little twostep involving the Stevens women. In Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), the egg yolk gains a completely contrasting identity as guarantor of authenticity. Paris, 1968, a very short time prior to the student uprising.9 An American boy, Matthew (Michael Pitt), meets a pair of French twins, Théo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green) and, because all three are passionate cinephiles becomes their special friend and is invited to sojourn with them in their parents’ fabulous apartment while the parents are away. At a critical moment, Matthew is preparing to take Isabelle’s virginity, on a dare from Théo. The action takes place in the kitchen as, down on the floor, Isabelle lies in wait and Matthew lowers himself to be with her. Standing nearby, at the range, is Théo. While Matthew and Isabelle make love, nervously at first and then with more urgency, Théo stands casually frying some eggs in a pan, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and safely away from the egg yolks (in the pose familiar to film lovers—just such as Théo is—from French noir, especially films with

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Which occurred on May 3, 1968.

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Jean-Paul Belmondo like À bout de souffle [1960]). As he carefully watches the bodies below, we see that he is both judging the effectiveness of Matthew as lover and protectively watching his sister’s awakening, yet also, with a dispassionate and unwavering gaze, simply observing action: a perfect camera. Lawrence Durrell has his narrator gaze just this way in Justine: It was impossible to explain to them that I was investigating nothing more particular than the act upon which they were engaged … Their posture, so ludicrous and ill-planned, seemed the result of some early trial which might, after centuries of experiment, evolve into a disposition of bodies as breathlessly congruent as a ballet-position. But nevertheless I recognized that this had been fixed immutably, for all time—this eternally tragic and ludicrous position of engagement. (165) Théo: must he be cooking eggs, of all possibilities? Granted if he insists on being present, he cannot be a mere gazing bystander, without some awkwardness disturbing for him and even more for us. He must be occupied, reasonably, usefully, and then as he turns his head for a gaze at his surroundings he will seem not only natural but comme il faut. Useful, too: a post-coital breakfast, implicit, and he is the loyal servant arranging it. If he requires to be near enough for a thorough view, an accurate view—because this is, after all, a chivarée—the stove could not be a more perfect placement. Let the eggs sizzle (let the desire flame) and effortlessly keep an eye. But why eggs? Other food could be cooked for a celebratory meal. Surely one would read Théo as a typical young man of his class and time, inept at cooking: yet anybody, no matter how distanced from domesticity, can fry an egg: so this untrained capacity of Théo’s matches a second untrained capacity, Matthew’s. He is no expert at sex yet perfectly capable, as anyone is, for acting without ease and will if not without choreography. The eggs metaphorize ovaries, of course, the hand upon the spatula a kind of utile extension of the self, Théo’s way of participating in the sex, within what he would regard as the bounds of brotherly propriety. (As to the issue of propriety, since we are confronted with the surveillance we must fully accept, acquiesce to, the sibling relation, else no call for propriety is fully relevant: as Théo and Isabelle, Garrel and Green look youthful, eager, nicely matched, companionable in every—that is, any—way.) In this scene, the bulging fresh eggs strike a certain tone of readiness, promise, fullness, desire, richness, nutrition and thus vivacity, yet also fundamental simplicity. Théo’s combination of carefully attending to the eggs and carefully attending to his sister’s experience allows the twin yellow yolks to certify the wholly inward feeling and knowledge she gains. The yolks here make affirmation; whereas in Thief they openly deny. But in both cases, they are classic in their situated integrity. The eggs incorporate and reflect all aspects of the moment. And the users of eggs, tossers, stubbers,

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fryers, watchers are perfect in their appropriations of yellow. Their gestes have, as Durrell says, “all the fidelity of good acting” (Balthazar 170).

Yellow Risk Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, Universal, 1964): I As Marnie (1964) begins, Hitchcock creates an unexplained incitement. Here is my description of it on the film’s fiftieth anniversary: Our first glimpse finds her already in motion, striding confidently away from the camera on an empty railway platform, modernity apotheosised, her body fitted snugly into tweeds, her styled hair black as coal. Beneath her arm is a fat purse, a labial pouch in Provocation Yellow. (8) A labial pouch, container of containers. Human labia are not yellow. But in the same breath one must say, this is a leather purse, not part of a body. What might it be to dream that one is witnessing such a sight as a woman walking away, bearing a pouch of exactly this kind beneath her arm? Always with Hitchcock one must study the composition of his shots. In this one, we have a set of eight lines heading away from us to an unseen vanishing point far behind the back of our heads: a perfect perspective. A train at left, a train at right, with top and bottom edges both, the two lines of the platform border, the two lines of the platform shelter’s roof, the proximal end of which, by the way, dips in a shallow gray V with its point just next to the woman’s head. The sky is clear, not a happy blue. The platform is gray. The trains in shadows are gray. The long tweed coat is dark grayish brown. The suitcase being carried in the right hand is gray. The only thing of blatant color in the composition is that purse, dazzling yellow, stoplight yellow, almost an iridescent yellow as it leaves the woman’s arm and approaches the viewing eye. Later in the film some children will chant a nursery rhyme: Mother, mother, I am ill. Call for the doctor over the hill. Call for the doctor, call for the nurse, Call for the lady with the alligator purse. The purse, the pouch. The “purse,” the vagina. The “alligator purse” a vagina with teeth. Old myth, never dying just as it is never true. But further: (a) the purse that we are seeing is not an alligator purse in any event, so can we think Marnie’s purse, even obliquely, is the reference called for in this children’s rhyme? (b) That chanted purse belongs to a lady, not “is being carried by”

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but “belongs to”; thus it is an essential female necessity, something intrinsic. However, since that (chanted) purse is not this (carried) purse, that “lady” is not the person we see. Perhaps this person is no lady. Certainly, this person is not connected to a nurse. (c) Because the “alligator purse” is an allusion to the vagina, not the vagina in fact, it works symbolically. If the chanting children have reason—or, since they are beating out nothing but a skipping rhyme, impulse—to fear the vagina dentata, already, in their innocence, that mythical object is by no means this actual purse, so our marcher here does not become, by virtue of carrying it, a toothed threat or a threat of any other kind, not here, not now. Indeed, the carrier is moving away from, not toward the camera. Only in the most superficial way is this yellow purse a harbinger of the alligator purse that will be invoked in the rhyme. But at the same time, this purse is a purse in the same way that that purse is a purse, and this purse appears labial enough. Labial and shining yellow. Tom Cohen calls this yellow beacon a “dismembered vaginal ‘phallic’ ” (264). It is, at any rate, yellow and true. … Whereas that black hair looks a little stiff, a little formed: as though it is a wig. The rhythm of the marching is forced, self-conscious. The marcher knows she is making an escape, a yellow escape, and we recognize her here before us, in this way, in flight. Flight from what we cannot possibly yet say. From fright? Well, flight fully equipped, flight with the goods beneath the arm. The woman she used to be, in whatever place she is coming from, is not the woman she intends to be at her destination, but to be any kind of woman anywhere she will require a pouch: symbol, prophecy. If some pouch, why not a yellow pouch? And we will see quite soon that this yellow purse is a treasure trove, literally. Perhaps the marching figure is a male in drag. A male who is “yellow” and hides himself in a disguise. Perhaps it is a woman, who is “yellow,” too. Or perhaps this container is merely yellow containment, and what it contains—a blossom. The yellow purse is as ostensible and simple a key object as one finds in Hitchcock altogether—his signal things are very often more complex than this and often less colorful: the lighter in Strangers on a Train (1951), the coffee cup in Notorious (1946). This one is something so brazen, and also so obviously brazen---so brazenly stated as brazen—that one is veritably forced to pay attention. Hands will soon open it and withdraw a small golden compact, inside of which are a number of Social Security cards with different names on them. Performance! This purse is part of a characterization. As the woman who carried it is now being stripped off in a tranquil hotel room, as in a bathroom sink the black of the hair is being rinsed away, the woman who bore this purse, whoever she was before, whatever her game, has gone, vanished without a trace, gone down the drain.10 The yellow purse was for

A motif rehearsed here as a reprise of Psycho (1960).

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catching our eye, mechanically so that we could be seduced into the film and then, more engagingly, so that we could understand the user playing to surveillers, any surveillers, with this optical candy that would seduce them into a belief. They will all—police, offended bourgeoisie, strangers—identify the woman as having possessed a brilliant yellow purse, as we might have done, too, were we not witness to the changeover, the clothing rumpled and this purse disappearing into the suitcase, then the suitcase finding its way to a railway station locker the key of which happens to slip down a drain. Watch this yellow purse!, Hitchcock points—this yellow item which I show you ceasing to exist: Call for the doctor, call for the nurse, Call for the lady with the very yellow purse. By bringing us into that hotel room (the traditional cameo shows that he is occupying the adjacent room) and showing us the meticulous dismantling of the yellow purse and the yellow purse bearer, Hitchcock admits us to the backstage, the dressing room, thus briefing us that carrying off and staging performance will be central to what continues; while at the same time making this performative character unstable, always able to don a new identity, and revealing, too, that by catching our eye with the yellow purse she has performed a kind of magical trick, a look-here-but-don’t-look-there. Catching the eye, indeed. The yellow net. And this person with the yellow purse poised to catch us on so many levels is also Hitchcock. Two motives for staring. First, the fold line in the pouch, the entry as seems, is a vision of the origin. We stare at that for its formal quality, just in the way that we stare at Gustave Courbet’s painting, “L’origine du monde” (1866) in the Orsay (as Courbet knew viewers would stare; and as Jacques Lacan did, in fact at one point acquiring the painting). There is a marvel in seeing our own beginning, distant, originary, but now turned to sunshine gold and schlepped so casually under this automaton’s arm. Then, too, that peculiar, riddling, poking Van Gogh yellow---not the same as his in magnetism but very like the yellow he used in the background of the fourth version of his 1880s “Sunflowers.” This yellow is applied, raw, arbitrary, a kind of paste, a makeup, appropriate as a woman’s accessory, so that the form the purse takes is made referential, not real, by the color.11 An eyecatching sign, a yellow beginning and a yellow end. Could this yellow have been the sun’s yellow on the first morning, the morning that emerged from the first night? Does it at least suggest a moment before this moment, when for this person on this platform, once upon a time, the sun was shining? In Dial M for Murder (1954), Hitchcock had given Grace Kelly a red purse (forerunner of the Hermès Kelly bag) but had not photographed it this way. 11

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The yellow purse implies a gateway to an enclosure in which waits all possibility yet no definite knowledge. A murky yellow for all its lambency, a promising but also a warning yellow. To move forward with this film, with this woman, with this purse, with this color, with yellow altogether, we must take a risk.

Of Black

Black night reigned again. JULES VERNE

By the light of the dark-lantern he saw the tulip in full flower, and as black as the darkness in which he was hidden. ALEXANDRE DUMAS, THE BLACK TULIP

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A Tale of Horror and Imagination The Fly (Kurt Neumann, Twentieth Century Fox, 1958) The Fly (1958) is a tale of horror and imagination, written for the screen by James Clavell from a story by George Langelaan and set in Montreal. A scientist named André Delambre (David Hedison) has been working in a secret home laboratory—astonishing how many sci-fi extravaganzas gros and petit revolve around some scientist in his secret laboratory—with a disintegrator-integrator machine (in the original story, a disintegratorreintegrator), somewhat precursing Gene Roddenberry’s “transporter” in the Star Trek television series of 1966. The machine takes matter apart at the molecular level, then recomposes it a short distance away.1 After tests with a newspaper and the family cat, Delambre’s labors have reached a point of culmination. He makes the decision to test the process using himself. As he steps into the initiating chamber, in what will be fateful happenstance a house fly zips in with him. We are of course given leave to see this little inadvertence, and he of course is not. Noting his absence for several days, his wife Hélène (Patricia Owens) ventures to the basement lab where she finds him bent over a table with a huge black cloth covering his head and arm. Questioned to the point of intolerability, André lets the arm slide out, coal black, laid over with enormous cilia, pincered. She goes, as they said in the 1950s, hysterical. Eventually we see that the fly’s head has also been planted on his shoulders, and we learn that somewhere (!) is the body of the fly with his head and arm. The huge jet-black fly head, the multifaceted eyes, the mandibles—all the complex insect anatomy rendered human size—are an abomination, our continuing attachment to the story resting entirely on what sympathy we can muster for this Thing/André. Knowing that he has retained his human mind (inside the fly’s head) is somewhat mollifying if not altogether incredible (and helpful for the dramatization, which would otherwise have to fathom an insect mind and establish communication with humans). While much about this film disturbs orientation, appreciation, and understanding, not least the fact that after Hélène fulfills her husband’s wishes by killing him his brother (Vincent Price) believes he has seen a fly with a tiny white head; or the fact that the film is told entirely in flashback, commencing with the discovery of the dead body and the wife’s confession of having committed the killing but refusal to say why, there is perhaps For a twenty-first-century take on this phenomenal action, see Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), where the trick is set in the context of the performance of magic. 1

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no more disturbing single moment than the one we share with Hélène on her first visit to the lab when she sees the great black sheet over her husband’s body. A number of issues are raised here: l

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A body can be covered in many ways, some of them relatively familiar. To bend over a table underneath one’s own coat, for instance, or underneath a collection of one’s own garments, is somewhat less confronting, while the choice here is for a clean, new, utilitarian fabric. The quality of the fabric is a promise of discovery: new covering = new knowledge through uncovering. Given that André might want to use fabric of some kind, there is no particular reason for him to choose the color black. Any fabric, suitably thick, will work as a cover. If we ask what the blackness brings to the equation of the moment we find ominousness, inscrutability, absence, and, too, a foretaste of the biology we are shortly to discover, because the fly-being is black, black, and monstrously black. Curious how in this Eastmancolor film the plot tension is encapsulated as a black-white dichotomy, the person-fly’s black black head, too too big, and the fly-person’s white white one, too too small. The wife will need to be informed about the transformation at some point, because the story structure has her commit charitable murder in the name of it; but she need not discover the husband-insect directly. She is prepped for a shock that will be all the more dramatic when it comes, because of that prepping.

One can use such logic to unpack the molecular structure of the moment, but what can be understood if logical arrangements and contingencies are laid aside and we concentrate on the moment as a visual spectacle? It is as visual spectacle that this and other moments in The Fly are built, after all. Though it comes from one, this is not a textual story merely illustrated with pictures; it is a pictorial accomplishment, and the pictures do more than only point to the nuances language sets forth. What do we see in the lab scene? What becomes apparent by way of black? l

A black cloth like the mask used by the medieval executioner, now applied to a pathetic figure either by himself (irony) or by some unseen powerful force who wishes him ill. Has he committed offence against a (natural) law by using his disintegrator-integrator to fiddle with matter? Has he buried himself in shame? Is it, by chance, his own fly-eyes from which he wishes to guard the mirror vision of this self?

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Also, a black cloth like the one used by photographers in focusing their large-format cameras. In bending over this way, is the scientist being regaled with, or preparing for, a special vision inaccessible to us? (The Fly can see thousands of times better than humans can.) A cloth the blackness of which signals punishment, retribution, or reproach, or else renaissance, since the natural form that was is now secreted away in a lab-within-the-lab, a dark space of privacywithin-the-privacy. Is the black cloth covering not only the hideous insect man beneath it (not discovered by us, either, until the cloth comes away) but also the Promethean promulgator of radical change, the inventor of the process? That is: is André as scientist, as theorist, as explorer far more repulsive morally than the man-fly is repulsive visually?

At film’s end, the detective trying to decode Hélène’s act of murder (Herbert Marshall) is with André’s brother. Together they see the tiny fly with the white head. “Help me! Help me!” it sings, as a spider approaches.2 The detective seizes a rock and destroys both with a single blow. A “black ill-favor’d fly.”

Black Faith The Silver Chalice (Victor Saville, Twentieth Century Fox, 1954) Simon Magus (Jack Palance) has curried favor with Nero, Emperor of Rome, dining on gilded fowl at his table, making snakes disappear into the air for entertainment. “Let me build a tower,” he begs, in quiet sibilance. I have a special wonder to show you. “I will fly.” Not any of the Christians, not Jesus, can fly, but I will. “I will smile upon you,” says Caesar. (As per convention, the ancients speak to one another with exquisite etiquette.) The tower is hundreds of feet high, with an inside ladder that seems to mount up to the stars. Simon has secretly rigged a mechanical crane apparatus that will attach by invisible wire to a special cloak he will wear, and he will “fly.” But when the day comes, and the massive crowd is cheering at the top of their lungs, “Hail, Simon!,” and rung by rung by rung he takes himself to the top, he jettisons his plan, and makes to fly unassisted. So much for what Universal’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, with an infinitesimally small human battling a spider predator, had been released in Los Angeles in the middle of the year before The Fly was shot. 2

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any sane Roman of the time would have called superbia. A crystal blue sky, quintessential background. Simon all alone, a mad frenzy smeared upon his face. His arms upraised histrionically. His flimsy gray cloak fluttering in the wind. He steps to the edge. Simon is dressed top to bottom in a carmine red leotard-style garment, tight-fitting on the body so it will give no resistance to the air. This is what he will fly in. But the garment is not undecorated. There are dozens of vermiform entities, wriggling upward with swollen heads, gigantic as befits the man who will fly like the gods. These entities are starkly black. Black wrigglers all over the red-swathed body. And Simon’s black hair is curled. And his black goatee and moustache give proper emphasis to his proud, sniveling mouth. Emphasis and the suggestion that something black is in his soul, too. This is Hollywood’s way of showing how in Nero’s debauched Rome, Peter and the ancient Christians were practicing in the shadow of necromancy, superstition, and fawning idolization. Caesar himself (Jacques Aubuchon) is petulant, plump, clearly stupid. He is surrounded by sycophants, in the style of many tyrannical leaders. It is thus automatically and without reflection that his public obeys him and makes ceremony of adoration. He lives to fatten and satiate himself, and his spare moments must be filled with diversion lest silence give him provocation for thought. No thought in this civitas, only illusion. As to illusion in The Silver Chalice (1954), the actormagician John Calvert acted as technical advisor; and much of the magic was accomplished through photographic effects by Hans Koenekamp and Louis Lichtenfeld. A splendid cinematic vision of imperial splendor, with the unctuous, serpentine, malevolently smiling Palance slithering through. Black worms with fat heads, indeed. Why, before throwing himself off the tower, must he be decorated with black snakes (black spermatozoa)? Snakes for potency, for mystery, for transformation. The spermatozoic hint invokes potency, mystery, and transformation as well as futurity: Simon the Magician would put himself up as the future of Roman religion, he whose deposit of self will fertilize the time. Indeed, he proclaims at the summit, “I am God!” He engenders himself. He gives birth to his own potency without limit. Yes, but why black? Could not Simon affirm his own sense of nobility, his conviction that he is the proper object of religious devotion in Nero’s Rome, by displaying squiggling embellishments of white, of blue, of yellow, as long as he did it in the context of a ritual of self-anointment, a prelude to flight? The answer, I think, is that the viewer must be led to wonder whether this figure is the spawn of Hades. The blackness of the forms suggests infernal origins just as their shape suggests the power of fertilization. Simon is the agent who will populate the world with evil. And all through his presentations in the film, Palance makes certain to let Simon skate along a

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very sharp edge between madness on one side and pomposity on the other, between ego and id. A figure of blackness, as, for audiences in 1954, this actor already was (from Shane the year before and from Sudden Fear before that). Black, terminal, unconsidered, impulsive, wholly bad. Chalice uses this black magician to show how in the face of the spiritualism invoked by Peter and the Christians magic is inherently evil, inherently the wrong side of faith. The silver chalice is a cup for holding the Grail, and it is to be etched by artisans with the figures of the apostles, unless the Magus Simon should dominate, and the thing become nothing but a goblet for feeding him better wine.

Seeing Past Black The Lone Ranger (1949–57); The Lone Ranger (Stuart Heisler, Wrather Productions, 1956); The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski, Walt Disney Pictures, 2013) The legend of the Lone Ranger has nourished American popular culture since the mid-1930s, in radio, television, and film. The most long-lived portrayer of the character was Clayton Moore; the most reviled Klinton Spilsbury; the least taken seriously Armie Hammer. Notwithstanding the numerous fictionalizations in which he thrived, the character is always attributed more or less the same origin. A group of (usually six) Texas Rangers are brutally attacked, most of them slain, but one manages to survive and is nursed by a native American, Tonto, to both health and a new identity. Donning a mask, he devotes his life, at Tonto’s side, to fighting evil. In the 1949–57 television serial, as well as in the 1956 film based on that show, both with Moore (1914–1999) and the Canadian Mohawk Jay Silverheels (1912–1980), the Ranger has access to a secret silver mine, wherefrom he funds himself and crafts the special silver bullets that are his signature. His white horse gets the name Silver from this mine. Invariably, the Lone Ranger’s mask is a rather small piece that covers his eyes and the bridge of his nose only. In terms of the mythology of the character, the Ranger is attached to this mask almost spiritually, and the unwritten law of the story is that he must never, in the presence of strangers, remove it to show his face (much in the deeply affected substructural way that in the Superman tales, the lead character must never touch Kryptonite or let anyone know that he is the “mild-mannered reporter” Clark Kent who changes costume, properly, out of view). The removal of the mask through force or accident works upon the Ranger much as a haircut did for the biblical Samson or exposure to Kryptonite for Superman: it radically disempowers,

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disenchants, and diminishes him. Rather than being superheroically potent and noble, without the mask he is a mere person. Which is to say, with the mask he is not a mere person. The mask elevates. In the Lone Ranger stories, the survivor of the original attack becomes a vigilante serving the ends of justice in honorable revenge for the deaths of his mates. But no rationale is given for the most iconic aspect of the tale, his donning the mask. Is he trying to avoid being slain if discovered as the surviving Ranger—in short, the mask signals his fear and wariness? Or is he masquerading, rather in the spirit of the Scarlet Pimpernel (who masked himself in darkness)—a masked avenger (pop cultural prototype) the more committed to honor, goodness, and righteousness the more his face is hidden? The figure, not the person performing him; that is, “The Lone Ranger,” not the Ranger himself. The hiding is marked and to be marked by us: because the mask that hides our hero, and elevates him in status, is black. Coal mine black. Pitch black. Destitution black. Perhaps the blackness of the device has special strength to confound the Eye of the Other, just as it seems to make the Ranger’s vision more acute. He does behave like a detective, picking up small details, calculating motives and eventualities. Roger Caillois’s observation of urban detection as an outgrowth of, an homage to, Fenimore Cooper’s wilderness tales is quoted by Walter Benjamin (Caillois, “Paris” 685–6, qtd. in Benjamin, Arcades 439): We must take as an established fact that this metamorphosis of the city is due to a transposition of the setting—namely, from the savannah and forest of Fenimore Cooper, where every broken branch signifies a worry or a hope, where every tree trunk hides an enemy rifle or the bow of an invisible and silent avenger. Beginning with Balzac, all writers have clearly recorded this debt and faithfully rendered to Cooper what they owed him. Works like Les Mohicans de Paris, by Alexander Dumas— works where the title says all—are extremely common. In the Lone Ranger tales, dusky Tonto, who is not either hidden or compromised by a black mask, watches the tree trunks while his palefaced companion—his once pale-faced companion; that face is halfblack now—plies his detection in the civilized canyons of saloons, banks, property managers’ offices, stables, the whole wooden armature of western civilization. When we try to see a person’s truth but are blocked by a black mask, an utter absence of illumination as it seems, or certainly this strange color that sucks in illumination so hungrily, frustration mounts to match the masked man’s honor by competition. The obstructing blackness incessantly states his stance above everyday social interaction, above normality. Wherever

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he intercedes, he stands apart. The mask forbids, just as it lures our gaze. The vortex of blackness, the flash of the secret that begs to be known. “I sometimes think I see that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret,” writes Norman O. Brown (Apocalypse 4). And of the mysteries that cannot be revealed, he quotes Ezra Pound: “Fools can only profane them. The dull can neither penetrate the secretum nor divulge it to others” (2). As secrets are the materiel of the Ranger and his mate, they are both clearly far from Fools, but the dramatic issue persists: how much of their arcane knowledge, of the detail they see in and surrounding the social world, is given over to the audience? How much of their keen black vision? The blackness of the mask is also emphatic colorfully, given the notable fact that until the 1956 film the character had been visualized strictly in black and white, the mask becoming a motile shadow. Once the story is in full color, behind the black blind the Ranger’s eyes contrasted with his white horse and white hat, and with the open faces of all who moved around, abiding or violating the law. He stood out from his surround, possessed not only position but also importance. The surround3 was, for the most part, the color of dry earth. Further: a convention of western stories in film and television, The Lone Ranger being no exception, is that to mask their identities cattle rustlers, bank robbers, and other miscreants—“bad guys”—pulled neck scarves up over mouths and noses, making eyes the only thing visible of their faces. The Ranger does the reverse. What he says comes out of an articulate—also visible—mouth. But his act of observing, noticing, detecting, and plotting trajectory seems a secret, hidden, dark one. The black mask conceals his intention, misguiding others as to his moves, allowing him to evade or parry attack and also to attack more efficiently. A defensive as well as an aggressive black. It is from the black cavern behind the black mask that the Ranger so astutely sees his world, sees beneath all the great circus of confounding surfaces people trade. Years ago, after one of his traveling shows, I met the Lone Ranger who was seated in a maroon Cadillac with Silver happy in his carrier hitched behind. He still wore the black mask. Many years later, on a bus heading from Newark Airport into the City, I sat near a man I thought was Clayton Moore, but of course without the black mask it was impossible for me to tell. A black mask: keeper of secrets even in its absence.

Much of The Lone Ranger for television was shot at the Vasquez Rocks. The film used, among other locations, the Bronson Caves in Los Angeles, site, the same year, of scenes from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 3

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Fate Treasure Island (Byron Haskin, Walt Disney Productions, 1950) “I’m the on’y one as knows the place,” confides the rum-sotted Billy Bones to young Jim Hawkins, near the beginning of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883): “He gave it me at Savannah, when he lay a-dying, like as if I was to now, you see. But you won’t peach unless they get the black spot on me, or unless you see that Black Dog again, or a seafaring man with one leg, Jim—him above all.” “But what is the black spot, Captain?” I asked. “That’s a summons, mate. I’ll tell you if they get that. But you keep your weather-eye open, Jim, and I’ll share with you equals, upon my honour.” (22) For Billy, “summons” is tantamount to “curse,” or “ordination,” because from this moment on he is sharply sensitive to those who come near him, most especially a blind old beggar named Pew: I was so utterly terrified of the blind beggar that I forgot my terror of the captain, and as I opened the parlour door, cried out the words he had ordered in a trembling voice. The poor captain raised his eyes, and at one look the rum went out of him, and left him staring sober. The expression of his face was not so much of terror as of mortal sickness. He made a movement to rise, but I do not believe he had enough force left in his body. (25–6) The beggar demands that Jim seize the captain’s left hand and bring it near his right, then passes something into Billy’s palm, “which closed upon it instantly”: “And now that’s done,” said the blind man; and at the words he suddenly left hold of me, and, with incredible accuracy and nimbleness, skipped out of the parlour and into the road, where, as I still stood motionless, I could hear his stick go tap-tap-tapping into the distance. It was some time before either I or the captain seemed to gather our senses; but at length, and about at the same moment, I released his wrist, which I was still holding, and he drew in his hand and looked sharply into the palm.

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“Ten o’clock!” he cried. “Six hours. We’ll do them yet”; and he sprang to his feet. Even as he did so, he reeled, put his hand to his throat, stood swaying for a moment, and then, with a peculiar sound, fell from his whole height face foremost to the floor. (26) It is made boldly evident by the author, then, that l

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the black spot has in fact been conveyed by old Pew into the palm of Billy Bones. He has been issued the “summons.” there is power beyond natural understanding in this black spot, whatever in fact it is, because only to gaze upon it is to come to the end of one’s life, as though through supernatural force. the young boy has been instrumental in the conveyance of the black spot, yet innocently, since he knows nothing about the fearsome beggar or about what the old creature could have in his hand. the seafaring Billy Bones was well aware of the “black spot” and its powers before it came upon him and suspected with some genuine anxiety (only marginally allayed by his overconsumption of rum, against Dr. Livesey’s commands) that some nefarious forces would be coming for him. and, finally, since ailing Billy has already met, and administered a cutlass slash to, another seafarer named Black Dog; and since, as Jim informs old Pew, all this action is taking place at the Admiral Benbow Inn located in, of all places, Black Hill Cove, we cannot suppose it is the mere mention of the color “black” in connexion with the “spot” that is intended by Stevenson to initiate and mount the reader’s alarm (that is, to engage the reader with the text). The “black spot” is black in a special way, a way that other black items are not. The blackness inheres in a spot (a stain, a macula, a disfigurement).

Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell! (Othello III.iii.448) Numerous renditions of this scene have been offered in stage, film, and television adaptations of Treasure Island, a particularly charming, and muchrepeated aspect being the contrast between the plain-spoken innocence of Jim and the shadowy, germ-infested, ominous, even portentous language and tone of Billy Bones, never more pronounced or more ominous than when he invokes the blackness of the black spot. A blackness of portent, of the end. Bones is a major introduction, to popular and widespread audiences, of the “pirate type,” and Stevenson’s carefully orthographed representation of his West Country speech (which oy tayke pleshure in ’ere replicatin’ in order fer

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dem’nstrytion) has become synonymous at least in film representations with the “Pirate.” More on this anon. Bones is narrative precursor to the soon-to-appear central fellow of the story, Long John Silver, the one-legged hobbler with a parrot on his shoulder who blathers in a “salty,” “rough-hewn,” and “seaworthy” tongue, aye he does, arrrrgh! In the renowned 1950 Disney film, the template from which virtually all filmic renditions of the story have derived, Bones is played by the estimable (and accent-rich) actor Finlay Currie, seventy-two at the time of filming. The “black spot” which terrifies, then kills him gains much of its potency from the voice he uses to acknowledge and identify it. It is not only a lethal threat, it is black piracy, blackness that runs among pirates not landlubbers (so that Jim quite believably needs to be told what it is). Currie had given a striking performance of another urchin of the sea, the prisoner Magwitch, in David Lean’s 1948 classic Great Expectations, also dialoguing there with an innocent boy in language contrasty and dark. If the “black spot” is a grave and horrifying thing in itself, as invocation in the mouth of Currie as Bones it is graver and more horrifying still. Gryve ’n’orrifying—Arrrrgh! And the delicious Long John is, gloriously, Robert Newton. A notable early-eighteenth-century concentration of money and manpower was to be found in the West Country port city of Bristol, which, being situated on the Avon, offered ample opportunity for ships plying trade between England and Africa, England and the Caribbean colonies, and England and Europe. The seafarers who established England’s economic dominance at the time hailed largely from this part of the country, sipped their ale at The Hatchet Inn on Frogmore Street (from 1606), entering the company of Blackbeard and others by way of a door laid over with tanned human skin; or Stevenson’s model for his Spy Glass Tavern, The Coach and Horses (1603), whence they could use a spyhole to peer over to the Redcliffe Caves; or the currently famous Llandoger Trow (from 1664)—therefore grunted with a Bristol twang. And the characters who came into piracy, essentially the attack upon a merchant vessel for theft of its stores and wares, were drawn very largely from this seagoing population. There was nothing caricatured or bizarre, then, about Billy Bones, Long John, and others on the voyage of the Hispaniola speaking “like pirates,” that is, in West Country dialect. With the black tongue, if you like. In a black spirit. On the black wind.4 Which brings up some last characteristics of the “black spot”: l

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With gratitude to Alex Clayton for the Bristol history.

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forces one might expect to encounter offshore. The Black Spot from black waters. A spot from the deep blackness of the sea. Thus, the “black spot” is not signal in the law of the land but marks passage on the seas and in seagoing relations.5 We are given no way to know whether in landlubber law, the conferral of the black spot from one hand to a second may constitute a crime of black proportions. We are not, inherently, inside terrestrial civilization in summoning, remarking, fearing the black spot. And so, with the “black spot,” we are in the territory of Odysseus far from home.

Far from his home, then, “at sea” in the Admiral Benbow, Billy Bones is awarded the black spot. Ailing there, and having scoffed at Livesey’s proscription against rum, he knows his days are numbered at any rate and that he will likely die—as he does—by the side of this well-meaning boy (Bobby Driscoll). Far from home, and indeed far from the very idea of home (the seaman’s fate, because he is always born by the winds), Billy does not offer up even a clue as to where on earth he began, quite as though all of his existence has been upon the waves, which means, at some distance this way or that way from the West Country. Jim Hawkins has a landed mentality, knowing his position on the map of England (Black Hill Cove) but the seafarers he meets tell place and time in a very different way, counting the apogees of the sun, for example; by proximity to or distance from moments when important events took place; and dropping in and out of rum-induced traumas. Bones possesses a “secret place” to be found on no conventional map because it is in his heart now. Thus, it is to the very heart of Billy Bones that the “summons” of the black spot is directed. Finally, the black spot is a map itself, in that its presence gives cause to the events that set a significant journey in motion. Carried away by the author’s elegant prose and gripping tale, it is easy to neglect the fact that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island in the mid-1880s, exactly at the time of Capt. James Cook’s third voyage (with its principally geographical and cultural-economic motives). He would have been writing the passages I quote here not more than three or four years after Cook’s death (1779). And in 1889, he journeyed to the south seas,

How fascinating it is to consider the seaman’s absence from terrestrial law (organization) in light of Michel Foucault’s discussion of the Renaissance history of the Narrenschiff, in which madmen “led an easy and wandering existence.” He reports that “in Frankfort, in 1399, seamen were instructed to rid the city of a madman who walked about the streets naked; in the first years of the fifteenth century, a criminal madman was expelled in the same manner from Mainz” (8). Folly “embarks all men without distinction on its insane ship and binds them to the vocation of a common odyssey” yet folly is not madness: “If folly leads each man into a blindness where he is lost, the madman, on the contrary, reminds each man of his truth” (14). 5

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becoming something of a seafarer himself, visiting Hawai’i commencing late January and February of that year and staying in Waikiki in September and October of 1893 (the hau tree beneath which he sat to write is still in existence; it may be that I sat there to write these lines). Given that he died within about a year of that (December 1894), one might suppose he had been summoned with his own “black spot,” a certain period, perhaps, upon a certain page.

A Black Stream Grease (Randall Kleiser, Paramount, 1978) It was becoming clear to social scientists by the early 1960s that the highschool system routinely used specific tactics for differentiating between various student groups and directing them by way of divergent pathways toward dissimilar educational, finally experiential ends. Aaron V. Cicourel and John I. Kitsuse’s The Educational Decision-Makers looked at the way some, but not all, students were deemed qualified for college and decided that the variation among students was significantly “a consequence of the administrative organization and decisions of personnel in the high school, … characteristic of the administrative organization of the high school” (emphasis mine). They saw a direct relation between “routine decisions of the guidance and counseling personnel” and “college/non-college decisions and, by implication, … the occupational choices made by students” (6). What Cicourel and Kitsuse call a process of “ability grouping” leads the school “to control the students’ access to higher educational facilities and, in turn, their life chances” (16). The process of streaming, expressly identified here for the first time by Cicourel and Kitsuse, and by now so commonplace in high schools as to be entirely taken for granted, not only effectively divided the population, establishing a de facto class structure, but also took young people at a remarkably early stage in their lives and, through measurement, statistical prediction, and the postulate of variable intellectual skill, actually guided some into higher learning (whether or not they wished it) while blocking others. At the (gigantic) high school I attended, there were four streams in action, already by 1959: academic (which meant, college-bound); secretarial (which led to subservient jobs [not pointed to as such, of course] as secretaries, assistants, clerks, and so on); technical, which led to mechanical occupations such as car repair; and artistic, out of which came numerous graphic designers for print, stage, television, film, and advertising. One feature of the high school, then and now, deserves special emphasis. It approximated (if not actually being) what Erving Goffman called, in

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1962, a “total institution.” As with prisons, mental hospitals, and military organizations, the high school was a setting in which virtually all aspects of clients’ lives were monitored, shaped, regulated, and subjected to reward and punishment based on overriding systemic needs and presumed values incongruent with the social backgrounds and aspirations of those who were trapped there. A student’s identity was subject to reshaping, indeed complete reforming (as had been described in Schein’s post-Korean-War analysis of brainwashing). For high-school students, though they spent only part of their lives within its walls, the institution’s policies, moral presumptions, and values were persuasive everywhere, and young people often thought of themselves as being—not only at school—the persons high-school personnel called them. In the case of streaming, then, because it was undertaken in a semi-total institution, the “college-bound” student Monday to Friday came to see herself as “college-bound” all the time; and the student who wasn’t “college-bound” never really thought of college as a choice, even—perhaps especially—having an illicit beer Saturday night. Yet one finds sparks of initiative, spirit, and strength inside the institution, reason enough to be concerned about the repressive and dampening spirit generally encouraged there. As Goffman writes, “Every total institution can be seen as a kind of dead sea in which little islands of vivid, encapturing activity appear. Such activity can help the individual withstand the psychological stress usually engendered by assaults upon the self” (69–70). School life was described in painful detail by Edgar Z. Friedenberg, whose summary observation was that high-school students “have a prisoner’s sense of time. They don’t know what time it is outside” (55); and that in high schools “the fundamental pattern is still one of control, distrust, and punishment” (57). As to what students actually learn in the high school: First of all, they learn to assume that the state has the right to compel adolescents to spend six or seven hours a day, five days a week, thirtysix or so weeks a year, in a specific place, in charge of a particular group of persons in whose selection they have no voice, performing tasks about which they have no choice, without remuneration and subject to specialized regulations and sanctions that are applicable to no one else in the community nor to them except in this place. … So the first thing the young learn in school is that there are certain sanctions and restrictions that apply only to them; that they do not participate fully in the freedoms guaranteed by the state, and that therefore, these freedoms do not really partake of the character of inalienable rights. (60, emphasis original) If in such a place, and subjected to streaming, a young man were to find himself underneath a somewhat beaten-up Pontiac Bonneville, covering it and his dungarees with grease as he attempted a repair under the hawkeye of a teacher (very often a man recently enough demobbed from the army),

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he might easily believe himself subjected to a life sentence for a crime he could not remember committing, eternally damned to wear the grease gun at his belt and to aim his loving gaze into a crank case or an exhaust pipe. He would become Danny Zucco, hero of Grease (1978), an only slightly parodic attempt to open the high school to the critical (if chuckling) eye. Danny (John Travolta) and his greaser friends are typical of the boys (there were never girls in this stream) pinned to a “Technical” education. They wouldn’t be going to college, but they had a taste for feminine beauty and would often have their eyes on girls who would. In the film, the paradigm is Sandy (Olivia Newton-John), as clean, as grease-free, as optimistically bright-eyed, and as focused as any resident of an “academic stream” had to be. Danny and Sandy will have a summer love, she being touched by his uncouth couthness, he being smitten by her demure perfection. While all around them high-school life goes on (and on), interrupted regularly for a bouncy Louis St. Louis song and dance routine, Danny and Sandy will be living in a dream, letting themselves forget, for just a breather under the stars, the script that has already, somewhere else, and by figures they are not entitled to meet, been written for them. If they do not have inalienable rights (and the film makes it perfectly plain that they do not), love allows them to transcend the deficit, albeit a hyperromanticized “love,” the meat of Hollywood. Danny (famously) sports a jet-black short-sleeved T, and Sandy is all banana yellow cashmere and bobby socks.6 At the dance, he is in a black suit (with flamingo pink shirt) and she is in fluffy white. His gang mates are generally strapped into simulations of the Perfecto 618 steerhide jacket (by Irving Schott, whose company originated it in 1928): theirs are the 118, introduced in 1977 and made of naked cowhide. Danny’s own has stars added on the epaulettes. The black leather motorcycle jacket (a nod to Marlon Brando in The Wild One [1953]) invokes a tough, machinic body and defensive-offensive attitude (as in, “You think I’m less than you?”), thus perfectly suiting the greasers generally treated by the system as lowest of the low although we can see they are sensitive, tender, and sweet, each and every one. Some viewers push all this away. But the vision is searing. While the film is often dubbed an “affectionate” play on high-school life, it is a critique for viewers who take it at face value (and, I think, a critique of viewers who do not see the high school for what it is). Sandy must finally commit herself to Danny by film’s end. She does this by wearing a tight-fitting black-leather body suit herself as she sings the finale song, John Farrar’s “You’re the One That I Want.” Black for liberty. Black for withdrawal from the program, because in that outfit she steps

Girls’ white ankle-length socks popular through the 1960s. Those who sported them were “bobby soxers.” 6

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away from the “Sandy” manufactured by the streaming system, indicates that she intends, at Danny’s side, to populate one of those “little islands of vivid, encapturing activity.” The black leather is very apt to seem initially shocking, stunning, noteworthy on Sandy, yet it never seems this way on Danny, and that is the clue that can help us undo a prior understanding of identity and attitude that has already been projected onto these characters and the conventional memory. It is quite as arbitrary for him to be confined in black leather as for her. Or, more harshly: Danny would happily grease his way into college were he given a chance. And as we see with Travolta himself, who is a highschool dropout, leaving the school system behind needn’t wound a career. The impossibility of college—read, bourgeois success—does not lodge in his intelligence or, as is so easily presumed, lack of it. Meanwhile, the system requires marching in step, upon a carpet that is spread out, even here at Rydell High, only for Sandy and her smart, privileged, self-conscious friends who would not wear black leather to save their lives.

The Black Father Star Wars (George Lucas, Lucasfilm/Twentieth Century Fox, 1977) The one thousand four hundred and forty people jammed into the Astor Plaza Theatre, two stories below ground at 1515 Broadway, entrance on West 44th Street, for the 8:30 p.m. showing of Star Wars on Wednesday July 13, 1977, did not have the chilling pleasure of seeing Darth Vader. What they—what we—saw, just a few minutes past 8:30, was a dimming of the lights until we were muttering in darkness, and then, after the majestic and famous Twentieth Century Fox logo and a quiet black screen, presenting in lake blue, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …,” and the giant triangular prow of the star cruiser emerging onto the screen over our heads and moving away until the full thing was visible against the black black universe studded with white white stars, and … And that was it. The sound groaning to a halt. The screen going black. And a man with a flashlight walking to the front of the space and asking everyone, please, very calmly and quietly, please, please, to exit the way we came, and at the door we would receive a complimentary admission for a future date. We stumbled en masse to the long escalators, which were not working. Up, up, up an endless stairway. Past the doorman generous with his tickets. Into the street. The dark dark queerly dark street, as dark as the universe in Star Wars (and entirely unlike Manhattan). An eerie silence, a few distant car

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horns. Civilians with flashlights at the corners helpfully directing traffic. This was the East Coast power blackout of 1977. The drama of it, which only began for us in midtown and grew into magnificent and unheard-of proportion as the hours wound on, was finally something out of human scale, out of the scale of earthly civilization as one knew it. And so it could not have been a more fitting way of jumping into the Star Wars universe. Fitting elementally, because the blackout, which covered the entire northeast of the United States and Canada, brought on a stimulating and agonizing shutdown, a tranquility that black Vader reflects in his movement and an eeriness with which he is suffused. When he makes an entrance, he is something of a shifting blackout himself, this huge, menacing, sibilantly gasping thing. A blackout come alive, if we can even think that he is alive. Darth Vader (as virtually everyone has noted, vader = vater [father]) is a gleaming obsidian black, but obsidian with personality and spirit, a stoniness in motion. Odd that while we learn directly that he does not mean well nevertheless we find ourselves attached to him, always scanning for the black presence. What can this affection for the nefarious be, other than desire unmasking itself, the hand of consciousness reaching out to touch the poisonous forbidden. Will the flame burn my finger, as it would any finger, or is my finger somehow impervious? Am I, that is, the first human safe from flame? Am I, perhaps, not human at all? Solo, Skywalker, Leia are threatened by Vader, unsettled and demeaned, and they should worry, but we can come close and escape his stultifying magnetism, we in our ensured comfort. Safe and cozy at his dangerous side. Kapos always think this way, and surely one of the problems with the film is that it turns us into kapos by making Vader cute. At one point in the film, he strangles a subordinate merely by looking at him and the camera position gives us to stand very close by and blithely survive. The dark Vader, the dark Father. What makes the father dark? And if the father is dark, is not the mother bright? The mother, origine du monde, is bright and knowable as a source; source of my consciousness, source of the world as I have come to know it. The father, by contrast, is an unknown force somewhere in the background, or in the distance beyond the limit of what I can see and imagine. Of him I can never be absolutely sure, while the mother is always remembered. Of the father we see only a dark shadow, so dark a shadow—Lucas would like us to believe—that he is unrecognizable in his paternity, and when that paternity is brought into the light we have a moment of stunning, also disabling, revelation. The black secret. A presence out of the black nowhere. Black Darth is always surrounded by countless gleamy white flunkies with ray guns, Imperial Troopers. He is their supreme commander, occupationally a military type. The black leader atop his black stallion atop the black hill under the black clouds, and not to be seen by those who fight for him in

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the white valley. He commands telepathically and is ushered around the universe like a monarch in a gilded carriage. The voice of darkness: well, we know it, now even in the back of the mind. It is low, gloriously so, the voice of a fine stage actor, one who struts the boards and commands attention with every gesture (the part is sounded by the magnificent James Earl Jones). We are told that something horrible happened to Vader, before … before …, before what? Just before. And so he must live his life strapped into the black face mask we cannot stop staring at (that renders him porcine). His air must be drawn from some interior tank, and so we hear his loud, considerably amplified, echochamber breathing. Space suit breath, as with Keir Dullea in the red suit in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Every black inhalation an announcement. In that hollow, encaved Vader breath a remarkable transformation is accomplished: that when we recollect our experience of this being, nothing he ever says and no action he ever undertakes are as memorable, as salient, as haunting as his breathing. Darth Vader is the character who breathes. Black breath. Just as, in his black suit, he is a paragon of untouchable mechanism, a robot. Yet as a monster of assemblage, he is also touchingly human, prototype of the “hard body” (a name Susan Jeffords coined in the Reagan era) now become mere image and affectation, a brutal carapace for a secret organism that is exceedingly delicate, vulnerable, sensitive. Because Vader’s black heart is impossible to see, it must reside in the territory of our imagination, black with mystery. The black cape is draped over the black armor, and the black armor is laid upon an invisible body. Another Invisible Man. But in James Whale’s classic (1933), the wraith that Griffin (Claude Rains) becomes is bandaged white. John Carpenter ups the ante (1992) by making his mannikin (Chevy Chase) scamper, invisible, in the rain, with the drops hitting and sliding off him in rivulets of silver. But Vader shuns, refuses, pushes back against our vision, giving us nothing but shadow, a weaponized suit, a voice hissing threats and commands and gurgles of selfcomfort, a mask built to offer unending glare. Black Vader always both present and absent. Star Wars, indeed the entire saga (with Vader reappearing), is a colorful endeavor, not least because of the construction of the many alien forms our heroes must meet. Vader moves through the multicolored narrative like a black hole, in every situation giving off a reek of human-shaped emptiness. Where he goes, only the black shadow of what he might otherwise have been goes with him. But because of this odd—most notably, oddly shaped—black vacancy in motion (against, especially on strange planets, a very colorful field), Darth Vader also analogizes the empty zone created in the traveling matte, a principal effects technique in cinema since the early days of the 1910s.

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Film someone against a black background7 using very high-contrast stock. In processing cause the entire “black” area to disappear and the figure appears as a black form. If the figure moves during photography, so does the black form, frame by frame. Later, sandwich the form against a piece of film containing the background you want and you are able get a resultant piece of film where that black form (shaped precisely like the model) moves against the background. Finally, sandwich against this the original shot of the model this time printed in reverse high-contrast so the ground drops out and you have the full picture. That black thing in the process, that essential form before it is filled in, is the essence of Darth Vader, the dark father (of the effect). Thus a Lucasian joke. Vader in Star Wars is rather like a matted projection sandwiched into every scene where he appears, since we detect him as a moving black form. We are always anticipating the transformation of that form into something visible and real (in the terms of the narrative); something that is not a gaping hole. Our anticipation becomes possession, Vader becomes our black doll.

Black Search Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, Universal, 1960): II What can it mean that Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) who as first we peep in on her is wearing a white bra with her boyfriend changes it, in her bedroom before leaving town Friday afternoon, for a black one? The white bra was useful under the white shirt she wore during the afternoon (the lovemaking session we interrupted was at lunch hour); it didn’t “show”; but at home she changes into a mid-tone shirt under which that white bra would have done just fine. Is it that she has only one white bra and wants a change of clothing? Is it that she wants to signal something to herself? Unless she has plans for another, perhaps contradictory, lovemaking session in the evening, nobody is going to see the black bra. If she is signaling, what does the signal say? The black bra seems more modest and self-effacing than the white one, which glowed and prodded the organ of attention. Marion came to work after lunch and found herself, unexpectedly, inside the boss’s office while he concluded a real estate sale. She was handed an envelope with forty thousand dollars in it for safekeeping until the bank reopened on Monday. She intends to steal this money. Are we being clued

In order to replicate the process as it was used until this film. By the 1970s, simulating a television effect, a blue screen was used to make the matte in camera. In later years the backing became green. 7

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into her deeper motive by the blackness (read, criminality) of the bra? Again, it is the white bra that makes Marion look more equivocal, more put on, more a cover for some underhanded operation. She plans to drive alone through the night, find her boyfriend Sam in the small town where he lives, use the money to lure him into marriage. Is the black bra more purposive, more businesslike, more “to the point”? Pointed and nocturnal. More pressingly: on the road Marion has adventures unpleasant enough, including pulling onto the shoulder for a catnap and being interrupted there by a highway patrolman with giant black eyes (sunglasses); exchanging her car with a suspecting used-car dealer; then driving through a pelting rainstorm, the washer blades hypnotic, the oncoming lights blinding. She finds the Bates Motel, meets Norman Bates, registers for the night, is regaled with a chicken sandwich and anecdotes about the motel-keeper’s mother (beloved mother, best friend), is peeped upon (he is a robust young voyeur) as she undresses and goes to shower. In all of this adventure, this adventure so mundane yet not for a moment mundane, it is only while Norman is peeking through the hole he has punched in the wall (under the little framed picture of “Susannah and the Elders”) that we see the black bra for a second time. Under her clothing, upon her skin, the black sheath. Never on the road. And afterward, well … It is difficult to write about Psycho bearing in mind that some readers have not seen it. … and afterward, well: we do not see the black bra either. We do not see the black bra again. Without definitive symbolic resonance, without any direct bearing upon the filmic action, Hitchcock takes care to show us Marion first in her white bra and then in her black one. As we progress in this film, as Marion progresses through her (businesslike) day, the movement is toward black: a black that has no further function. Except, perhaps, that it tints a certain swamp. What can this be about, the blackness of the bra. The shots in which we are carefully shown it. The image of a black presence packaging, bounding off, or protecting a white one (the bra: Marion’s skin) is reprised only once in the film, near the conclusion, when we find ourselves staring at a glaring and bizarrely attractive white object which swings back and forth through an envelope of blackest darkness. Perhaps Marion’s black bra on her white skin is foreshadowing through some magical inversion. And yet, I suspect not really. In the cultural convention of the time (1960), the black bra was sexier than the white one; the white bra was tidy, proper, even perfunctory while the black one was racy, suggestive, magnetic. To reach out for the pristine white bra is possibly to taint or mar it with soiling contact, but to reach out for the black one is to make a move that will prove ultimately invisible, secret. The white bra advertises the body, but primly, with reserve; the

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black bra makes the body a hungering mystery. Note that Marion’s sexual moment, upon the culmination of which we intrude, is handled in a white bra, not a black one. She is teasing Sam for lunch. In her black bra she is never sexy, she never implies sex, she is never involved with eroticism in any way (except, perhaps, in an ultimate way upon which Freud has discoursed). At any rate, Marion has sexual feeling in a white bra, or at least gives a show of having sexual feeling. A second problem is more daunting: Marion—as body, as personality, as figurehead, as a focus for our concentrated attention—is really not so central in this film, and so the careful decoration of her body, the body that belongs to and always indicates Marion, is finally of no importance. The black bra and Marion will both fade from view. Hitchcock had specifically intended the black bra: “A bra and slip—even just showing the midriff section—was very racy then and fairly verboten,” Rita Riggs explained. “There was great equivocation about whether Janet would wear a black or white bra and slip in the opening. It went on and on. We had each ready, of course, and not until we were almost ready to shoot did Mr. Hitchcock finally choose white for the opening, black for after she steals the money. It was strictly for character statement. He had an obsession for the ‘good’ girl or the ‘bad’ girl.” (Rebello 73) When Marion has dressed with black and headed off in her car, when she is at the wheel, when she buys the new car and drives through the blackening rain, when she comes through blackness to the motel, when she meets Norman and signs in, when he brings her to his study (with the black stuffed birds) and gives her to eat—when all of this happens—we have forgotten about the black bra. Her undressing before the shower will give us a quick reminder. Yet reminder for what? Given that it doesn’t function dramatically through the action to come (that is, no event occurs because of it), why need we share Norman’s Peeping-Tom view so that, like him, we can see her black underwear and thus remember the origin of this journey, the moment she put it on, that originary moment with the black bra when we, too, were peeping. Is her presence in Norman’s secret gaze the moral payoff of her having changed into that black bra? The white underwear would also have worked less effectively through the peephole, because he is peeping from a distance, and white would have been too close a match for Marion’s skin. Seeing her through the hole, we note the black underwear as underwear, we sense the character methodically being stripped (further on which, view Anny Ondra and Cyril Ritchard in Hitchcock’s Blackmail [1929]). This reminder not only retrieves a memory: oh yes, that black bra (we watched her in it as she prepared to be

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a thief) but, because the reminder involved disrobing and re-robing, pinions us to the thought of going beneath the surface, peeling, looking behind the mask. Norman, gazing erotically, is not undressing Marion in this rather general way, as he watches her undress herself; nor remembering. He is snatching a view of her body, exciting for him (the excitement revealing him); but it is the viewer getting the reminder, since we were in her bedroom and Norman was not. We were in the car dealership toilet with her, looking at her pronounced bustline in the mirror as she counted money, perhaps remembering the black bra under the dress, perhaps only counting along with her, but in any case, Norman was not there. He is watching; we are remembering. The black gives us moral placement, and Norman only a dark thrill. In this way we can see the distinction between excitement and evaluation.

Jocko In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, The Mirisch Corporation, 1967) Two stark moments from In the Heat of the Night (1967), a film that is a portrait of American racism (certainly of its time—the Civil Rights Act was 1964). In the first of these, a train is pulling into the station at Sparta, Mississippi, where a tall, dignified man alights in an expensive suit. Immediately, because his skin is black, he is picked up by local police and brought to the station for interrogation, where, to the locals’ embarrassment, he is identified as a detective from the North, come to assist with a murder investigation. In the second, Virgil Tibbs (“They call me Mister Tibbs”) is riding along with Chief Gillespie, on a straight dirt road through a cotton plantation (the film’s title song is in the background, sung by Ray Charles), with pickers and loaded trucks gliding by. “None of that fer you, uh, Virgil?” the Chief mocks. Rod Steiger chewing gum while he snips at Sidney Poitier, glancing askance through yellow-lensed sunglasses. Virgil staring back icily, without a word. In only a short moment, the scandalous (yet here in the South without scandal) demeanor of the cop has been radically changed. The two men have reached the Plantation House of legend. At the door, a black butler greets them, in a starched white coat, and guides them to find Mr. Endicott (Larry Gates), the owner, in his greenhouse (a fabulous collection of orchids). Here one of the explosive moments in American cinematic history. Suggesting quite vaguely that Endicott may know a little more about the murder than he is letting on, Tibbs stands proudly, eyes open, watching the man, and Endicott, his lips turned down in a silent snarl, swiftly reaches out and slaps

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his face with the back of his hand. Just as swiftly, Tibbs reaches out and with the back of his hand slaps back: ENDICOTT (looking over at the police chief): Gillespie— GILLESPIE (off): Yeah. ENDICOTT:  You saw it! GILLESPIE (seated, looking up): Oh, I saw it. ENDICOTT (grimacing): Well, what are you gonna do about it? GILLESPIE (pensive, eyes turning): I don’t … know. ENDICOTT (to Gillespie): I’ll remember that. (To Tibbs:) There was a time … when I could have had you shot.   Tibbs glares into Endicott’s face. The scene makes explicit, to a degree at that point unheralded in American filmmaking, the radical discontinuity between Black and white experience in the 1960s United States. As preparation for this: the butler’s jacket is even whiter than Gillespie’s skin; whiter than Endicott’s; blatantly, surgically, so that we will see (possibly before thinking) that it is not the color white but the whiteness of skin that holds sway in this culture. Endicott is welcoming in his orchidarium—rich man’s hobby, rich man’s prerogative. Everything about his manner announces prerogative, preference, and power, notably his little lecture about orchids and how, “like the Negro,” they require continual care; and his astonishment that Tibbs should know about them. A white man’s hobby, a rich white man’s prerogative. The matched facial slaps are graphically ineradicable, but the two arm actions, white and black, spring out of nowhere—Whack! Whack!—one haughty and demeaning, the other following with scarcely a breath, as in a natural reaction. Virgil’s blackness is not protected. He is not in the North now. He is in plantation land. (To avoid racial troubles, much of the shooting was scheduled for Belleville, Illinois.) Endicott’s cotton pickers iconize class distinction, we can note from Gillespie’s car as he and Tibbs pass through the fields. Young and old, they are hard at work in what looks like the glare of midday heat, and there is a close-shot portrait of one woman, her hair wrapped in a bandana, a look of perceptive resignation on her face. These people are not the slaves of the ante-bellum South, for whom, as we learn from a telling narrative, life was unceasingly exigent: When I remembered that one of the chief annoyances of slavery, in the most mild form, is the liability of being at any moment sold into the worst form, it seemed that no consideration, not even that of life itself, could tempt me to give up the thought of flight. And then when I considered the difficulties of the way—the reward that would be offered—the human bloodhounds that would be set upon my track—the weariness—the

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hunger—the gloomy thought, of not only losing all one’s friends in one day, but of having to seek and to make new friends in a strange world. (Pennington 216) The specter of the unemployment line has replaced the specter of the bloodhound. There is a virtually immeasurable disparity between the life conditions of these workers (paid by piecework) and a man like Endicott, who has a dignified-looking African American (Negro, one would have said at the time) butler to serve his guests lemonade in the conservatory. He boasts himself a man who can presume superiority because of his high standing in the community (a standing itself not unrelated to his class position): “May I see your police chief?” he asked. Fred, at the desk, spoke into an intercom. A moment later he nodded, and Sam, sensing his role, led the way. “Mr. Endicott, this is Chief Gillespie,” he said after they reached the office. Endicott held out his hand. “We have met,” he said simply. “I am a member of the city council.” Gillespie got to his feet and came out quickly from behind his desk. “Of course, Mr. Endicott. Thank you very much for coming down.” He started back to his chair and then turned around. “Please sit down,” he invited. (Ball n.p.) Endicott’s claim of “membership” is a swank cover for his brute economic power. “I belong to a group, I have passed the test of membership,” is a far cry from “The group is me: me and people of my kind.” That worker we see close-up in the field: is she dreaming of another life, or of what her life might have been had her circumstances not dictated such constraints? There is one sin that slavery committed against me which I never can forgive. It robbed me of my education; the injury is irreparable; I feel the embarrassment more seriously now than I ever did before. It cost me two years’ hard labor, after I fled, to unshackle my mind; it was three years before I had purged my language of slavery’s idioms. (Pennington 246) In his pride, Endicott is historically, biographically, culturally, psychologically, and morally unprepared to meet Virgil Tibbs, an African American he cannot easily suppose to be low. Were he less privileged by birth, he could surely be one of Rush Limbaugh’s Angry White Men, as described by Michael Kimmel:

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All that he needs is that shared sense of aggrieved entitlement—that sense that “we,” the rightful heirs of America’s bounty, have had what is “rightfully ours” taken away from us by “them.” (32) Endicott’s is not protest against the specter of his rightful bounty being snatched away by a “feckless” them but advance guard against it, since he knows in his heart that his “rights” are but fictions, that the “enemy” is at the gates. His South is a post-Birmingham-1963 South. He hears still, somewhere in the hot breeze, an echo of what James Baldwin said in a televised response to Martin Luther King’s great speech: The American white republic has to ask itself why it was necessary for them to invent “the nigger.” I am not a nigger. I have never called myself one. But one comes into the world and the world decides you are this for its own reasons. And it’s very important for the American, in terms of the future, in terms of its health, in terms of the transformation we are all seeking, that he face this question—that he needed the nigger for something. Sidney Poitier had touched James Baldwin’s heart and soul. “It’s only the black artists in this country,” he wrote, “—and it’s only beginning to change now—who have been called upon to fulfill their responsibilities as artists and, at the same time, insist on their responsibilities as citizens” (222). He went to see what he found a disappointing Blackboard Jungle (1955) “but I thought that Sidney was beautiful, vivid, and truthful in it. He somehow escaped the film’s framework, so much so that until today, his is the only performance I remember” (223). Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs, another man who does not think of himself as a “nigger,” and very much “beautiful, vivid, and truthful,” also does not inherit the identity of, has never surrendered to be, and does not imagine himself as one of the black males observed repeatedly by bell hooks: Eager to “do it for daddy” … individuals tortured by what I call “unrequited longing for white male love.” For the most part, black males do not represent themselves in this manner. They are represented in this manner by white cultural productions, particularly in television, film and advertising. The colonizing culture’s manipulation of representation is essential to the maintenance of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. (105) Vivienne Sanders reports the actor to have been precise and demanding about his participation in the film (he was already star of The Defiant Ones [1958], Porgy and Bess [1959], Paris Blues [1961], Lilies of the Field [1963], A Patch of Blue [1965], and To Sir, with Love [1967]), notably about the

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Endicott scene and director Norman Jewison’s specific plan for the slap: “I’ll make this movie for you if you give me your absolute guarantee when he slaps me I slap him right back and you guarantee that it will play in every version of this movie,” proposed Poitier (qtd. in Sanders 178). Play in every version: in both Northern and Southern theaters. But, as to black: A tiny flashing instant in the film, so tiny and so flashing it might fly past without notice. Gillespie and Tibbs are striding up the walkway to Endicott’s door. The camera is low to the ground, knee height. We see suddenly, screen left, complacent upon the carefully mown lawn, a gleaming Jocko, the black stable attendant struck out in cast iron and paint,8 his jacket red as blood, his eyes and cap white as moons, and his face a stunning, ethereal black, shiny, uncompromised, glaring. No African American is, indeed, black, iron black, but this awkward representation is. Gillespie’s hand gently rubs over the top of Jocko’s cap. An affectionate relaxation, a condescension. Unquestionable possession. Jocko at work: we will witness brutality in the orchidarium, Endicott’s presumptuous outrage and Tibbs’s response, but it is crucial to grasp that this is not the story of two individual men on one hot afternoon. It is the story of a racial divide, all across America, and also, since it is a filmmaker offering the gesture, all across film.

Originating, some like to claim, in a stable boy who worked for George Washington, then upgraded into a groom and in his popularity brought to guard the lawns of the wealthy. 8

Of Brown

All my lousy life I’ve crawled about in the mud! And you talk to me about scenery! ESTRAGON IN WAITING FOR GODOT

Anyone who loves art knows that psychoanalysis has no monopoly on the power to heal. NORMAN O. BROWN

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Continuous Brown Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, Horizon, 1962) It was not until the third of December, 1953, above East 54th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, that, on the stage of the Ziegfeld Theatre, Alfred Drake echoed the melody of Alexander Borodin’s “In the Steppes of Central Asia” introducing to the popular mind, via Kismet, the phrase, “sands of time.” Princes come, Princes go, An hour of pomp and show they know, Princes come and over the sands, And over the sands of time they go. A poetry and a melody infused with circles, repetition, echoes, echoes upon echoes, a sense of the past drifting away, drifting around in circles, returning in irony. Princes, that is, socially elevated, pretty but arrogant claimers of superior position all moving in a caravan across the shifting yet never moving sands of time, time which devours all conceits, time the redeemer. No matter your station, the sands move over you. Not only do princes come, but princes go. Sands move as the wind moves. Ozymandias is watching. Move and curl, cover and retreat, like a sea. A sea of brown that can swallow and disgorge, entrap and permit, feed and succor and starve. In a way, sand is history. Think of the prehistoric sea and its continual drift and wearing, its materials and deposits; for sea life degrades and is broken up by the flow. The sea goes out, the sea comes in. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was thinking his way through this in 1789, a theorization of the effective difference between pelagic and littoral deposits, based on a study of the chalk cliffs near Paris. Stephen Jay Gould, who marvels at Lavoisier’s courage and preciseness of thought, elucidates: The Chalk consists primarily of fine white particles, swiftly washed out to sea as the cliffs erode. But the Chalk also includes interspersed beds of hard flint nodules, varying in size … the size and rounding of nodules should indicate distance of deposition from the shoreline—for pebbles should be large and angular when buried at the coast (before suffering much wear and erosion), but should then become smaller and rounder as they tumble farther away from the coastline in extensive erosion before deposition. (103) “The size of particles,” Gould continues handing over Lavoisier, “then decreases continually away from shore, as the pebbles break up and erode

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(changing from ‘sable grossier,’ or coarse sand, to ‘sable fin,’ or fine sand, to ‘sable très fin ou argille,’ or very fine sand and clay)” (106). Calciferous forms gone to particles, particles en masse appearing pale brown in the sunlight (mauve or blue at night), particles worn and worn again until they are fragmented and polished, ancient creatures, time and erosion and decay, stones and weathering, the degradation of materials finer and finer until the particles could be placed on the tip of a finger and, gathered upon one another innumerably, constitute a littoral, then a beach, then an expanding pocket that covers the earth as far as the eye can see: The cities dissolve, and the earth is a cart loaded with dust. Only poetry knows how to pair itself to this space. (Adonis 197) The shifting of continents and retreat of the sea, Arabia breaking off from Africa, the inland desert, the Arabian Desert, endlessly stretching under the stars. Under the night canopy the sands cool down substantially, but in the merciless heat of midday they scald and sink under the feet. David Lean’s head of publicity on Lawrence of Arabia (1962) wrote this: The heat radiates like the proverbial blast furnace from the desert floor to a height of a thousand feet. Cast and crew wear goggles, for not only does the dazzling colour hurt the eyes after a prolonged gaze, but also the sand itself, blown by the “khamsin” or desert wind, stings like birdshot. (qtd. in Brownlow 434) Dazzling color: dazzling brown. But in the end, a brown converted to a dazzle. “The heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless,” wrote T. E. Lawrence (45), claiming it got to the point where he couldn’t discern colors altogether—Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, rewritten because the manuscript was lost in the railway station at Reading. (I looked for it, fruitlessly.) Sand is born from the sea, the glittering pale brown from the glittering blue. Erosion and degradation, erosion and degradation, succeeding waves of reduction over the eons, in a sequence that proceeds endlessly. “During the Cretaceous,” writes Edgell, “much of south-western Arabia was warm subtropical lowland, but the majority of what we now call Arabia was covered by shallow sea in which carbonate sediments were deposited … deep oceanic sediments were obducted onto the far north-eastern corner of Arabia in the Late Cretaceous, but did not begin to form the Oman Mountains until some 5 million years ago” (29). He notes that “there are some 36 submerged dunes along 70 km of [Bahrain] coastline extending 15 km off-shore” (xlii), some particular contributions to the formation of

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the desert made by erosion of sandstone. Look at it any way: the desert, the brown universe, was once something that crumbled, wore, degraded, blew in the wind. The desert of course is a peculiar brown challenge: Driving into the desert (The Passenger [1975]; Un homme et une femme: 20 ans déjà [A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later] [1986]; A Hologram for the King [2016]), riding through the desert (The Sheik [1921]; The Sheltering Sky [1990]), stumbling through the desert (Bitter Victory [1957]; Woman of the Dunes [1964]; Zabriskie Point [1970]; Gerry [2002]), skimming over the desert (The Flight of the Phoenix [1965]; The English Patient [1996]). Dunes arising upon dunes, shades of brown: yellow-brown, white-brown, tan brown, burnt brown, a brown that lay blue, as Lawrence writes, because of “the false distance of the heat” (90); brown flecked with “separate flakes, porphyry, green schist, basalt” (64); brown with shadows, glaring brown with no shadows, a blowing brown curtain that absorbs one’s footprints and then covers over the theft. Brown covering over one’s footprints in the brown, instantly they are erased, so that after taking a single step forward and turning to look back one has already lost oneself. In this way, the sands are history. To move across such a history, to go with the sands as a way of life: the Bedu. And the European visitor, catching his breath at the waving spectacle of the brown undulations, struggling, cursing, perpetually rejecting the past. Wilfred Thesiger (dubbed “Mubarak bin London”) was a notable exception. Travelling the Arabian desert, he was awed: As I rode along I reflected that nowhere in the world was there such continuity as in the Arabian desert. Here Semitic nomads … must have herded their flocks before the Pyramids were built or the Flood wiped out all trace of man in the Euphrates valley. … Previously the great Bedu tribes of the Najd and the Syrian desert had dominated central and northern Arabia. All traffic between the oases, villages and towns, the pilgrim caravans, everyone in fact who moved about Arabia, had to pass through the desert, and the Bedu controlled the desert. They levied tolls on travelers or looted them at will; they extorted blackmail from villagers and cultivators and from the weaker desert tribes. Bedu raiders, as elusive as the bands of Norsemen who once harried the coasts of Europe, had only to regain the desert to be free from all pursuit, whether by Roman legionaries or Turkish mercenaries. (92–3) Regain the desert, regain the safety of brown, sandy brown, historical brown, the washed and rewashed brown of time, the desert brown that lends a continuity as nowhere in the world. Leagues and leagues of brown and a thousand browns.

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David Lean’s designer John Box (1920–2005) recalled the chagrin he shared with Lean when, at their producer Sam Spiegel’s insistence, the company had to move from Jordan to Spain: “I tell you what, I cried. I didn’t want to leave the desert. I really did give the family terrible trouble when I came back because I couldn’t adjust to anything. The desert was pure. But we had to leave” (qtd. in Brownlow 456). Princes come, princes go. If, as seems, the brown sands stretch in all directions, forming not only a dry sea but a veritable Planet of Sand, an always-shifting, alwaysdeveloping planet, there are navigators. The Bedu travel this colossal space with apparent ease, reposition themselves as royals do: note Lean’s beautiful scene introducing Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif), who will become Lawrence’s friend (as Sharif became Peter O’Toole’s): a pinpoint in the farthest distance grows as it approaches (with the khamsin blurring the air), soon taking the form of a man on horseback before we hear the sound of the gunshot that kills the stealer from wells who has guided Lawrence here. Lean is entranced by the brown power of the desert. We will see in the film how sand will eat a human being (quicksand), tanned young skin, tamarind, crying and disappearing into the brown vortex; or how always the sand will radiate upward the holy beams of the sun, attracting and punishing the eye. The silent sand, which carries only the sound of the wind that speaks mutely in its shifts and formations. The “talking” sands. The coherence of the sandy conversation, with one brown melting into another, any brown compatible with all other browns, a true unification; and all resting beneath a contrasting cup of sky that uplifts the brown and gives the sands a unique identity. Lean photographed Lawrence principally in Jordan and Morocco. He was in love with the beauty of the place, the rolling sands, “after more than six months of preparatory work in the southeast Jordanian wastelands” (Brownlow 434). Often the sand had to be bulldozed flat so that the Wickham dolly could move on it (435). Freddie Young (1902–1998), the cinematographer, recollected that “many things came up in shooting that we could use, … Light conditions were a constant surprise, and peculiar phenomena such as spirals of sand, called dust devils, would arise from the desert and, whirled by some heat currents of air, travel rapidly at us in long sideways column, taking sunshades and other paraphernalia with them” (435). “Dust storms like the smoke trails of a djinn,” wrote [Elizabeth] Dilys Powell (1901–1995) in the Sunday Times, “the shapes of infinity, the colours of heat—I think it is the first time for the cinema to communicate ecstasy” (481). Born in Shropshire, educated at Oxford, a lover of cinema and of vast, old places. The colours of heat: far scarlets and farther mauves, umbers, but none more pressing or more intoxicating than what is seen from afar, the pallid brown of the massed sand particles flowing outward forever. The sand as impassable distance, and with the dunes continually shifting a confuser of

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orientations. Brown camels in the brown sand, trudging, seeking, with the territory realigning continually around their sun-baked hooves. Not only does the dazzling colour hurt the eyes: the manifold browns, shading off into purples and blacks, lightening into blinding sand beige. Hurt the eyes, as though one has seen to the end of the world (as Wenders put it in a splendid film: jusqu’au bout du monde), which is the limit of what vision will show, and can hold the eyes open no longer. Until the end of our living hope of knowing the world. The brown desert: spectacle that makes one close the eyes. The desert’s brown: does it absorb and diminish other colors, devour and reduce them, draw them into itself? An odd thing about Lawrence of Arabia: it contains what everyone knows are very great, very subtle performances (from O’Toole, Sharif, Anthony Quinn, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Claude Rains, Anthony Quayle, I. S. Johar, Arthur Kennedy, and on and on), performances in shocking moments; and it shows conflicts penetrating and scathing at once; and it offers a symphonic buildup of dramatic tension; and it is lit by a palpable historical insight—but when one has come away, reentered the frenetic bazaar of the everyday, it is neither performances nor conflicts nor dramatic arc nor history that one retains, but only, in awe, the majesty of the brown sand. Limitless, boundless, ineffably unstable product of erosion and sun, long, long erosion and blistering sun. The Abu-Tayi horses dancing on the brown. Camel riders teetering with sunstroke. Sumptuous tents laid down in the brown wind. The charging army making for Aqaba across the brown flats, Lawrence screaming in the lead. Always inevitably endlessly bringing hope and rest and despair, the sand is the field of life, on which people can only come and go because the sand itself only comes and goes. The Syrian poet Adonis has an observation: I congratulate you, sand. You are the only one who can pour water and mirage into the same bowl. (266) Lawrence was a remarkable achievement, shot almost entirely on location (location shooting is always especially difficult; and there are no power outlets in the desert); narrating historical events and passages of enormous and enduring political and cultural importance; and optically stunning. Also, dramatically pungent in the extreme: Lawrence (O’Toole) is informed at one point by Abu Tayi (Quinn) that a thief has been discovered and it is none other than his faithful servant Gassim (Johar). Lawrence is obliged to execute him by twilight, with the Howeitat massed on their blankets all round. Or the train explosion, with the track running through the vast plane of brown and the train puffing toward its destiny. That raid on Aqaba, an

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army photographed in one panning shot from on high—never before this in cinema had a horde so immense occupied the screen. In O’Toole’s rendition, Lawrence becomes a beaming, uncertain, deeply passionate and deeply torn personality, impossible not to watch in every second of his perpetually uncertain movement. But: When it is over—it concludes in the deep green country byways of England—the Arabs are still squabbling tribe against tribe at the conference table, the British and French diplomats are squatting on their privilege, Lawrence is dead on his motorcycle, and only the desert remains, far away in memory, far away in the wake of time. No particular spot, no particular scene, since in the desert any spot is every spot, any scene all scenes. The sand sea. The brown sea. In the long shots the crests of the dune ranges form strange glyphs against the sky, the lettering of an untold hieratic language. Ineffable. The first time for the cinema to communicate ecstasy.

Tyranny in Beige Interiors (Woody Allen, Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions, 1978) One has no reason for supposing that Eve (Geraldine Page), the maternal figure in Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978), is familiar with Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (notwithstanding that on its release the film was widely revered, possibly also in Diegesisland). Decorative Manhattanite that she is, she has made of her abode a veritable desert. Everything in Eve’s life, as she would have it and as she has achieved having it, is beige. Beige furniture, beige carpet, tall beige ceramic vases, tepid beige walls, taupe beige trim. She clothes herself in shades of beige, and her three daughters, Flyn (Kristin Griffith), Joey (Mary Beth Hurt), and Renata (Diane Keaton), to honor and pacify their mother, also dress in beige, reliving childhoods in which, as we can presume, Eve dressed them that way. Arthur (E. G. Marshall), who wears conservative suits, acts in a conservative manner, speaks with a conservative softness and precision—yet hardly at all—and is preparing, unbeknownst to her, to divorce Eve, may or may not like living in her “desert” but he does not make complaint, not a whimper, and, force of nature that she is, Eve interprets his silence in the most positive terms. Here and there across the living room she prowls, like some great cat, pausing to take a critical view. Beige curtains over the windows to keep out the world. A beige mentality. Woody Allen would have us read Eve as repressed, depressed, unexpressed, and impressively all of these. Here, as in Lean’s film, the action is subservient to the décor (Interiors is designed by Mel Bourne [1923–2003] and photographed by Gordon Willis

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[1931–2014]), and when the turmoils, bouleversements, and tortures of family life, having progressed through a climactic maelstrom, are becalmed, leveled, sweetened, and made tranquil, it is the uniformity of beige, the beige conceit of Eve’s world-design, that remains behind. The beige residue or substrate. The brown beneath all things. The oh-so-pallid brown, pallid because the acids of evaluation have leached away what once, ages ago, nourished this soil. Arthur can do no more than be forthright and honest. He feels it is time for another life. And Eve, thrown out of her conceits, a stranger now in her own territory, falls into the blackest of black depressions. She takes some black electrical tape, a large roll, and uses it to seal up all the high windows and the door. Then she turns on the gas. Then she spreads herself upon the beige sofa, in her beige drapery, very much in the pose of a courtesan of the court of Louis XIV. Beigeness comes to a halting conclusion, Eve must be put in care; but for the viewer, caught up in the lives of these New Yorkers, the beige endures. What (the viewer is induced to wonder) might be the force or principle organizing the consciousness of a woman like Eve? Clearly she is not now, nor has ever been, obsessively interested in her children or her marriage. She is an embodiment of the Creative Spirit, creator spiritus, a designer with Taste, a cultivator of Values and Balances. In her day-to-day, it is always far less important what people say, or what they intend to mean by what they say, than what they look like saying it, what things look like all around, a show not a statement, everything with openness to the eye; and for Eve the principal things in life are spaces. She is a designer of spaces. She is a person for whom space does not adequately fulfill its function by housing the mere action of players in harmony or conflict: dramatic space, thrilling space, perilous space. For Eve, the purpose of space is to appear, and by appearing to influence, and through influence to produce sensation, and through sensation to evoke feeling and in this way guide and move life. Space as image, image as feeling. (She is an Imagist.1) What can it be that is driving her in this abode, this internal desert where the rolling waves are all made rectilinear, upholstered, perfectly situated? Perfectly situated: every position that one could take here has become a promontory. Every inspection a composition. Art that never ceases never dies. Like all good Imagists, she is a reductionist, our Eve. Beige as a reduction not only of brown but also of all-color, a reduction not an absence. Beige as a dilute hint, a mere whiff of perfume, so that, looking at it splayed around The three principles of Imagism, as initially formulated by H[ilda] D[oolittle], Richard Aldington, and Ezra Pound: “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome” (Pound 335). 1

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the residence, one begins to think of beige as a drop of color infused into a vast and colorless sea. Through Eve’s eyes everything is form, only form, a primordial sea of form, and she has dropped a tincture of beige. The least amount of color before nothingness. And then, some tiny variation being required in order that objects may be discerned—the velvet beige love seat; the low, pale brown corner cabinet—the beige is augmented as touch, one touch here (hand on the love seat, factually not lovingly) another touch there; here a little reduced (the brown hair drawn tight into a softened cone) there a little turned up (that trim, emphasizing the windows through which no inspirations will come); every indicator brown or brownish but no two indicators browned in the same way. Once form can appear, one is in a position to use lines, masses, masses upon masses, lines intersecting lines, outgrowths, receptacles, congruences to make structures. But to use the fewest elements, variant in the slightest possible way, to create a world. Yet—mark!—not an abstract world, isolation and purity of form in relation to only itself. Eve wants a real place, with real things, but every real thing must sacrifice its reality, promise to breathe quietly, refuse to talk, stand in its own shadow, then diminish even further in expressiveness so that, with the quietest verve, it attaches itself to a design, blends in with other things, gets along. We must all get along. And this is surely part of Eve’s deep motive, desire to harmonize discords and simplify chaos, organize the universe of experience. Design a universe, her universe, bring every aspect of growth and feeling and form under a single code of principles, subsume them all under a singular and wholly beneficent vision of ultimate goodness. Go far from tremolos, from anger and throbbing. A messianic impulse, some would call it. To restore a golden stability; to seek and find a Utopia.2 A passive aggressive creativity, to be sure, which strives to strike out for the Territory of Beauty in order to whip the recalcitrant world into shape. All is to be designed, from carpet to necktie, from gatherings of blossoms to dinner plates. She uses, too, the restraint of feeling that can be produced by forcing oneself always to speak quietly and in persuasive whispers. She wraps herself up in grace, imposes formalities upon her girls as a mere extension of personality, their own “blossoming.” Arthur, poor Arthur can see all this; has seen it; is taking action. If the girls see it, if the men in their lives see it (Sam Waterston, Richard Jordan), they are too frightened or too respectful to make utterance. Eve would be called an artist instead of a tyrant by anyone who (like her) did not realize that true art never imposes form, it discovers form; never shapes materials or space but plays with materials to find space. The vagrant single-mindedness of Eve is betokened by her constant predilection for beige, call it her beige

2

See, for example, Scholem.

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mentality, her Beige Manifesto. The many are one; the unruly multitude are governed, swathed, and reduced in the name of unity. Unity that is beige. Stephen Jay Gould writes of genius having many facets—Eve is magnificent but she is no genius—particularly of how so many people who regard genius, so many who admire it and chronicle its feats seek single-mindedly for the single-minded. One senses what William Blake called “single vision and Newton’s sleep.” In the case of Charles Darwin, writes Gould, is to be found a beautiful complexity hopelessly reduced and flattened by critical perspective: Many biographers have argued that the intellectual radical must be construed as the “real” Darwin, with the social conservative as a superficial aspect of character, serving to hide an inner self and intent. To me, this heroically Platonic view can only be labeled as nonsense. If a serial killer has love in his heart, is he not a murderer nonetheless? And if a man with evil thoughts works consistently for the good of his fellows, do we not properly honor his overt deeds? All the Darwins build parts of a complex whole; all are equally him. We must acknowledge all facets to fully understand a person, and not try to peel away layers toward a nonexistent archetypal core. (181) It is interesting how in watching Interiors, which is the story of Eve and her fate, one can simultaneously focus on her extremity, her tender vulnerability, her fear, her crippling urgency to create and also have a second experience, one that, I believe, is finally dominant. That is the oblique and unconvicted perception of Eve’s beige world—her world in all its numerous manifestations—as both alarmingly attractive to the eye (who could miss it!) and hideously improper. Her beige is a sarcophagus.

The Brown Frontier The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, Produzioni Europee Associate, 1966) A forlorn graveyard in the blazing sun: Sad Hill. Tiny dilapidated crosses of nailed wood, made by the very poor to honor the very poor. The ground burnt out by the unremitting sun: brown earth. Malignant Tuco (Eli Wallach), who earlier forced him to hang himself, then force-marched him through the desert, has now been strung up by Blondie (Clint Eastwood), a symphony in browns: wide-brimmed dark brown hat, brown nativewoven serape, a brown cigarillo stuck between his lips like a bridle. A rope dangled over a tree is noosed around pathetic Tuco’s sweaty neck and his

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hands are brutally roped—trussed, as a wayward steer is trussed in a cattle run—his feet precariously balanced upon the brown wooden crosspiece of a brown wooden cross stuck in the brown ground. Whining. Whimpering. Mewling. Begging. Simpering. Imploring. Wailing. Beseeching. Blondie is simply methodical and silent, the cigarillo clamped between his lips and his eyes carefully estimating his work. This is a culminating scene of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966). A drum beats somewhere: in Blondie’s heart? Tuco’s blood vessels? the distant horizon? the spectator’s deep consciousness? The sun blazes. Far off is scrub, and beyond the scrub a low rise, and at the top of the rise a lone tree and the horizon. Tuco squints, twists, grimaces, twists, squints. While Tuco looks on, Blondie digs up a nearby grave, yanks out canvas sacks as heavy as mountains. One he slits open and a myriad gold coins tinkle out. There are numerous sacks, but he straps two of them to each side of his saddle and leaves the rest. “Blonnnn-die!” whimpers Tuco. Blondie gives him a brown squint, the brown woolen serape a knight’s cloak upon his wide brown shoulders, the broad-brimmed brown hat victimized by hard use. Tuco is also in brown. The rope is brown. The temperature brown. A study in brown. A study in brown, something, perhaps, of the bold and violent contrast of forces one can see in “The Crucifixion” (1511) by Albrecht Dürer but also, here more tellingly, something of the somber, sighing tone of Van Gogh’s sepia ink sketches of Saintes-Marie-de-la-mer. Van Gogh lived and worked roughly at the time this narrative is set. He made many drawings of Saintes Maries-de-la-mer, the comforting little houses there, done in tobacco-brown ink on cream paper. Blondie, unconcerned with— uncurious about and uninterested in—Tuco, methodically mounts his chestnut-brown horse, patiently turns, rides slowly away up the rise to the horizon. At the furthest distance, he stops and turns to look back, nearby that tree. From Tuco’s perspective we see him, a mere grasshopper against the sky. Tuco must be feeling the nearness of death. Dead in the air beneath this branch, rotting and drying brown. Becoming only brown dust through time, dust indistinguishable from the ground beneath his feet. The symbolism of the hidden gold being in a grave, of all possibilities; a hole in the ground— not an exact, but a sufficient reference to John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a film in which all the brown, the considerable brown, is in black and white, and in which the gold, for all its triumph, might as well be in a hole in the ground. But now, in a jump cut: his brown serape atilt, the cowboy raises his rifle and steadily, conscientiously, meticulously takes aim. Clamping on the cigarillo. One shot only. We are back with poor Tuco, as the bullet slices the rope and he goes tumbling to the earth, where lies the treasure for which he was so eager at betrayal.

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Eastwood’s cowboy, a wearer of brown, dirty brown, old brown. Here and in his other films of the west. The western has its own traditions, its own holy trajectories. In the early days, the noble hero wore a white hat, the hat being the embodiment and symbol, but also the aggregation, of his goodness; a reflective goodness, spreading the sunlight, and positioned cerebrally. The goodness of brightness, the sunniness of goodness. Le roi soleil and his enlightenment. It’s all very much the east, this good-becauserational, this good-because-thoughtful, even pensive. And the villain in dark clothes, under a dark hat, his villainy stemming from the darker parts of the self (or if not the self, the soul). Now this eastern morality, so easy to invoke as guideline in new territory, has fully gone west. Heroism is no longer clear-cut, easy to make out against the rocks, the hard-ridden ground, the violent shadows. Blondie’s brown hat has a distinct purity, an existential purity derived from his experience, his travels, his agonies. But the dirt of reality has come upon him, too. All these rough, unshaven men of the west … The serape Blondie wears against the weather and the hat blocking the sun’s glare, so that he can navigate straight-arrow, give together the effect of a completely Heimlich relation between the cowboy and this place, as though, through some magic, the cowboy has taken the colors of the territory into himself. Filthy Tuco doesn’t seem at home here, too slovenly, too cupidinous. He doesn’t belong, but appropriates the place. Blondie “belongs” because he vanishes into the brown territory, the way a wild animal, cautious in the wilderness, uses its coloring to vanish into the territory. And the landscape both reaches forward, toward the viewer’s eye, and withdraws into its own safety, catching at the other characters but never permitting them full citizenship. To come from California (Clint Eastwood was born in 1930 in San Francisco) is to stand in the sun, to know glare and squinting and bleaching and shadow as one knows one’s hand. The actor is merged with the character. Whereas the Eli Wallach who is Tuco comes from the east, he is a Brooklynite born in 1915. Joan Didion describes a Professor of Classics named Victor Davis Hanson, whom she has seen in a photograph, “his features and general stance so characteristic of the Central Valley (a good deal of sun exposure goes into this look, and a certain wary defiance) that the photograph could seem indistinguishable from snapshots of my father and cousins” (Where 175–6). Iain Sinclair wrote of Hackney, London, “The past is an optional landscape,” and what we see onscreen here—but everything is past—is the way it is, just so, because it comes to us invitingly and then tucks itself away into indistinctiveness (Lights Out 208). The characters are of the land, on the land, for the land: the land as was. The colorations speak honesties. Leone’s scene is displaced from Hollywood convention, where even if colors are dusty, worn, aggravated, and eroded nevertheless one has the sharp sense that once upon a time they were colors. Colors like jewels back in the east,

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desiccated and shrunken now from the long journey west. And, too, Leone’s brown is primordial, the brown of the deepest earth where the minerals form beneath the roots of the green. To make a case, begin instead Howard Hawks’s El Dorado (1967): rich, even flamboyant watercolors of cowboys in the west by Olaf Wieghorst decorating the credits. The colors are bold, saturated, exciting—a child’s storybook colors, colors of nostalgia, colors quite as exciting as the daring postures of men upon snorting horses on tricky ground. Eastwood, the Study in Brown, the Brown Boy, gives the lie to this western as folk myth, this El Dorado that Huston’s wanderers slaved after, and initiates the reconstructionist era wherein the west is made dusty-real, sociological, no longer a garden of innocence. That “garden” myth came from the US National Geological Survey photographers of the mid-nineteenth century, trekking to visualize possible routes for the railroad. Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan. Later on, in a more worshipful vein, Ansel Adams. When the myth dried up like the territory it sang, Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz, topographers not celebrants. The west as the “looks-within place,” as Sam Shepard calls it in Angel City, because it has been recognized in extremis that there is no paradise there. The Fountain of Inspiration gone desiccated, the bones gone dry (in George Englund’s Zachariah [1971] we see all this), the motives gone mundane, the nobility of high morals reduced by the browning sun to broken signposts beside rutted roads (Paris, Texas [1984]); the moral annunciation of Stagecoach (1939), Shane (1953), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) transmogrified as neoliberal relativism in Unforgiven (1992), The Quick and the Dead (1995), The 3:10 to Yuma (2007), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), and True Grit (2010), then subsequently wrenched into Verbinskian caricature in The Lone Ranger (2013). Eastwood draws a straight line through this, a line born of the straight edge of that cigarillo, the existential clinch with practicality, a line vibrating from the straightaimed rifle poised for shooting Tuco’s rope—that rifle lifted in one hand and stabilized against the other—the firm line of the western gaze, a brown hawk’s sight embedded in a brown-coated man. And there is the greater unbroken line: now, and then now, and then now: of uncommitted momentary moralities. The brown truth one makes for justice against gravity. In Richard Brooks’s The Professionals (1966), Ehrengard (Robert Ryan) is sorely perplexed by men who “have a knowledge of the desert, can survive in it, are expert horsemen and trackers, all of which strengthen their association with the wilderness” (Wright 122): Broiling by day, freezing at night, alkali dust choking every hole in your body, how in the name of God does anybody live here long enough to get used to it? (qtd. in Wright 100)

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His chum Rico has an awed response: “Men tempered like steel, tough men, men who learn how to endure.” But the man Eastwood becomes onscreen, our brown Blondie, the methodical man in that brown blanket-cape, upon that brown horse, wearing that too characteristic brown hat, and porting like a burden of honor that brown mien, does not see himself Rico’s way. He knows the innermost secret: that all the tempering, toughness, and learning in the world avail one not, on the brown frontier.

A Brown River Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, Wolper Pictures, 1971) Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder), the wizard who owns a wizardous chocolate factory in a sleepy little town, has put up a contest for reasons we do not know (but will learn, to our immense gratification, in the last moments of Mel Stuart’s film [1971]). Mr. Wonka does make, we gather, very fine chocolate. The finest chocolate in the world. Unimaginably wonderful chocolate, “scrumdidilyumptious!,” combined and rarefied and pulverized and stewed. A number of little children, most of them monsters, have found the secret golden Wonka Bars tucked away in the vast, widely distributed collection of Wonka products, and have come by invitation to the factory for an adventure. Let us sweetly forego the demandingly beastly Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole); the gum-chewing, jaw-grinding Violet Beauregarde (Denise Nickerson); hopelessly inattentive Mike Teevee (Paris Themmen); and gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner), each of whom fingers up far too many sweets at all the wrong moments and is punished with eternal expulsion by way of innumerable trap doors, tubes, and spring-loaded ejectors. We are left with little Charlie (Peter Ostrum), the sweetest, most good-natured, most charming, and most courteous little boy on the face of the earth, and he, of course, is befriended, embraced, adopted, and given his Great Reward. Let us permit all of this (delightful, in its way) material to drop away just as the globs of chocolate drop down into candy molds and candy formers and candy cleaners and candy wrappers and candy flavorers and candy whateveryouwannadowithcandy. Let us just hold our breaths and stand back. Because chocolate brown is everywhere. The dark, rich, jolting brown of the very best chocolate, the brown that promises instant invigoration, salutary satisfaction, wholehearted wholesomeness, bracing beauty, and elegant ecstasy, not to mention profound pulsations of peculiar, pragmatic pomp. Oh, that chocolate! Running in the

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Chocolate River, yes, with a gay boat sailing along, the river that one can drink—a cold hot chocolate—a revivifyingly remarkable righteously ripe river. And there is Wonka himself, the fabulous, the famous, the frenetic, the fearfully misunderstood, standing in his top hat with his cane, a model of urbanity and couth, and also, because he is Gene Wilder, singing with most magnificent ease and gentleness, in his candy voice, the theme that Anthony Newley has written: There is no Life I know To compare with pure imagination Living there You’ll be free If you truly wish to be. There, yes—in person!—is Wonka, designer, cultivator, maker, and nibbler of every imaginable form of chocolate and also of his most recent creation, the Everlasting Gobstopper. Though he has forborne to garb himself in it, we nevertheless imagine him coextensive and copresent with chocolate, a man, perhaps, with chocolate blood, surely a personage infected by chocolate, affected by chocolate, perfected through the gracious gift of charming chocolate. It is chocolate and only chocolate purloining our senses here: each character’s travails with chocolate, the factory’s humming machines plopping out chocolate, chocolate to swim in, chocolate to dream of, chocolate so replete and omnipresent that the very word “chocolate” comes to have flavor when we say it, even enough flavor that we can satisfy our chocolate cravings merely by singing along, or by saying “Chocolate Factory” a hundred times in a single breath. Roald Dahl published Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964 and then wrote a screenplay, but David Seltzer, brought in to do revisions by David L. Wolper, angered the author who withdrew his services and, disappointed that Spike Milligan had not been cast, disaffiliated himself from the film. No matter, there’s more chocolate coming! (Which is a friendly way of saying, a fiction is a fiction and a film is a film and nothing of this enchanting film takes a bite away from the enchantment of Dahl’s flavorful book. Facts, details, words do not war with the peculiar enchantment of film.) “Prince Pondicherry wrote a letter to Mr Willy Wonka,” said Grandpa Joe, “and asked him to come all the way out to India and build him a colossal palace entirely out of chocolate.” “Did Mr Wonka do it, Grandpa?” “He did, indeed. And what a palace it was! It had one hundred rooms, and everything was made of either dark or light chocolate! The bricks

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were chocolate, and the cement holding them together was chocolate, and the windows were chocolate, and all the walls and ceilings were made of chocolate, so were the carpets and the pictures and the furniture and the beds; and when you turned on the taps in the bathroom, hot chocolate came pouring out. “When it was all finished, Mr Wonka said to Prince Pondicherry, ‘I warn you, though, it won’t last very long, so you’d better start eating it right away.’ ” (12–13) Reveling, as most viewers do, in the chocolatiness of the film, dreaming of inhabiting one’s own chocolate factory—where if it is not hardened into an alluring coating every color in creation swiftly dissolves into chocolate— adoring to absorb the Wonka story again and again, just in the way that one can never be satisfied (unless one is modest Charlie) with only a single bite, we participate in a cultural arrangement of some distinctive longstanding and a mathematically daunting magnitude. In our real world (where without a chocolate bar I write this!), the number of chocolate pieces manufactured in one calendar day, in only one of many possible chocolate factories here, there, and everywhere, numbers in the hundreds of millions. Though Roald Dahl was Welsh, chocolate, in its origins, was not. Wolfgang Schivelbusch surmises in Tastes of Pleasure that it was a Catholic, southern (European) drink at first, by contrast with coffee, which was Protestant and northern. Wonka’s river is the oldest part of his territory, given that “whenever chocolate is mentioned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [the centuries of its earliest prominence in Europe], it refers to … hot, liquid chocolate” (87; emphasis mine). Because of its nutritional value, writes Schivelbusch, chocolate was useful for breaking fasts (numerous in the Catholicism of Spain and Italy), becoming, therefore, a “more or less vital beverage.” It was the Spanish court that enjoyed, lauded, and exported chocolate to great profit. “With [princess] Anna [of Austria], who had grown up in Madrid, chocolate came to the French court” when she married Louis XIII in 1615. What would become, albeit in fiction, Wonka’s bread and butter was early on a popular boudoir motif, a “status beverage of the ancien régime” (92). Moreover, chocolate became something of a decoration. “Before 1789,” notes Schivelbusch, “an aristocrat’s colorful, sumptuous costume was the expression of social prestige: His goal, if anything, was to present himself like a peacock; whereas for the simply dressed burgher nothing was more offensive and laughable than an association with this bird. Once again, in middle-class society it was children and women who were allowed to wear colorful dress. What the peacock was for costume, the “sweet tooth” was in matters of gastronomic taste. The lover of sweets differed from the general

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gourmand or glutton. Middle-class taste, physiologically and by extension aesthetically, abhorred the bright and sweets, favoring somber black garments and bitter foods. In this sense coffee was both black and bitter, the antipode to the aristocracy’s light, sweet chocolate. (93–4) Note how chocolate is intrinsically identified, in its lascivious sweetness and excess, with the foppish, peacock-imitating taste. As Wonka, Wilder sports a flamboyant fuchsia purple tuxedo and waistcoat with his cinnamonchocolate brown top hat and milk chocolate cravat. Chocolate became a children’s drink, and it became possible to imagine a Chocolate Factory to which hungering children would wish to flock (even as, here and in the 2005 Tim Burton remake [with an ultra-foppish Johnny Depp in a cherry-red ribbed velvet tunic], the children come in their parents’ tow). In the ceremonial moment of greatest seriousness and drama, little Charlie slowly, hesitantly, wishfully draws back the gold foil wrapping from his bar to see if inside there is a golden ticket. And if, dear Reader (young or old), you do not already know what he found, if you have never seen but are chocolate-curious and being told is not quite enough, you will just have to watch the movie. Stuart’s version, with the ending Dahl abhorred that brings a thrill not even chocolate can deliver.

A Brown Chagrin L’heure d’été [Summer Hours] (Olivier Assayas, MK2 Productions/France 3, 2008) We are to conceive a fairy creation: a writing desk, bureau or grand escritoire, fashioned out of finest grade mahogany and with ornate gilding at the heads and all the way down the legs. It has been made in the Art Nouveau style by one of the principal leaders of the form, Louis Majorelle (1859–1926)— The expression “Art Nouveau” was first introduced by Samuel Bing, a native of Hamburg, Germany, who in 1885 opened a shop in Paris that originally specialized in Japanese art. In 1895, he decided to revamp his business in line with the recent revival of interest in the decorative arts, and marked the occasion with an exhibition to celebrate this new direction. The exhibition included, along with many other equally distinguished contributions, designs for glass by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Émile Gallé, sculptures by Auguste Rodin, and posters by Aubrey Beardsley. … In general terms, the Art Nouveau style was characterized by dominant undulating lines or contours to which all other elements (like color, form,

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and texture) were secondary, and it was greeted as a new and revitalizing force in the arts. (Majorelle n.p.) —and has endured the years since its making in the securest care, so that its surfaces gleam in their polish, as new, and the object seems to smile with gratification in reflection of its long and fruitful use. The desk was made in the first few years of the twentieth century, most likely in or around Nancy, and is now more than a hundred years old, since we see it in what is to be understood as present time (2008), resting upon a covert dais inside the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, exemplar there of furniture of the Art Nouveau style (1890–1910), thus by open claim borrowing the curvatures of nature, her efflorescences, her dense interweavings. Mahogany when polished gives off a rich reddish-brown quality, fine-grained, fragile to the touch. Highly prized in furniture making, the wood is harvested principally in South America. The desk top, with its three little drawers, is a shallow bowl and gives the appearance of being seamless (an impossibility). A fabulous piece of artistry, and one that must be thought to command a very high price indeed. Expensive, beautiful, untrammeled brown. Forestial brown, brown of the mysterious south, brown of the splendid Belle époque. To say even in whispers, “Paris around 1890” is to invoke peculiar and phantasmal spirits: Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Camille Saint-Saëns, Paul Cézanne, Gustave Caillebotte, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the Folies Bergère, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the Eiffel Tower, Maxim’s … The desk is enchanted brown, not regal but of the entranced and engaged public spirit, the citizen of the streets reaching up for Form and Light. We must imagine it, too, surrounded in the Orsay by a horde of eager tourists who peer and lean, whisper, squint to see the details better— because they are not permitted to come too close—and listen to every syllable of the learned voice of the guide teaching them about Majorelle, Art Nouveau, and the Spirit of the Age whose manifest form seems to inhabit the sinews of the wood. The grand museum—the Orsay was opened in December 1986, after the defunct Gare d’Orsay underwent elaborate conversion—is full of telling and gorgeous objects such as this one, filled with them in all its many rooms, filled but also on guard. The populace must keep its distance. The human finger must not touch Manet’s “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” or Jean-Joseph Perraud’s snowy marble “Le Désespoir” or the Majorelle desk. Look but nothing more. Well, fine, take a selfie. The glowing desk is something of a dream for those who see it, a dream come real to confront them in a physicality that must remain forever indistinct, forever dream. As Ortega writes, “An age-old habit, founded in vital necessity, causes men to consider as ‘things,’ in the strict sense, only such objects solid enough to offer resistance to their hands. The rest is more or less illusion” (111).

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The visitors surely pepper their guide with innocent questions. “How could the artist have caused the wood to curl, so?” “Would he have been paid a great deal for making this desk?” “Who influenced him?” “Was he the most popular, or not the most popular, craftsman working in the Art Nouveau époque?” No one asks where the desk came from, how it might have travelled to this sanctified spot before their eyes. No one wonders how the museum came into possession. When. By what route and through what means. The docent does not feel it necessary to say everything she knows—a good policy in general—so she does not remark that the desk had been in the study of the great painter Paul Berthier, born around 1912 in, let us say, a little village, Butry-sur-Oise, or maybe even in the Bourgogne, some place like Ornans or Besançon. Of this she does not inform her audience, who see only the work of art, only the touchstone of Majorelle. But why, on a pretty afternoon when the multitudes have stopped flocking, should not two lone visitors stand in the same place, meditating, worshipping, loving? And why might not the hunger in their heart, the chagrin, the melancholy extend like a hand as if to touch the magical desk, but fail? Could they not move slowly around it, like a dollying camera, catching, seizing it from all possible angles? And could this not be the concluding moment in a profound film, L’heure d’été [Summer Hours] (2008), by Olivier Assayas, the horribly ironic moment when we see the fate that befalls an object, a family, an epoch? Could not a regard for the brown majesty, the man and woman’s regard and ours, not reflect, through sharp summation, all of the whirlwind of events to which the film has exposed us: the joyous family gathering in the old country house to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of Hélène (Edith Scob), Berthier’s beloved niece (perhaps his too beloved niece?); her long, patient, discernably matter-offact discussion with Frédéric (Charles Berling), her eldest, about the value of the house, the objects, the two Corots, the Josef Hofmann cabinet, the Majorelle wall unit and desk, the Berthier notebooks; her subsequent death; the arguments between Frédéric and his two siblings, Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), who is working for Puma in China, and Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), a designer living in New York, arguments leading to the decision, relieving for the two younger ones but distressing for Frédéric, to sell the property and divide up or sell all that is in it; the clearing out, the packing, the emptying, the making vacant; the new owners with their teenaged children having a party. The desk had to go, and, the Musée d’Orsay having previously expressed sincere interest, a sale could be made. Box it up. Drive it away. So that now, in this moment to which everything in the film has inexorably led, might we not recognize the two visitors as Frédéric and his wife, come not to say goodbye, not to offer recognition, but perhaps to continue to possess in the way that the heart and memory possess, because, yes, anyone at all can visit the museum, including the spirit of Majorelle himself.

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Clear everything out at the best price they can get, that’s the thought. Jérémie needs the money; Adrienne can’t be bothered. It’s only that Frédéric is outvoted, nothing personal. Nothing—personal. Two to one. May Majorelle himself have given the desk to Berthier in trade for a painting or two? It has lingered all these many decades in Berthier’s room, nestled in the middle of his house, the house that became Hélène’s: time memorialized and transfigured, radiant brown, curved, gilded with art. In the very house of Berthier, or his spirit, has Majorelle himself been living on through its rooms, now vacant, living on and using his desk, living on as Hélène’s paramour ghost? Without mistake the house is of immense value. At the same time the house is of no value. Someone will go deeply in debt to have it. But the two younger children have no attachment, and Jérémie’s young kids are unattached totally. What is inside the house is merely chattel, or treasure, depending on what? attitude? age? reminiscence? love? “A few things I would like to have,” says Jérémie softly while Frédéric sits in abject, comprehending silence. The Majorelle desk is a radiant, uncannily beautiful brown. Brown from tropical forests, hewn, shaved, warmed and wetted and stretched, mortised, stabilized, sanded and polished and polished again, gilded and gilded again. One reaches for it impossibly, it is ineluctable, brown of the disappeared past. The smooth, beautiful, fault-free, beckoning brown of childhood lost. A brown chagrin. Perhaps more radiant and splendid than ever, now that it is in the museum, away from home.

Democratic Brown North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, MGM, 1959) In one of the most celebrated sequences in North by Northwest (1959), indeed one of the most celebrated sequences in world cinema, there is a moment when a man in an expensive silk business suit throws himself into the dirt. This is, of course, the cropduster scene, with Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) fleeing for his life from an airborne assassin who is machinegunning him (the plane’s wobbly circling and descending bring up images of the First World War). As virtually every observer has noted, the scene is intentionally set by the filmmaker in a vast and vacant rural zone along a paved route, where nothing interrupts the eye’s scan but a small stand of corn (imported to the location for the photography), dry brown and shuddering in the wind. Everywhere Roger looks for succor he sees only boundless earth, earth running off into fields for planting, earth bordering the highway in shoulders. The business suit is rather like armor for this

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advertising executive. It not only ensheathes him away from the everyday world he is at pains in his work to glorify, mock, extol, manipulate, and parody but also gives him an enduring sense of being trim and tidy, cleaned up against the elements, sleek and streamlined and sane. He is the easiest target imaginable. The plane makes a strafing run, retreats, circles, and comes back for another, and as Roger runs along the road with bullets cracking all around him, he finds it necessary to dive into the dirt shoulder. A bullet hits just beside his head. Then he’s up again, covered with dirt, making a desperate run for the corn stand which will, of course, help only too little and only too briefly because the plane is equipped with insecticide to spray him down. “That’s funny … that plane’s dustin’ crops where there ain’t no crops.”3 But fixate upon just the one singular moment, Roger flung down into the dirt. This was shot on a soundstage at MGM with the plane approaching in rear projection, a technique that made clearly focusing on the character’s body, lighting him, and having the plane withdraw relatively easy to manage. Soundstage work also facilitates making multiple takes, in this case the wardrobe assistants changing Grant’s suit repeatedly so that he could dirty it again each time. The central gesture of the moment, Roger ruining the suit, was, in the film’s production as well as its finished look, potentially emphatic. What can be thought implicit, for Roger and for us, as he throws his body, encased in that silk accomplishment, into the soil? Definitively brown soil, dusty soil (we can choke on it), soil that stains, mars, disfigures what it touches even as it draws objects close to the chthonic reality of life on the planet. Roger going to ground, Roger being grounded. He has been a flippant, cagey, smarmy, suave, goofy, slippery, and stunningly agile personality but has never for a moment seemed grounded. Or dirty. Advertising has him producing lies twenty-four hours a day, and when he doesn’t lie, he harbors with Mother (who is driving him crazy, albeit he loves her). He doesn’t react to situations as Anyman would. In cozy Room 796 of the Plaza Hotel, he seems anything but cozy, not quite in his place; and the same holds for the Members’ Lounge of the United Nations, the dining car of the Twentieth Century Limited, the Townsend study on Long Island, the Oak Bar at the Plaza where he merely drops in from the lobby and climbs out again without really getting used to a bourbon. He is like a floating spirit. But here now, in the cornfield (in fact not far from Bakersfield, California but fictionally Prairie Stop Route 41 in Indiana south of Chicago), he is forced to embed himself, forced into the ground, forced into stillness, into an ultimate subjection to mortality, the physical real. Once he is on his belly, without opportunity to deftly hang up that suit jacket so it won’t get wrinkled (or give it to a bellboy for pressing), he is as safe as it is possible

3

For more on this sequence, see my “Fall” 41–43.

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for him to be here and now, given the circumstances: “safe,” but still in the open and utterly vulnerable. Vulnerable in brown. A number of ways in which that embodied personality—the deep Roger— is briefly safe while prostrate, since one key project of the action is to give reason for his being this way. Safely brown: l

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For a short breather, he can breathe. That is, he has pulled himself out of the race, if only madly, unthinkingly, spontaneously (Roger has not been shown earlier to be especially spontaneous except verbally). We can imagine him panting, thinking, orienting himself, mapping the territory now that his face is literally rubbing into it. Mapping as he realizes the reality. Buckminster Fuller wrote “Vertical is to Live—Horizontal is to Die” in 1969. “Living” in the case of the action of this scene means, being on one’s feet and racing to save one’s life. Here, Roger is transformed into a “dead” marker, even a loser. Standing up, running, darting, dodging—all these vivacities, from the point of view of lying on the ground destitute, deeply fearful, and loving Mother Earth, are pointless and out of the question. For a moment he is out of the game of living, but safely brown. In the roadside dirt, considering Roger’s awareness of how he will look to the pilot of the plane (advertising folk are obsessively concerned with how audiences will see the advertising they concoct, how the product will look), our hero can be thought “playing dead.” For an instant, it must have occurred to him that if he just lies still the horror show will be over. But the droning of the plane’s engine from afar makes it evident the pilot, a skeptical consumer, hasn’t bought it, hasn’t given up yet, and Roger must pull himself together and keep fleeing. He hoists himself up and heads for that stand of corn. As to “playing” dead while not actually being dead, here is a supreme lie, of the sort that actors “tell” all the time. Is our Roger, played by an actor, an actor? There are numerous clues in the film to Roger’s unannounced identity as such (see “Fall”). Not only does advertising make up and promulgate lies, but performance does, too, and Roger is acting as an advertiser now acting dead, that is advertising himself as dead. Being with other people is acting, acting is doing, acting is masquerading: life being masquerade, Roger is living very intensively in guising himself as dead. Seemingly horizontal, he is secretly vertical. “Bite the dust” is cinema-speak for “get killed.” But it can be the present that is killed as one “bites” the dust of the past; the dust that is the past. Carolyn Steedman writes of Archive Fever:

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A grey exhausted day in the record office (you don’t finish), a long journey home, a strange dislocation from all the faces, stations, connections, delays, diversions, road-works you feel you must endure (that you add to the long list of historians’ hyperbolic complaints stretching back to the century before last)—all these are in retrospect the mere signals of the terrible headache that will wake you at two- o’clock in the morning, in your own bed, the pain pressing down like a cap that fits to your skull and the back of your eyes the extreme sensitivity to light and distortion of sound, the limbs that can only be moved by extraordinary effort, and the high temperature. Archive Fever Proper lasts between sixteen and twentyfour hours, sometimes longer (with an aftermath of weeks rather than days). You think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in. (19) Roger has been breathing in the dust of his forebears. He will surely awake with a terrible headache. l

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At the same time, something is happening by virtue of that sweet, wellpressed, shimmering gray suit hitting the dust. As we watch the scene, it is less Roger as body, Roger as personality, Roger as hero, or even Roger as a man in dire straits that attracts our attention than Roger as the wearer of that suit. He is going to ground, but more importantly the suit is. Normally it gets regular dry cleaning to keep in good form. He wears it, or a similar suit, to work, gliding in before ten in the morning and gliding out around five, after giving a happy wink to the elevator boy. A routine suit, subject to business routine, excruciatingly precise (like Cary Grant’s, Roger’s clothing is meticulously tailored) but also pleasingly quotidian in its shine and pallor and softness. Roger’s is the kind of routine that makes for predictability, order, pattern. His creative mind is soothed by routine patterns. When the suit is suddenly besmirched, it shatters the form, breaks violently into Roger’s normative everyday. The conditions in this scene are emphatically grave: grave in every way, including the psychological. Further, Roger in the dirt is, in two distinct but overlapping ways, as far from Madison Avenue as one can get: first, New York being what it is, there are no open spaces like this on Madison Avenue, not even in the board rooms; and secondly his form, his outer shell, is now tarnished to the degree that he could not, without substantial transformation, appear at work again. Reduction in brown. Backstage in brown. And the Midwest is brown, cornfields, potato fields. Manhattan is gray, built up of stone upon a foundation of rock. An even deeper trauma here rests in the fact that getting the suit dirty, putting it out of play, “killing” its functionality all work to separate Roger the man in the dirt from Roger the slick ad executive prancing down the avenue with secretary in tow. This moment is a supreme life

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change for Roger O. Thornhill. And, at least evaluated through the lens of his august career, it is a life change for Cary Grant, too, because although he has hung precariously from a dinosaur, fallen down a hill searching for a dog’s bone, had the back of his trousers come apart at the seams, and much more, this kind of abject submission to gravity, this desperate throwing of the self down into the dirt, is a new one for him. Too undramatic, too plain for sophistication. The personality has become a mere corpse, a thing with weight. And falling here of all places, the weight is picking up dust. Picking up dust, finally, as do all things left untouched for a very long time. The dusty bookshelves, the brown atmosphere, the junk shop in Blow-Up, Miss Havisham’s chamber. Roger is like an antique, while being in fact fresh and youngish. He seems also a rural personality (having been at the start a wholeheartedly urban personality), a man of the field for whom getting dirty is a regular part of the business of the day. The brown earth brings Roger down from his aerie, establishes his values in accord with the yeoman values of the farmer (who owns this land and has planted this corn). To be more emphatic (and viewers have noticed this), putting himself in the corn stand and being subjected to the insecticide brings him into relation with the pestiferous world; he is treated like a pest, lowered beneath the human. But he has also become, apparently so very bluntly, a pest for those who have mobilized this pilot. He is a pest to be gotten rid of, even as, for Roger momentarily at least, his life and career as a white-collar royal is to be gotten rid of, too. Shed it all for freedom. Freedom, release, disintegration: The earth lay rich and dark, and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes. Sometimes they turned up a bit of brick, a splinter of wood. It was nothing. Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth. (Buck 30)

Brown Filth The Magic Christian (Joseph McGrath, Commonwealth United Entertainment, 1969) In his symphonic quest—through the byways of Freudian psychoanalytic theory—for the “magical body,” the unified body, which is the body of childhood, the playful body, the body before the problem of sublimation—

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Turning and turning in the animal belly, the mineral belly, the belly of time. To find the way out: the poem. (Paz, qtd. in Brown, Love’s Body 564) —Norman O. Brown comes finally, in a forthright sforzando, to shit. Excrement, the rejected product, which is finally all we have. “Excrement which is aliment,” excremental nourishment. “The Trickster of primitive mythologies,” he notes, “is surrounded by unsublimated and undisguised anality.” Brown offers an account by Paul Radin of the Winnebago Trickster, as follows: He comes upon a bulb which tells him that whoever chews it will defecate … So he takes the bulb and chews it to find that he does not defecate but only breaks wind. This expulsion of gas increases in intensity progressively. He sits on a log, but is propelled into the air with the log on top of him; he pulls up trees to which he clings, by their roots. In his helplessness he has the inhabitants of a village pile all their possessions upon him, their lodges, their dogs, and then they themselves climb upon him … And so the whole world of man is now on Wakdjunkaga’s back. With a terrific expulsion of gas he scatters the people and all their possessions to the four quarters of the earth … He now begins to defecate. The earth is covered with excrement. To escape it he takes refuge in a tree, but to no avail, and he falls into mountains of his own excrement. (Life Against Death 301–2) A bulb: Bulbs are annuals, so the Bulb of Excrement is tied in its origins to the cycle of seasons, rebirth and recreation, refashioning. With every generation, the universal brown of excrement is reborn. The old, old man in Antonioni’s garden at Barcelona: “Niños: I’ve seen so many of them grow up. Other people look at the children, and they all imagine a new world. But me, when I watch them, I see the same old tragedy begin all over again” (Wollen, Peploe, and Antonioni, The Passenger [Professione: Reporter]). Only breaks wind: Origin of the wind, Aeolus for the Greeks, the spirit that carries odor and perfume, that upturns the world, that permits the voice and also the foul odor that instigates procedures for public health (see Corbin). He pulls up trees to which he clings, by their roots: There is a marvelous photograph by Jerry Uelsmann (b. 1934) called “Untitled: Floating Tree and Peapod” (1969) which shows two trees hovering in the air with their roots dangling somewhat like upside-down trees.

Damos vueltas y vueltas en el vientre animal, en el vientre mineral, en el vientre temporal. Encontrar la salida: el poema (1950). 4

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The whole world of man is now on Wakdjunkaga’s back: The story of Atlas, who must hold up the heavens—keep the heavens away from man. Wakdjunkaga being, unlike Atlas, upside down we may think this a prevision of the state of affairs shown onscreen in Gravity (2013), where we see that when we are far enough away from Earth’s surface it is impossible to orient oneself as to up and down. He scatters the people and all their possessions to the four quarters of the earth: Scattering as differentiation, the creation of types; and this because of an elemental, alimental, frantic problem, a condition unparalleled and unanticipated, if also elementary. The earth is covered with excrement: Yes, because the body is worn into the soil, excrement of life. Because, per Einstein, conditions in all parts of the universe are the same. Brown immediately sees this Trickster Wakdjunkaga as a hero, the source of man’s material culture (filthy lucre). The world of things is created “by a filthy trick.” To recognize this relationship, for Brown, is to go a long way back, or a long way in, to see that “the mask which seduces us is derived from the play of the primary process” (62). Art must be—must only be—“subversive of civilization” (63). The brown of excrement is the signal color of life, then. The body and self, which we abandon at our peril because “we are nothing but the body … all values are bodily values” (293). If money is linked to excrement, this is because of the infant’s impulse to play with that substance, an impulse repudiated with upright posture. Triumph over death can be worked out with things—the lumps of civilized manufacture—“only if the things produced by the body at the same time nourish it. Possessions are worthless to the body unless animated by the fantasy that they are excrement which is also aliment” (293). Brown notes Ferenczi pointing to money as “odorless dehydrated filth that has been made to shine” (qtd. in Brown 287). Then a vital formula: The assimilation of money with excrement does not render money valueless; on the contrary, it is the path whereby extraneous things acquire significance for the human body, and hence value. If money were not excrement, it would be valueless. (293) The Trickster is thus really, essentially, wholly, and at heart a Fool, not a fool. Just as the joke (for Freud) is a way of saying the unsayable, uttering the unutterable, pointing to what is denied, the joking Trickster wears a grinning mask that covers seriousness. In Joseph McGrath’s The Magic Christian (1969), adapted for the screen by Terry Southern from his novel of 1959, the polymorphous turning, the inventive spin, the hilarious truth is managed by (the aptly named) Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers), presumed to be

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the richest man in the world (and certainly one for whom the money supply is without noticeable limit). With his adopted son Youngman (Ringo Starr), he goes about his business (should we say he takes pleasure in?) taunting agents of civilization with their own repressions: seducing Traffic Warden 27 (Spike Milligan) into swallowing the ticket he has just placed on Grand’s limousine in exchange for an attaché case full of money; taking a table at a fabulously expensive and exclusive restaurant filled with smug keepers of the bourgeois order and ordering a monstrous helping of caviar (the size of a baked trout or a pie) and then rubbing it all over his face. But the apotheosis is a veritable orgy of brown. Sir Guy arranges for the building of a very large tank, some eight or ten feet in height, circular, fifty or so feet in diameter. Then we see trucks pull up and deposit very broad hoses into the confined space. They proceed to pump, to a depth of about four feet, untreated human waste. A foaming lake of sienna brown foulness. This proceeds (Sir Guy and Youngman watching patiently with interest) until the tank is full to the top with what is now a rich brown miasm. The Trickster and his assistant now proceed to don gas masks, and, prancing around a circular walkway that skirts the rim, they toss in, willy-nilly, crisp new pound notes. More and more and more and more and more money. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of pounds. Money floating, money sinking, money fluttering in the fetid breeze. Now business types come running in their three-piece suits and bowler hats, climbing up, having a peek, and, seeing the prize, jumping in to retrieve. Business types, bobbies, strangers, all sides of the law. McGrath films the scene at sufficient length to drive home the inexpressibly awkward, tensionproducing connection between the frenetic capturing of money and the unblocked exposure of the body to excrement; not only excrement but unidentifiable excrement (not that excrement is ever identifiable; see for a turn on this the frenzy of the courtiers in The Madness of King George [1994]). McGrath’s men from the city, with their bowlers and brollies, make up a wading party for delving into the idea that we are all human, and only human, and in this way producers of excrement and seekers of wealth. The population at large entirely represented by its production, classless, ageless, without race or religion. At once an uncompromised attack upon false superiority and hollow status. And a cringe-making contact, multiplied in every direction, with the untouchable. The point of this grand Grand exercise is that these money seekers have gone too far to recapture the excremental joys of infancy; that for them it is all horrifying sublimation, a frenzied search in the world for some paltry substitute for the immense and lost pleasures of the long past. As the businessmen go enthusiastically diving into the brown, Paul McCartney and Badfinger are chanting, If you want it, here it is, come and get it

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But you’d better hurry ’cause it’s goin’ fast. Here is film designer Assheton Gorton’s recollection of making that scene: That was at the National Theatre on the South Bank. We had an empty site adjacent. We thought we’d rent it for the scene, put a big tank in there, fill it with water and put odious stuff that looked like shit. And all these business people would come down with bowler hats, very smart, and umbrellas. They chucked the money into the thing and all these guys came and dove into it. In the course of shooting this, the director’s first assistant sent the second or third assistant into the National Film Theatre to get some water, and they refused. They said, “We don’t want to have anything to do with your lot out there.” Here was a big film being made, with famous actors (Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr among others), and they completely turned off. Every night there, they screened a film equivalent to ours, or not quite as good, but they weren’t interested in how films were made, even with one being made immediately outside, on their doorstep. I found that very odd. (72) Adjacent the National Theatre (NT), a place of inherent theatricality, show, put-on, camouflage, all to cover a baser excremental reality. Also, a site where the tickets aren’t cheap. Stuff that looked like shit: key phrase, “looked like.” Appearance again. A distancing from the fundamental, a careful prophylactic against filth; but the folk at the NT needed that the prophylactic should be wearing a prophylactic. Umbrellas: yes, always, in sun or rain, show imperviousness to the weather (nature) and be equipped for any contingency (stiff upper lip). First, second, or third assistant: A nice, tidy, wholly sublimated bureaucratic organization, with every flunkie on the ladder answering to the one whose derrière is above his head. Movie shoots do work this way: the McGrath shoot was recursive. They refused: that is, to give water, source of life. (What person compos mentis refuses another person water?) We don’t want to have anything to do with your lot: rejection of the excremental, hiding it away, keeping it “out of touch,” undoing perception. Rejecting even the look of the excremental. And rejecting the rear end of things in the bargain. “Few experiences,” John Updike wrote in 1956, “so savor of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman’s fanny.” Undoing perception because what McGrath was showing here, with Gorton’s manifest help, was ordure and nothing but ordure, not as secret product but as explicit spectacle, a forced display of the thing we wished not to look at, because there was nothing else to look at, nor any action available but looking. Brown, brown everywhere but shut the eyes to be redeemed.

Of Mauve

… that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things. JOAN DIDION, SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM

In the end, the thing one must absolutely reject is the search for some “realist” significance of colors in images and works of art. MICHEL PASTOUREAU, “TOWARD A HISTORY OF COLOR: POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS” (TRANS. MINE)

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Sleight of Hand Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, MGM, 1944) We should take care with a predilection for positioning experience between contrasting polar, but insufficient extremes, with thinking too glibly of the hybrid concoction that reveals the powers and strengths of neither serious art on one side nor garbage on the other. Writing of comic books and their pleasures, for example, Leslie Fiedler warned of a generally negative attitude they once inspired (and still do), and went further to suggest that “it is not the fully literate, the intellectuals and serious writers, who lead the attack, but the insecure semiliterate” (“Middle” 21): the comic book as a creation not suitably high, yet also apparently not announcing itself unequivocally enough as trash. The insecure semiliterate are always concerned that things are not high enough, and when we speak of color, we might imagine a critical voice proclaiming impurity, indecisive effect, color not quite stated clearly enough. Somewhere between purple and white—yet also nowhere between them at all, in important ways cast aside by those who insist upon only the unquestionable and the exigent—is mauve. Mauve the haunter. As Simon Garfield reminds us, it was around 1857 that mauve became fashionable in France and featured prominently—thanks to the probable influence of the Empress Eugénie—in the gown Victoria wore to the wedding of her daughter the Princess Royal in 1858: “rich mauve (lilac) velvet, trimmed with three rows of lace; the corsage ornamented with diamonds and the celebrated Koh-i-noor brooch; the petticoat, mauve and silver moiré antique, trimmed with a deep flounce of Honiton lace” (61). That fount of satire, Punch, soon invoked an epidemic of “Mauve Measles … infectious, beginning with the eruption of ‘a measly rash of ribbons’ and ending with the whole body covered in mauve” (60). Yet the color has hypnotic power, can seem to swamp the looker’s experience quite like a spreading rash on a tender body. Immediately some clarifications, in order that the penetration of the mauve in its context at that royal wedding may gain the understanding that will soon convey us to the impressive colorist Vincente Minnelli: Honiton lace: From the early sixteen-hundreds, an arrival from Belgium. Natural patterns (flowers, leaves, branches, birds) were created separately and sewn into the lace ground, very laborious activity (thus time-consuming and expensive). By the middle of the nineteenth century, lace was being made by machine, and Victoria caused something of a stir in the industry by ordering a pure Honiton-lace gown; regal disapprobation of advanced industrial standards in favor of traditional (even cottage) methods. The gown had to be handmade, and more than a dozen types of stitches were

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employed to effect it. “Honiton lace” thus implied delicacies of detail, lavish extravagances of labor, exceeding refinements of beauty, and rareness. The lace part of the gown might well have attracted its own particular kind of attention: the desire to reach out and touch it, as with snowflakes, and the concomitant awareness that upon touch it could instantaneously be ruined. Even she who carried it upon her body did not strain to touch it. And it would be a stunning counterpoint to mauve. The Koh-i-noor. “Mountain of Light,” one of the largest cut diamonds on earth, the property of Victoria after the 1849 surrender of Punjab. The jewel was displayed at the Great Exposition of 1851, after which Victoria had it recut as a round gem. Six facets, 105.6 carats. Currently in the possession of the Queen of England (who, as Victoria did, possesses much). One of the telling points of a diamond once it is cut is that even the smallest beam of sunlight is captured, multiplied, and broadcast by the stone into the eyes of observers. The wearer becomes a source of illumination, a “sun” in herself. In this case, a mauve sun. After the transformation of lighting practice in Europe from gas to electricity, late in the nineteenth century, the lighting system itself was capable of spreading illumination across a space, although useful economies could be achieved through the invention of arrangements whereby a small light source was intensively magnified (the electric chandelier). The intensification of light by natural source, as in the prismatic wonder of the cut diamond, is a throwback, thus a principal social value. Again, a balance and counterweight for the powerful charge of the mauve gown. In the case of Victoria’s mauve presence at that wedding, the Koh-i-noor was brilliant and dominating but not the only source of radiance, since a metaphorical shine came from her esteemed, revered position as Queen, and since her diamonds were multiplied by way of a corsage trimmed with them. Watchers had the sense that preciousness, light, skill, and rarity were combined and diffused around her, ornamenting, bolstering, even amplifying the mauve of the garment with relatively smaller, independent but richly gathered sites of emanation. If the queen’s lace-trimmed garment were precisely the right color, the brilliance of all the jewels would make the entire confection glow in motion as though it were alive. What is it about mauve, then? What is it that could appeal to our imagination, regardless of whatever properties caught the interest of that particular sovereign at that particular time? 1. That the color tincture is relatively slight, yet all the more powerful for being so. Mauve is not a deep and heavy color even in saturation. It seduces by invoking marginality: times of day with marginal lighting, dawn, dusk, the moments of passage out of and back into darkness. Lacking the unfathomability of purple, it stuns through its shimmering

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and elusive brightness, its evocative, serious, and mysterious tendency to hint. Radiant and seductive, mauve seems entirely out of league with conventional colors, as if visiting from another sphere. It transcends the palette of the everyday. It beckons to the imagination, confounding speculation and rational process. 2. While typically as we concentrate upon it a color, warm or cold, has a way of advancing toward our consciousness, mauve retreats. It betokens an absence, invoking a distinct presence that was only in the past. Mauve always carries us back. It characterized, as seems, the world before we lived in it, the world that is, for each of us, and regardless of our historical explorations, entirely and only a dream. Thus, mauve leads us through dream time to some powerfully previous, only partially imaginable, wonderland. Mauve also tickles our easeful forgetting, drawing us not to specific fragments that are lost—distinctive things— but, even more beguilingly, to the awareness of fragments being lost, the idea of loss itself. Mauve keeps indicating the previous. In that way, it seems originary, an essence that precedes, but only and always precedes, whatever we call current experience. This is not to argue that our lives flow out of some Edenic mauve, out of a mauve world; but that mauve effectively, beautifully stands now for the evanesced before. Mauve evokes, sings of something we do not determine. When we see mauve, we are lifted by it out of the flow of contemporaneity and drawn back to unexperienced, only vaguely intuited, history. 3. Rather than stating, mauve alludes. In its frightening momentum, it throws us away from navigable paths, distracts our rationality, suggests rather than defining, waves rather than pointing. Mauve seems to move away from the eye, to bashfully turn, to hide itself in the interstices of the light. Mauve has the sweetness of cultivation, sugar; but also the herbal tang of the naturally untamed, spice. Mauve has hardly been a staple color of cinema. Its appearance in Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) is thus, like its other appearances, remarkable, not to mention the stunning fluidity and ungraspable magic by which it is given here to be seen. In the celebrated “Trolley Song,” Judy Garland’s Esther Smith, riding along amid a cluster of happy friends all singing ferociously as they go, is given to wear a pair of: Hypnotic mauve gloves. It was fashionable at the end of the nineteenth century for women, especially dainty girls, to keep their fragile hands from touching the world directly, lest their sensitive personae should be contaminated by the rogue filth of life. Decorative gloves were very much in use, tight-fitting, created by fashion designers. But as to these particular gloves (indubitably from Fulton County), the mauveness jumps off the screen, leaps into and then scurries

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away from the viewer’s awareness, not least because of some evocative hand gestures the singer uses with rhythm, framing her face, pointing to the world, cupping wondrously as she sings. Her song is a declaration of excitement, forward-gazing adventurousness, desire for love. The gloves— mauve butterflies—seem to separate her hands from her self. The gestures themselves are on the beat, and also syncopated against it, accomplished with the most elegant musical sensibility (nothing strange for Garland); these are limb gestures, polished by culmination in the hands. But the mauve gloves transform those hands utterly, give them an illumination strange and disturbing, perhaps as though, optimistic lyrics and garrulous facial attitudes notwithstanding, the girl attached to these mauve hands will never find complete happiness, never find rest, never be able to stop singing (this or any other song). The color balance (color timing) of the number is fascinating in itself. The girls and boys who circle around Esther and sing merrily with her are all garbed in vivacious colors, one young woman even wearing a gown of mauve (!), yet a notably dull mauve. Esther’s bright, provocative mauve hands leap out of the scene, not so much contrasting against the other colors as giving them no heed, having no truck with any essence but their own mauveness, a quality that emanates, we must believe, from a special mauve world, a magical world of wonder and fulfillment to which only Esther has access. No color however powerful could obscure this mauve. Could one say the mauve is otherworldly? “Zing, zing, zing went my heart strings.” A quotidian trolley in a burgeoning city at the turn of the twentieth century, a normal vehicle for its time, containing riders who exhibit perfectly normal behavior, everyday personalities on show, yet leaping toward us a pair of hands in mauve that seem independent, shining, rare, transformative, as though ornamented with sparkly diamonds and Honiton lace.

Mauve in Rotation The King and I (Walter Lang, Twentieth Century Fox, 1956) In his Life of Anna Leonowens, Alfred Habegger makes plain that when in 1862 the English schoolmistress paid her first visits to the Court of the King of Siam, she encountered a certain sharp and pervasive conflict. As a single woman she was categorized as socially inferior (women inferior to men; unmarried women inferior to married women); yet as an English foreigner she was superior (England the Imperial). “Her status was ambiguous, it wasn’t clear how much respect was due her, and she felt a strong compulsion to assert her dignity” (164). The tension between her two incompatible but

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omnipresent identities made for awkward, sometimes curiously humorous, encounters with King Mongkut, as in the following exchange, reported by Leonowens herself but somewhat doubted by the skeptical Habegger: “How many years shall you be married?” “For several years, your Majesty.” He fell into a brown study; then, laughing, rushed at me, and demanded triumphantly:— “Ha! How many grandchildren shall you now have? Ha, ha! How many? How many? Ha, ha, ha!” (170)1 To the regular Siamese practice of prostration, Leonowens took particular offense (a reaction dramatized in a stage and film scene about kowtowing). As Margaret Landon reports, “She had no intention of letting anyone enforce the custom of prostration upon her household” (218). This far from comical arrangement of bodies in rigid social-class order, and in all circumstances, chafed her sensibilities, founded in the European cultivation of the delicacies of touch, thus proximity. She reports one Siamese person’s answer to an American’s query about the astonishingly narrow streets and alleys of Bangkok: But you have been here a long time! You know the Siamese! Have you ever seen two Siamese of exactly equal rank? But of course not. So why should the walks be broad enough for two, since there are no two in the kingdom who could walk together? (218) Her upbringing in the British class system notwithstanding, the king’s schoolmistress was made acutely conscious of social and spatial distance. Her experience in the court unendingly brought up class in an invidious way, as well as the tension between courtesy and meaning. To avoid presenting irresolvable social difficulties, Anna had to “dance” her way through court life. The “Shall We Dance?” number of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s The King and I (March 29, 1951; St. James Theater)2 thus invokes broad allegorical reflections, involving formalizations of physical contact, equality of head position, and a densely Europeanized cultivation of taste and embodiment. With its ironic repetition of three sharp beats, “Shall we dance? DUM DUM DUM …” bridging the second and third beats of the opening bars in blunt

Fans and admirers of Yul Brynner’s stage and film performance as Mongkut will perhaps be intrigued to learn how closely his dialogue—written by Oscar Hammerstein II—followed the original. 2 Originally choreographed on Broadway by Jerome Robbins. 1

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imitation of the king’s “Ha, ha, ha!”—which in the play is transformed into “Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera!”—this waltz marks the singular moment when the two so different figures finally begin to accept one another as people, even as gendered people, regardless of their cultural differences: Shall we dance? On a bright cloud of music shall we fly? Shall we dance? Shall we then say “Goodnight” and mean “Goodbye”? Or perchance, When the last little cloud has left the sky, Shall we still be together With our arms around each other And shall you be my new romance? Hammerstein’s repetition of the word “shall” cagily picks up—but also amends—Mongkut’s somewhat clumsily ungrammatical use of that same word. And the possibility of an entanglement or romance arising from the contact of the bodies under the influence of the three-beat music is directly announced. Let it be said that in Leonowens’s original 1870 account of her sojourn in Siam, no romance is invoked. For Walter Lang’s two-hour-and-twenty-four-minute road-show CinemaScope film, including Overture and Entr’acte (just as in virtually all stage versions), Anna is gowned, by Irene Sharaff, in splendid and radiant mauve while she dances this dance. A mauve that reflects prevailing light with an especially soft, warming glow, as though it were emitted from sacred candles. The dance has its own form, requiring that she spin, and that the King (Yul Brynner) somewhat athletically spin her—he a powerful activating force and she a responsive reactive one—so that in play the mauve becomes a flashing ungovernable orb. Leon Shamroy’s camera is on a crane so that the point of view can easily fly up as the dancers swirl forward, the mauve radiance enlarge and brighten. So optically absorbing is the colorful movement (the King sporting a scarlet, gold-braided tunic) in synchrony with the charming (if simple) music that all thought of social position, courtly etiquette, and power relations evaporates. The mauve dress commands the screen space, the King now apparently attached to it, mesmerized, overrun by European opulence though he is opulent enough on his own. Of course, this is a way of deprecating the Asian’s status relative to the Englishwoman’s, the person of color in relation to the white, with the dizzying waltz tune covering the strategy. Both in Leonowens’s time (1831–1915) and in the early 1950s, there were plenty of generic Siamese (now Thai) dance forms available for use in this

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scene (and indeed Leonowens gives a striking account of an affecting local dance); nor need the King and Anna have needed of diegetic necessity to fall into a waltz instead of, say, foxtrotting or, for that matter, not dancing at all, since in her own account of her time at the Siamese court Leonowens does not describe any moment of having danced with the King, notwithstanding her critical admiration of him: Of Somdetch P’hra Paramendr Maha Mongkut, late Supreme King of Siam, it may safely be said (for all his capricious provocations of temper and his snappish greed of power) that he was, in the best sense of the epithet, the most remarkable of the Oriental princes of the present century,—unquestionably the most progressive of all the supreme rulers of Siam, of whom the native historians enumerate not less than forty. (237) An estimable person is not necessarily a dancing partner. Given that in his book for the play Hammerstein wished to include the waltz, the mauve waltz as happens, we can say that what it adds is a quality of compulsive rotation and repetition—thus, in a way, an educational format—and an emphatic rhythm that points at one and the same time to the heartbeat, the intoxicated mind (the waltz is a whirl), and the desire for formal interrelation. In the mid-1860s, the waltz was an elaborate etiquette of holds, positions, and moves, expression of formal much more than of personal inclination. Inclination bowed (kowtowed) to form, not the other way round. What could be personal for the dramatized Anna in the dancing derives from the fact that the gentle touch that features in it had not been part of the story of her relationship with the King theretofore. Distance was the byword. Further, the crinoline beneath her shot satin gown works here, as everywhere in fashion of the time, to keep the woman’s body at a distance from the man’s, with the effect that in the dance as choreographed we see an elaboration of the outstretched arms of both partners, dignified but also a technical necessity for keeping them in step together while being so artfully separated. The separation also monitored and guarded touch. “Dancing was emphatically not one of Yul’s natural graces, nor Gertie’s [Gertrude Lawrence, “Anna” in the Broadway version],” Yul Brynner’s son reports, “but once they had rehearsed enough to avoid tripping over Mrs. Anna’s voluminous skirts and falling on their faces, the play was made” (57).3 The waltz in The King and I is a mauve waltz because the stunning mauve of the swirling garment, the rhythm of the alluring music, the flowing, spinning gestures of the two bodies, and the dramatic meaning of the moment are all entirely inextricable one from another. Thus, an evaluative distance is Beyond making the play, the dance seemed to make the actors’ experience. When I saw Brynner perform this scene, he fell into a transport of childish delight at the waltz, seemed to lose, on behalf of the whole audience, any sense that this was a performance. 3

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created from a certain arcane comment of Oscar Wilde’s: “I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner” (152). Beyond the fact that the Greeks couldn’t have commented on the “mauveness” of anything, Wilde’s comment seems to neglect how the grass and the color mauve might be unified in experience, whether one comments in language about them or not. To discuss the mauveness of Anna’s waltz is not to be extraneous but to catch at the shine of the moment.4 Was mauve always, initially, even essentially heady? William Perkin, who invented the color in 1856 had been working to “convert an artificial base into the natural alkaloid quinine” but had not succeeded. “With a desire to understand this particular result, a different base of more simple construction was selected, viz. aniline, and in this case obtained a perfectly black product. This was purified and dried, and when digested with spirits of wine gave the mauve dye” (36; emphasis mine). Simon Garfield notes that aniline, a distillation from indigo discovered in 1826 by Otto Inverdorben (and subsequently derived from coal tar by Friedlieb Runge), had been in use for thirty years in connection with colorants by the time Perkin invented his dye. However, “in the unlikely event a scientist would have thought a particular tint might be useful in the dyeing of a woman’s dress, they would most certainly have believed such fripperies unworthy of their calling” (37). Perkin’s mauve was a “brilliant and lustrous colour … that did not fade with washing or prolonged exposure to light” (37) and, as Joshua Yumibe reminds us, colors made from aniline made the production and distribution of synthetic color considerably more frequent and profitable—leading to color technologies in cinema (26). Sharaff was prescient selecting mauve over say, pink grenadine which, in 1862, was a popular color for ball dresses but hardly as spectacular as Anna’s ruffled, glimmering, slyly rotating gown.

Natural Mauve Amadeus (Milos Forman, AMLF/The Saul Zaentz Company, 1984) Who will ever know if Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, musical prodigy, musical genius (1756–1791), possessed hair as white as oxeye petals and wore by habit a dainty crème cravat above a pale, radiant, amethyst silk mauve coat?

Fascinating is the use by Claude Monet of mauve to elaborate the shadow upon the sandy walkway in his “Argenteuil” (c. 1872). The adjacent grass becomes greener precisely against— that is, with—this mauve. 4

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The coat buttons massive, silkened, too; the fit snug and sleek, so as to produce enticing wrinkles up and down the arms. The coat sufficient to both attract and finger the consideration of the viewer, finger, poke, prod, and stimulate, just as, standing on the podium and conducting the orchestra at his operas, this Mozart, as we see him in Milos Forman’s Amadeus (1986), pokes, prods, inserts his finger into the air, stimulating his music to squirt forward and spray the audience. Mauve prodigy, mauve revolutionary. Tingling mauve?: Lucy Fischer quotes Patrizia von Brandenstein on her design for the film: “Mozart’s world was reflective, bright, silvery, pastel, brilliant, tingling like crystal, faceted like his music” (Brandenstein in LoBrutto 186; qtd. in Fischer ed. 12). Is this Mozart (Tom Hulce) made not only believable but also dignified for us by virtue of the decorous pallor of his mauve jacket? The film gained a wide following because, in part, its central character was played as being outside the boundaries of normality: a wild giggler, a wild gesticulator, wildly racing around, hiding under the table, goosing girls, screaming with delight, falling into the deepest darkest pits of morose depression, skyrocketing again. He is a perfect Joker, a court Fool, this Wolfie (even the name is a tag for hilarious and adorable eccentricities), but doesn’t that shimmering jacket, glowing like a still pool at twilight, refine and elevate him? Does the mauve not utterly transform the man, and anything it touches? Turn the quotidian into the ethereal …? Because surely if anything at all, Mozart’s music is a transformation. And because (here is the dramatic crux of the story) Court Power and musical genius will find a way to marry and cohabit, their extended organs of curiosity and pleasure must both intertwine and interpenetrate, in order that social propriety might be graced with Mozartean ornamentations and that poor, destitute, crumpling Mozart be given support. The Court certainly does not understand Mozart, but it knows what its ears shout out, that here is a force to be reckoned with and appropriated. So, if Mozart is to appeal to the Court, to the (hardly brilliant) Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones), he must ascend. His sprightly, randy, uncontrolled adolescent body must be encased in a shell of obedient (and also commanding) respect. And this shell is the tranquilized and tranquilizing mauve jacket, the dress-up that not only makes Mozart shine but makes him rise. Because Mozart must rise (in order for us to experience the pleasure of his musical and social successes as resting above, and feel ourselves properly elevated, too), because he must be jacked up, there will have to be an elevating device, and it is surely not in his uncouth manners or mannerisms. Mauve serves perfectly. It makes him regal, resplendent, and, most important, nobly restrained, in a way that underneath his garment our adorable Wolfie never is. He is an unrestrained, bombastic buffoon but now he becomes nothing less than a mauve contemplation, a slim taste of the river of royalty. And royalty, which is to say pretty dignity, or capital form, will enhance his

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composition. In Mozart we will find form as much as innovation; form as much as play and ornament; form as much as thrill. Form will be the grammar that leashes him. Forman will choreograph the thrill. Forman’s Mozart’s rococo style—what to the modern eye would be the feyness of the pallid but alluring mauve, accompanied by his uncontrolled giggle—works against the august gravities of the Court, yet at the same time serves the Emperor unequivocally. Forman spices his film with a malevolent, intriguing Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), always dressed dark, who resents Mozart’s successes and his own failures at pleasing royalty. But because Mozart tickles us, flamboyant, glowing, effervescently humorous, and full of harmless mischief, it will follow that he tickles the Court. Tickle the Court naturally, not as a reprehensible toady (of which the Court has plenty already). He opposes bourgeois tidiness by living in a storm of impulses, reacting to any and every instigation. How can this naturalness be signaled visually, outside the antic behavior which could always lead to a diagnosis of madness? One answer is the shimmering surface of the mauve jacket, its champagne flavor, and the golden waistcoat beneath it, or any other silken garment he wears but none so resplendently as the mauve, because we sense its surface reacting suddenly, directly to every shift of sunlight or candlelight around. Mauve on Wolfie is both here and not here. An eclipse of the hungers of the flesh. A reflection of the world, and the world’s Divine.

Hot Mauve Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, MGM, 1966): I The protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the filmmaker’s first English-language feature, produced for Carlo Ponti at MGM and adapted for the screen from a story by the Argentinian Julio Cortázar, is a self-possessed photographer in hip London (David Hemmings). This young man—there are versions of the script in which he is named “Thomas,” but in the film he has no name whatever—has set up for himself a posh studio in Holland Park (a renovation, built for the film, of mod photographer John Cowan’s actual studio at 49 Princes Place), and in that studio, like so many other photographers, he possesses roll-down seamlesses (as they are called), rolls of colored paper that can be unfurled behind a subject to create a suitable “background.” One of these is mauve. Definitive, brilliant, unyielding, uncompromising mauve. Any seamless will become a universe if the lens is focused near enough to it, but the mauve seamless becomes a wholly electrifying, strange other world.

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Because this mauve articulation has no seam—the paper roll is roughly four feet in width, sometimes larger—when someone stands before it the color seems to swell in a deliciously vague manner and cover the entire field of perception. That is, the entire world of imagination. The mauve seamless appears in two different contexts in the film, at one time somber, melancholy, meditative, even gloomy; a second time buoyant, giddy, enthusiastic, passionate. Meditative mauve > joyous mauve. The mauve of wondering, of linkage, of end points, of defenses. The mauve of escalation, prodding, touching, caressing, needling, probing, exciting, if bounded playful aggression. Business mauve. Sexual mauve. He has been in a beautiful little park photographing serendipitously. A quiet Saturday morning. He comes upon a pair of lovers and follows them, clicking away. The woman sees and becomes agitated. She races toward him (Vanessa Redgrave) and demands the film, a hand uplifted to mask her face. “This is a public place. Everyone has the right to be left in peace.” He pulls back, grinning with either embarrassment or titillation, since she is stunning and he is clearly energized. “You know, most girls would pay me to photograph them.” He promises the reel if she’ll come to his place. Not long later, she does: GIRL: I’ve come for the photographs. PHOTOGRAPHER: How did you manage to find me? GIRL: Do you live here? He leads her upstairs, pulls down his mauve seamless, and stands her in front of it. “Have you ever done any modelling? Fashion stuff I mean. You’ve got it. Hold that. Not many girls can stand as well as that.” She is wearing a short gray skirt and a cotton shirt with black, gray, and white checks. Her hair is fire red. Her pose for him is at once casually natural, effortless, unthought; and stylized, symmetrical, elegant, alluring. Antonioni has Carlo di Palma shoot this bit face-on, putting us behind the eyes of the photographer. There is no difficulty seeing that he is both acutely sensitive, extremely tasteful, and absolutely correct: she has it, she could be on the cover of Vogue. Here. Right now. (In her other film of this year, Morgan, Karel Reisz had made Redgrave seem flexible and sharp-witted; Antonioni here makes her seem an iconically beautiful energy bank.) Yet there is more to this moment. The Girl is apparently nervous: better, anxious. Strained, looking around as though with urgency. Something is on her mind. Likely something that relates to any of these: (a) the reel of shots made in the park, that include pictures of her; (b) shots, photography, in general, the idea of being photographed instead of “being left in peace”; (c) this particular photographer, his sexiness, his boldness, his technical capacity. Or (d) something lingering in her mind about which, at this moment, we have no clue. At any rate, if she is posing with accomplishment, she is

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also entirely uncomfortable: what he is seeing that is so impressive, because he knows she is uncomfortable, is exactly her ability even in discomfort to strike so magnificent, so proud a pose. She is thinking of something else; she is in a daydream. Hurry, hurry, I need to get that film and leave. I have somewhere to be, or else: I cannot be seen remaining here. (We never find out.) She is a wild animal caged (in mauve), unable to show anything but natural grace and yet afraid. Of what could she be afraid? He intends nothing more than to look at her, toke her up a little, have some wine, listen to some jazz, remove a shirt or two, and see what might happen. She is certainly casual with such shenanigans. Easy youth. Here, then, the mauve indicates a kind of tentative and empty sky, an overcast aura, a subtle yet evenly spread weight that comes down upon her as she stands in front of it. (Evenly spread: the whole point of a seamless is to be literally “seamless,” uniformly colored with absolutely no breaks or stitches or alterations in tone. The subject in front of it will appear to float, as in a filmic matte.) Mauve for alert anticipation. Mauve for retiring fragility. Mauve for a jittery sense of the future. Mauve for stimulation, yet also for retreat. The mauve of confusion when we cannot see a pathway through a complicated problem. Call it Problematic Mauve. Soon later, and in the same location, a pair of teenaged girls (called in the mid-1960s “teenyboppers”) (Jane Birkin; Gillian Hills), who begged him earlier in the film to take their pictures, show up unannounced at his door. “Can you manage to make a cup of coffee?” he asks. They climb upstairs while he resumes a phone call. Rummage through the Marimekko dresses hanging on a rack. He enters, smiles, and teases them. The tease turns into a mock fight. The mock fight into a romp. A race down to the area where he has the seamless. They get there first. Pulling at the paper. Pulling. Pulling. Raucous shrieks of laughter. The seamless, yards and yards and yards of it, entirely pulled down and rumpled on the floor. Laughter without meaning and without purpose, the laughs that come directly out of the body in its desire. Pulling at one another. The three of them at sea in an enormous crumpled mass of mauve, bodies and contrasty clothing ravenously intertwined, yanking at fabric, finding skin. Ménage à trois—never before seen onscreen in an American-produced film. Nudity, for at least Birkin full frontal nudity—never before seen onscreen in an American-produced film. The noise of the paper rumpling, crumpling, and dumpling under the bodies as a neat percussive accompaniment to the trebles of their pleasure. Interminably hot mauve, ravenous mauve, desperate mauve. Jump cut to the “moment after,” tranquil as dawn, the girls fully dressed now and carefully lacing on his shoes. In this conclusion, the mauve of the seamless seems to have evaporated away. Say, Harmonic Mauve. Hot Mauve. Now, Cooled Mauve.

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What is perfect about the sexual mauveness is its interminable, unbounded suggestion of penetrable depths, an extreme, mysterious, hidden interior zone for which we yearn and don’t stop yearning; toward which we navigate and don’t stop navigating, in a search for release. Surfaces—skin, even the mauve substance as a skin—are only promises. Any other color would pronounce, identify itself at some point, draw progression to a halt, but the mauve hints and continues to hint without ever being so definitive as to state, no matter in what fragmented shape it shows up on the screen. Blow-Up itself hints and searches, of course. “Come to me, come to me.” It becomes a diffuse reflection, this mauve, a clue about experience that never quite explains. The two instantiations of the mauve seamless work to parenthesize one singular node of action around which the film is built, namely the at-first presence and subsequent absence of a body in that tranquil park. Interesting that the photographer’s phone call to his agent, the call interrupted by the marauding teenyboppers, has as its main purpose an expostulation of wonder and excitement at having saved someone’s life. Instantly, he is waylaid by the young women, Bacchae of the modern world, who literally threaten to tear this pretty Pentheus to pieces (they figuratively rip at him, pulling his clothes off). We can recall that Pentheus’s abiding, provoking rationality and aloofness provoke the Dionysiac women. His pride and glory need to taste the real, the flesh, the ecstasy, and the mortal. As Euripides’s The Bacchae puts rationality and carnality in opposition, Ill starred, luckless poor King Pentheus,    Takes his left hand in her right hand,      Tears his arm from out its socket,      Not by any strength that’s mortal,    But by super-human powers, Which the god had granted to her. On his right side then did Ino     Finalise his sad destruction,      Tearing all his flesh asunder.    Then attacked him Autonoe And the whole crowd of the Bacchae.    There was one collective screaming. … With their hands all blood bespattered, Like a ball they tossed King Pentheus. (56–7 [1129–32; 1141–2]) So in a way does Blow-Up confound and toss, its one mauve a cool, rational presence, foundation of systematic, scientific, profitable labor through a representational form (seamlesses are used conventionally by commercial

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photographers5); and its other a wild and boundless quest for the agony of freedom, in which, the camera plainly shows, as utensil of productivity the mauve seamless is utterly destroyed. Crumpled, the thing can no longer be used to background a subject to earn a quid, even as it perfectly evokes the sexual knot. The crumpling sound is a natural one, too; in its round fullness and strange spontaneous variation it calls up the sound of flames licking firewood, the splash from a rapids, or the sound of a pebble skipping across the surface of a lake. Purely musical yet unrelatable, all, these sounds seem to be of the true body, the body that is our inheritance independently of our strivings for intelligence, productivity, achievement, measurement, and reliance. In the crumpling moment, the color mauve surrounds the bodies and carries them beyond measurement, beyond reliance, beyond the everyday real. Whereas in the earlier modeling scene, a rational mauve backing Redgrave engaged in “showing how she stands” retires into modest accompaniment, glows—but to offer helpful illumination not to express. In the diegesis, our photographer (one of London’s smart young talents) has cannily selected this mauve, of all possible backdrops, to form a contrast against the woman in her clothing, to make her radiate and to isolate and contrast her form against the space in which she would appear to hover. This is a purposive mauve, but in the sex scene we have a mauve entirely for play. Play is not purposive in the way that work is. In this strange and wonderful film, mauve is for both clarification and confusion, the former leading to, and resolving in, the latter. Can it be said that color is woven or associated with time? Objective time, such as it is, surely not; the clock ticks on a wall of any color. But since color is apprehended, interpreted, felt, and absorbed by a sensitive viewer, and since this same sensitive viewer has a sensitive appreciation of time, feels the past sliding away, anticipates the future, perception of color has a temporal relation. In a sense, mauve announces itself in Blow-Up before it makes an active, diegetic appearance, offering the perceptive eye an introductory nod, a presentiment of the dramatic form soon to open. The photographer, still not introduced to us as such, has been spending the night in a doss house (an oblique reference to George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London

In the design, Hemmings’s character is meant as stand-in for a group of “swinging” London photographers of the early 1960s, David Bailey, John Cowan, Terence Donovan, Brian Duffy, whose work straddled the border between Vogue-style commercial portraiture and social realism. Bailey is very often cited as Antonioni’s model although given the company’s use of his studio space Cowan may well have been closer to the mark. Cowan’s fashion photography of the time was important in the catalogue of British Vogue’s imagery, and there is thought that he inspired the scene in which our photographer does a session with (Countess) Veruschka (von Lehndorff). 5

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[1933])—because, we conclude at the time, he has nowhere to sleep—but afterward, when he climbs into his forest green Rolls, packing a camera into the glove box, he becomes visible as a secret observer who was snagging clandestine photographs (for what we will learn is a book he’s producing). He drives through the London streets (in a sequence filmed mostly in the City), and we spy ahead of him, through his windshield, long roads margined by brutalist gray blocks—towers of flats, towers of business. The entire perspective is brutalist gray, flat, uninviting, mundane, quotidian: the kind of dull terrain that inspires daydream escapes into the private domain of fantasy and memory. Our hero is thus not really doing a careful observation as he drives, but because we are viewing this film near its beginning we are. And quite briefly, in the distance, an entire side of a building has been painted mauve. A mauve trapezoid flashing and then disappearing, with the gray sky behind it and the gray terrain all around. Only the smallest of clues as to the delirious doubt that may be coming down the road. The mauve jewel that will open the cache. Does the color mauve contain some special tincture of foresight therefore, some magical capacity to suffuse the present moment with a sense of things to come? The mauve in Blow-Up seems to be urgently present, itself and only itself, here and only here; but also, always, a gateway to a thrilling, if unimaginable beyond. It waits to be caught and teased out. In the sex scene, for example, there is no doubt the attention of most viewers is riveted to the increasingly naked, blushing, eager bodies; the unconventional choreographic arrangement; the surprise of the passion, coming into a film where there has been but scant prelude to it (the encounter of the photographer and the Girl from the park is artfully elided). The crumpling mauve seamless, inevitably present, is always retiring, accompanying the flesh but also dropping away, thus always a mauve bonded to, splashing across the body of experience. In the posing sequence, it is the magnificent form of Redgrave—her posture, her attitude, the openness of her facial expression—that catches the eye, while the mauve background rests, withdraws, undulates forward, whispers, “I could if you wished …” Mauve does not point but with a secret power it assures a destination. Fare forward, voyagers.

Retreat Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, Warner Bros., 1961): I A stew of hunger and shame brought to the boil. In the best melodramatic form—the passion of engendering, family, the tortures of inheritance—here is the story of two young people in 1928 Kansas (a

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script by William Inge: the heroes are both possibly readers in their youth of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz [1900], also set in Kansas, and may have identified, but with whom?). All of the scenes astringently written, if in stereotype: The girl, pretty, intelligent, and loyal (Natalie Wood) with a sexual appetite for which her intrusive and puritanical mother (Audrey Christie) has made her feel shame. The boy, handsome, athletic, and innocent (Warren Beatty, his film début) with an even greater appetite than hers, but cramped, pressured, and ridden by an obsessive magnate father (Pat Hingle) who is using his son’s promise to remake himself. The desire leads to cataclysm of a particular (teenaged) kind (not the one Deanie’s mother or Bud’s father fear, unbridled sexual release): because Deanie holds herself back from culminating with Bud, he is rendered anxious, clumsy, self-conscious. One night after a party, he witnesses a gang of male friends preparing to rape one of Deanie’s schoolmates. Entering the fray to attack them, he finds himself attacked instead, viciously. Not only is he wounded but so direct an exposure to the ugliness of the sexual motive displayed with such rawness traumatizes him. He pulls back from Deanie, cold and self-protective, leading her into the darkest depth of confusion. She becomes depressed, introverted, silent, withdrawn, someone who does not recognize herself. In class, she is humiliated for daydreaming, then forced to read and explicate a passage from Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” which brings her (understandably) to tears. As she floods out of the classroom, Kazan puts his camera near the floor just outside the door, with a wide-angle lens, so that as the door flies open into the echoey hallway it feels as though the screen itself is in flight. Deanie comes home a wreck. A fancy meal is being served. “Deanie, c’mon honey, supper’s ready. Deanie, come on, honey! Deanie! Come on! Supper’s getting cold! Veal roast, mashed potatoes, and succotash for my girl!” a manipulative maternal half-smile. Deanie arrives in … A mauve bathrobe. And she will not eat. Her nosey mother continues to coddle and provoke, especially in an alarming scene as Deanie languishes in a hot bathtub. “Deanie, how serious have you and Bud become? You know what I mean.” Panic-stricken but repressed, in her young fear now writhing from a chain of intrusive stabs, Deanie ducks into the water to make it her shield. Finally: “Did he spoil you?” Deanie loses all composure. “SPOIL?” in a scream. Turning and submerging and emerging in battle. “No, Mom! I’m not SPOILED!!! I’m not spoiled, Mom. I’m just fresh and virginal, like the day I was born!” She climbs out of the bath now and confronts her mother sopping wet and stark naked: “A good little, good little, GOOD little girl!” then races into her room. But that retiring, hyper-modest, even recalcitrant mauve bathrobe, resting in memory through all the wretched filth of the bath. That pristine, placid, intemperately becalming mauve robe. A color that lays a blanket of calm

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upon turbulent waters, tentatively, precariously. It is very close to Maerz and Paul’s “Fontainebleau.”6 Wood began the film wearing pale colors, in scenes filled with autumnal, ancient rusts, burnt golds, pallid greens. In the poetry sequence, she is suddenly dressed in a beautifully tailored plum red dress (Maerz and Paul’s “Renaissance”), a real attention grabber (and a deft collaboration between costume designer Anna Hill Johnstone and film designer Richard Sylbert), almost the red of the school sweaters on the students we see surrounding her, but not quite. At the table, however, her display is muted and esoteric, esoteric more than anything, the insistent mauve surface a reflection of her esoteric retreat. The mother is ladeling rich brown gravy on Deanie’s plate, slathering the veal, the succotash, and the potatoes with far too much motherly attention. The excess makes the melodrama, here quintessentially and throughout the film. The loud excess and the silence regarding it. Deanie in her hush-hush mauve shell sits properly but cannot bring herself to take the food. She pulls away: from dinner, from her mother, from the family, from “normality.” The mauve of withdrawal. Medicinal mauve. There is one shot in which part of Deanie’s mauve-wrapped body is visible against the festive tabletop and the exciting food, a color contrast of great magnitude. Emphasis is lent the sustained hesitation, self-negation, and withdrawal of the girl in this (magical) gown. Her mauve is a neutralizer, a battle shield against tempest, a retractor of emotion. Just prior to the bathtub scene in which she will scream her passion—her passionate denial and affirmation together—Deanie is silent and murmuring, pointed inward to some endless darkness. The mauve is a meditative—for Deanie nightmarish—one, a plateau on which painful contradictory thoughts may touch and flee. The mauve of the garment literally seems to arch away from the appealing home cooking, just as Deanie seems to be arching away from the family, from social life, from the appeal and homeliness of romantic attachment. Romantic attachment, too openly invoked in this particular home, is now contaminated, overcooked by probing attention, as though for Deanie passion and family are incompatible. In melodrama, the family is a cauldron in which it is impossible to make a family. Deanie will undergo a serious trauma and be institutionalized. We see her sitting alone in a cold institutional room, staring through a tall coldlylit institutional window at the equivocal, incomprehensible world outside. She is separated from that world, withdrawn from the self she had there. The challenge of giving a color a name has been met and remet many times, the Maerz and Paul dictionary only one of numerous compendia addressing the problem. On his voyage in the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin used 110 color names specifically designed to address the color array he found in nature: Greenish White, Tile Red, Leek Green among them (see Syme). 6

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Withdrawn, even, from the film. Again we find her in the mauve robe that, here in neutralized space, is the only node of color we can see. Two and a half diegetic years later she is preparing to leave this place, healed, whole again, and sitting in the office of her therapist she wears a deeply saturated, dark, regal purple dress. There is no better demonstration than this, that mauve is not a form of purple, and purple is not born of mauve.

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You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! THE TEMPEST I.2.517–19

ROTHKO: And red! And red! And red!—I don’t even know what that means! What does “red” mean to me? You mean scarlet? You mean crimson? You mean plum-mulberry-magenta-burgundysalmon-carmine-carnelian-coral? Anything but “red!” What is “RED?!” JOHN LOGAN, RED

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Explode Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, Warner Bros., 1961): II Deanie can no longer push her desire beneath her mother’s enforcing propriety. After she has kept herself in exile for some time, Bud’s chum Toots (Gary Lockwood) pays a call and smilingly invites her to the big dance. She agrees to go with him. When the time comes, we see her “dolling” herself up, making tiny spit curls at her temples, putting on jewels (believably paste), and wearing a flamboyant, eye-imprisoning, wholly glorious red satin dress (Maerz and Paul’s “Afghan Red”). The dress is the scene. The red rubs, teases, provokes, warbles. Some will note how, as Deanie climbs into Toots’s roadster, she has rolled her nylons down to mid-thigh. At the dance, she quickly jettisons Toots with one of her girlfriends and attaches herself, shyly, hesitantly to awkwardly retreating Bud. Besotted with her glamor, he is torn between desire and his father’s ambitions for him. She draws him outside and begs him to make love to her in the back of his car. He pulls away, confused, distraught. Toots comes out, takes her with him, and drives off. They find themselves at the waterfall (where in the film’s opening scene Deanie was necking with Bud in a very hot chastity). She leaves his car and runs away, clambering along the night-shadowed embankment, her furtive, horribly urgent movement in the red dress and golden high heels, her glowing form in the twilight intercut with shots of the black-green falls, the pond dropping over a precipice, the perilous rocks. She is in the water, her blazon of red flickering by half-light. Four workers plunge in (sheathed in white) and seize her, screaming, flailing, just at the lip of the falls. And now a scene at the hospital. We are positioned in a very long corridor, at the far end of which, small and pathetic, stands the doctor with Bud’s pushy father, furtively glancing our way. Deanie’s room is immediately at left, just out of frame. A nurse emerges, steps a little way across the screen, then turns away from the camera and strides down the corridor in the direction of the conspiring men. She has in hand—we saw it up close when she entered the frame—a vivid, even monstrous sopping red item. Shapeless red, flamboyant red, screaming red, farther and farther away as she adds up those efficient nursey steps then disappears. Bud goes in to see Deanie but emerges a moment later stunned and depressed. “Want to help Deanie, Bud?” the doctor has come up to say straightforwardly. “Stay away from her.” Call for the doctor, call for the nurse … What was that red phantom object being borne away by the nurse in her sparkly whites? Down the antiseptic corridor. To the unknown future. Bud struck by Deanie, the doctor treating Deanie, the father probing into Deanie’s

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condition, the nurse touching Deanie … that object hanging and dripping and soft and fleshy and as red as blood. Nothing blocks an obvious, and rational, understanding that the red silk dress has been stripped off the girl’s body, and now, useless, is being dispensed with. Her party is over. The seduction is fated. The final hope for contact with Bud has set like a dying sun. Deanie’s red must disappear (it will not reappear in the film), must flare up for an instant, a stinging instant, as this brilliant, shudderingly bright, too organic substance, a substantial red, anticipated— but only anticipated—by what Deanie wore when quoting Wordsworth in the classroom. This one, in its twilight glory, had been a fully blossoming tropical red, terrifying red, “Afghan red,” red with a dim blue aura—Goethe speaking of how red can shift toward either yellow or blue, or refuse to shift altogether. It was an alluring and fascinating and intoxicating red that prepared for nothing but ultimate release. Gone, gone, gone, however. Now and forever. Wet and red and sopping and … alive. But: The red thing we see with such a red scrim of speed, in its burning redness, is not confined to its appearance in the narrative, its story function. Nothing onscreen is confined that way. In film, a story is only a calculated translation. An instruction to the mind. Every happening lives among other happenings. Other happenings: all happenings being enchained in cinema, we stitch the present moment to previous ones, make “continuity,” at this particular instant by seeing in that nurse’s professional hand only and wholly Deanie’s hopeless dress, waterlogged and destitute. The dress she wore to the prom, the prom that didn’t work out for her. To follow the dress is to enact an archaeology of recent history. But what appears to the eye is something distinctly less verbal,1 less rational, less action-oriented and, in fact, swiftly troubling: This shapeless thing dropping away from the nurse’s hand. Red as maternal blood. Something entirely used-up, soft and organic. Wet, sickeningly saturated, a shock for the eye. More like a placenta than a garment come off a body prepared for a party. Placenta, which is the crux of anxiety all through the story: Will Deanie, clearly already mature enough to become pregnant, actually become pregnant? Will Bud get her pregnant? Will his father have new financial obligations then? Will her parents have a moral price to pay, since “now” their daughter is “one of those girls”?

The choice and creation of color, especially the relation between various colors in the frame, is a vital part of the screen design. Merrill Schleier notes scenes in An American in Paris (1951) where Leslie Caron is “placed in frames with diverse colored backgrounds to reflect her various personalities, which were, in turn, augmented by the costume designer Sharaff’s matching outfits” (77). And regarding Chinatown (1974), the designer Richard Sylbert said, “Every color will be related, from the white to the color of burnt grass to the color of a shadow on the deepest end” (LoBrutto 51). 1

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And not just a placenta, vivid red, “Afghan red,” but a placenta being borne down a corridor by a stiff-postured nurse moving in her white purity away from our locus of attention.2 Deanie will make her way back to Bud at film’s end, find him married with a child and working a farm. Now engaged to be married, she would like just once to see him again and is somehow able to find closure in a much-too-short visit. His charming wife stands patiently in the kitchen, clad in mauve.

Stench The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, Paramount, 1956) As the well-known story has it, because the Pharaoh was recalcitrant (“hard-hearted”) to free the Israelites who were his slaves, the Lord beset Egypt with plagues, ten as sources have it, the first being conversion of the Nile into a river of blood. The water would become, not bloody but, blood itself, impotable, and for seven days the citizens of the country would be unable to quench themselves—which is to say, since the Nile was their only source, to drink at all. The river would stink, and the fish would die (Exodus 7). There is a gouache of this circumstance by the Pre-Raphaelite James Jacques Joseph Tissot, “Water is Changed into Blood” (1896–1902), showing a crowd fearful to descend shallow stone steps to the river and a man stretching his magical rod. A trace of blood seems to have seeped across the entire canvas. Here is a good exemplar of hideous, fearsome, ugly red, red that instantaneously disturbs, red where we would not have it, which is to say obscene red, red inappropriate to such a scene, except that the nature of the scene has been altered by Divine intervention. In order to grasp the plague in its full horror, it is necessary to empathize with those who will now be afflicted by it. For some reason, in the Tissot, the flowing blood looks viscous, and we may imagine that touching or entering the flow would make one slick with a substance utterly repellent. Somewhat more fluid in its way of passing across our field of vision is the Nile recreated by Cecil B. DeMille for The Ten Commandments (1956). Two small streamlets, designed for the sides of a large statue, work as a fountain emptying into the river, and

Kenneth Anger reports an action of San Francisco Deputy Coroner Michael Brown on September 10, 1922, after the death of “Fatty” Arbuckle’s party companion Virigina Rappé: “He was just in time to see an orderly emerge from an elevator and head for the hospital’s incinerator with a glass jar containing Virginia’s injured female organs” (35). 2

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now, Moses (Charlton Heston) having but touched the area with his rod, the liquid converts to blood which runs down into the river, slowly swelling across its full width. Pharaoh (Yul Brynner) tries repurification by pouring sacred water from a holy ewer, but this, too, turns to blood, making him leap back aghast. One might somehow be accustomed to thinking of the amount of blood that could flow in a human being; but to consider the amount of blood flowing in the Nile would defy conception. DeMille gives a spectacular shot gazing across the near bank of the river to the assembled potentates on temple steps. All across the bottom of the screen, the red rapidly flows, glinting with sunlight, opaque to consciousness. Needless to say there is a grand irony here, the stuff of life now increased to the point of poison, the blood/river becoming not a site of vivacity and health but a threat to life itself. Red threat, flowing threat, interior threat, since blood must be coming from somewhere (at least mythically) and one imagines hordes of slaughtered bodies feeding the Nile. But not only hordes. Entire populations, tribes all around, animals and humans alike, since this river is all the blood imaginable. Standing aback from it, Pharaoh seems cold and bloodless. “Between them,” David Batchelor has noticed, “colour and artifice produce a kind of terror” (60). But terror may be a product of not color but red; not artifice but spread. Red is adorable in touches, the red roses, but where it leaks or runs or spills or races away, taking over territory, suddenly it achieves startling mortality. “Before turning the page she would place upon it her hand with its familiar pigeon-blood ruby” (Nabokov, Speak 59). Terror and distance: in the case of the bloodied Nile, distance with irony, perhaps. Film is always, inevitably, not what it appears to be in the exact sense that its pictures are not the things of which they are pictures. A river on the screen is not actually wet as we see it, does not harbor fish who now, with the flow of blood, will find it uninhabitable. As with all other screen entities, this Nile is both real and unreal. It may be that a very dynamic vision—the spillage, the massive space, the antagonism—goes further to challenge our sense of the real than does a perfunctory, quotidian one. The flowing river is dynamic, and its dynamism retracts it from our presence just as it lures our attention. When the Nile turns to blood, we are repulsed doubly: first because as both an idea and a spectacle a river of blood is inherently off-putting, too much blood, too too much blood, and secondly because in and of itself this sparkling flow is removed, a dynamic entity. And the Nile does sparkle! Neither do we stop gazing at the blood flow (unstanched) nor can we feel proximate to it. Red is thought to attract the eye; Goethe thought it was a “plus.” But from this red river one wishes to turn the eyes away. Wishes and cannot, wishes and is stunned. This red ends the possibility of continuation, renders us blind to possibility and thus blind. A red in which there is nothing to

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be found but cancellation, as Wittgenstein proposed or wondered: “White cancels out all colours,—does red do this too?” (46e; 214).

Fire Apple Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, Warner Bros., 1955) Three red blazes arc through Rebel Without a Cause (1955)—not including the very famous opening where, after the Warner Bros. logo, we see James Dean drop to the pavement and gaze fondly at a little wind-up red-capped monkey while his name and the other front credits are splashed across the screen in a flaming red. Red title and red gateway: is Dean—is the film—to be associated with red, then; innocence opened to fascination and passion framed? Has Jim Stark, in this empty nocturnal pave, this city uninhabited, found the only place he can feel at home? “Culture is what’s left behind when everybody goes home”: Chris Marker. Will Jim inhabit, always, the center of some road? “Always is always now”: Philip Larkin. But the three red blazes: l

1. Jim owns that (now internationally famous) spanky red windbreaker, tends to wear it over a white t-shirt—powerful contrast, bold spectacle. The color holds a hint, but no more than a hint, of darkness, the black hole in the heart of a ruby, the fire pit. But also a boast of freshness, the red of an apple not yet dropped from the branch upon Newton’s head. Fire apple red. While the design of the garment is elegant and simple, it is the color and only the color that lures the eye. Red red red. Red of all reds. Red in quintessence. Or, at least: a thing that without reservation we call “red.” Rot. Rouge. In Hebrew, adom, as in “of the earth,” but while Jim was earthbound when the film began he is hardly earthbound ever again because his red makes him hover, fly, lapse into meditation. The apple that falls from the tree but never hits the ground.

On the problem inherent in recognizing, or “recognizing” the color red consult Ludwig Wittgenstein: It makes sense, for example, to say “the sighted person distinguishes with his eyes between an unripe apple and a ripe one.” But not: “The sighted person distinguishes a green apple from a red one.” For what are ‘red’ and ‘green’?

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Marginal note: “The sighted person distinguishes an apple that appears red to him from one which appears green.” But can’t I say “I distinguish this kind of apple from this kind” (while pointing to a red apple and a green one)? (39–40) While pointing to a red apple? Pointing, that is, to an apple that appears to me to be, as I point, that which I would name red. Pointing to a thing that appears to be what I would name an apple. Appears as I would estimate. I am the apprehender and the ascertainer. And if I recount this to you (in this way), should I believe that you would find the same “apple” apparently “red,” as I do? The same windbreaker? Red stably and without equivocation. Goethe does not phrase a question this way when, meditating on red’s unstable existence between blue and yellow, he leads us to wonder where red stops and blue begins. Or yellow begins. Jim is in his jacket and the garment fairly explodes with a vibrancy attributable, we think, not to the boy’s personality but to the essence of the color: as though on Jim’s torso a windbreaker of any other color would not have “exploded.” The energy, we credit, the power is not in the character, it is in the costume (something every actor always remembers). The film and this item, its central icon, are now so classic that one need only murmur “red windbreaker” and Rebel is invoked. The windbreaker gains occasioned considerable discussion, yet in a perfunctory way: its noticeability, the sense it lends of masculine dominance, its chic. Everything but the redness as such. The red windbreaker: a fabric arrangement that exists only to provide opportunity for red to show. Is it the redness of the red windbreaker that stops (brakes) the wind? Of course, a blue windbreaker will break the wind! But will it break the wind in the same smiling way that a red windbreaker will? Jim chooses a garment both functional and happily bright, also one that will provide cover for a shy, retreating self. Red for modesty, not because as a color it recedes but because as a color it stuns and withdraws attention from the face. Ray knows that he can give extra power to Dean’s facial close-ups this way: the face that has been waiting in the wings. Wearing the red windbreaker, Jim becomes a model of form with every bodily gesture. Form, not identity. Although it is always and only Jim who chooses to don the red windbreaker, by way of that red windbreaker we are never given access to Jim. Returned late at night from the “chickee run,” a clifftop car chase in which his competitor and friend Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen) has just lost his life, he stands in the doorway between kitchen and living room, a quart of milk in his hand; throws his head back; raises the bottle horizontal (Nicholas Ray’s affinity for the lateral constructions of CinemaScope); lets the cold white liquid flow into the self he has tucked away in red, that red

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windbreaker stone still for a moment, tranquilized by the death and the drink. Soon he will be upside-down on the sofa (red windbreaker upon red sofa). When his father awakens from his slumber before the television and his mother races downstairs, he will confront the two of them, will stand at the bottom of the staircase with arms outstretched and one parent at each side. “You’re tearing me apart!” Easy to conceive the analogy between tearing apart a soul, tearing apart a conflicted personality, tearing apart a boy’s loyalty, and tearing the seams of the red jacket, rending that perfect red armor. Apple fire red. Having discerned fire in this red, we must also see the apple, the apple in the garden, the Original State, some shining, pure intent untrammeled by political weight (the antagonism of Buzz’s gang) or emotional weather (Jim’s concentration at the race), or even by that genetic motive (as Kenneth Burke labels it), mom’s influence and dad’s. Apple red, the first red, the red we cannot hold ourselves back from devouring. The red before generations. (And before Snow White’s red.) The red before the idea of conception. The red before the idea. The red, whatever we can think it is, before the color red. Jim Stark is the apple of his parents’ eyes—that is his predicament.3 And the apple of the viewer’s eye, too, ergo the enduring reputation of the actor and of the film. The apple of Judy’s young eye (“Never till this day / Saw I him with anger so distemper’d”) and of Plato’s (Sal Mineo) young eye, confused about social order, but with a natural taste. As an apple never falls far from the tree, as what grows up must fall down, Jim is caught by his parents’ moral cowardice. Have they infected him? As to Newton’s law: the film is intensely buoyant, vivid, exciting; but it ends in a great collapse. l

2. Wrapped in a long red coat Judy (Natalie Wood) sees Jim at the police station, she is wrapped in a long red coat. She is but a waif, tiny, swamped by that coat. And tears of anxiety are streaming down her face. She is alone in the world, righteous and abused, a girl whose father, gushing with disapproval, wants to wipe her lips off. Those lips are coated with red lipstick—these are the iconic red lips of commercialized 1950s female sexual allure, advertisement lips, elevated but also debased lips, lips from which no man will escape.4 The red of Judy’s lipstick and the red of her coat are two different, clashing reds.5 She has dressed herself, not assembled herself. The

In preparing to make this film, Ray concentrated intensively on parent–adolescent relations in America. See Slocum. 4 In Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models, we see a giant billboard showing apple-red female lips. They are entryway to a secret area behind. The film was released only about a month after Rebel. 5 In Ray’s Party Girl (1957), Cyd Charisse in a red (bordering on blue) dress will splay herself upon Robert Taylor’s red (bordering on yellow) sofa: another clash of reds. 3

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coat has a fine, conservative line, good cut. The lipstick has been put on a young girl’s lips, neither messy nor perfect, by a young girl not yet accustomed to painting lips. We can see someone who is wearing lipstick because she wants to try on being an adult, not because this is a regular act for her. When she cries, the voice that comes out of those painted lips is tragic. What clashy world is it in which a grown man seeks to own, marshal, protect, and mete out the sexuality of his daughter—notwithstanding that among adult males of the time (of the time only?) such desire was widespread, even normal? What world in which a girl’s femaleness is not hers to command and display, experience, and share outside of paternal stricture? (The 1920s diegetic world of Splendor in the Grass has not evanesced; and that film is around the corner.) In her distress, Judy is canny to the presence of two other young people detained in this place at this time, each for a different crime: Jim and Plato. She is visible to them but has not met them and is giving them no performance. Except that the efflorescent quality of her reds does the work of drawing attention, against her will. The design of the long coat suggests she is a rich girl, or at least from more money than Jim and, as far as we know at this point, Plato. The lines of character and action do not neatly converge here at the station (where all waywardness is supposed to be cleared up, all tension harmonized under the aegis of police “wisdom”). Judy’s situation appears on the surface to be the deepest, the longest running, the most overwhelming, so much so that her tears seem to have turned to blood and stained the lips and the coat both. Judy will soon have a real (and really red) confrontation, because at the dinner table, standing respectfully next to her seated father (William Hopper), she impulsively leans down and kisses him. A child’s affection. But the moment is jarred out of alignment: incensed, outraged, terrified, flooded over with shame he both pushes her away and excoriates her for moral laxity. (She is an embarrassment.) Clearly enough, this is a man with conflicted orientations and incompatible desires—in a way, a man who has never grown up—here facing one of those incomparably awkward moments when, his child having matured into young adulthood quite suddenly, as though overnight, he finds himself confronted with an unheralded sexual presence that touches upon tabooed sexual feeling. A conflicted vision now: the daughter as his innocent “little girl,” his baby, and as the world’s mature young woman, someone he must realize he cannot know only as his own. Hers is a kiss from the wrong kind of person (perhaps a kiss his deep self desires too much?). The wife is humiliated to her core. The little son is completely unaware (not only of what is going on here, but of the man he may one day become, now gracelessly being modeled).

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Now we understand how Judy can have felt her father wishes to wipe her lips off. Lips that are carmine carnal red. l

3. At the end of the film a police marksman standing impossibly far away will take Plato’s life. The boy lies in Jim’s arms in the portico of the Griffith Observatory, and the camera reveals that— not unlike Fred Astaire in his best routines—Plato is wearing two different socks, one fire apple red, one sky blue. A hot sock, a cool one; an inflamed sock, a sedate one. Some causation instantly seems necessary and is missing. He dressed too quickly, with too much eagerness for what was to come, and could not be bothered searching for a matching sock? He had a moment of colorblindness (or is colorblind altogether)? He was intentionally showing himself to be an artist, the sort for whom convention (sock matching) is of no significance? He wanted to be like Fred Astaire? It is the red sock that stands out, not the somber blue one, as though all the blood of this young body has drained into it. All the blood of all young bodies.

If we follow the arc of Rebel graphically (always with Nicholas Ray follow the arc graphically), we see that Jim’s red windbreaker and Judy’s red lips lead to this red sock on the dead boy’s stilled foot.

The Red Clue Cries & Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, Cinematograph AB/Svenska Filminstitutet [SFI], 1972) Is it marvelous, is it profound, is it inspiring, or is it only compositional that in Cries & Whispers (1972) we are situated in a suite of crimson rooms? Crimson, not blood red. The red of sanctity and awesome morbidity. The red of celebration and establishment. Fully, entirely, unremittingly, deeply, throbbingly, urgently red. Red of the high climes. A mansion in Scandinavia. A woman dying. Her servant and two sisters, dearly embraced servant and distant silent sisters, wandering the rooms in cotton clouds of pristine white. The rooms crimson. The crimson rooms. Utterly unspeakably crimson. Everlasting, undying, unborn crimson. Unrelenting crimson. l

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Crimson walls, boundlessly stretching. Crimson ceilings, ever after. Crimson curtains, falling, falling. Crimson carpets beneath our feet.

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The furniture upholstered in … crimson. The furniture caught in the crimson design, distilled, recomposed in crimson. All of experience is caught, distilled, and recomposed in crimson in this crimson universe, including agony, meditation, emptiness. Crimson emptiness. And fear, hollow as an inhabited room. On the red room, Charles Riley discusses Henri Matisse’s painting “The Red Studio” (1911): The ghostly paradigms of domestic furniture are suggested by slight yellow strokes quickly swallowed in the quickening red of that unreal domain … The presence of the red redefines space and our relation to it. (139) Unreal domain. Redefines space. He cites John Russell’s excited commentary as well: Other objects in the room have been bled of [their own chromatic] identity and restated in terms of the glorious, uniform red which gives the picture its name. What we see is, in fact, an unbroken field of red on which certain incidents have been laid, or incised … these incidents are the captives of that one resonant, imperious, inescapable field of red. (Russell 67, qtd. in Riley 139) Incised in an imperious field. Ingmar Bergman’s “laying of incident” upon the crimson ground, his depositing of circumstance in this cosmos, is a fundament of his art, and as Eco tells us, “We look upon art as a focus of lived experiences, given order and form by our normal imaginative processes. Artistic particularity arises from the manner in which the order and form are made concrete and offered to perception” (109; emphasis mine). Crimson is the manner. By his use of the word “captive” Russell would seem to have grasped something that eluded Riley, that it is sensible to speak of “the presence of red” as though when all is red one can think the red has presence. The red is everything, the red is unboundable, and the word “presence” blocks us from absorbing that to be a “captive of red” is not to discern red’s “presence” but to be rendered incapable of discerning. This mansion could hold a feast of carmine-ripe cherries, an inundation of cherry juice—misir—from Istanbul, a flood of pomegranates, yet also robes, high robes, robes of crimson estimation. To be surrounded by, to look back to one’s childhood and remember oneself as having been surrounded by, having lived in a high world of crimson. To sense crimson with every breath, a repetition, an emphasis, a rubric. The crimson rubric, fantastic redundancy. Looked at through crimson glass the world jumping away from itself, softening, melting backward. Goethe writes that red “conveys an impression of gravity and dignity, and at the same time of grace and attractiveness.” Moreover, red glass “exhibits a bright landscape in so dreadful a hue as

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to inspire sentiments of awe” (172–3). Ruby glass. Grave dignity; graceful attraction; and dread. The red, dreadful world. Dreadfully red. The white bedclothes, the screaming victim, the crimson blanket. The black dress, the crimson walls, the rust red hair. The crimson antagonism, provocation, enticement, travesty. Crimson, the color of sincerity. Cries. The crimson does cry, makes a loud, unfettered pronouncement: place, time, being, experience, sensation, space, distance, memory, anticipation, breadth, wonder. No red before the eyes is as strong, as intoxicating as the red remembered. Even stronger is the red forgotten: John Huston’s bizarre Moulin Rouge (1952, with Georges Auric’s haunting “It’s April Again,” to hear which one must strain through the thick muslin presence of Eva Gabor, and the opening credits in the full vibration of Technicolor red). Bergman’s red is not an utterance but a scream, not a murmur but a chant, not a melody but a world: From the depths I have called You, O Lord. O Lord, hearken to my voice; may Your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. (Psalm 130) Is it a chant of affirmation? Boldly to speak one’s life, because living it is insufficient? Firmly to assert one’s requirements, one’s hopes? The crimson is untethered promise. But also patient reception, the attentive ear. Hear me in my woe, in my travail, that I may be counted among the blessed. The red chapel, abode of the Fisher King. & Whispers. O, but the crimson does whisper. Whispers of respect, of fidelity, of prayer, of anger. The crimson state of mind in confrontation with the sublime as we close our eyes and ears and think of the ultimate cause. The crimson truth. The royalty that is crimson, the fealty that is crimson, too. The red rooms whisper the secret of experience and whisper the clue that will lead us away. Red, the trail of blood through the forest. Crimson design by Marik Vos-Lundh (1923–1994), who also did The Virgin Spring (1960), The Silence (1963), The Hour of the Wolf (1968), and Fanny and Alexander (1982), photographed (for an Academy Award) by Sven Nykvist (1922–2006).

Red River The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, Miramax/Paramount, 1999) An unprovoked moment for the viewer of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999):

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A brazenly charming young man (Matt Damon) has infiltrated the lives of an American living in Italy (Jude Law) and his rich girlfriend (Gwyneth Paltrow), projecting what has far too quickly seemed an excess of admiration for the former and a wariness of the latter. Who is this Tom Ripley who claims to have known Dickie Greenleaf at Princeton? What does he really want? And the answer—not withheld—is: to be Dickie. Soon, indeed, having removed Dickie from the scene Tom has successfully developed a complex routine for imitating Dickie, for becoming Dickie, as long as he can keep out of Marge’s sights. One night in Rome he is at the opera. To give us entry to Tom’s precipitous consciousness, the filmmaker Anthony Minghella shows us a scene from the opera itself, not merely a scene of Tom watching it. We sit in Tom’s seat, as it were. And the opera is Peter Ilyitch Tchaikowsky’s Eugene Onegin (1879), the story of the young poet Lensky and his friend Eugene Onegin who has come to visit. They have been at a ball where Onegin has paid far too much attention to Lensky’s girl, and Lensky has lost his composure and challenged Onegin to a duel. We are witnesses now, Act 2 Scene 2, the two wholly regretful men standing face to face and unable to call off the confrontation, as in the fateful moment Onegin shoots Lensky dead. All of this is seen from above (one of the expensive boxes) and performed with an intense sense of dramatic and musical intensity, as befits a tale of nineteenth-century Imperial Russia (from the Pushkin verse novel of 1833). We are seeing two handsomely dressed noblemen in a forest glade, and now one of them, after the report of the gun, falls dead to the stage. Operatic exaggeration, high drama. But a gasp: From his body flows a river of blood that Tom (that we) cannot help but see in alarm. River of blood: l

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not, as seen by the audience, a simulation of a river but a river in fact, a palpable flow; so that the first impression of the watcher in this box seat, at this distance, is that the singer has inadvertently actually been slain, and we are watching his blood flow across the stage (it would not be the first onstage performer death. Like life outside it, life on the stage is perilous); “across the stage,” because the blood is streaming out in several directions at once, even like the petals of a giant liquid rose; and it is also evident, quickly, that Tom Ripley is aghast (we share his state of consciousness), aghast, it is easy to surmise, because this killing is too strongly reminiscent of an earlier one, the moment in the boat off San Remo when he bashed Dickie’s head in with an oar and blood was everywhere. Dickie, his “friend,” as Lensky was Onegin’s. Dickie, whom he visited in Italy, as Onegin visited Lensky.

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Then, as though a switch has been thrown in the back of the mind, it is suddenly clear that this is not—cannot be—real blood, it is an extraordinarily artful stage effect (designed, ironically, to be especially affecting for viewers looking from above as we are—both in the diegetic opera house and here in the cinema): huge bolts of ruby silk, buried in a container just beneath the stage level at the point where Lenski fell, are now being drawn away from beneath the body on invisible threads controlled by stagehands invisibly off. The speed of the staged action is such that the appearance is of an inconceivable river of blood escaping away from the body. (“Yet who would have thought the old man/ to have had so much blood in him.”)

The moment is startling—startling red—for a number of reasons: l

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First, unless one knowingly gathers that the opera being performed is Onegin (the film gives no attribution) there is no expecting a death of this kind; and because of the sharp (dissonant) report of Onegin’s pistol, even if one is aware, the moment comes as a shock. Secondly, romantic opera (romantic music in general) is intensely emotive and expressive to extremes but is not normally associated with realism in the same way as realism has been shown throughout the film thus far. To see the body fall is one thing, to see the blood streaming away from it is quite another, a heightening, a boost. Cinema overtakes opera. Thirdly, by the late 1990s, all contemporary film viewers were familiars to film depictions of bloody death. Classically, blood had been clearly shown in Hollywood film but in limited quantity, usually pooling around the wound, until Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) when the rules changed with the invention of the make-up squib. Here in the Ripley opera, the body is entirely diminished in proportion to the quantity of blood flowing from it. “So much blood in him.” The redness of the blood overtakes the scene. Fourthly, the blood does not just move away from Lensky; it races away, as though to some alluring destination in an outer circle of the universe. More than that, it flows and flows and continues to flow, as though there is unlimited blood in him, and he will never fully expire. “Yet who would have thought.” This blood will fly into the audience, will coat us. Finally, most impacting: the “blood” is a shining scarlet in color, the color of nobility, of sacrifice, of now inutile constraint and

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discipline. Unaffected, uncontaminated, untainted blood now shed to fertilize the “ground” yet sliding rather than seeping in. This scarlet is the color of flags wrapped in the wind, military uniforms gilded and braided and hung with medals, fat jewels hung in gold and silver chains, the finest claret served in the best crystal, but it is also, sharply, a signal red, the red one cannot fail to see, the red of emergency (emergent emergency), the secret red of life now brought to the light. In the life of a single man there is such red to be found; and so much red, uncontainable; and a red of such intensity and conviction. “Red is a color that is rarely denied an active role,” writes Alexander Theroux (267). So pronounced is this red display, partly, of course, because it is set as theatrical, that we must think of it as grave. The untidiness of actual life is so often elided in the careful design of art, the spot standing in for the puddle, the gash standing in for the rank opening of flesh. Here Minghella gives us to conceive a “designer” of this staged production who takes life seriously, that is, recognizes that when life is terminated the situation is profound, immeasurable, unbounded, even when sung. But Minghella does not hold a contradictory view. Thus the “opera designer” has built a shocking effect that the filmmaker has found an ideal point of view for catching, even augmenting. In a more conventional dramatic treatment, we could now interpret Tom as a rank desperado who deserves nothing but punishment, human and divine. Instead, because of Minghella’s camera placement, we can recognize him as recognizing that river, too; see that he is alive, even if Dickie is not, and that one might not wish him to suffer the same fate. It is only with this shred of affiliative hope that one can proceed through the film’s dark, darker, and darkest moments as the various “rivers of blood” it offers trickle, flow, speed away to the sea.

Choose This Red The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, The Archers/Rank, 1948) In François Truffaut’s Day for Night [La nuit américaine] (1973), there is a brief scene in which Ferrand (Truffaut), director of Je vous présente Pamela, a film-within-the-film, extremely preoccupied with a particular creative decision is pulled away by an assistant director to a spot where a collection of pistols has been laid out in a line. “Which one?” We see him swiftly gaze, touch, pick up, put down, gaze, touch, and then, in a moment of elegant performativity on the actor’s part, select with an arbitrariness visible to us

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but not to his assistant, one out of the many guns that all look more or less alike. The point isn’t the group of weapons, or the similarity or difference between them, as some uninformed observer could judge, but the fact of the director’s power and responsibility; that he must be the one to make a choice, that he recognizes this fact, and that he chooses. In Fernand’s actual shot using it, the gun works perfectly well (as any one of the guns would have), since it is seen (as all along he knew it would be) only from a distance. In placing this moment into his film about filmmaking, Truffaut is reprising and making homage to a scene in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), a film that would have been close to his heart not only because of its signal magnificence and its artistic treatment of artistic treatment but also because it was shot at Denham in Buckinghamshire, not so far from Pinewood where he had made Fahrenheit 451 (1966), availing himself, during the shooting, of the opportunity to rush into London to see other films. In The Red Shoes (a film about the Lermontov Ballet Company and their rendering of a work called “The Ballet of the Red Shoes,” based on Hans Christian Andersen), the “director” figure is Maurice Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), impresario behind a chain of productions (all of them referring to the work of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, with Lermontov being a rendering of Serge Diaghilev). “The Red Shoes” is in production now. The young musical genius Julian Craster (Marius Goring) is busy shaping the score. The wise old designer Ratov (Albert Bassermann, here rendering, perhaps, Léon Bakst) is conceiving the décor. And the ingénue Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) is feverishly rehearsing under the tutelage of the ballet master Ljubov (Léonide Massine) with the comforting help of her dancing partner Ivan Boleslawsky (Robert Helpmann, who in fact, with Massine’s help, choreographed the ballet). All are eager, professional, dedicated, passionate, and frantically working—“children of quite remarkable talent,” as Lermontov remarked in a scene filmed and deleted in the edit; “Nothing but their art existed for these dedicated artists” (Powell 616). There is an electric excitement about what is to come. And suddenly we see a little scene in which Lermontov is walking along a very long row of paired scarlet ballet slippers, faced with the challenge of picking the One. These will be “The Red Shoes,” visible in the shop window in the opening tableau of the ballet, then magically appearing on the ballerina’s feet, so that she dances and dances and dances and can never stop dancing while she is wearing the red shoes, which refuse to come off. It must be the right pair. Exactly right. They have to silently scream, “We are the Red Shoes!!”6

As shot in three-strip [British] Technicolour by Jack Cardiff, The Red Shoes is one of the real triumphs of color cinematography in cinematic history. 6

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He moves with care in an angled shot, stepping from the right distance leftward and forward, with the shoes laid out on the ground beside him. With the stick, he touches each pair that interests him, this one, not that one, this one, this one, not that one, not that one, not that one, this one. We can see the swift appraisal, all his creative faculties compacted and aimed in a visionary beam, as it were, along the length of his stick toward the red shoes. And finally, the Right Pair. These he does not merely touch. These bring a little smile to his face, and he uses the stick as a monarch uses the sword, to “dub” them Chosen. All of the shoes Lermontov is considering are indisputably red, fiery and deep red, shining red, glowing red, pulsating red, timid red, blushing red, hopeful red, bashful red. The chosen shoes will be transformative. Powell’s designer Hein Heckroth “had dyed seventeen pairs of ballet slippers in seventeen shades of red in order to get the right red” (Powell 658). In “The Ballet of the Red Shoes” itself, spotlighting, orchestration, and association of the shoes with the stunning body of the prima ballerina will intensify and isolate the regality of the red shoes. They will take on life and character, the life and character of a supreme and demanding spirit, but since the shoes in the lineup have been artfully prepared by the designer and costumer of Lermontov’s company, we can rest assured that any and all of them would work properly to incarnate “The Red Shoes.” The nomination must be made by Lermontov, the maestro, director of the company, whose personal “Ballet of the Red Shoes” this very clearly is going to be. Once one has been designated supreme ruler, any choice one makes becomes the supreme, the regal choice. Any pair of shoes he touches in a special way will become the red shoes. (“All royals, incidentally,” writes Alexander Theroux, “have exclusive use of scarlet livery” [252]). Everything of “The Ballet of the Red Shoes,” its design and movement, its presence on film, is structured to elevate, personify, and radicalize these two shoes, their power incarnate, their positively stunning, addicting redness. They are “brought into play as a magical image with a power over their wearer, exactly as in the fairy tale” (Powell 652). Christmas ornament red, fresh blood red, ribbon red, candy red. Although diabolical in the end—“Dr. Jekyll’s evil potion in Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale is ‘a bloodred liquor’ ” (Theroux 215)—the shoes seem innocent in their brightness, promise, delirium. In the climactic dressing room-stairway-railway scene, as Powell described it long afterward, “the flashing light and the flaring colour get more and more intense” as Vicky “starts to run in the opposite direction from the stage” (652). In the same way that the redness of the red shoes is redness for its own sake, only and fully that essence or manifestation or presence or ghost which we would call “red,” so Vicky’s flight is for its own sake, too; not part of Boleslawsky’s choreography (what happens on the stage) but pure flight, untainted flight, instantiation of the mere desire to flee, to fly, to be in motion unlimited.

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The red shoes must not only dominate the story, dominate the character, and dominate the audience’s consciousness. For Powell, they must center and control the image itself, and this extraordinary power is attributed by virtue of three interesting design features. l

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First, Vicky dances the ballet (which is to say, does a run-through and in the finale later prepares in her dressing room to dance the ballet) in a very pale pink tutu with matching tights, a related neutrality against which the redness will surely glow but also one tinctured with a drop of the shoes’ blood so that it is never an icy neutrality and the shoes do not seem “foreign” to the rest of the attire. The shoes are her. She is the shoes. (As the shoes will not come off her feet, her feet will not be separated from herself, as in the Andersen story they come to be.) Secondly, when in her final moments she lies upon the railway track, with Julian bent over while she begs him, “Take off the red shoes!,” the tights around her foot are horridly bloodied (a reference to Andersen’s ghoulish finale in which his ballerina’s feet are chopped off), with the stains irregular and abstract in shape by comparison with the pretty, rounded, confined shape of the shoes. The tension between the shoes and the ugly reality they can cause brings us to augmented awareness of the shoes as idiographic reminders of dance, art, life, rhythm, movement, spirit, and the expense of all these. Finally, Shearer’s was (and is revealed in the film as) stunning red hair, incandescent copper red, so that she seems in every instant the proper wearer of shoes bearing such potency. More: it is as though, as the “Ballet” is about to begin, even as it is in rehearsal and as she prepares for the endurance test it will put before her, the redness of the shoes, the practice shoes, in fact the very idea of the red shoes has infected her and climbed all the way into her hair. Past her brain, past thought, and reaching to the upper sphere.

Yet note: It is clear enough that, as admitted even in the front title card, Powell and Pressburger’s red shoes are derived from Hans Christian Andersen’s. But why should we assume that Andersen’s magical ballet slippers, the ones that would dance the wearer away to oblivion, should necessarily have been imagined as red and only red? In order to hypnotize, seize, confound, direct, and inspire the dancer, why did Andersen need—why did he suspect we would need—red? In the story, Andersen gives the redness an intrinsic magical quality (suggesting secret forces, powers greater than human will) and associates it with unconventionality, if not downright incorrigibility. An

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old village widow “sat sewing a pair of shoes from scraps of red material. She did her very best, but the shoes looked a bit clumsy” (289). (Ah! It was the widow, not Andersen!) Karen, a pretty but destitute little girl for whom the shoes were made, has to wear them to her mother’s funeral “though they weren’t the proper color for mourning.” An old lady adopts her, quickly throwing the ugly shoes into the fire. (So much, we may well think, for the red shoes!) Then one day a Queen brings her beautiful young Princess to town, and Karen sees this Princess also wearing red shoes, quite lovely ones that she desires. (Red desired; red as desire.) Later, when Karen is older, she needs to dress for her confirmation. In a shoemaker’s shop she sees, between two pairs of boots, “a pair of red shoes just like the ones the princess had worn. Oh, how beautiful they were!” (290): “I think they are patent leather,” remarked the old lady. “They shine.” “Yes, they shine!” sighed Karen as she tried them on. They fit the child and the old woman bought them. Had she known that they were red, she wouldn’t have because it was not proper to wear red shoes when you were being confirmed. But her eyesight was failing—poor woman!—and she had not seen the color. (290) (Two red mishabiliments! And failing eyesight—which in the movie would be problematic to display or invoke, the audience striving to see the screen relentlessly.) The red shoes function first to stun the young eyes, then to confound the older failing ones. Everyone informs the old lady as to the color of the shoes she has bought. She reprimands the girl. But preparing for communion the following Sunday, Karen puts the red shoes on again. (A recalcitrant little girl. Or one already possessed. Possessed while seeming to be innocent.) At the church entrance, there is an old soldier who begs leave to wipe the dust from the girl’s feet. “What pretty little dancing shoes!” said the soldier and, tapping them on the soles, he added, “Remember to stay on her feet for the dance.” (291) After the service, as the old lady and Karen are about to enter their carriage, the soldier, standing nearby, remarks: “Look at those pretty dancing shoes.” His words made her take a few dancing steps. Once she had begun, her feet would not stop. It was as if the shoes had taken command of them. She danced around the corner of the church; her will was not her own. (291)

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The coachman helps remove the shoes and they are put away in a closet. Now the old lady is gravely ill. But Karen goes to a ball—and wearing her red shoes. She danced! But when she wanted to dance to the left, the shoes danced to the right; and when she wanted to dance up the ballroom floor, the shoes danced right down the stairs and out into the street. Dance she did, out through the city gates and into the dark forest. (292) The old soldier is there among the trees, and sees her. “Look what beautiful dancing shoes!” Terrified, she tried to pull off her shoes. She tore her stockings but the shoes stayed on. They had grown fast to her feet. (292) A very unhappy ending indeed, and I elide the gorier details. There are clear and strange associations involving these shoes: with the old lady’s combination of kindness and brittleness, ability to see shininess but inability to see color; with dancing (and social events at which dancing is, and is not, proper); and with the odd red-bearded soldier, who keeps appearing and commenting about, indeed seems to be issuing commands to, the shoes themselves, as if, in some incalculable way, they are his to command. We can easily enough see the coherence of the tale, its enchanting side steps and variations: it is like a ballet! Eliminating all the characters but Karen and the shoemaker, then substituting a romantic figure for the soldier, Boleslawsky’s “The Ballet of the Red Shoes” still preserves Andersen’s haunting tone, giving a hint of impropriety and a firm show of unstoppable, unearthly talent. In the story, at every mention of their existence early on the redness of the red shoes is given as a perfunctory description—it is the shoes being characterized, and the fact that they are red helps us identify and remember them but that is all. By redness the shoes are set apart from other objects in the story world. In this way they give the little girl a distinctive object instantly to fixate upon: not only red but “shiny” red, a visual attraction (which the film perfectly replicates). It happens the red is problematic at the confirmation because that is a passage to adulthood, thus, for Karen, menstrual capacity,7 the possibility of motherhood, the abandonment of childish whims. Even if red arguably helps to establish this negative equation at the confirmation, nevertheless the confirmation itself is but a minor event in the story, and even without it the redness of the shoes functions as an attraction, catching the

In Diane Kurys’ Diabolo menthe (1977), a teenage girl reveals to her mother that she has had her first period, and the mother gives her a slap on the face that reddens the cheeks; then a tender, welcoming embrace. 7

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soldier’s eye, the old lady’s, the Princess’s, and certainly Karen’s. Red: special, charged, chargeable. Fortitudinous and fortuitous red. The soldier invents the dance for Karen in her red shoes, one could say sends her dancing, and Lermontov (Walbrook had been an important soldier character in Powell/ Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [1943]) shapes Vicky’s dancing career, picking her out of a group of girls at a tryout where most are rejected, catering to her, doting upon her, finally offering her a starring part in a new ballet. But he also works to imprison her, because when she falls in love with Craster and leaves the dance, Lermontov casts her out. At his polite invitation she returns, but cannot resolve the tension between Craster pulling her in one direction (away from Lermontov) and the shoes, Lermontov’s shoes, pulling her in the other. In the film, from the moment of Lermontov’s selection parade the red shoes become the central agents of Vicky’s action, the focus of the ballet, the obsession of Lermontov. There is nothing odd about the fact that the more and more one stares at them, at the redness of the red shoes, stares knowing the film has set them up to be stared at, still the more one cannot grasp the formula underlying their provocative power, the more they defy logic and argument, become an axiom without an explanation. Yet again: why should there be shoes that are red? Any other dancing shoes would be ordinary, and would behave ordinarily. The red shoes are attached to the girl’s fascination and desire from the start— but anything could be; anything colored in any way, since the attachment is an arbitrary construction of the narrative. She is forced in her desire to be dancing without end, the story reveals: because this is the storyteller’s choice, why choose red for the shoes that force? Why must the girl’s desire be a red desire? Is all desire red? Is every girl’s desire? Yet—the red shoes come from Lermontov! The shoes and the idea of using them in a ballet about “The Red Shoes.” All Lermontov’s. These shoes that Lermontov has chosen are and are not ballet shoes; they have qualities idiosyncratic and far-reaching. Further, their curious effect lies, as we are led to believe, in the redness not the shoe design, the redness not the connection with ballet. The shining red, the intoxicating red, the mysterious red. For Vicky, the red shoes transcend the dance itself and for us they transcend the film. When she wears them, she is dancing the story that the shoes are telling about her: the story of the girl who comes upon the red shoes and is entrapped by them forever. Red both the elevation and the fall. Yet still this plaguing question: What is gained dramatically, mythically, poetically, and narratively by the redness of the red shoes, taken in itself? Sarah Street cannily notes that “the symbolism associated with red shoes is an integral part of transformative myths” (188), yet other colors function strongly in such myths as well. Surely Andersen’s shoemaker could have been stitching a pair of poorly-made green

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shoes; the Princess might have arrived wearing splendid green shoes; Karen could have desired green shoes like them and acquired such a pair, green patent leather, they are so shiny! A soldier in a green cloak might have said to her, “What lovely green shoes!” and so on. The story would have been called “The Green Shoes” and been immortalized as such. What element is struck by converting this hypothetical green to an ideal and actual red? What does redness have, especially? The answer, of course, is redness, whatever we could agree that is. A geist, to be sure. Impetuous, provoking, restless. A disturbance, an arousal. In redness the shoes become especially noticeable, definitive, compelling, dominant, unavoidable, alarming, and stimulating, and we must believe in the specialness if we are to take them seriously in the first place as the subject of the film. Stimulating red, energizing red, empowering red. Little Karen extends herself to the shoes because they have extended themselves to her. She believes in them. Credible red. Because we believe in her, we believe in what she believes in. And because they are in her story, the red shoes must be, finally, what Karen wants them to be. The red of hope. As Karen has been created by Andersen, we must believe in him as well. As to extending the self: in the filmed “Ballet of the Red Shoes” we see Vicky’s arms reach out toward the shopkeeper’s vitrine where the shoes lie glowing, and then—a lovely trick possible only in cinema—the shoes leap faster than a wink out of the window and onto her feet. She looks down in surprise and there they are! And now she starts to dance! … As with so much in cinema, we believe in the red shoes because they have been offered as objects of belief, and belief is all. A red horizon. Lermontov wanted the ballet to be made. Lermontov arranged for it. Lermontov chose the shoes. Lermontov chose Vicky to wear them. To believe in the power of the red shoes on Vicky’s feet we must believe in Lermontov, even—most intensively—when she does not. Lermontov does what he does only because of Powell, who believes in him and who believed in Andersen. Powell is the source of the delirium, the embodiment of the red shoes. He is the force that will not permit the dance to stop, here or ever. As with all cases of genesis, the creator names it, and it is so.

Rational Red 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, MGM, 1968): II Wheeler Winston Dixon offers a delicious riddle of the image that perceives: The “look back” is … the combined, cohesive act of the entire cinematic apparatus in operation: the production, presentation, and ultimate

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reception of a film … the “look back” gathers force from shot duration, composition, and editorial patterning; it can also gain power from the gender origins of its address. (3, 7, 8) As we look at a film, the film looks back at us looking. Looks back at us looking at it looking back at us. Rarely has cinema regarded its audience with such all-comprehending malevolence as through the open eye of HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Here is a perfectly circular, malevolently glowing red orb of meta-consciousness (HAL is the computer presence controlling all aspects of a voyage to Jupiter), never winking, never dozing, never forgetting, never failing to take notice. A seeming gender challenge, too: male and female both, arch and blunt, technical and sensitive. In the sense that it possesses all expertise (as long as the problem is mechanical), all knowledge (as long as the question is superficial), all power (as long, we may wish to believe, as feeling is left out of it), and omnipresence, HAL is the human species as surface, compacted into a series of translucent chips fitted into a giant board. HAL: image of what we were, what we are, and what we will become. And, of course, a surveiller. A red-eyed Tireisian wonder. The surveilling eye: David Lyon, writing almost thirty years after Kubrick’s film, argues the political and military implications: Ever since modern governments started to register births, marriages and deaths, and ever since modern businesses began to monitor work and keep accurate records of employees’ pay and progress, surveillance has been expanding. Surveillance denotes what is happening as today’s bureaucratic organizations try to keep track of increasingly complex information on a variety of populations and groups. Yet it is more than just “bureaucracy.” Surveillance is strongly bound up with our compliance with the current social order, and it can be a means of social control. (4; emphasis mine) Social control that, allied with vision, wakefulness, and calculation is practically unbounded in its capacity for information storage and utilization. The surveilling eye as icon of power, a whole reversal, suggests Martin Jay, of the instrument of baroque vision which, “anti-Platonic in its disparagement of lucid clarity and essential form, celebrated instead the confusing interplay of form and chaos, surface and depth, transparency and obscurity” (47). HAL is anything but anti-Platonic, and has no truck with form and chaos or depths below. HAL indeed reads interior motive directly from surface observation, as we see in the classical lip-reading scene.8 The redness of that HAL eye seems to increase its acuity and perspicacity, no end. In which, plotting in a soundproof capsule to overtake HAL and gain control of the vessel the cosmonauts Frank and Dave (Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood) are lip-read by the computer. 8

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As a hyperrational, directive, and highly retentive utility HAL is an agent of the capitalism Wolfgang Schivelbusch terms “dry,” the rational enterprise. Never wavering, stupefied, drowsy, giddy, or even hypersensitive except in sifting facts; and perhaps not, finally, so gender-indeterminate, HAL is “a symbol of patriarchal society” (120), the cultural form that depended on stimulation (tobacco and coffee, not alcohol); on the interminable reading and interpretation of signals from without—not only the cosmonauts’ environment on the ship but the cosmonauts themselves. HAL “experiences” the unsatiated (and unshielded) stimulation of constantly in-flowing data. At the same time, in the tried-and-true tradition of smarmy Hollywood villains, upon whose high-mannered tongues butter would not melt, HAL offers a candied tone of voice even when committing brutality. HAL reminds us what “Nietzsche, that great unmasker of fair appearances, meant” by calling gratitude a form of revenge: expressing thanks when one has received a favor or a present gives an immaterial counterpresent, so to speak, a formula by which the recipient attempts to neutralize or, more accurately, to avenge, the incursion into his existence the gift represents (Schivelbusch, Tastes 176). Repeatedly doing his please-and-thank-you with Frank and Dave, querying them with unctuous etiquette, HAL epitomizes horrifying resentment. Indeed, the entire atmosphere of 2001 is pervaded by his noxious antisentimentality, his nosey observation, his ostensible withdrawal from feeling (that will prove a mask). For all the grandeur of the film’s aspect, there is no play. Red HAL is not at ease, not really. In the interstellar voyage, as conceived by Kubrick, play is entirely out. And HAL, our veritable hero, our paragon of seriousness, is red-jacket red, priestly red (like the twin surgeons in Dead Ringers [1988]). Nor just plain old red, “anytime red,” but signal red. Stoplight red. The red that shrieks boldly, “Do not proceed. Stand here until you receive permission from me.” It is a red that hierarchizes, disempowers, reduces. In the context of the film’s setting, an immense voyage to the far reaches of the solar system—that is, an unimpeded forward motion—it is a contradicting red: do not go forward, do not go at all. Wait. Wait. I am calculating. (I am thinking = I am plotting.) And fascist red, because based in the proposition that any spirit should on command properly restrain itself only so that a commander can have leave to expand, rationalize, direct, and cleanse; to jettison the unwanted. “You wait until I tell you it is all right not to wait.” Here HAL is an albeit unwilling agent of the structure behind the action, because HAL did not build himself in Urbana, Illinois. Cold planning and measurement. “For many cultures,” Victoria Finlay writes, “red is both death and life—a beautiful and terrible paradox. In our modern language of metaphors, red is anger, it is fire, it is the stormy feelings

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of the heart, it is love, it is the god of war, and it is power” (157). There are antitheses in the metaphor, because the powerful is not the heartfelt (though what fills the heart but blood?) and red HAL is all-powerful. HAL has none but a jealous heart. We prefer to think of the heart as sincere and kindfeeling, and easily see HAL having no simulacrum of a heart, while it does have a simulacrum of a brain. Red HAL, always a stop sign. Always the idea of a stop sign. A stop sign that must be stopped. When he labors to disconnect, dismantle, decommission, or murder HAL (we are never in a position to discriminate these terms here), Dave must operate inside the innermost chamber (the holy of holies in a cyberuniverse), a cozy, high, rectilinear space where the illumination is suffocating red, almost a red cloud. The memory chips show snow white against this atmosphere. Red high and low, left and right, red everywhere, a universe of red, which fills Dave with a sense of caution and hesitation in his movements, red doubt, red attenuation. HAL’s red eye was a window to its red “soul.” Only in its penultimate moment does HAL give up its rubric of rationality, its policing task, and lapse into song. Song that line by line becomes deeper and deeper, from alto to bass, to contrabass, and deeper, deeper into the “earth” that is so far off: Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer true. I’m half crazy Over the love of you. Half-crazy, note; not crazy. What is the half that is not crazy in HAL’s final moment? But quickly the voice of paternity clicks in, clear, male, distant, forgotten. “Good day, gentlemen …”

Macula Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, Universal, 1964): II A brief glance at a horrifying moment experienced, endured, and survived by Mary Taylor (a.k.a. Marnie Edgar [‘Tippi’ Hedren]) in Marnie (1964). She is working in the Philadelphia offices of Rutland and Co., diligent at her desk, dipping a pen into red ink and marking a ledger. One drop of the ink falls onto the forearm of her white silk blouse. The camera jumps in to frame the macula, and a musical hit notifies us of the shocking and alarming effect on the wearer. (We have been informed already that for reasons unknown this young woman is overthrown by the color red.) She panics. She races to the bathroom. She strips off the blouse and tries desperately to wash out the color in the sink.

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In the Winston Graham source novel (1961), the eponymous narrator informs the reader that as, at a party, she and others “began to get coats and things out of the bedroom, I found I’d picked up a stain on the sleeve of my frock, and stayed dabbing at it” (48). The stain is not identified as red. And in the film, Marnie is not “dabbing,” she is ferociously scouring. And for her, the stain is more than just red, a red blotch against a white ground, it is the first evidence of a magnificent infection, something that threatens on the spot to spread across the entire garment, across all of Marnie, until she has succumbed to it utterly; so, at least, do her actions make it appear. Marnie/Mary fraught at the sink is a powerful reminder of Lady Macbeth, of course. V.1.28–44:

DOCTOR: You see, her eyes are open. GENTLEWOMAN:  Ay, but their sense are shut. DOCTOR: What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands. GENTLEWOMAN: It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour. LADY MACBETH:  Yet here’s a spot. DOCTOR: Hark! She speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly. LADY MACBETH: Out, damned spot! Out, I say!—One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do ’t.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow’r to accompt? The sense of blind panic; the anguished delirium; the loss of reality (there is plenty of time later for Marnie to have her shirt laundered unless—as seems to be the case—the immediate presence of the stain is overwhelming in itself: that it is red, that it is here, now, that it must be stilled). The redness of present time. Yet who would have thought a tiny pen could pick up so much ink? Worse: who would have thought what looks to the viewer’s eye like a minor ink stain (not so very nice, since the shirt is clearly precious, yet also not a monstrosity) could seem to our heroine so monumental, so looming. Red bore relation to Hitchcock’s own fears, production designer Robert Boyle told Vincent LoBrutto: “Q: So you almost had to work as a color psychologist. A: Yes, right” (11–12). This one was a “damned spot” to be certain, one that Marnie (Hitchcock’s creation) would condemn, as she condemns all blemish from red. One that has partaken in damnation, that has supped on the victuals of damnation and now prepares to spread itself, its infernal presence, over her. She would prefer to be pure. Even to cease existing if existence meant drowning in this spreading, overwhelming red.

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Our Marnie would prefer to be pure. “Yet here’s a spot.” Mladen Dolar refers to the blot: The blot shatters an everyday idyllic life, a customary order; it emerges as a foreign body, a counter-natural element in a natural pattern. It estranges and perverts its orderly background, which suddenly becomes filled with uncanny possibilities … If there is no blot in the field of vision, then the blot is solely the surplus-knowledge as such—it is enough to disrupt the ordinary peace and to get hold of our vision from the inside, to structure the gaze. The blot is in the gaze, not in the visible. (133, 134) l

Given that it is necessary for Hitchcock’s dramatic structure that Marnie, a character terrified of red, should, if she is going to drop ink from a pen onto her shirt, drop red ink, still, as the film in fact shows, there are plenty of other ways for fragile Marnie to be attacked by the red army, and there is no urgent dramatic necessity at this diegetic instant—as far as the tale goes—for giving her a pen, a ledger, and a bottle of ink. Once the ink and the pen, the drop; but why the ink? (She is working as a clerk, yes. But there are many things clerks do.)

The answer is both mechanical and widely known. Rutland and Co. have expenses, which is to say, economic losses, and so someone needs to be attending to them and red ink is the standard operating mode. What this scene tells us about Marnie, then, may be more necessary than is generally supposed. She has been assigned to the down side of things. But further: she has not been assigned to the up side, to using black (or perhaps even green) ink. This is a technical narrative matter for the film. The company’s profits are not immediately visible to her, by way of her work; she is attending to the company’s losses. Soon later, then, when she purloins Ward’s secret formula and opens the company safe, when she reaches in to take a treasure, she is acting not with premeditation (“Oh, what a rich family are the Rutlands; oh, what a successful company!”) but on the spur of the moment, entirely out of spontaneous impulse. Just as Marnie is impulsive in racing to the bathroom to cleanse out that spot, that damned spot, she is impulsive in everything she does, and doesn’t plan out her future. She is filled with the urgency of red: red impulse, red spirit, red terror. The redness of present time. She rolls forward, as film does.

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This green plot shall be our stage. A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM III.1.822–3

And they gazed at him a long moment, amazed. Everyone wondered what it might mean That a man and his mount could both be coloured The green of sprouting grass, and even greener— Like emerald enamel that glowed on a ground of gold. SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, TRANS. KEITH HARRISON

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The Green and Final Sea Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, Warner Bros./Seven Arts, 1967) In the concluding moment of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), we are given a Dutch angle looking down onto the fatal bullet-ridden vehicle from which Bonnie Parker’s dead body hangs out. This pitiful object is in the lower part of the screen. Above, and filling the space, as though without bound, receding outward from the null spot of the vehicle of death, fearsomely yet peaceably stretching away, is an unbounded field of green. Not green in some vague, or too quickly defined sense but a particular, an exact green, and very pale, the color of a chrysalis, the color of spring. Only a green tincture, and wind fluttering across it. Green as a lightly rippled lake. Or a mythic green sea across which the spirit is rowed to the Land of the West. An unmistakably Utopian green. The future will come. The film has offered no moment of such respite, of unbridled, unmodulated color, a plain color field plainly stated, divorced from the jitters of activity and purpose. Nor any opportunity for meditation. We must seek to know how this promising and disturbingly beautiful sea of green, pale pale pale green, freshest green, can work to release the tensions of the drama. Bonnie and Clyde are dead now, dead and irrevocably dead, as from the beginning of our encounter with them we knew they would be and we would see them, one day. Death has haunted the film. Death has lurked in every moment. And now, having done its worst, Death has fled, leaving behind only the optimistic sheet of green promise. Green of hope. Green of recovery and rehabilitation. We must seek the arcane linkage between green and death. Here as often, there is a bent toward realistic representation. In the case of the Bonnie-and-Clyde Ford V-8, positioning it at the side of a road against green grass was not a disservice to historical truth. Yet—and this is something many who think about the cinematic medium neglect to consider—there are numerous ways the filmmaker, Arthur Penn, could have arranged to have his prop car set against some verisimilar background. The exact shot we get here, as in all the exact shots we get in cinema, is a testament not to historical fact but to a filmmaker’s imperative. That field of lightly waving, exceedingly pale, yet in its paleness strikingly rich green: it is part of the composition of the moment. That composition: the vehicle reduced to a state of hopeless dysfunctionality; the torn, slumped body trapped inside; these cueing a predictable finality, one that plays upon a particular audience expectation born out of historical “memory” (broadcast media accounts) and developed dramatically as a chain of “fateful” moments of encounter. All this gathered up in the ending. Stephen Prince cannily writes,

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The death scene at the end of Bonnie and Clyde is remarkable because of the incredible firepower deployed against the outlaw couple and the close attention the film gives to the physical impact of the bullets; yet the scene lacks a sustained sense of the emotional and psychological components of Bonnie and Clyde’s death agonies. The viewpoint of the scene is entirely exterior and physical. (143) Indeed, the entire film is something of a safe, quasi-pornographic thrill ride along a progressively violent road toward an ecliptic moment of finality. The green field attests to the end of the road, the surcease of expectation and its replacement by a calm, day-dreamy prospect. Perhaps not quite not emotional. Look out upon this rippling sea. Look forever. (I had a pal once whose bedroom was painted this color, not quite Chartreuse. A pale, alluring version of Werner’s Siskin Green [Syme 39].) We should have two thoughts about Prince’s use of the phrase “incredible firepower.” First, firepower is, after all, power. And although Bonnie and Clyde have weapons—a key scene in the film has Clyde teaching Bonnie to shoot straight—their “fire power” cannot match another, dominating firepower profoundly external, belonging to, and expressed by, agents of the State. In the “overkill” of the ending, a form of bureaucratically centralized power is put in play against, and wins over, an independent, localized, amateur form in a much lower register. The police do not “play” with guns; they even transcend merely “using” them. In the finale, the State and its agents become a single colossal machine of execution aimed to eradicate what have been deemed enemies of the State. Secondly, the word “incredible” is not just an empty verbal exaggeration here: it leads us to recall that even leading up to the finale, when the heartbeat quickens at the sense of impending doom, one proceeds quite rationally to imagine the weight of oppression that will be leveled against the “heroic” Bonnie and Clyde. The police will triumph, and in every film where this happens though one knows the outcome nevertheless one takes the trouble to imagine the police. What eventuates here is that the imagination is staggered, just, in fact, as Bonnie and Clyde are both staggered. Our much too conventional imagination of the size and weight of justice has been matched by theirs; and so Prince’s reaction, that the gunfire is “incredible”— difficult to believe; not to be believed—nicely conveys the audience and protagonists’ reaction to the tidal wave. Incredible it is. Though there is no life left in them to be converted to belief. (For an homage of sorts, see the finale to Dog Day Afternoon [1975].) For the scene to “lack a sustained sense” of the criminals’ death agonies is a necessary central feature if the logic of the finale shot is to come clear. To examine the fragmented bodies, no longer now resembling the characters we came to know or even human beings at all, would be to draw into tight

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focus our feeling of mixed dispassionate witness and empathetic horror, to beam that feeling onto one body and then the other; so that the aerial shot would become nothing other than a blatant signal of the film’s end, a liftingaway from the action, an official and egregious “summation.” Egregious because nothing could be more summative than what so articulate a close shot of either body, or both bodies, would already have conveyed. To convey that abysmal reality and then tack on an aerial shot would have been a queer case of overstatement on Penn’s part: there are no such statements elsewhere in the film. The absence of close shots is a requirement for the Dutch angle to work as it does, offering a conclusion as only its most superficial gift and then striking our sensibility with the incoherent match of the death vehicle and the green sea upon which it floats. The spring green sea, the virginal, hesitant green sea, the field of green in which one does not imagine punishment at all. Not punishment, nor crime summoning punishment, nor bank infiltrations summoning crime, nor banks summoning bank robberies, nor capital wealth summoning banks. The delicious pale green is before all this, the green of the earthscape under sun and wind, where no evil, indeed no action, waits.

The Green Fire Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, Warner Bros., 2011) Take as read what can be claimed of Green Lantern (2011) and all other comic-strip-based action films: that a strange and bizarrely powerful hero battles and defeats unspeakable forces of evil, thereby protecting the innocent citizens of a civilian metropolis and redirecting to a proper moral course some grotesque wayward advance of science which produced both him and his enemy. The world is saved, and with it the venue in which one is watching this film! All such film stories worry excessively about scientific experimentation— it produces the villainous persona or diabolical machinery—yet in the end they sanctify and approve the kind of laboratory play or scientifically rationalizable event out of which, and from only which, the hero emerges in the first place. The hero’s battles are numerous, but there will always be a culminating confrontation, usually inside or above a city, with mammoth rays of destruction aimed at goodness (and its costly architectural symbols) but thwarted by the hero’s shielding and countervailing powers. He will be notably good to look at, yet finally chaste, since any thoroughgoing bond with a normal female would, as it did with Samson, drain his power. Superheroes in these films are relentlessly heteronormative or else ascetic.

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They are relatively uninterested in family life, domestication in general, or the discipline of civilization except perhaps as a subject for witty play or gentle mockery (or as a cover identity’s piety). There is plenty of discipline of the military sort; and flirting. Action superheroes are inevitably, in their hearts, soldiers, and cute ones. An interesting line of theorization could be formulated—but will not be, here—about the continuity between war film and comic action films, say Back to Bataan (1945) and Green Lantern (2011). Writing of Paramount’s early acquisition of rights to Superman and hiring of the Fleischer Studios in the very early 1940s, Drew Morton reminds us that “the core audience for the comic, radio show, and animated shorts was obvious: children and young adults of both sexes.” But then he continues, “During World War II, the United States Army had been the largest purchaser of comic books” (43). Its generic story and precisely choreographed action notwithstanding, and aside from the persona of the hero as cast through the agency of Tom Cruise, Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon, Chadwick Boseman, Jennifer Garner, George Clooney, Eric Bana, Natalie Portman, Ryan Reynolds or whomever else, the comic action film, especially as produced through Marvel studios, relies thoroughly on luminous effects, specifically the way extra-special metals and other (magical) materials might emit, transmit, or reflect the lighting of modern civilization on one side and the luminosity of extraterrestrial force on the other. Materials tend to have a particular hard glow, reminiscent, perhaps, of what Tom Wolfe called the Kandy-Kolored tints of souped-up 1950s automobiles; or of the brave little Christmas-tree lights in many colors, often bubbling but always reflected in the slender sheen of tinsel strips on the Tannenbaum. There is a completely extranormal, exciting thrill in the luminous colorations available on the screen with these films, but it is also to be said that red, yellow, and blue feature prominently in most of them. Yellow or its variant orange as a contrast; red and blue as tokens of patriotism. If the soldier-heroes are to be taken seriously, they must fight on the side of America: if not the American government or American capital (both of which frequently show up in enemy garb) at least in the name of the noble, simple, yeoman-agrarian American volk of the mid-nineteenth century, extrapolated forward as futurist taxpayers and powerless populations needing to be saved. The principal issue in Green Lantern is green, and a particular version of it (a neon-style graphic illumination, close to Chrome Green [see Harvard 99]). Most action and melodramatic narratives assign greens to nature, casting them away from the heroic protagonist and into the vegetative surround. A green forest (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes [2014]), a green pond (A Room with a View [1985]), a green sward (Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes [1984]), green pines (All That Heaven Allows [1955]): this is the green world of medieval imagery, commencing in the hortus conclusus and moving forward through the Wild Man and Arthurianism to the landscapes

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of Claude, the hushed reveries of Watteau, the hunts of Courbet, the Château noir paintings of Cézanne, and the still lifes of Fantin-Latour. Wild men showed up in the medieval carnival masques, write Gómez et al.: “They wore a green close-fitting costume with furs and leaves attached, a wig and beard and eventually either a belt or a crown made out of oak leaves” (192). Green is expelled from civilization as the primordial tincture of the Garden abandoned in the wake of advancement and civilization. If the Garden was a womb and haven, freely given before the arts of man could invent it, its greenness lapsed in the face of the machine (machine = hierarchical organization). Conventional action-film green is thus pathetic green, green vanquished. However, the green of Green Lantern is different. Not the­ sea-green of Vernet or Turner or the borderline nauseating veronèse (emerald) green of Van Gogh, not the slick ornamental green of Sirk or the bucolic green of Rohmer and the New Wave. A vibrating, neon-electric, interplanetary green that shows four strange characteristics: l

Because of the nature of the story, and the nature of the principal character who pinions and motivates it, the color is in virtually constant motion, like some mammoth Brownian particle bouncing on amphetamines around the container of the screen. For that reason, the hero’s green is not stable. It does not present its features and go to rest, so that we may take time to apprehend and consider it.1 Action film in general, thought by many naïve viewers to be about the action of characters—Rabbit-Man speeding through the universe in his Rabbit-Ship—more truly expresses the action of cinema itself, the way cinema manifests ongoingly without letup as it displays action to the eye. Lantern (Ryan Reynolds), a man who has undergone conversion (a very typical trope in superhero action), is a wearer of green, an emitter of green, a green presence, and unceasingly a green transformation. When we see him, his greenness precedes his sensibility. He floods us with his green, which dissipates when it reaches the screen to scintillate and does not rub off on us. He may even be taken as a contemporary equivalent of the Green Man of medieval myth, the creature of the wild emerged to confront civilization. Not only does the Lantern move, the green that indicates and exemplifies him, his bloody green, his essential tint moves as well. The screen is a reservoir of green action, green flight, green skipping, greening emotion. And the green-in-motion leaves a trace behind, a green halo or train, a green vapor trail. Green was here. That trail is dimmer, more evanescent

For consulting with me about the consideration of film images and the time necessary for that, I am indebted to Peter Treherne. 1

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than the green figure racing ahead of it. That figure shines, glows, even explodes in sparkles of green. When the greenness drops into shade, it picks up a slight blue cast, mechanical, unfeeling, grinding, unresponsive. At other moments the green shines with a sunny tinge, the green of flesh and feeling, birth and growth, expansiveness and radiation and play. The Lantern’s green has luminescence, can be expressive in and of itself regardless of circumstance, of characterological intent, of situational irony. The green makes a statement and is a statement: not a reference. Referential green points to a condition, a place, or an object. This green does not point. It has a voice. It lives. By fashion, the action hero’s garment should cling tightly to his body, should fit him like a surgical glove (or a condom). The garment is the body and the body is the garment, so that here the green radiance is all there is to the man beneath. As with the dancer in leotards, the garment enunciates the body. In Green Lantern, the principal green is a skin-tight muscular green: it has green power, to be sure, but the power emanates from a green body not a mechanism. Even the prototypical Superman, who also wore a tight body suit in most representations, owned a power owing to hard mechanical origins and giving off a mechanical effect, since, attached as it seemed to the “mild-mannered” persona of Clark Kent, it flowed outward from a defunct alien planetary source and gave a strength made visible when Superman outperformed earthling machines: gun barrels twisted into knots; aircraft in flight grasped and redirected. The Lantern’s power is more radiant than focused, more organic than mechanical. Magical chlorophyll has reinvented him. Every vision of Green Lantern is one in which the color effuses and the personality of the figure is withheld, sublimated, in order that it not take precedence over the green surface. While we are to know at every instant, and thus always assume, that the power of Green Lantern has been conferred upon an ordinary human (through astounding transformation), the ordinariness does not transmit (other than as the sometime basis of humor) while the green mask, the green clothing, the green ray all do. Another way to put this: Lantern rests upon a human substructure entirely uninteresting compared with the Green Being the human becomes. The story needs the substructure in order to make rational the setting, but not more. That green being is so internal it is inside even the blasé personality of everyday Hal Jordan. Bursting with highlights (that convey the idea of explosive heat), Lantern’s green radiance seems to emit light from within-the-within, deeper than deep, from an

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internal light source that cannot but shine through the tinted lens of its covering. Hal Jordan is not wearing green, he is green. Thus, we see a green that is not structurally recessive, pointing to something else out of which it grows. It glows and comes forward naturally, as itself and only itself. It throbs, it sings its mystery. It sings its mystery, of all things that it could sing, because there is impossibility in what is given to the eyes to see, and every instant of the film, every green spark acknowledges that impossibility and leads us to transcend it. We think of colors, we engage with them, we transact colors, we analyze and invent, all by virtue of language, which acts to make the color green inseparable from the word green. But here and always a word is only a crude and arbitrary attachment. In the same way, we think of fire by means of the word fire. When we attach the word fire to an optical phenomenon, it brings to mind all other occasions when we have made the attachment fire. We see orange, yellow, transformation, consumption. The attachment green has typically invoked tranquility, shade, repose, meditation, secrecy. To say that Green Lantern is composed of, and emits, a green fire is thus to be inherently contradictory, to pair not only somewhat incompatible single words but also incompatible word-domains we have understood as mutually exclusive. Green fire might be cold. And the Lantern’s green ray, fiery and efficient, might operate by negativity. Yet in the end, we have no truck with its way of operating. We want to see it, the green excess, the green trail, the green redemption, the green greenness.

Generally in art, green affects through an exclusion and an incorporation. Exclusion of its negation, as in the landscapes of Meindert Hobbema where the uncountable splendid green leaves in the tall lush trees proclaim their separation from the horse cart on the path beneath, from the tiny cottage, from the charming stream. As in the still lifes of Cézanne where the green apples distinguish themselves, their consciousness, from the dull ceramic pitcher, the inert tablecloth. “With an apple I want to astonish Paris,” said Cézanne (Cahn 383), and in 1907, it was proclaimed of him that “Cézanne did not seek to represent forms by means of line. Contour existed for him only as the place where one form ended and another form began” (Rivière and Schnerb, qtd. in Cahn 383). And incorporation, by drawing aspects from the surround into a specific arcane recipe. The green of the configured leaf borrows something from the cobalt blue of the configured air, from the yellow ochre of the configured earth. Oddly, eccentrically, in Green Lantern the green, being a digital effect, shines with a glow we cannot find in reflections of the sun or the sky, borrows from nothing but itself, defines

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itself only in being and not in reflecting any other entity. This independence is what gives the green of this film an idiosyncratic fire. The green fire is a great secret at any rate, and viewing the Lantern suffused by it, floating inside a cloud of it, one is carried to remote dream climes disconnected from the pressures and force of the everyday. Poi s’ascose nel fuoco che gli affina; and he hid himself in the fire that purifies (and its flames were green).

The Water Mill’s Green Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams [Yume] (Akira Kurosawa, Warner Bros., 1990): II In the last of Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990), a young man who has quested his way along a labyrinthine path, through forest and tunnel and art gallery and cornfield (Akira Terao), comes to a village of water mills where he is encountered by an old man (Chishû Ryû, who quested his way along a labyrinthine path through fifty-two films of Yasujiro Ozu). Uninterrupted sound of plashing water. A broad stream. Vibrant green eelgrass. A long row of wooden water mills on the far side of the stream, slowly, slowly, slowly turning. The water a perfect Ophelia green, as in the Millais painting (1851), and the stream bridged by narrow wooden walkways. Old soft worn pallid wood. A conversation. Time. Time, rhythm. Rhythm, season. Season, rebirth. Rebirth, silence. Silence, then conversation. Grass beside the stream and grasses inside it waving, freshwater eelgrass, like a green maiden’s hair. All of this has gone before. All of this will come again. The water of the stream is the magical green of continuous motion, endless time, and fervent yearning. Respectfully taking off the hat: “What is the name of this village?” Looking up with a smile: “Doesn’t have one … We just call it the village. Some people call it the Watermill Village.” To be inside, to be outside. It is necessary to stand back and make division in order to see how this village could be called the Watermill Village, because such a pointing would adduce portions: the river as distinct from the walkways upon it; the water mills as distinct from the river in which they turn; the old man as distinct from the river with which he has grown. To make portions, and then to find the distinctive portion, the telltale portion: there are plenty of rivers, plenty of old men; but a chain of water mills? Thus, Village of Watermills. To be outside. For the old man, however, never having moved from this place, which is to say, never having stepped outside it, there is no apportioning, and his hands fabricating part of a wheel are hands with the river, the river a flow with the turning wheels,

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the wheels turning for his hands, his hands turning for the wheels. Even such a sentence as that, even that grammatical hoax is impossible, since there is only one word. One word, not a chain of words strung together. Village. To be here and only here. To see as far as the eye can see. Jusqu’au bout du monde. As the old man sits, the wheel turns behind him, counterclockwise— except that only in the most superficial way does the wheel resemble a clock. Truly there are no clocks here, there is only time. Time unmeasured. Time stipulated in green. Green time, as in the everlasting living. Thus, green timelessness. Pointless, even arrogant questions, because once one has entered a place in which one does not live, in which one’s life has not been rooted, some pretext must be found for addressing the stranger (even the very old stranger, who cares not about pretexts). “Do all the villagers live here?” “They live in other places.” “There’s no electricity here …?” “Don’t need it. People get too used to convenience.” How can it be that the green of this river, the green rushes, grasses, water, the green of the wood of the waterwheels drying in the sun and browning— all these greens, how can they be properly and wondrously inconvenient? Inconvenient greens. They do not answer to the stranger’s question. They do not address the stranger’s feeling of need. These greens are for local use only, and convenience does not come into it, ever. “They throw out what is truly good.” Young man sitting at old man’s feet, supplicant, student, child of the master. To learn is to be, to sit in calmness and to be. The river is the teacher. The green river. They don’t have lights; they have only candles and linseed oil. “But night’s so dark.” “Yes. That is what night is supposed to be.” On some level this dialogue is, of course, an interrogation of modernity, its methods of undoing, but that is only the most superficial aspect of it. That electricity banished the night, expanded the workday, turned labor into an hourly business, and so on. Early nineteenth century moving into full development for a hundred years. All of this drama (a grand drama) could have been set anywhere, anytime. The young modern student asking questions that could be stripping him of his culture: anywhere else. What is the value added by presenting the old man in the green Village of Watermills, with the mill turning behind him? To show the omnipresence of green as a fact, not a mere mythological hope or ideological construct: that is the value. That the wheels do turn endlessly into the water, and the water is greened by the grasses, and the age of the old man is greened into youth by the water even before he is

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confronted with the engaging young man. There is nothing in this universe but green, its endless promise. There are such places, we can believe, because this is such a place.

Spectacular Green The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, MGM, 1939): II A tantalizing nugget on page 34 of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900): “If you did not wear spectacles the brightness and glory of the Emerald City would blind you.” Think of the apocryphal city as a wondrous and spectral world, fashioned, by the greatest artisans to be found, entirely out of carved, mounted, and ornamented pure emeralds that were dug by happy miners from some wondrous and spectral mines. Emeralds, emeralds everywhere. Light blazing through them, entrancing and beguiling the eye. Emerald as truth. But then, out of the mouth of Baum’s Guardian of the Gates, this crux: Even those who live in the City must wear spectacles night and day. They are all locked on, for Oz so ordered it when the City was first built, and I have the only key that will unlock them. He opened the big box, and Dorothy saw that it was filled with spectacles of every size and shape. All of them had green glasses in them. Spectacles fastened on, notice; not only in the sunshine but also by moonlight, so that the shadows of the nocturnal City are deep and green. Green the towers, green the alleys between, green the paved streets, green the windows shining with green light. They are all locked on … What is to be made of this conundrum? The answer is a simple and brief formula of conclusion, easy enough to convey with print on a page but virtually impossible in a movie theater when one is staring at the screen; staring, I should add, with eyes from which the “spectacles” have fallen. Oz, the Emerald City, the city fashioned of emeralds, the repository of emerald truth, is not in fact what it purports to be. It is not made of emeralds; and it is not green. But the citizens are led, indeed forced by lock and key, to believe that it is. The Wizard is a dictator. The Emerald City, citizen’s fantasy, has become a state of affairs for those who live there, live, we must remember, with their eyes screened.2

“Emerald” green was an apt invocation for the early-twentieth-century Baum. Lucinda Hawksley informs us of the great popularity in Victorian times of emerald green, almost always rendered from arsenic, as a (far from salutary) color agent for wallpaper and fabrics (65). 2

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Should the city have been built of emeralds, if it were the Emerald City, the wizard who sat upon the throne there would have been a man of immense puissance, untold wealth, shining green glory. He who controls any merely normal city is merely a mayor, a functionary. The Wizard of Oz would have been—would be—no mean functionary. Not even a lowly king. MGM’s The Wizard of Oz eschews those green-lensed spectacles. To show a normal-looking city with a population laced into green eyeglasses would for a brief moment seem comical but swiftly become tedious and without point. Even if one could posit a single citizen who removed the glasses and saw the “truth,”3 only disenchantment would follow. For the audience the city was already “naturally” and quite wondrously green. The city’s being green for the viewing audience is one of the central pleasures of this film. It is as though the audience comes equipped with special spectacles of its own, yet of course this is not and cannot be the case. The film operates—the film must operate—as though in the (climactic) Emerald City sequences the whole audience wears “locked-on” spectacles as in Baum’s text, although without any consciousness whatever (whereas Baum’s Ozians knew they had spectacles locked over their eyes). Those spectacles are metaphorical, figurative, yet wholly functional thanks to the film’s design. The production design by Malcolm Brown, William Horning, and Jack Martin Smith works intensively to produce a city of emeralds, beginning with a vague green glow on a distant horizon, proceeding past a green-clad gatekeeper and green pavement and a green “horse of a different color” to green buildings, green corridors, and the fabulous green throne room of the evanescent wizard, who perches in flames upon the wall. Even the nongreen flames momentarily seem non-nongreen, and testify at any rate to the “authenticity” of the green elsewhere, its essential greenness even without us seeing it through a device (such as the device through which we are seeing it). A spectacle without spectacles. Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion are too preoccupied with the flaming face and what it might promise to see what little Toto picks up almost without a flinch, namely that to the side there is a shimmering green curtain. The pup rushes up and yanks it back with his teeth. Green curtain, green chamber behind. And in the chamber a perfectly ordinary man, not wearing green, his back to the camera, busy manipulating knobs and handles of a great instrument panel and leaning forward to speak into a protruding microphone. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Pay no attention!

In John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), this is Roddy Piper, who has magical sunglasses. “I can see!” 3

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Here, through verbal ambiguity, is the indication of Oz as a charlatan’s production. That is, this man fiddling with knobs is a charlatan; but the man enacting this man is not! While we digest the man’s command, we experience two strange pleasures at once: First, there is no moment in which we can see the face of the man at the same time as we see lips moving and hear sounds emerging from the mouth. When the powerful revelatory line is uttered, his back is fully to the camera. When he turns and splutters, the splutter, not being microphoned, does not seem to be in the same magnified voice. Thus, the sacred illusion of an all-powerful wizard, appearing in flames upon a wall, is preserved even in the face of canny little Toto’s declarative detective action and the “fact” it reveals. Second is the green itself. This brilliant, radiant color stupefies, entrances, bewilders the consciousness notwithstanding the politique of revelation underway in the throne room. Through all of the Wizard’s presentation and subsequent transformation, we remain confronted by, and delighted with, that green. Seductive, galvanizing even beyond seduction, Oz green speaks for itself, no matter what any character says in its presence.

To Swim and Not to Swim Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, Twentieth Century Fox, 1945); Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, Frenesy, 2017) Prior to the invention of the bikini in 1946, scant months after the première of John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven, the celebrity show-off in a swimsuit was already a popular attraction. If the bikini was newly revealing, even the revealing garments of the 1930s (Bette Davis can be seen in one of these, in Three on a Match [1932]) highlighted the wearer’s body—hidden treasure— as proportionate, formal, and suggestive albeit only partially accessible. The point in using swimsuit gear for dressing celebrities in particular and ostensibly “beautiful” women in general was not to suggest their athleticism or fondness for water pleasures (sycophants of or substitutes for Esther Williams) but to point to the now-at-least-somewhat-revealed body as a noteworthy example of the female type popular according to prevailing conventions of the time: a body that could be considered idealized, thus special and worth gazing at, especially gazing at in the peculiar way that the swimsuit made possible. A body officially shaped to please. The bikini gave automatic emphasis to the breasts, because of the contrasty bare midriff bluntly visible underneath; and the diminutive bottom was cut to suggest, if not dramatically position the eye upon, the navel and the belly below, as

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well as the v of the crotch. In beauty pageants after 1946, where bikinis were in widespread use until Catholic panic banished them, the displayed bathing suit very clearly had nothing at all to do with immersion, swimming, or water play. The bathing suit showed the body as a form, and it was that formed body in competition; the suit remained dry. Gene Tierney—a bathing beauty if ever there was—is transformed, by John M. Stahl working from a script based on Ben Ames Williams’s fiction, into the heiress Ellen Berent. On the train to New Mexico, she bumps into a famous author sitting near her, befriends him without knowing he’s on the way to visit the same people she is. Since he is tall and handsome and literate, and she is dark, cunning, and glorious, if also beastly, shall we say she falls in love? She is burying her father, to whom she was (extraordinarily) attached, and is now (extraordinarily, but differently) attached to Richard (Cornel Wilde). They marry and go to his natural retreat in a New England woods. Wooden cabin out of a bucolic agrarian dream. Green lake, utterly pure. Pine forest. He works slavishly at the typewriter, and we come to meet his younger brother Danny (Darryl Hickman), who has been suffering from polio, debilitating to his body but not to his greenly refreshing spirits. As he will not suffer Ellen to go off to Maine with Richard, the adored brother, she blithely contrives to arrange for Danny to kill himself by swimming the lake too soon after eating and cramping up there. (A scene of exceedingly troubling violence focused on her waiting patiently in the rowboat in which she has been escorting the boy, sunglasses over her eyes, until he is no more.) Ellen becomes ongoingly possessive, controlling, demanding, relentless, and monstrous. And so on. Not a happy ending. She is a commander, a navigator, an arranger of “flowers.” Just a little before the debacle with Danny, she is already seizing ownership of the scene as she swims in the gorgeous pool beside which Richard is typing and her adoptive sister (and romantic competition) Ruth (Jeanne Crain) is clipping wisteria. Green pool water, body moving like a shark in our direction as we wait at the pool’s edge, body pulling itself up onto the pool lip: soap-white bathing cap, archly smiling lips made articulate with dark red lipstick, and, adorning that perfectly shaped body, that contest-winning form, now drawn half out of the water, a vivid … … avocado-green bathing suit. Avocado-green: not the fruit’s dark, amphibian skin but once a knife has carved its way inside and the pip has been removed that almost brazen, carnival green, the green of posters and absinthe held up to the light, and that beckons, “Look, look, look at me.” All of the desire and anxiety associated with the property, the forest, the pool, the narrative universe seems drawn into, compacted through, and expressed by that bathing-suit green. Ellen’s suit is not a bikini, but it functions as one, creating the same revelations of form, implying the same nudity. Here as generally, the bathing suit identifies and characterizes the

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woman in it, rather than only covering her modesty. The bathing suit as statement of personality and intent. Slick. Sleek. Persuasive. Magnetic. The phrase “avocado green,” which conveniently describes the exact color of the suit, also covers an instantaneous impression and feeling, namely, that this is the green of abject jealousy and resentment, the green of crime. Albeit brighter, because she is swimming in full sunshine, this green is almost the same as the skin of the man stepping toward us down the road in Edvard Munch’s “The Murderer” (1910). In the painting as here in the film, beneath this atrocious and ineluctable green the murder (or ability at murder) is hidden. Can a beautiful, tender woman kill with her beauty and her tenderness? Meanwhile, in Italy and decades later, love is a many-splendored thing. Teenaged Elio, the professor’s son (Timothée Chalamet) has taken Oliver (Armie Hammer), the professor’s summer grad assistant arrived all the way from America, under wing to show him the local territory. Lush ancient green trees, long lawns, a green swimming pool margined by ancient stones, a family table at which only luscious food is served. The older young man and the younger young man tumble together into a spell of yearning. Lovemaking, teasing, joking, education, lovemaking. Elio is told to call Oliver Elio, and Oliver responds by calling Elio Oliver. Time passes too quickly, the summer will be over, the summer is waning, the summer is gone. “The story of my life / And the particular accidents gone by” (Tempest V.i.2382-3). Summer gone, Oliver will become engaged to be married. But “the summer still doth tend upon my state” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream III.i.974). Elio must learn love lost. It is like those lines of Charles Olson’s: Now I begin to Go—hear me I have sent you the message—I am gone Elio and Oliver were at the pool, Elio in the water meditating, his pale naked skin casting back the glowing dapples of green light. Oliver had stretched himself on the poolside stones and was reading. He wore a pair of evergreen bathing trunks. His body made no claim, offered no secret; a mere presence and visibility, presence and distinct visibility. Even if at the moment Elio looked away, he rotated his gaze. They would stand together, Oliver a little behind and touching Elio’s slender neck; the older one in his evergreen, the younger one pale and unmarred, his trunks stylishly patterned, yellow and blue always promising to convert to green. They would ride bicycles through tall green grasses. Would dive into a large dark green pond. But if Oliver’s trunks became wet it was only so that he could share the water temple with

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Elio; and if Elio swam it was only so that Oliver’s presence and his own could wet themselves together. The bluish green of Oliver’s suit is sincere and devoted; a calm and normative green, a green that does not equivocate or deny itself. Ellen’s green was a flamboyant, dishonest, magnificent, self-conscious green. Richard is too besotted with his writing near the midnight-green pines to decode that bathing suit. Elio is Oliver’s pupil, learning the great subject, love. He permits his teacher’s sincere green to wash him inside and out.

Green Boy The Boy with Green Hair (Joseph Losey, RKO, 1948); Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, Twentieth Century Fox, 1956) Joseph Losey’s The Boy with Green Hair (1948) is an allegory of war violence and the destruction of youth, in which little Peter (Dean Stockwell, aged twelve), an American in England, learns one day that he has been orphaned and soon thereafter sees in the mirror that his hair has turned green. What might happen in “normal” society to a boy with green hair? The taunting, the mockery, the exclusion, the vituperation, the loathing. Finally, as a coup de grâce, a haircut:4 thorough and exhaustive, until he is bald. It is easy to leap into a discussion of the film in its allegorical function; to worry through the position Losey takes toward military conflict, toward youth, toward dependence and independence, and toward social censure and control, all the while skipping over the central feature of the film: Peter’s green hair. Without any trouble, one can jump from the hair to a condition symbolized in the boy’s being entrapped by it, all the while failing to consider the hair itself. His green hair as such. The greenness, its particular vividness; its being on—then its taking over—his head. This one is a shocking, St. Patrick’s Day Kelly green, almost iridescent, giving the hair the appearance of an alien or artificial substance. As seems, the presence and presentation of the awkwardly green hair cannot but be a construction, a brazen fakery; even growing out of his skull the green hair cannot be thought natural to the boy. As vibrant and attractive to the eye as the color is, so does it draw (too much) attention to itself, vibrate independently, so that in shot after shot we wonder about effect and action, whether we are to take things as happening or as having been choreographed and decorated for camera in order “to metaphorize a point.” Are we in postwar England or in an allegory? The boy There is a curt homage to this outside the fire station, viewed on television, in François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966). 4

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not only doesn’t fit English society but also doesn’t fit cinematic diegesis. He cannot successfully reside within the tale of his resident troubles. As with the shiny suit worn by Jonathan Buttall, Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” (1779), so with the hair worn by Stockwell’s Peter in Boy: it confounds, escapes, and finally contests against the palette that contains it. This is due to George Barnes, who shot the picture; and Ralph Berger and Albert D’Agostino, who designed it. The hair not only has its own existence but also has run from the stable. It is too bright and too monochromatic to accompany the subtleties of the boy’s face, or the settings in which he moves, or the other characters around. So the boy with green hair is both anomalous within the diegesis—a stranger beyond alienness in postwar London—and anomalous within the film. This allows the viewer to mirror the attitude of the complacent civilians within the story, who disparage Peter, alienate him, threaten him, and finally do him an unspeakable violence. As a figure, he is made to stand out abruptly from the fictional ground as coherent in itself and offered up in the theater. To go a step further, Barnes, Berger, and D’Agostino have worked hard to unify, harmonize, and rationalize the décor, lighting, and coloration all around Peter and all through the film in such a way that he will be the only thing that doesn’t fit, and there can be no doubt that the lack of fit is due to his green hair, to the greenness itself. Green hair that instantly suggests equatorial vegetation, eternal becoming; but also some kind of block. Hair that is inhuman, even out of nature; while simultaneously being nothing but human, since it is growing from the head of a sweet and very human little boy. This green hair pulls us in two contradictory directions. We are pulled apart by this green hair. In the case of another little boy, instead of standing out from the frame in blaring misfit his body merges with the material of the story, dissolves agonizingly into the scene. This is Richie Avery (Christopher Olsen, aged ten), living in a cozy family triangle with his mother (Barbara Rush) and father (James Mason), she a housewife (as women who spent their lives arranging and maintaining the home were called in the 1950s) and he an even-tempered school teacher moonlighting as a taxi dispatcher. Richie and his dad are best of pals. Richie is mom’s favorite. A textbook family, out of Dick and Jane and the Hardy Boys. But something goes disastrously wrong. Beginning to feel ill, Ed consults medical practitioners who diagnose a very rare condition hitherto decidedly untreatable; but now, they think cortisone might help, taken regularly and in a precise dose. A precise dose only. The drug does help, but makes Ed feel so euphoric by comparison with his earlier pains that he violates the protocol and slowly, methodically overdoses. He is transformed before our eyes (in an actorial movement quite remarkable in the history of screen performance [see Pomerance, Virtuoso]) into a dictatorial, opinionated, outspoken, violent, finally murderous monster. One

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key transitional scene has father and son out in the back yard tossing a football. Not just any football, either, but the token football from Ed’s heroic college football career, now gifted from father to son and Richie’s special treasure. Try as he might, Richie keeps missing the catch and, provoked and hypercritical, Ed finally demands that he must succeed on the next, third attempt or forego his lunch. The yard is a stark contrast to the neutral, soft coloring of the house interior (where much of the action takes place): grassed over, somewhat unmown, it is a green retreat, and a haven as well because Richie never troubles to look at the ground as he runs across it, so familiar, protecting, and deeply remembered is every foot of the place. He runs. Ed throws the ball. Richie misses it. Now, reduced to despondency and to begging for his father’s respect and affection, the boy collapses to the ground. Nicholas Ray is often celebrated for his use of lateral constructions onscreen, this a direct outflow from his early days studying architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright (who used the horizontal principle as a foundation of his work). There are remarkable laterally constructed CinemaScope shots in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) which had preceded this film, Warner Bros. having leased the proprietary lenses and rights from Fox for that production. Here in the backyard scene, the screen is built with a vitally strong horizontal line, this occupied by Richie’s stretched body upon the grass. The camera reveals the boy entirely in a single shot, from below the soles of the feet to above the head, as he lies unmoving and face-down in the lush, deep green grass. As Richie is fully bound in the shot, he is fully committed to his despair; there is no tiny body part stretching for safety toward the world outside. Richie belongs in this yard, it is the domain of his routine play and daydreaming, the exteriorization of his private space. No doubt that at this moment he wishes to impress himself so deeply upon the grassy ground, his blanket, that he merges with it, disappears inside the welcoming green blades. Escape the censure of the father, escape one’s humiliation—although Ed’s pass was in fact overthrown, as we clearly saw: either because the father fully intended to humiliate his son or because he lost some of his physical coordination due to the cortisone. The boy is fleeing into himself and into the ground, in this way becoming more and more tightly wedded to the material of the scene, the green grass that is a secret utopia.

Green Redemption The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Nunnally Johnson, Twentieth Century Fox, 1956): II That corpulent culture of modernism I described earlier, that high pagoda of lonely Organization Men in puffy flannel (the extent of which

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television’s “Mad Men” attempted in vain to evoke), showed two salient features. First, because of postwar recovery, the glorious project of domestication: manufacture of household goods, building of suburbia, reconstitution of a weakened male employment force. Second, because of the rapid growth of the consumer economy, a heyday of advertising: the process by which a populace already trained to scrimp and save were to be encouraged and rewarded at shopping, buying, using, wasting, and reacquiring material life. The two forces could merge: advertising to remake, reimagine, and reinvigorate the home; home and family as the new temple; the melodramatic family as linchpin. One craved Salton hot trays (from 1943) for keeping food warm at the table; stoves and refrigerators in matching coral pink or Tahitian aqua and Sonoma avocado dishwashers; laminate kitchen counters patterned as though by Miró; dreamy Californiastyle furniture and accoutrements; wall-to-wall broadloom or gleamy linoleum on the floor. A daydream of Veblenian conspicuous consumption. Thus the centrality of the (albeit somewhat less showy) Rath house, beacon to which Tom commutes home every night after his gray day of obedience. Tom (Gregory Peck), Betsy (Jennifer Jones), and their daughter Janey (Portland Mason), in a sanctified suburb (Westchester if not Long Island). Every man’s home is his castle. The war now relegated to the shelves of memory, Tom is utterly reinvented in his homey middle-class life, his marriage, and his paternity, realigned to the benevolence of full and useful employment (if employment in the name of a hunger that churchgoers would question on moral grounds). But then we find that Tom is not so relocated, remade, at all. In Italy during the fighting, he met, bonded with, and fathered a child upon a young local girl, destitute and, since the war’s end, secretly benefitting from contributions Tom has been mailing overseas (without telling his wife). When Betsy finds out there is an explosive blowup of major proportions, the two of them haranguing each other in the bedroom and then Betsy rushing downstairs and outside, refusing to let him touch her. Across the road is an expansive parkland, receding as far as the eye can see. It is the depth of night. Some very high-mounted civil illumination is flooding the grass hotly, so that it radiates green and takes on an especially unfamiliar curvature. It could be a professional baseball field, on which nobody is playing baseball. Tom and Betsy run into the center of this space, regarded almost entirely in extreme long shot taken from in front of their house, as though “we” are nervous to invade their privacy except by scanning from a distance for gestures. She in a pink dress, he in his gray flannels. They wrestle, wrench away from each other, dance a contortioned passion. He tries to embrace her down on the ground. It is a very lengthy shot, and seen in notably long focus, observed from another planet. A stretching, evaporating green. The voices cannot quite be heard, but syllables leak through to tease the ear.

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Tempestuous and problematic for the characters, this moment in the park is, wondrously, a marvel of tranquility, balance, and color saturation. As though we have been transported to a fairyland, where a fight to the death is in progress. The rounded spaciousness of Claude, the pithy density of Constable, the shocking vividness of Cézanne, whose greens, like this green, are entirely incomprehensible, entirely beyond touch. Tom has been inhabiting two not so dissimilar environments, the advertising firm with its offices, its cold desks, its opulent but restrained modernist furniture, the neutral clothing of all the people who work there, adjoined to the neutral, technical environment of the commuter train which connects workers to this (and numberless other) places in the City. And the home environment, woody and satisfying as it rings with brown and red or pink tones, but a place that is Betsy’s (basically the cage in which convention has her residing, a large cat with an unkenned appetite). When she flees down that staircase, it is only partly to get away from Tom. It is the prison she yearns to escape, the “successful” but stultifying suburban cloister. For his part, Tom wants to flee from his past. The park is the ultimate sanctuary for both of them, if also their battleground. Green as redemption, because as a result of their dance of confrontation on this green sward the marriage is saved and a spirit of charitable grace given leave to replace jealousy, bitterness, and self-centeredness. The park’s singular feature is its vastness: the grand, hard-to-navigate surface of the green. One can run and run and run and never reach a boundary, never come to the end of one’s escape, while yet feeling the throb of escape, the speeding breath. Betsy can finally breathe here, and through breathing come to a new state of mind. In a way, she and Tom are become children again: At first, everything is mixed together and everything appears moving. The segregation of colored surfaces, or the correct apprehension of movement, only comes later when the subject has understood “what ‘seeing’ is,” that is, when he directs and casts his gaze in the manner of a gaze, and no longer in the manner of a hand. (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 232) The hand, in this event alien to green, is the organ of possession, of organization: Tom and Betsy grappling by hand. But vision comes when the hand is transcended by the gaze, the reaction to the “colored surfaces” of the space they now inhabit together. Here, nothing limits vision except the tiny bodies, who have now escaped the containment of our consideration. The great green empty park, tended by unseen hands for occupation by … whatever spirits will manifest themselves for good.

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Green of Dreams How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, Twentieth Century Fox, 1941) I feel I shall never forget the image that flooded toward me as the aircraft made to land at London Heathrow the very first time I visited England almost fifty years ago. It was a virtual assault of green. Green below us, green running off endlessly, in farmland, villages, forests, and streams. It is one thing to read of England’s green; to hear it spoken of; to sing or hear sung, in a school run by expatriate Victorians, and while sniffing the noxious aromas of institutional cleansers mixed with sun-drenched varnish from the windowsills—“And did those feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England’s mountains green?”—to think about the importance of the bucolic that is residual in the modern age there, to voyage in the imagination westward to the special green of Wales. Imagine all this as you will, but something else is the actual vision, because one is abruptly made conscious that the word “green” as we use it in conventional speech and the thing itself, thriving in the world, moving toward one’s consciousness, embracing and teasing, are different altogether. I had possessed an entirely verbal “green,” even “green of Britain” boarding that plane, but now, in the vague morning sunlight it came skittishly, then in ripples, to life. Deeper, more variegated, lusher, more sumptuous as it rolled and rolled than any green I had ever seen or dreamed. What I had thought to find was, as it turned out, an abstraction. Similarly abstract is the green Welsh valley in John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941), because the film is shot in black and white. “Ford,” writes Joseph McBride, creates a feeling of nostalgia to counterpoint the sense of loss that gradually consumes the characters and their village. With its prescient metaphor of the green valley turning black from the waste slag of the coal pits, the film shares a central thematic concern with [Orson] Welles’s 1942 film of Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons, the story of an American city destroyed by the polluting force of the automobile. (329) All through its long autobiographical meander backward in time, as one is confined to the streets and homes of the tiny mining village in a valley of South Wales,5 to streets and homes that, McBride notes, were photographed

5

The village was built, entirely, under the supervision of Nathan Juran north of Los Angeles.

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with “split lighting of interior and exterior sets to convey a sense of harmony between man and nature” (329), one sees the utopian shadow of that eponymous green, a glorification of childhood experience. Our narrator Huw (Roddy McDowall), now grown and looking back, is a living and unfettered indication of the untouched potential that charges one’s romanticized vision of childhood. The British viewer would have longed to walk beyond the mining village, as Huw actually does, and find the green meadows, the spring flowers, the budded trees of Wales. “Walking” this way, that viewer might well have been able, out of hope and desire and loyalty, to shift the exquisite black-and-white images by Arthur Miller and Gregg Toland into a colored vision. But for the innocent viewer seeing the film and Huw the innocent within it, the “greenness” of the valley is nothing but an index and invocation, something one can dream the young character is dreaming in his odd and special dream, his sacred recollection. All the hinting tokens carefully placed: the Welsh choir chanting Penpark perfectly, and the tones of Bryn Calfaria and Llwyn Onn; the performances by Donald Crisp, Sara Allgood, Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald, Rhys Williams … the pale stone walls, pale stone houses, the stony untrammeled hearts … the mine, lethal and prolific … All these indicate rich complexity, an idea of a green utopian past rooted in Welsh soil, green because it is the past. It is an idea that provokes a thirst. The action of the story may seem to cover the thirst over; life action: friendship, brotherhood, love, marriage, danger, death, memory—“Men like my father cannot die”—but then little Huw wanders off to the beckoning meadows and hills, in the vivid clarity that is his memory but not, because of cinema, his alone. In the man’s memory, is this place black and white? The viewer craves to see what is seen in the recollection, just as the boy craves to see again in life what he sees only in memory. But, but … does he see the green? He craves the perfection of green as when he saw it first, the green of today’s yesterday, always the best green. The film not only offers a story of nostalgia, and this through the agency of a nostalgic narrator, but also produces its own direct nostalgia, through the boundless invocation of color. How Green Was My Valley is, in fact, entirely an invocation. To Huw, by way of time passing. To us, by way of film, which never ceases falling into the past.

Green Is the Wind Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, MGM, 1966): II When it became clear that for his first English-language film, to be shot in London, Michelangelo Antonioni might like to have scenes in a park, he

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communicated this to Assheton Gorton (1930–2014), the film’s designer, and the hunt was on. London is, if anything, full of parks: between Croydon and Chislehurst alone there are dozens of them, large or small. Hawkwood Estate. Scadbury Park. The Glades, Bromley. Gorton found Antonioni very, very early in the morning and they went scouting together. Day after day after day. Adam and his Shadow looking to find Eden again … Then, not far east of Greenwich, they came upon Maryon Park, the perfect place. It had both lower and upper levels, vital for setting the story as the filmmaker wanted to. It was secluded and quiet. It had a silent and haunting charm. Considering the grass and the thick tree-lined borders it had substantial green. And— It had a tennis court. (And still does.) Antonioni was both surprised and delighted by that, and it inspired him to dream up the finale tennis sequence, shot with mimes (Julian Chagrin and Troupe); and then, in a continuation of that inspiration, to dream up the film’s opening with the same performers on the City streets, with protest placards (“Not This!”). None of this material had been in the original conception or screenplay for Blow-Up (1966). This park has all the muscles of experience: meeting, courting, flirting, yielding, tempest, serenity, life, death. Our photographer protagonist tails and photographs a romantic couple there. He is an eager watcher, not in the figure of a person staring coldly from without, the one whom Elie Wiesel calls “neither a victim nor an executioner,” but as a committed insider, as long as he is inside, someone who knows that, as Cortázar has his photographer confide to us in the story from which the film is made, “every looking oozes with mendacity.” Oh yes, “I think I know how to look, if it’s something I know.” He is exercising his knowledge of both himself and his world, which is to say, living, the camera a part of his hand. An echo of How Green Was My Valley: when he gets back to the studio and processes the negatives of the day’s shooting, then prints up, on 16 × 20 sheets of glossy paper, a man and a woman catching one another’s hands, coming close, looking around, the woman’s furtive gaze, the woman’s horrified gaze, and all around them the trees, and underneath their sprightly feet the green lawn, and the trees blowing in the wind … when he does this, and pins up those shots on the beams of his living space, we see over his shoulder, perhaps with alarm, that he has been working in black and white. Yet through some sorcery of desire, proximity, and time, the park does come alive again as we dolly in to examine the photographs, and we hear the wind blowing through the trees as we did when we watched him make the shots. The wind is green. The wind is palpable. We are transported. A park in which painted mimes frolic. A park with the wind (of action) blowing through the trees.

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A park with drama, drama worth photographing. The drama of life and death. But all drama is the drama of life and death. All moments proceed. At any rate, a man and a woman, being to each other—as the camera sees— only and fully what men and women have always been. When he returns to the park that same night, there is no moon. In replacement a turquoise neon sign, immense, very high up, casting down an eerie cyan iridescence that bastes the grass. He has chosen to wear the park, in that his full conviction is devoted to the curls of its geography and also to the figures, real or phantasmal, who are alive there. His full conviction which is also his skin. He is wearing a dark green, black-green velvet jacket, so that were he to lie on the grass near the darkest trees he would be not only in but also of this place (as little Richie tries in shame and remorse to be in Bigger Than Life). The iridescent green grass is like a magic carpet. His amber hair is a flame of life. “It’s not my fault if there isn’t any peace.” If he were to lie on the grass: Actually, there is someone lying on the grass. Behind the great bush. The man from this morning’s shoot. Dead and cold. Green-gray, the grass and the green wind having invaded him. Dead green. His eyes are staring open, the whites all greened (verdigris setting in). The photographer, who has not brought his camera, can look only with his eyes: eyes that do not record on film. Eyes that see in color. Antonioni’s usual working method, once his set had been prepared for the shooting at hand, was to ask the crew and actors to stay out and to enter the space on his own. Slowly move about. Stand. Meditate. Let the vision come, and afterward assemble the actors and prepare the crew. With the park in Blow-Up, he brought Gorton with him into the private sanctum. They could stand in Cox’s Mount, master and pupil, the sanctum sanctorum that was the upper stratum of the park, above the wide wooden stairway where Redgrave would come stridently rushing, her hand blocking her face: stand in silence and look. For the night shot it was possible to stand under the neon flash of the ineradicable and inexplicable sign—you are saying something, but what is it that you say?—and stare forward at the long receding green, the green-black trees shifting in the wind, the great bush as if from Genesis yet if it burns burning only with time. It was possible, before Carlo di Palma’s camera (of necessity) intruded, to have the green to oneself alone, to rest alone with the green. To have the green thought. The designer and the filmmaker, for whom the film was colors, colors everywhere, even in the black-and-white photographs. Looking at green is, perhaps, the signal act of looking. The act of being arrested by the world. The act of imagining a tomorrow. And as to looking, Cortázar: “It’s that which expels us furthest outside ourselves, without the least guarantee.”

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320

INDEX

Note: Numbers in italic denote images À bout de souffle ([Breathless] JeanLuc Godard, 1960) 180 Abraham, F. Murray 249 Abstract expressionism 105 Adams, Amy 153 Adams, Ansel 223 Adams, Robert 223 “Adonais” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) 60 Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber) 216 Aeolus 235 Affleck, Casey 150, 152, 153 Afghanistan, and ultramarine blue 9 n.16 Agfacolor 15 Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams ([Dreams (Yume)] Akira Kurosawa, 1990) 73–5, 287, 295–7 Aladdin (Ron Clements John Musker, 1992) 95–6, 118–20 Aldington, Richard 218 n.1 Aldrich, Robert 6 Alexander the Great (Robert Rossen, 1956), 97 Algeria, French engagement in 22 Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) 57, 114, 159 Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010) 114 Alice Through the Looking-Glass (Lewis Carroll) 114 Alice Through the Looking Glass (James Bobin, 2016) 114–17 Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) 80–2 All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) 291

Allen, Corey 265 Allen, Woody 103, 105, 217 Allgood, Sara 308 Altman, Robert 122 Always (Steven Spielberg, 1989) 152 Amadeus (Milos Forman, 1984) 247–9 American in Paris, An (Vincente Minnelli, 1951) 261 n.1 American west, as mythological frame 35 n.13 Amphitryon 34 Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (BBC, 2006) 97 Andersen, Hans Christian 274, 276–80 Anderson, Richard 77 Andresen, Bjorn 31–2 Angel City (Sam Shepard) 223 Anger, Kenneth 262 n.2 aniline dye 21, 47, 247 Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) 24, 25 Anna Karenina (Maurice Maître, 1911) 24 Anna Karenina (Joe Wright, 2012) 17, 24–6 Anna Karenina (Karen Shakhnazarov, 2017) 24 Ansen, David 166 Ant Farm’s “Cadillac Ranch” (Amarillo, Texas) 58 Ante-bellum South, see Racism Antonioni, Michelangelo 60, 159–60, 249–50, 253 n.5, 308–9; working method 310

322

INDEX

Apartment, The (Billy Wilder, 1960) 143 n.6 Apollonian shadow 25 Arabian Desert 213, 214 Arabian Deserts (H. Stewart Edgell) 213 Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty” 262 n.2 “Argenteuil” (Claude Monet, c. 1872) 247 n.4 Arizona Dream (Emir Kusturica, 1993) 43, 57–9 “Arnolfini Marriage, The” (Jan van Eyck, 1434) 7 Around the World (Orson Welles, Adelphi Theater, May 31, 1946) 19 Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016) 153–6 Art Deco 103 Art Nouveau 227–8, 229; introduced by Samuel Bing 227 Artaud, Antonin 14 Arthur, Jean 33 Arthur (king of England), legend of 291 Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin, 1955) 266 n.4 As I Lay Dying (James Franco, 2013) 40 As You Like It (William Shakespeare) 72 Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The (Andrew Dominik, 2007) 223 Astaire, Fred 88, 144 n.8, 268 Astor Plaza Theatre (New York) 200 Atkinson, Leo 163 Atlas 235 Aubuchon, Jacques 189 Auric, Georges 270 Avon River 195 Babel, Tower of 155 Bacall, Lauren 62, 130 Bacchae, The (Euripides) 252 Bach, Johann Sebastian 93 Bachelard, Gaston 113, 133; Prometheus complex 133–4, 135, 136, 201

Back to Bataan (Edward Dmytryk, 1945) 291 Badfinger 237–8 Bahrain 213 Bailey, David 253 n.5 Bakst, Léon 274 Baldwin, James 209; on Sidney Poitier 209 Ball, Philip 97 Ball of Fire (Howard Hawks, 1941) 55 Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo 274 Balthazar (Lawrence Durrell) 181 Baltz, Lewis 223 Bana, Eric 291 Band Wagon, The (Vincente Minnelli, 1953) 88–9 Bangkok, narrow streets of 244 Barefoot Contessa, The (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954) 62 n.3 Barnes, George 303 Barney’s (New York) 143 Barr, Jean-Marc 40 Barrymore, John 54 Barthes, Roland, punctum and studium 26 Bassermann, Albert 274 Batchelor, David 2, 263 Batman (1966–8) 100 Batman (Leslie H. Martinson, 1966) 100 Batman (Tim Burton, 1989) 91, 98–102 Baudelaire, Charles 1 Baum, L. Frank 162, 297 n.2; vacationing in Holland, Michigan 162 Beardsley, Aubrey 227 Beatty, Warren 255 Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot 211 Becky Sharp (Rouben Mamoulian, 1935) 18 Bed Sitting Room, The (Richard Lester, 1969) 75–6 Bedu 214: and Europeans 214; familiarity with desert 215; of the Najd and Syrian desert 214 Beery, Wallace 59

INDEX

Belle Époque 228 Belmondo, Jean-Paul 180 Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) 97 Bend of the River (Anthony Mann, 1952) 40 Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (Jean Negulesco, 1953) 40 Benjamin, Richard 175, 176 Benjamin, Walter 191 Berger, Ralph 303 Bergman, Ingmar 269, 270 Bergman, Ingrid 2 Bergson, Henri, laughter 174, 175 Berling, Charles 229 Bertolucci, Bernardo 166, 167, 168 Besson, Luc 41 Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris) 47 Bigger Splash, A (Luca Guadagnino, 2015) 40 Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray, 1956) 303–4, 310 Bikini (bathing attire, invented 1946) 299: Catholic ban 300 Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek, 1989) 166, 167 Billington, David P. 117 Binoche, Juliette 229 Birkin, Jane 240, 251 Birmingham (Alabama) riot of 1963, 209 Bitter Victory (Nicholas Ray, 1957) 214 Blackbeard 195 Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) 209 Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929) 126, 205 Blake, William 220 Blithe Spirit (David Lean, 1945) 152 Blood Simple (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 1984) 12 “Blow-Up” (Julio Cortázar) 309 Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) 9, 234, 240, 249–54, 308–10: shot in London 308 Blue (Derek Jarman) 41 n.15 “Blue Boy, The” (Thomas Gainsborough, 1779) 33, 303

323

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) 12 Bobby-soxers, 1960s 199 n.6 Bogarde, Dirk 30 n.12 Bogart, Humphrey 122 Bollner, Michael 224 Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) 288–90 Boseman, Chadwick 291 Boss, Hugo 143 Bourne, Mel 217 Boutemy, Thierry 47 Bouton, Jim 122 Bowie, David 86, 88 Box, John 215 Boy with Green Hair, The (Joseph Losey, 1948) 302–3 Boyle, Robert 284 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) 166 Brandenstein, Patrizia von 248 Brando, Marlon 84, 132, 199 Brautigan, Richard 142 “Breakfast in Fur” (Méret Oppenheim, 1936) 179 Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) 20 Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954) 9 n.15 Bristol 195 Britain 307, 308; British viewing attitude 308 British Library (London) 126 Bronson caves (Los Angeles) 192 n.3 Brood, The (David Cronenberg, 1979) 80 Brooks Bros. (New York) 89, 143 Brown, Malcolm 298 Brown, Michael (San Francisco Deputy Coroner) 262 n.2 Brown, Norman O. 192, 211, 234–5 Brownian motion 292 “Bryn Calfaria” (Ralph Vaughan Williams) 308 Brynner, Yul 244–5, 256, 259, 263; and dancing 246, 246 n.3 Burke, Billie 18 Burke, Kenneth 266 Burton, Richard 97 Burton, Tim 117

324

INDEX

Buttall, Jonathan 303 Butterfly Effect, The (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004) 40 Buzard, James 165 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The ([Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari] Robert Wiene, 1920) 105 Caillebotte, Gustave 228 Caillois, Roger 165: on urban detection 191 Calhoun, Rory 6 California Gold Rush 125 Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017) 301–2 Calleia, Joseph 134 Calvert, John 189 Canada, in shadow of the U.S.A. 153 “Canco del Llabre” (Catalan folksong) 61 Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991) 40 Capucine 52, 53 Cardiff, Jack 274 n.6 Cardinale, Claudia 53 Carême, Marie-Antoine 46, 47 Carlyle, Thomas 109 Caron, Leslie 261 n.1 Carpenter, John 202 Carrey, Jim 99, 100, 153 Carroll, Lewis 114 Castelnuovo, Nino 22 Cazale, John 133 Cézanne, Paul 8, 228, 292, 306: Château noir paintings 292; still lifes 294 Chagrin, Julian and Mime Troupe 309 Chalamet, Timothée 142 n.3, 301 Champ, The (King Vidor, 1931) 59 Channing, Stockard 48 Charisse, Cyd 88, 266 n.5 Charles, Ray 206 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl) 225–6 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton, 2005) 117, 227 Chase, Chevy 202 Chatman, Seymour 159 Cherbourg 78,

Quai Alexandre 3, 22 Cheung, Maggie 131 Chicago 162 Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) 261 n.1 Chion, Michel, acousmêtre 95–6 Choco butterfly 87 Chocolate, see Schivelbusch Christie, Audrey 255 Christie, Julie 67, 68 Chrome Green 291 Cinema, beginnings of 8 n.12 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) 6 n.7 Civil Rights Act (1964) 206 Claude (Lorrain) 292, 306 Clavell, James 186 Clayton, Alex 195 n.4 Clift, Montgomery 59: filming A Place in the Sun 142 Clockwork Orange, A (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) 80 Clooney, George 291 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) 122–5, 153 Coach and Horses, The (Bristol, from 1603) 195 “Coal Carriers, The” (Claude Monet, 1875) 1 Cohen, Leonard 153 Cohen, Tom 182 Cole, Julie Dawn 224 Cole, Nat King 172 Colt, Steve 122 Coltrane, Robbie 139 Comstock, Daniel 18 Confessions (Jean-Jacques Rousseau) 45–6 Confidence Man, The (Herman Melville) 119–20 Connelly, Chuck 8 n.14 Conried, Hans 106, 107, 108 Constable, John 158, 306 Constantine (Francis Lawrence, 2005) 166 Conti, Tom 87

INDEX

Cook, Capt. James: third voyage 196; death 196 Cook, Peter 76 Cooper, Jackie 59 Cooper, James Fenimore 191 Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille 229 Cortázar, Julio 137, 249 Courbet, Gustave 292 Courtenay, Tom 155–6 Cousteau, Jacques 40 Cowan, John 249, 253 n.5: studio on Princes Place (London) 249 Crain, Jeanne 300 Crawford, Johnny 142 n.4 Crawford, Michael 75 Crayola crayons 125 Creamsicle 127, 127 n.2, 128, 130, 131 Cretaceous period, Late 213 Cries & Whispers (Ingmar Bergman 1972) 268–70 Crisp, Donald 308 Cronenberg, David 80 Crosby, Bing 20–1 “Crucifixion, The” (Albrecht Dürer, 1511) 221 Cruise, Tom 291 Cukor, George 6 Culkin, Mackenzie 142 n.3 Currie, Finlay 195 Curtis, Tony 6 n.9 Cusack, Cyril 68 D’Agostino, Albert 303 Dahl, Roald, origins in Wales 226, 227 “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)” (Harry Dacre) 283–5 Damon, Matt 271, 291 “Dancing in the Dark” (Cole Porter), routine in The Band Wagon 88 Dangerous Liaisons (Stephen Frears, 1988) 166 Daniels, Jeff 103 Darwin, Charles 220, 256 n.6 Davis, Bette 299 Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014) 291 Day, W. Percy 28

325

Day for Night ([La nuit américaine] François Truffaut, 1973) 4, 273 Day the Earth Stood Still, The (Robert Wise, 1951) 153 Day the Earth Stood Still, The (Scott Derrickson, 2008) 166 Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988) 282 Dead Zone, The (David Cronenberg, 1983) 171 n.4 Deadly Mantis, The (Nathan Juran, 1957) 6 n.8 Dean, James 142, 264; filming Rebel Without a Cause 142 De Angelis, Michael 166 Death in Venice (Thomas Mann) 31–2 Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971) 30–3 De Balzac, Honoré 191 Debussy, Claude 228 Defiant Ones, The (Stanley Kramer, 1958) 105, 209 De Haven, Gloria 134 Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Édouard Manet 1862–3) 228 Delft pottery 31 De Mille, Cecil B. 262, 263 Deneuve, Catherine 22 Denham Studios (Buckinghamshire) 274 De Niro, Robert 83, 132 Denney, Reuel 142 Depp, Johnny 58, 59, 114, 116, 117, 227 Depression, the 103 De Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri 228 De Wilde, Brandon 33 Diabolo menthe (Diane Kurys, 1977) 278 n.7 Diaghilev, Serge 274 Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) 183 n.11 Diary of a Mad Housewife (Sue Kaufman) 175 Diary of a Mad Housewife (Frank Perry, 1970) 175–7 Dick and Jane books (Zerna Sharp) 303

326

INDEX

Dickstein, Morris 103 Dictionary of Color (Aloys Maerz and M. Rae Paul) 256 n.6; see also Maerz Didion, Joan 222, 239 Dilys Powell, Elizabeth, origins in Shropshire 215 Di Palma Carlo 250, 310 Dixon, Wheeler Winston 280–1 Dixon, William K. L. 128 n.3 Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975) 289 Dolar, Mladen, blot 285 Dome of Many-Colored Glass, A (Amy Lowell) 60 “Do-Mi-Do Duds” (Frederick Hollander) 106 Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) 146–8 Donovan, Terence 253 n.5 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) 218 n.1 Down and Out in Paris and London (George Orwell) 253–4 Drake, Alfred 212 Dreamers, The (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003) 179–81 Dressler, Marie 153 Dreyfuss, Richard 123, 124 Driscoll, Bobby 196 Duarte, John 61 Duell, Randall 163 Duffy, Brian 253 n.5 Dullea, Keir 202, 281 n.8 Dumas, Alexandre 185 Dunaway, Faye 58 Dunst, Kirsten 45 Durrell, Lawrence 44, 180 East Coast power blackout (July 13, 1977) 200–1 Eastman Kodak Company: Eastmancolor negative 15, 78, 124, 187; fade-resistant negative 4 n.5, 15; stability of Eastmancolor 4 Eastwood, Clint 220, 223, 224; origins in San Francisco 222 Easy to Love (Charles Walters, 1953) 40

Eco, Umberto 269 Educational Decision-Makers, The (Aaron V. Cicourel and John I. Kitsuse) 197 Edward Scissorhands (Tim Burton, 1990) 117 Edward VII (formerly the Prince of Wales), and gray flannel trousers 144 n.8 Edwards, Blake 54 Eiffel Tower 228 Einstein, Albert 236 El Dorado (Howard Hawks, 1967) 223 Elizabeth II, and Koh-i-noor diamond 241 Elsaesser, Thomas 128 Elvira Madigan (Bo Widerberg, 1967) 12 Empson, William, ambiguity 110 English Patient, The (Anthony Minghella, 1996) 214 Enlightenment, the 46, 222 Eugene Onegin (Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, 1833) 271 Eugene Onegin (Peter Ilyitch Tchaikowsky, 1879) 271 Euphrates valley 214 European sensibility about body 244–5 Evein, Bernard 23 Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966): 67, 68–70, 103 n.2, 274, 302 n.4; “Finale” (Bernard Herrmann) 69 Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Anthony Mann, 1964) 96–8 Fanning, Dakota 142 n.3 Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982) 270 Fantasia (Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, et al., 1940) 93–4 Fantin-Latour, Henri, still lifes 292 Fariña, Richard 142 Farner, Ellen 22 Farrow, Mia 103 Feminine Mystique, The (Betty Friedan) 143 n.5

INDEX

Ferenczi, Sándor 236 Fete de San Gennaro (Little Italy, New York) 82 Fiedler, Leslie: comic books 243; on Pocahontas 119; on the Fool 100 Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999) 63–6 Film viewing, through DVD, Blu-Ray, and downloading 7 Finger, Bill 99, 100 Finlay, Victoria 282–3 Fischer, Lucy 248 Fishburne, Laurence 291 Fitzgerald, Barry 308 Fitzgerald, Robert 11 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., The (Roy Rowland, 1953) 105–8 Flatland (Edwin Abbott) 103 Fleischer Studios (New York) 291 Fleming, Victor 163 Flight of the Phoenix, The (Robert Aldrich, 1965) 214 Florida 115, 125 Fly, The (Kurt Neumann, 1958) 186–8, 188 n.2 Folies Bergère 228 Folsey, George 78 Forbidden Planet (Fred McLeod Wilcox, 1956) 76–80 Ford, Harrison 170, 171, 172 Ford, John 6 Foreign Correspondent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940) 126 Forman, Miloš 249 Forth (Railway) Bridge (Edinburgh) 126 47 Ronin (Carl Rinsch, 2013) 166 “Fountain” (Marcel Duchamp, 1917) 179 Fox, Michael J. 153 Francis, Anne 77 Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) 81 Freleng, [Isadore] ‘Friz,’ 53 n.2 French film noir 179 French Pastry Chef, The (MarieAntoine Carême) 47

327

French restaurants, Michelin twostar 178 French Revolution 46 Freud, Sigmund 205, 234: jokes 236; stimulus shield 116 Friedenberg, Edgar Z. 142: high-school experience 198 “Frog Pond, The” (Claude Monet, 1869) 99 “Frog Pond, The” (Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1869) 99 Fugitive, The (Andrew Davis, 1993) 40, 170–2 Fuller, Buckminster 232 Fulton County (gloves) 242 Gabor, Eva 270 Gage, John 7–8 Galatea 50 Gallé, Émile 227 Gallo, Vincent 58 Gambon, Michael, origins in Dublin 138 Garfield, Simon 240, 247: Queen Victoria at the wedding of the Princess Royal 240–1 Garland, Judy 165, 242, 243 Garland, Robert 41 Garmes, Lee 134 Garner, Jennifer 291 Garrel, Louis 179, 180 Gass, William 17 Gates, Larry 206 Gauguin, Paul 161 Gaurav, Kumar 168 Gavin, John 37 Geisel, Theodore (Dr. Seuss) 105, 106 Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002) 214 “Ghent Altarpiece, The” (Hubert and Jan van Eyck, 1432) 7 Ghost (Jerry Zucker, 1990) 152 Ghost Story, A (David Lowery, 2017) 137, 150–3 Gibbons, Cedric 78, 163–4 Gibson, George 78, 163–4, 164 n.1 Gibson, Henry 122 Giger, H. R. 80

328

INDEX

“Girl in the Alice Blue Gown, The” (Ross Parker) 21 Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000) 97 Glazer, Nathan 142 Godard, Jean-Luc, v Godfather films 84, 133 Godfather, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) 131–3 Godfather: Part II, The (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) 82–6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 39, 261, 263, 265, 269–70 Goffman, Erving 197–8 Gogh, Vincent van 161, 172, 292; sepia sketches of SaintesMarie-de-la-mer 221; veronèse green of 292 Golden Gate (San Francisco) 125 Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco): 50, 125, 127; as symbol of San Francisco 126 Golden mean 149 Goldin, Marilyn 41 Golla, Robert 44 Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) 10: Atlanta fire sequence, 135 n.5; Scarlett’s gown 7 Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The (Sergio Leone, 1966) 220–4 Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Sam Wood and Sidney Franklin, 1939) 139 Goode, Matthew 173 Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) 59 Goodman, Paul 142, 146 Gordon, Irving 173 Goring, Marius 274 Gorton, Assheton 238, 309, 310 Gotham Book Mart (W. 47th St., New York) 71 Gould, Elliott 120, 122 Gould, Glenn 153 Gould, Stephen Jay 212–13, 220 Grand Central Station (New York) 143 Grant, Cary 144 n.8, 177, 178, 230, 233, 234 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) 235 Grease (Randall Kleiser, 1978) 48, 197–200

Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) 234 Great Expectations (David Lean, 1948) 195 Great Exposition (London, 1851) 241 Great Train Robbery, The (Edwin S. Porter, 1903) 77 Greatest Show on Earth, The (Cecil B. DeMille, 1952) 6, 171 n.3 Green, Eva 179, 180 Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011) 290–5 Green Man 292; see also Wild Man Green Room, The ([La chambre verte] François Truffaut, 1978) 7 Greene, W. Howard 134 Greenwood, Bruce 153 Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (Hugh Hudson, 1984) 291 Griffith, Kristin 217 Growing Up Absurd (Paul Goodman) 142 Guinness Alec 216 Gyllenhaal, Jake 146 Habegger, Alfred 243, 244 Halberstam, David, 1950s cultural icons, 141–2 Halloween 152 Hamlet (William Shakespeare) 23, 54, 159 Hammer, Armie 190, 301 Hammerstein, Oscar II 245, 246 Hanson, Victor Davis 222 Hardy Boys books (Franklin W. Dixon) 303 Harris, Richard 138, 157, 159: and Hodgkin’s disease 138; from Limerick 138 Harris, Robert 4 n.4 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón, 2004) 40: and long beard 138–41 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Chris Columbus, 2001), and long beard 138–41

INDEX

Harry Potter books 140 Hatchet Inn, The (Frogmore Street, Bristol, from 1606) 195 Hawai’i 197, see also Waikiki Hawkins, Jack 216 Hawksley, Lucinda 297 n.2 Hayden, Sterling 122 Hayward, Susan 6 Head, Edith 20: and Edward Stevenson 20 n.7 and gray suit 143 n.6 Heartburn (Mike Nichols, 1986) 102 Heckroth, Hein 275 Hedges, Lucas 142 n.3 Hedison, David 186 Hedren, ‘Tippi,’ 283 Heflin, Van 33 Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg]) 7–8 Heisenberg, Werner 115 Heisner, Beverly 163 Helpmann, Robert 274 Hemmings, David 240, 249, 253 n.5 Hero (Ang Lee, 2002) 131 Herrmann, Bernard 69 Hesse, Hermann 142, 169 Heston, Charlton 6 n.9, 97, 259, 263 Hickman, Darryl 300 High Tower (Los Angeles) 121 n.1 Hills, Gillian 240, 251 Hingle, Pat 255 His Majesty O’Keefe (Byron Haskin, 1954) 7 Histoire de Babar le petit éléphant (Jean de Brunhoff) 170 Hitchcock, Alfred 6, 285: cameos 183; as catcher of attention 183; compositions 126, 178, 181; directorial intention regarding Psycho 205; fears 284; framing 126; and Henry James 37; key objects in 182 HMS Beagle 256 n.6 Hobbema, Meindert 294 Hobbit, The series (Peter Jackson, 2012–14), and long beard 138–41

329

Hockney, David 40 Hoffer, Eric 142 Hoffman, Dustin 71 Hofmann, Josef 229 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 5 Holland, Michigan, see Baum Holland Park (London) 249 Holliman, Earl 77 “Hollow Men, The” (T. S. Eliot) 70 Hollywood: Academy Award 270; Academy ratio (1.33: 1) 2 n.2; arc light in 23; ASA (American Standards Association) rating 78; blue screen 203 n.7; CGI 173 n.7; CinemaScope 2 n.2, 78, 79–80, 245, 265, 304, see also Ray; color cinematography 78; color technologies 247; color timing 243; conceit of the gray flannel suit onscreen 143 n.6; crane movement 245; depiction of early Christianity in 189; deprecation of Asians 245; division of labor in studio system 154; Dutch angle 288, 290; early color techniques in 15, see also Technicolor; green screen 203 n.7; and hyperromanticized love 199; location shooting 216, see also Lawrence of Arabia; make-up squibs 272; matte effect 28, 28 n.11, 77, 77 n.5, 78, 163, 251; painted backings 9, 9 n.15, 28, 78, 163; parallel editing 171 n.2; rear-projection 135 n.5, 231; run-zoneclearance distribution 6; Second World War 62 n.3, 134; tradition of the smarmy villain 282; traveling matte (since 1910s) 202–3 Hollywood Studios 20: Marvel Studios 291; MGM (Culver City) 77, 163, 231, 249: Metrocolor lab 78, 124, policy

330

INDEX

for high-key lighting 163, Stage 27, 163, 164; Paramount (Los Angeles) 20, 126, 291: rights to Superman 291; Twentieth Century Fox (Los Angeles), logo 200: CinemaScope, (anamorphic) lenses 304; Walt Disney (Burbank) 77, 118, 119: Disney animation, 93, Mickey Mouse 93; Warner Bros. (Burbank): cartoons 173 n.8, and Fox 304, logo 264 Holm, Ian 80, 81 n.6 Holocaust (Marvin J. Chomsky, 1978) 81 n.6 Holocaust, the 70: Mussulmen, 71 Hologram for the King, A (Tom Tykwer, 2016) 214 Homer 40 Homestead Act (1862) 35 Homespun of Oatmeal Gray (Paul Goodman) 146 Honiton lace: Belgian origin 240–1, 243; and Queen Victoria 240–1 hooks, bell 209 Hopper, William 267 Hordern, Michael 76 Horney, Karen 159 Horning, William 298 Hortus conclusus 291 Hotel d’Angleterre (Nyhavn, Copenhagen) 126 Hour of the Wolf, The (Ingmar Bergman, 1968) 270 How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941) 307–8, 309 Howard’s (New York) 143 Howe, James Wong 72 n.3 Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) 59 Hudson, Rock 62, 108, 111, 128 Hugo, Victor 99 n.1, 101, 102 Hulce, Tom 248 Hurt, John 80 Hurt, Mary Beth 217 Huston, John 223 Hutton, Betty 6 n.9

Imagism 218, 218 n.1 Impressionism, French 8, 8 n.13, 9, 15: Impressionist shows in Paris (1874–86) 8 Industrial Revolution 117 In the Heat of the Night (John Ball) 208 In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967) 206–10: shot in Illinois 207 “In the Heat of the Night” (Quincy Jones, Marilyn Bergman, Alan Bergman) 206 “In the Steppes of Central Asia” (Alexander Borodin) 212 Incredible Shrinking Man, The (Jack Arnold, 1957) 188 n.2 Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) 153 Indies, the 159 Inge, William 255 Inferno, The (Dante Alighieri) 295 Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978) 12, 217–20 International Orange 125 “Intimations of Immortality” (William Wordsworth) 255 Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies, 1953) 153 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) 192 n.3 Inverdorben, Otto, distils aniline from indigo 247 Invisible Man, The (James Whale, 1933) 202 Irene (Herbert Wilcox, 1940) 18–22 Isackes, Richard 163 Island of the Colorblind, The (Oliver Sacks) 29–30 Istanbul 269 It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (Stanley Kramer, 1963) 105 “It’s April Again” (Georges Auric) 270 James, Henry, as mentor of Alfred Hitchcock 37 Jay, Martin 281

INDEX

Jeffords, Susan 202 “Jerusalem” (Hubert Parry) 307 Jewish Question, The (Jean-Paul Sartre) 68 Jewison, Norman 210 Joe Lowe Co. of New York 127 n.2 Johar, I. S. 216 Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1953) 40 Johnny Mnemonic (Robert Longo, 1995) 166 Johnstone, Anna Hill 256 Jones, James Earl 202 Jones, Jeffrey 248 Jones, Jennifer 305 Jones, Tommy Lee 172 Jordan, Richard 219 Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanely Kramer, 1961) 105 Jungle Book, The (Rudyard Kipling) 133, 134 Jungle Book (Zoltán Korda, 1942) 113, 133–6 Juran, Nathan 307 n.5 Justine (Lawrence Durrell) 180 Kael, Pauline 142 Kalmus, Herbert 18 Kandinsky, Wassily 113, 114 Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The (Tom Wolfe) 291 Kane, Bob (né Kahn) 99, 99 n.1, 100: studies at Cooper Union (New York) 99 n.1; work at the Max Fleischer Studio 99 n.1 Kant, Immanuel 105 Katsoulas, Andreas 172 Katz, James 4 n.4 Kaye, Danny 20–1 Kazan, Elia 255 Keaton, Diane 217 Keith, Robert 128 Kelly (green) 302 Kelly, Grace 177, 183 n.11: Kelly bag (Hermès) 183 n.11 Kelly, Jack 77 Kennedy, Arthur 216

331

Keynes, John Maynard 56 Khandekar, Narayan 8 n.13 Kidd, Michael 89 Kimmel, Michael 208–9 King and I, The (Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, St. James Theater, March 29, 1951) 244; “Shall We Dance?” number 244–5 King and I, The (Walter Lang, 1956) 243–7 King Lear (William Shakespeare) 99–100 King, Martin Luther 209 Kingston, Maxine Hong 167 Kinnear, Roy 76 Kismet (Charles Lederer and Luther Davis, Ziegfeld Theatre, December 3, 1953) 212 Klein, Yves, International Klein Blue 41 Knightley, Keira 24 Kodak, see Eastman Kodak Kódaly, Zoltan 123 Koenekamp, Hans 189 Koh-i-noor (Mountain of Light) diamond 241 Korda (né Kellner), Alexander 134 Korda (né Kellner), Vincent 27, 134, 135 Korda (né Kellner), Zoltán 134 Kubrick, Stanley, planning the slab for 2001, 149–50, 281, 282 Kurtz, Gary 77 n.5 Kusturica, Emir 57 Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (Lafcadio Hearn) 74 n.4 Kwaidan (Masaki Kobayashi, 1965), “Woman of the Snow” episode, 74, 74 n.4 Lacan, Jacques, acquiring Courbet painting 183 La Cucaracha (Lloyd Corrigan, 1934) 18 Ladd, Alan 33 Lago di Garda 40 Laing, R. D. 142

332

INDEX

Lake House, The (Alejandro Agresti, 2006) 40 “La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même” (Marcel Duchamp) 165 Lancaster, Burt 6 n.9, 72 n.3 Land, Edwin H., Polaroid 14 n.19 Landis, Jessie Royce 177 Landon, Margaret 244 Lang, Walter 245 Langelaan, George 186 Larkin, Philip 1, 147, 264 Laurier Palace Theatre fire (Montreal, January 9, 1927) 135 n.6 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, pelagic and littoral deposits 212–13 Law, Jude 24, 271 Lawrence, Gertrude 246 Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) 212–17: location shooting, 216; shooting in Jordan, Morocco, and Spain 215; use of Wickham dolly for 215 Lawrence, T. E. 213, 214 Lean, David 213, 215 Leave Her to Heaven (Ben Ames Williams) 300 Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945) 40, 298–301, 302 “Le Désespoir” (Jean-Joseph Perraud) 228 Ledger, Heath 99, 100, 102 Le grand bleu ([The Big Blue] Luc Besson, 1988) 39–42 Legrand, Michel 23 Leigh, Janet 6 n.9, 203, 205 Le lieu du crime ([Scene of the Crime] André Téchiné, 1986) 40 Leone, Sergio 222–3 Leonowens, Anna 243, 244, 245, 246 Les Mohicans de Paris (Alexandre [Alexander] Dumas) 191 Les parapluies de Cherbourg ([The Umbrellas of Cherbourg] Jacques Demy, 1964) 22–4

Les quatre cent coups ([The Four Hundred Blows] François Truffaut, 1960) 23 Levi, Primo 70 Lewis, Jerry 43, 54–5, 58, 59 Lewis, Wyndham, “Vorticism,” 165 L’heure d’été ([Summer Hours] Olivier Assayas, 2008) 227–30 L’Homme qui rit ([The Man Who Laughs] Victor Hugo) 99 Libertine, The (Laurence Dunmore, 2004) 117 Lichtenfeld, Louis 189 Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943) 279 Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The (Wes Anderson, 2004) 27, 40 Life Lessons (Martin Scorsese, 1989) 8 n.14 Life of Anna Leonowens (Alfred Habegger) 243 Lili (Charles Walters, 1953) 58 Lilies of the Field (Ralph Nelson, 1963) 209 Limbaugh, Rush, angry white men 208–9 Lindon, Lionel 171 n.6 Little Buddha (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1993) 166–70 “Little Gidding” (T. S. Eliot) 154 Live Free or Die Hard (Len Wiseman, 2007) 59 Llandoger Trow (Bristol, from 1664) 195 “Llwyn Onn” (Trad.) 308 LoBrutto, Vincent 284 Lockwood, Gary 260, 281 n.8 Logan, John 259 Lom, Herbert 52, 54 London Blitz (Sept. 7, 1940–May 11, 1941) 134 n.4 London: Chislehurst 309; Cox’s Mount, Maryon Park 310; Croydon 309; Greenwich 309; Heathrow 307. Parks searched for Blow-Up: Bromley 309, Hawkwood Estate, 209;

INDEX

Maryon Park 309; Scadbury Park 209; The Glades Lone Ranger legend, in popular culture since 1930s, 190 Lone Ranger, The (1949–57) 190–2, 192 n.3 Lone Ranger, The (Stuart Heisler, 1956) 190–2, 192 n.3 Lone Ranger, The (Gore Verbinski, 2013) 190–2, 223 Lonergan, Arthur 78 Long, Justin 59 Long Goodbye, The (Robert Altman, 1973) 120–2 Longo, Vincent 19, 19 n.3 Lord of the Rings series (Peter Jackson, 2001–3), and long beard, 138–41 “L’origine du monde” (Gustave Courbet, 1866) 183, 201 Loring, Eugene 106 Losey, Joseph 302 Louis XIII (king of France) 226: and chocolate, 226 Louis XIV (king of France) 218: le roi soleil, 222 Louis XVI (king of France) 45, 47 Louis, Jean 106 Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (Henry King, 1955) 40 Lowe, Arthur 76 Lucas, George 77 n.5, 203 Lyon, David 281 Macbeth (William Shakespeare) 272 MacKenzie, Thomasina 142 n.3 “Mad Men” (AMC, 2007) 305 Madison, Guy 6 n.9 Madness of King George, The (Nicholas Hytner, 1994) 237 Maerz, Aloys and M. Rae Paul 256; “Afghan Red,” 260; “Fontainebleau,” 256; “Renaissance,” 256; see also Dictionary Magic Christian, The (Terry Southern) 236

333

Magic Christian, The (Joseph McGrath, 1969) 234–8 Magnificent Ambersons, The (Orson Welles, 1942) 307–8 Magnificent Obsession (Lloyd C. Douglas) 111 Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954) 40, 108–11 Mahler, Gustav 30 n.12 Mahogany, harvesting in South America 228 Maiorca, Enzo 40 Majorelle, Louis 227, 228, 229: imagined origins of desk, 229 Malleson, Miles 29 Malone, Dorothy 128, 130 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The (Sloan Wilson) 144 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The (Nunnally Johnson, 1956) 141–6, 143 n.6, 304–6 Man Who Fell to Earth, The (Nicolas Roeg, 1976) 88 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (Murray Pomerance) 27 n.10 Man Who Laughs, The (Paul Leni, 1928) 99 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (John Ford, 1962) 223 Mancini, Henry 52 Maness, Karen 163 Mankiewicz, Herman 18 n.2 Mara, Rooney 150, 153 Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976) 70–3 March, Fredric 54 Marchetti, Gina, and Eurasian characters 168 Marcuse, Herbert 142 “Mariana and the Moated Grange” (John Everett Millais, 1851) 42 Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) 45–8 Marie Antoinette 45, 46, 48 Marimekko 251 Marker, Chris 264 Marnie (Winston Graham) 284

334

INDEX

Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) 161, 181–4 Marshal, Alan 18 Marshall, E. G. 217 Marshall, Herbert 188 Martian Chronicles, The (Ray Bradbury) 68 Martin, John 123 Mary, Queen of Scots (Charles Jarrott, 1971) 81 n.6 Mason, James 303 Mason, Portland 305 Massine, Léonide 274 Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale, The (Robert Louis Stevenson) 69 n.2 Masters, Anthony 150 Mathers, Gerry 142 n.4 Matrix films (The Wachowskis, 1999, 2003) 166 Matte, see Hollywood Maxim’s (Paris) 228 Mayersberg, Paul 87 Mayol, Jacques 40, 41 McBride, Joseph 307 McCarey, Leo 6 McCartney, Paul 237–8 McCormack, Patty 142 n.4 McDowall, Roddy 308 McGrath, Joseph 237, 238 McIntire, John 37 McKellen, Ian, origins in Lancashire 138 Mediterranean area 97: lemons, 175 Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) 240–3 Memoirs of an Invisible Man (John Carpenter, 1992) 202 Meneau, Marc 47 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 118 Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence ([Senjo no Meri Kurisumasu] Nagisa Ôshima, 1983) 86–8 Method acting, New York movement 71 Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) 81 Metty, Russell 19 n.4 Meyer, Emile 35

MGM studios, see Hollywood Michel, Marc 22 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (William Shakespeare) 301 Miles, Vera 37 Milland, Ray 18 Miller, Arthur 308 Milligan, Spike 76, 225, 237 Mills, C. Wright 142, 143 Minghella, Anthony 271, 273 Minnelli, Vincente 243 Miró, Joan 305 Mission Dolores, see Mission San Francisco de Asís Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores) (San Francisco) 49 Missouri Breaks, The (Arthur Penn, 1976) 102 Mitchum, Robert 6 Moby Dick (Herman Melville) 84 “Mona Lisa” (Leonardo da Vinci, 1503–6) 118 Monet, Claude 228: use of mauve for shadow, 247 Mongkut (Supreme King of Siam) 243, 244, 245, 246 Monroe, Marilyn 6 Montand, Yves 2 Montreal 153 Moore Annabelle 128 n.3 Moore, Clayton 190, 192 Moore, Dudley 76 Moorehead, Agnes 108 Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (Karel Reisz, 1966) 250 Morgan, Jeffrey Dean 172–3 Morton, Drew 291 Moschin, Gaston 82 Moulin Rouge (John Huston, 1952) 270 Mourlet, Michel 28 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 247 Mr. and Mrs. Smith (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941) 20 Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974) 8 “Murderer, The” (Edvard Munch, 1910) 301

INDEX

Musée d’Orsay (Paris) 183, 228, 229: renovation of Gare d’Orsay, 228 Mussolini, Benito 40 My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991) 166, 167 Nabokov, Vladimir, v 21, 24, 25, 25 n.9, 44: on purple 111 Nancy (France) 228 Naked Spur, The (Anthony Mann, 1953) 5 Napoleon and Love (Derek Bennett and others, 1974) 81 n.6 Narcissus 26 National Geological Survey (U.S.), photographers in 223 National Theatre (South Bank, London) 238 Neagle, Anna 18–22, 18 n.1 New Monthly 46, 47: new avatars of French pastry 47 New Wave, French 292 New York (city) 192: commuter haven 143; commuter locations 143; diamond district, 71 New York Times 144; Style Magazine 144 n.8 Newark Airport 192 Newley, Anthony 225 Newman, Paul 8 Newsweek 166 Newton, Isaac 264: second law of gravity, 266 Newton, Robert 195 Newton-John, Olivia 199 Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953) 40 Nicholson, Jack 59, 91, 99, 100, 101 Nickerson, Denise 224 Nielsen, Leslie 77 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 282 Night on Bald Mountain (Modest Mussorgsky), in Fantasia 93 Nishihata, Jesse 86 n.7 Niven, David 52, 53 Nolan, Christopher 102 Nolte, Nick 8 n.14

335

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) 28, 171 n.5, 230–4: location in Bakersfield, California, 231; Madison Avenue in 233; settings 231 Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946), coffee cup, 182 Novak, Kim 48, 125, 126, 127, 143 n.6 Nutty Professor, The (Jerry Lewis, 1963) 54–7 Nykvist, Sven 270 Odyssey, The (Homer) 11, 196 O’Hara, Maureen 308 Ohio River 35 Olivier, Laurence 71, 98 Olsen, Christopher 142 n.4, 303 Oman Mountains 213 On the Beach (Stanely Kramer, 1959) 105 Ondra, Anny 205 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn) 157 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Caspar Wrede, 1970) 155–7 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Miloš Forman, 1975) 102 One from the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982) 9 Op art 105 “Ophelia” (John Everett Millais, 1851) 295 Orange (fruit) 131–2 Orientalism 8 n.11, 27, 119, 168 O’Rourke, Patricia 134 Ortega y Gasset, José, illusion 228 Ôshima, Nagisa 87 Osment, Haley Joel 142 n.3 Ostrum, Peter 224 O’Sullivan, Timothy 223 Othello (William Shakespeare) 194 O’Toole, Peter 215, 216, 217 Owens, Patricia 186 Ozu, Yasujiro 295

336

INDEX

“Ozymandias” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) 212 Page, Elliot 153 Page, Geraldine 217 Palance, Jack 34, 188, 189 Pallandt, Nina van 122 Paltrow, Gwyneth 271 Paramount (studios), see Hollywood Paris, chalk cliffs nearby and Lavoisier 212 Paris Blues (Martin Ritt, 1961) 209 Paris Student Uprising (May 1968) 179 Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) 223 Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1957) 266 n.5 Passenger, The ([Professione: Reporter] Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975) 59–61, 102, 214, 235 Pastoureau, Michel 239 Patch of Blue, A (Guy Green, 1965) 209 Pater, Walter 118 Peck, Gregory 145, 305 Penn, Arthur 290 “Penpark” (J. T. Rees) 308 Pentheus 252 Périnal, Georges 27 Periwinkle blue, origin in sea snails 39 Perkin, William, inventor of mauve 247 Perkins, Anthony 37 Perrey, Mireille 22 Perrier, Marc 41 Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, 2016) 40 Perspex (Plexiglas) 150 Pez 124 Phantom of the Opera, The (Rupert Julian, Lon Chaney, 1925), Handschiegl process in, 5 Phoenicians, and shellfish 97 Phoenix, Joaquin 97, 99, 100 Pickford, Mary 153 Pickwick Papers, The (Charles Dickens) 68 “Picnic” (Paul Cézanne, 1869) 99

“Pictures at an Exhibition” (Modest Mussorgsky) 93 Pidgeon, Walter 77, 153, 308 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (John Bunyan) 68 Pinewood Studios (Buckinghamshire) 274 Pink Panther, The (Blake Edwards, 1963) 52–4 Piper, Roddy 298 n.3 Pirate stereotype, and West Country 194–5 Pitt, Michael 179 Place in the Sun, A (George Stevens, 1950) 142 Plexiglas, see Perspex Plummer, Christopher 96, 98, 153 Pocahontas 119 Podesta Baldocchi (San Francisco, since 1871) 48, 51, see also San Francisco Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991) 167 Poitier, Sidney 206: and arrangement with Norman Jewison, 210; and James Baldwin 209 Ponti, Carlo 249 Popsicle 127, 127 n.2, see also Creamsicle Porgy and Bess (Otto Preminger, 1959) 209 Porizkova, Paula 59 Portman, Natalie 291 Post, Laurens van der 86–7 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Tay Garnett, 1946) 102 Pound, Ezra: emotion 164; Imagism 218 n.1; mysteries 192 Powell, Michael 275, 276, 280 Pressburger, Emeric 276 Prestige, The (Christopher Nolan, 2006) 186 n.1 Price, Vincent 186 Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) 68 Prince, Stephen 288–9 Prizzi’s Honor (John Huston, 1985) 102 Professionals, The (Richard Brooks, 1966) 223–4

INDEX

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) 36–39, 182 n.10, 203–6 Punch 243 “Pure Imagination” (Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley) 225 Purple Rose of Cairo, The (Woody Allen, 1985) 102–5 Purse, Lisa 173 n.7 Quayle, Anthony 216 Quick and the Dead, The (Sam Raimi, 1995) 223 Quinn, Anthony 216 Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) 97–8 Rabier, Jean 23 Racism in America 206, 207, 210: ante-bellum South, 207–8 RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) 71, 81 n.6 Radcliffe, Daniel 138 Radin, Paul, Winnebago Trickster 235 Rains, Claude 202, 216 Ransohoff’s (San Francisco) 143 n.6 Rappé, Virginia, death of 262 n.2 Rasputin 54 Ravenna 157, 159 Ray, Nicholas 6, 265, 268: fondness for CinemaScope, 265, 304; preparing for Rebel Without a Cause 266 n.3; studies with Frank Lloyd Wright 304 Readymades (Marcel Duchamp) 179 Reagan, Ronald, era 202 Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) 142, 264–8: CinemaScope in, 304 Red Desert ([Il deserto rosso] Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) 40 n.14, 157–60 Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) 59 “Red Shoes, The” (Hans Christian Andersen) 274, 276–80 Red Shoes, The (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948) 7, 273–80, 274 n.6 “Red Studio, The” (Henri Matisse, 1911) 269

337

Redcliffe Caves (Bristol) 195 Redgrave, Vanessa 250, 253, 254, 310 Reimann, Walter 105 Relph, George, origin in Northumbria 97 Renier, Jérémie 229 Renner, Jeremy 153 Rennie, Michael 155 Reno, Jean 40 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 228 Rettig, Tommy 106, 142 n.4 Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, 2008) 143 n.6 Revolving door 164, 165 Reynolds, Joshua 31, 33 Reynolds, Ryan 153, 291, 292 Richard, Jean-Louis 69 n.2 Richardson, Ralph 76 Riesman, David 142, 143 Riggs, Rita 205 Riley, Charles 269 Ritchard, Cyril 205 Rite of Spring, The ([Le sacre du printemps] Igor Stravinsky), in Fantasia 94 Ritt, Martin 6 River, The (Jean Renoir, 1951) 40 River’s Edge, The (Tim Hunter, 1986) 166, 167 Road Runner cartoons, see Hollywood Robbie the Robot 77 Robin and Marian (Richard Lester, 1976) 81 n.6 Robinson, Jerry 99, 100 Roddenberry, Gene 186 Rodin, Auguste 227 Rogers, Fred (Mr. Rogers) 123 Rohmer, Éric (Jean Marie Maurice Schérer) 292 Röhrig, Walter 105 Rome, Republican 97 Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare) 118 Romero, Cesar 99, 100 Room with a View, A (James Ivory, 1985) 291 Rosetta Stone 138 Rosson, Harold 163

338

INDEX

Roth, Philip 70 Rothko, Mark 259 Rothman, William 3 Royal Parisian Pastry Chef (MarieAntoine Carême) 47 Royal Shakespeare Company 81 n.6 Rubens, Peter Paul 33 Runge, Friedlieb, derives aniline from coal tar 247 Rush, Barbara 303 Russell, John 269 Ryan, Robert 223 Rydell, Mark 122 Ryû, Chishû 295 Saboteur (Alfred Hitchcock, 1942) 126 Sabu (Sabu Dastagir) 134 Sacks, Oliver 10, 10 n.17, 17: Pingelap, 12–13 Sainsbury’s 170 Saint-Saëns, Camille 228 Sainte Chapelle (Paris) 42 Sakamoto, Ryuichi 86 Saks (Saks Fifth Avenue, New York) 143 Salaire de la peur, Le ([The Wages of Fear] Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953) 2 Salton hot tray (from 1943) 305 San Francisco, locations for Vertigo 48, 49, 50, 51, 125, 126, 127, 143 n.6 San Francisco Bay 125 Sanders, Vivienne 209–10 Santayana, George 70–1 Sartre, Jean-Paul 67 Satie, Erik 228 Scene of the Crime, see Le lieu du crime Scheider, Roy 71 Schein, Edgar, brainwashing after the Korean War 198 Schickel, Richard, quoted by David Halberstam 142 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 226: chocolate and fashion, 226–7; chocolate and fast-breaking 226; dry and

rational capitalism 282; origins of chocolate in the Catholic South of Europe 226 Schleier, Merrill 261 n.1 Schneider, Maria 59 Schoengarth, Russell F. 130 Schott, Irving, and Perfecto black leather jackets since 1928, 199 Schutz, Alfred 2 n.1 Scob, Edith 229 Scorsese, Martin 133 Scott, Alex 68 Scott, Allan 105 Scott, Helen 69 n.2 Scott, Ridley 80 Secombe, Harry 76 Seed and the Sower, The (Laurens van der Post) 87 Sellers, Peter 52, 53, 236, 238 Seltzer, David 225 Serrone, Christopher 59 Seuss, Dr., see Geisel Seven Pillars of Wisdom (T. E. Lawrence) 213, 214: lost at Reading, 213 Shakespeare, William 100, 287 Shamroy, Leon 245 Shane (George Stevens, 1953) 28, 33–6, 190, 223: Wyoming mountains in, 28 Sharaff, Irene 245, 247, 261 n.1 Sharif, Omar 215 Shearer, Moira 7, 274, 276 Sheen, Michael 97 Sheik, The (George Melford, 1921) 214 Sheltering Sky, The (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1990) 214 Sherwood Forest (Nottingham) 139 Shining, The (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) 102 “Shining Young Officers” attempted coup d’état (Tokyo, February 26, 1936) 86 Shoe shining 144 n.7 Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse) 168–9

INDEX

Silence, The (Ingmar Bergman, 1963) 270 Silver Chalice, The (Victor Saville, 1954) 188–90 Silvera, Darrell 18, 20 Silverheels, Jay, Canadian Mohawk origin 190 Simmel, Georg, the trader 34 Sinclair, Iain: on Hackney (London) 222; on Lago di Garda 40 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 287 Sirk, Douglas 111, 292: Danish origin, 111 “Sisters” (Irving Berlin) 20 Skoglund, Sandy 58 Smith, Jack Martin 163, 298 Smith, Jaden 142 n.3 Snipes, Wesley 291 Snodgress, Carrie 175 “Snow White” (Brothers Grimm) 68 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 137 Sorvino, Paul 59 Sousa, John Philip 124 Southern, Terry 236 Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973) 65 n.4 Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960) 19 n.4, 98 Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) 166 Spiegel, Sam 215 Spilsbury, Klinton 190 Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961) 254–7, 260–2, 267 Stack, Robert 62, 128 Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939) 223 Stahl, John M. 300 Stalin, Josef, era of 155 Stapleton, Maureen 12 Star Trek (1966) 78, 186 Star Trek: The Next Generation (CBS, 1987), “Darmok” episode, 155 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer, 1982) 153 Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) 200–3 Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980) 77 n.5

339

Starr, Ringo 237–8 Statue of Liberty (New York) 126 St. Clair, Kassia 131 Steedman, Carolyn, Archive Fever 232–3 Steiger, Rod 206 Stepford Wives, The (Bryan Forbes, 1974) 81 Sternad, Rudolph 105 Stevens, Warren 77 Stevenson, Edward 20 Stevenson, Robert Louis 195, 196: death, 197 Stewart, James 48, 126, 146 Stewart, Kristen 142 n.3 St. Louis, Louis 199 Stockwell, Dean 302, 303 Stokowski, Leopold 93 Storaro, Vittorio 167 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson) 54, 56 Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951), cigarette lighter in, 182 Stravinsky, Igor 94 Street, Sarah 279 Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950) 2 Stuart, Mel 224, 227 Stuart, Paul 143 Submergence (Wim Wenders, 2017) 40 Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952) 190 Sunday Times (London) 215 “Sunflowers” (Vincent van Gogh, 1880s) 7, 183 Susannah and the Elders 204 Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957) 72 n.3 Swimmer, The (Frank Perry, 1968) 40 Swimming Pool (François Ozon, 2003) 40 Swinton, Tilda 41 n.15 Sylbert, Richard 256, 261 n.1 Szasz, Thomas 142 Takahana, legend of 87 Talented Mr. Ripley, The (Anthony Minghella, 1999) 269–73

340

INDEX

Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe) 70 Talton, Alix 6 n.8 Tarzan the Ape Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1932) 6–7, 7 n.10, 134 Tastes of Pleasure (Wolfgang Schivelbusch) 226 Taylor, Lili 58 Taylor, Robert 266 n.5 Taylor-Johnson, Aaron 17, 24 Tchaikowsky, Peter Ilyitch 93, 271 Technicolor 15, 18, 18 n.2: as attraction, 19; color contrast in 20; demise 78; dyes 21; early forms 3, 18, 19; laboratory 78; red 270; stability 4; Three-strip 3, 18, 21 n.8, 134, 163, 167 Technicolour Britain 27, 78, 274 n.6: laboratory, 78; 35 mm IB/Scope prints 78 Tempest (Paul Mazursky, 1982) 40 Tempest, The (William Shakespeare) 77, 79, 118, 259, 266, 301: “Our revels now are ended” soliloquy, 78 “Temptation” (Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed) 129 Ten Commandments, The (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) 40, 259, 262–4 Tenniel, John 114, 117 Terao, Akira 287, 295 Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, 1983) 102 Thames River (London) 27 “That Old Black Magic” (Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer) 55 Thatcher, Margaret 80 Themmen, Paris 224 Theroux, Alexander 273, 275 Thesiger, Wilfred (“Mubarak bi London”) 214 They Live (John Carpenter, 1988) 298 n.3 Thief of Bagdad, The (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1940) 27–30

39 Steps, The (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935) 126 This Island Earth (Joseph M. Newman, 1955) 153 Thomas, D. M. 67 Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) 299 3:10 to Yuma, The (James Mangold, 2007) 223 Thring, Frank 97; origin in Australia 97 Thumbsucker (Perry Lyman, 2005) 166 Thwaites, Brenton 142 n.3 Tierney, Gene 300 Tiffany, Louis Comfort 227 Time magazine 142 n.1 Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) 40 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) 33 Titus Andronicus (William Shakespeare) 188 To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955) 177–9, 180–1 To Sir, with Love (James Clavell, 1967) 209 Toland, Gregg 308 Toll of the Sea, The (Chester Franklin, 1922) 19 n.6 Torn Curtain (Alfred Hitchcock, 1966) 8, 126 Torrent (Monta Bell, 1926) 19 n.3 Tosi, Piero 31–2 Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) 19 n.4 Tracy, Spencer 54 Train, The (John Frankenheimer, 1964) 171 n.6 Travolta, John 199, 200; school career 200 Treacher, Arthur 18 Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson) 193, 194, 196 Treasure Island (Byron Haskin, 1950) 185, 193–7 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The (John Huston, 1948) 221 “Trolley Song, The” (Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane) 242–3

INDEX

True Grit (Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2010) 223 Truffaut, François 4, 69 n.2, 273, 274 Tuan, Yi-Fu 29 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 292 Tushingham, Rita 75 Tuttle, Lurene 37 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Richard Fleischer, 1954) 40 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) 148–50, 202, 280–3 “Tyger, The” (William Blake) 86 Umbrellas of Cherbourg, see Les parapluies de Cherbourg Uncommitted, The (Kenneth Keniston) 142 “Unforgettable” (Irving Gordon) 172, 173 Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood, 1992) 223 Until the End of the World ([Jusqu’au bout du monde] Wim Wenders, 1991) 216 “Untitled: Floating Tree and Peapod” (Jerry Uelsmann, 1969) 235 Un homme et une femme: 20 ans déjà ([Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, A] Claude Lelouch, 1986) 214 Updike, John 238 U.S. Army 291 Ustinov, Peter 98 Varini, Carlo 41 Vaseline 72 n.3 Vasquez Rocks (Aguadulce, California) 192 n.3 Veblen, Thorstein 305 Veidt, Conrad 29, 99 Verne, Jules 19, 185 Vernet, Claude Joseph 292 Vernon, Anne 22 Vertès, Marcel 28 “Vertical is to Live—Horizontal is to Die” (Buckminster Fuller) 232

341

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) 7, 48–51, 125–7, 143 n.6: restoration, 4 n.4 Veruschka (Countess Veruschka von Lehndorff) 253 n.5 Victoria (queen of England): and Kohi-noor 241; and mauve 240–1; and Punjab 241; see also Victorianism Victorianism 119, 307: popularity of emerald green, 297 n.2; Victorian era 54, 103 Video recording 7 Villeneuve, Denis, Québecois origin 153 Virgin Spring, The (Ingmar Bergman, 1960) 270 Visconti, Luchino 30 n.12 VistaVision, in 70mm, 154 Vitti, Monica 157, 159 Vogue 250, 253 n.5: British Vogue, 253 n.5 Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. 142 Vos-Lundh, Marik 270 Waikiki, and Robert Louis Stevenson 197 Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett) 42, 68 Walbrook, Anton 274 Wales 307, 308 Walker, Alice 92 Wallach, Eli 220: origins in Brooklyn, 222 Walt Disney studios, see Hollywood Waltz 246 Washbourne, Mona 76 Washington, George 210 n.8 Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009) 172–5 “Water is Changed into Blood” (James Jacques Joseph Tissot, 1896– 1902) 262 Waterston, Sam 219 Watkins, Carleton 223 Watteau, Jean-Antoine 292 “Wave, The” (Gustave Courbet, 1869) 99

342

INDEX

Wayne, John 6, 59 Weaver, Sigourney 80 Webster, Ben 121 Wehrmacht 70 Weir of Hermiston (Robert Louis Stevenson) 69, 69 n.2 Weissmuller, Johnny 6 n.9 Welles, Orson 19 Werner, Oskar 67, 68 Werner’s Siskin Green 289 Westcott, R. Burton 18 Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973) 81 White, William H. 142, 145 White Christmas (Michael Curtiz, 1954) 20 Wieghorst, Olaf 223 Wiesel, Elie 309 Wilcox, Fred McLeod 79 Wild Bunch, The (Sam Peckinpah, 1969) 272 Wild Man, legend of 291, 292; see also Green Man Wild One, The (Laslo Benedek, 1953) 199 Wilde, Cornel 300 Wilde, Oscar, on Greek attitude 247 Wilder, Gene 224, 225, 227 Williams, Esther 299 Williams, Grant 128 Williams, John (actor) 177 Williams, John (composer) 123 Williams, Lawrence P. 18, 20 Williams, Rhys 308 Willis, Bruce 59 Willis, Gordon 217–18 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971) 224–7 Wings of the Morning (Harold D. Schuster, 1937) 27 Witches of Eastwick, The (George Miller, 1987) 102

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 11, 30, 102, 104, 264–5 Wizard of Oz, The (Victor Fleming, 1939) 18 n.2, 77, 81, 162– 6, 297–9 Wolfe, Tom 291 Wolper, David L. 225 Woman of the Dunes ([Suna no Onna] Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964) 214 Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (L. Frank Baum) 162, 255, 297, 298 Wong, Anna Mae 19 n.6 Wood, Elijah 138 Wood, Natalie 255, 256 Woolf, Virginia 11, 92 World Viewed, The (Stanley Cavell) 2 World War I 230 World War II 143, 179, 291, see also Hollywood Wright, Frank Lloyd 304 Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) 62–3, 127–31 Wyman, Jane 108, 111 Wyoming, see Shane Yasutani, Ryoko 66 Yeats, William Butler, “gyres” 165 Young, Freddie 215 Young, Roland 18 “You’re the One That I Want” (John Farrar) 199 Yumibe, Josh 19 n.5, 247 Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970) 214 Zachariah (George Englund, 1971) 223 Ziegfeld Theatre (New York) 212

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