Lost Objects Of Desire: The Performances of Jeremy Irons 9780857454447

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Imogen, Narcissism and the Intolerable Idea
2 Brideshead Revisited Charles Ryder Drowning in Honey
3 The French Lieutenant’s Woman Charles Smithson beyond the Pale and Mike beyond the Run
4 Swann in Love Exceptional Feelings
5 Dead Ringers The Flight from Strange and Unloved Women
6 M. Butterfly René Gallimard and the Flair for Melodrama
7 Lolita The Two Basic Laws of Totemism
Conclusion
Bibliography
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

Lost Objects of Desire

Lost Objects of Desire The Performances of Jeremy Irons

Mark Nicholls

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

First edition published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2012 Mark Nicholls All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nicholls, Mark Desmond.   Lost Objects of Desire: The Performances of Jeremy Irons / Mark Nicholls. -- 1st ed.      p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-85745-443-0 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 9780-85745-444-7 (ebook)   1. Irons, Jeremy, 1948---Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.      PN2598.I685N53 2012 791.4302’8092--dc23 2011044911 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 978-0-85745-443-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-444-7 (ebook)

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 1

1. Imogen, Narcissism and the Intolerable Idea

25

2. Brideshead Revisited: Charles Ryder Drowning in Honey

50

3. T  he French Lieutenant’s Woman: Charles Smithson beyond the Pale and Mike beyond the Run

82

4. Swann in Love: Exceptional Feelings

102

5. Dead Ringers: The Flight from Strange and Unloved Women

121

6. M. Butterfly: René Gallimard and the Flair for Melodrama 138 7. Lolita: The Two Basic Laws of Totemism

158

Conclusion

193

Bibliography

199

Filmography

205

Index

209

For Ali, Oscar and Carlo

Acknowledgements I am exceptionally grateful to a number of people who have contributed to this book over many years. Primarily, thanks go to Mark Stanton and his colleagues at Berghahn Books who embraced and pursued the project with enthusiasm and patience. As an author I cannot have hoped for a more efficient and sympathetic publisher and I am very grateful for all the support given to me by Berghahn Books, by Paula Clarke (copy editor) and by Mark in particular. I am also grateful to Jeremy Irons who not only created the wonderful work that inspired this book, but who advised us on its final publication. While researching and writing I have been fortunate to have benefited from lengthy discussions with Terrie Waddell, Anika Ervin-Ward, Charles Green and Paul Nicholls, all of whom have made important contributions to this book. My regular congress with these scholars has had an immense impact on my work over many years and I am extremely grateful to them for their many insights and their outstanding intellectual and personal generosity. I acknowledge the generous support of The Dean and Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne and all my academic and professional colleagues in my former school of Art History, Cinema Studies, Classical Studies and Archaeology, my present school of Culture and Communication, as well as those colleagues in the Elisabeth Murdoch and the vii

Acknowledgements

University of Melbourne libraries. In particular amongst my colleagues, I want to thank and acknowledge my valued and long-term collaborators in Cinema Studies and Art History. Many of the ideas for this book originated in my work with Barbara Creed which started over seventeen years ago. As is obvious from reading the book, her scholarship continues to inspire me. My association with Jeanette Hoorn and Angela Ndalianis goes back even further and I am extremely grateful to them for their continued interest and support for my work. For supporting my research abroad, I would like to thank the staff of the British Film Institute Library, London and the library of the Istituto Gramsci, Rome, as well as Richard Keen, Richard Nicholls, and Dennis Hunt, without whose hospitality, research in the UK would have been impossible. My students, tutors and research assistants at The University of Melbourne have provided constant stimulation and inspiration for thinking and writing about film, as well as countless hours of listening to the germs of ideas that have come to a certain maturity in this book. In particular thanks go to Radha O’Meara, Libby Avram, Michael Fleming, Anna Knight, Luana Ciavola, Fincina Hopgood and Helen Townshend, to whom credit goes for a most succinct description of the subject of this book. Similarly kind friends and colleagues have always been keen to discuss ideas central to this and other research and have gone out of their way to lend me their assistance and support. In this regard I offer thanks to John Jackson, Ingmar Wahlqvist, Michael Bartlett, Jason Fitts, Frazer Hughes, Peter Mountford, Alan Eustace, Nicole Strang, Ron Ridley, Genevieve Avery, James Panichi, Madeleine Swain, Claudio Bozzi, Vivien Gaston, Alison Inglis, Liza Power, Brigid Stapleton, Sandra Sdraulig, Lyndell Brown, Sian Prior, Pam Cook, Peter Otto, Anthony White, Caerwen Martin, Grace Taylor, Luke Van Ryn and those many Rear Four Theatre supporters who have provided the essence for an engaging forum for the creative expression of most of the perversions outlined here. viii

Acknowledgements

Finally I would like to acknowledge the generous support and encouragement of my family, my brothers Andrew, Richard, Philip and their families, our beloved sons, Oscar Wirtz and Carlo Nicholls and their canine sidekick, Cocoa. Above and beyond all, thanks and praise go to my partner, Ali Wirtz, who not only supports and encourages me in my endeavours, but as listener, reader, editor and censor of nonsense and excess, is my ultimate and enduring collaborator.

ix

Introduction In his Academy Award winning performance as Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune (1990), Jeremy Irons is arguably at his most restrained. Pottering along calmly as the chief exhibit in a show trial designed to test the strength of the US justice system, it is only in his ageing Sloane Ranger, stiff-upper-lip routine that we see anything of the strangeness that he hints at in his time of trial and grief. Protesting his innocence against the charge of killing his wife Sunny (Glenn Close), he appears, nonetheless, almost indifferent to reliving the events that led to her death. Beyond these oddities, to account for his infamy, we must look to the way von Bulow has perversions put upon him like tails pinned on a donkey. In the face of old rumours that he also murdered his mother, Claus himself mentions the more recent rumour that he murdered Sunny in order to indulge his penchant for necrophilia. Later when he is dining with his defence team, a junior lawyer in the group seems only able to digest the idea of von Bulow’s relationship with his mistress by thinking of her as his ‘love slave’. From what we see of Claus’s relationship with his mistress, it is, in fact, a somewhat more mundane affair. In the picture that the film builds of von Bulow as ‘the most hated man in America’, the additional information that he has a history of going with the meanest prostitutes in the city appears almost as an afterthought. But it is a sign of the way this film operates to alter 1

Lost Objects of Desire

our perceptions of what we consider normal and perverse that the most outstanding accusation of his aberrance relates, not to these extreme quirks and oddities, but to questions of his masculinity and his occupation. As his marriage to Sunny breaks down and he seems to spend most of his time getting Sunny what Sunny wants, her calls for him to stop being her butler and to start being a man are matched by her reluctance to let him work: ‘Claus, you marry me for my money then you demand to work. You’re the prince of perversion.’ Almost all of Jeremy Irons’s characters who are the principal protagonists of their respective films are either perverse or are occupied with the business of the perverse. That is to say, when his protagonists are not themselves engaged in one particular perversion or another, they are paired with an antagonist who most definitely is. In this context we think of Meryl Streep’s indifference to expectations about her role as a young and unmarried woman in nineteenth-century society in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Anthony Andrews’s dipsomania in Brideshead Revisited (1981), Robert De Niro’s violence in The Mission (1986), Sinead Cusack’s baby-stealing hysteria in Waterland (1992) and Annette Bening’s narcissism in Being Julia (2004). The attraction of his non-perverse protagonists to these perverse antagonists suggests, of course, that the dividing line between the two states is extremely fine. This is made clear by the fact that in two films, Dead Ringers (1988) and Ohio Impromptu (2000), that perverse antagonist is, in fact, played by Irons himself. The dynamic of perversion and bearing witness to perversion is further emphasized in Irons’s more recent film and television work where he has often taken and been cast in key supporting roles. These have enabled him to portray states of subordination (Elizabeth I, 2005) and simple and relaxed evil (Appaloosa, 2008) that are central to the pursuit of perversion. In any case, in portraying characters who are perverse or who contemplate, witness or play guide and analyst to the freak show of aberrant behaviour surrounding them, the films 2

Introduction

of Jeremy Irons, over thirty years, have shown themselves to be constantly concerned with perversion. Furthermore, these films have acted as a site for an audience that is addressed as, if not perverse itself, at least similarly occupied with the business of the perverse. I am using the notion of perversion in its fullest sense with a particular concern for the way most people experience it. That is, I see these films as engaging with the idea both in psychoanalytic terms, regarding what Sigmund Freud called sexual inversion, and in social terms relating to aberrant behaviour not obviously related to sexual drives. Almost all of Irons’s characters can be said to be perverse in that they deviate from the norm, they are rebellious and they hold obstinately to a particular antisocial course. There is certainly nothing unusual in this. In any film, depending on the way the social world is defined, a certain degree of the perverse is essential. In fact in Hollywood melodrama, where the social world is usually so corrupt, the perverse may be said to be the genre’s major concern. What distinguishes Jeremy Irons’s characters in their perversion is that they are so extreme. These characters hang onto their headstrong course to the bitter end. Classical and contemporary mainstream films usually bring their central protagonists and the world they inhabit into some form of reconciliation. The films of Jeremy Irons rarely do. Beyond the general social meaning of the perverse, in a psychoanalytic sense these films represent a catalogue of perversions, both enacted and contemplated, which Freud would have instantly recognized. These include incest and paedophilia in Lolita (1997) and an associated compulsion towards younger or adolescent girls in films such as Stealing Beauty (1996), Chinese Box (1997) and Being Julia; transvestism, homosexuality and effeminacy in Dead Ringers, M. Butterfly (1993), The Lion King (1994), Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995) and And Now … Ladies and Gentleman (2002); sadomasochism and sexual obsession in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Betrayal (1983), Swann in Love (1984), 3

Lost Objects of Desire

Damage (1992) and Elizabeth I; narcissism in Dead Ringers; and manic fixation in Moonlighting (1982), Kafka (1991), 1914–1918 (1996) and The Fourth Angel (2001). As in the previously mentioned example of Reversal of Fortune, in virtually all Irons’s films we see a hint of mental necrophilia though the workings of loss and melancholia. Perversion predominates in these films through examples of fetishism, exhibitionism, overvaluation of the desired object, an extreme expression of the omnipotence of love, as well as the various acts of homosexual and lesbian love making which Freud catalogued and which still, perhaps, pass for perversions in certain conservative and highly repressed minds. To consider the notion of perversion in Jeremy Irons’s work as merely the sum total of various representations of perverse acts and categories is to miss the real point of the place of perversion in film and, I suspect, in our conscious lives. What the presence of perversion does is to qualify and even define and structure our very idea of normality. This is certainly the use to which Freud put, what he called, the sexual aberrations when he was working on his theory of sexuality in the years following 1900 and the completion and publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. Of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which were first published in 1905, it is the first essay on ‘The Sexual Aberrations’ where we find Freud’s most detailed work on the issue of perversion. Preceding the essays on ‘Infantile Sexuality’ (one of his most explosive papers) and ‘The Transformations of Puberty’, Freud’s chapter dealing with the ‘inversions’ of adults might seem out of order were it not for the obvious importance he places in the use of perversions for reading sexuality generally. What is most important about Freud’s work for understanding the notion of perversion in Jeremy Irons’s films is that not only does Freud consider perversion from a neutral position as a highly relative concept, outside prurient moralizing,1 but he clearly accounts for perversion as the opposite to neurosis. In psychoanalytic terms, if neurosis is the enemy of health and 4

Introduction

wellbeing, then perversion, its opposite or negative, can only work in the service of the repression-free mind.2 In relation to Freud’s casting neurosis as the negative of perversion, Teresa de Lauretis puts it succinctly when she writes, ‘it always struck me, that phrasing it that way, Freud was in a sense qualifying the perversions as positive’.3 Beyond his rejection of the social and scientific orthodoxy of his day on the issue of the perversions, Freud has no qualms about expressing the idea that the perversions are ‘no great rarity but must form part of what passes as the normal constitution’,4 and indeed ‘that a disposition to perversion is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and that normal sexual behaviour is developed out of it’.5 In short, Freud recognizes that we are all perverse and we can only really gain any purchase on our socially constructed ideas of normality by reconciling ourselves to the importance of perversion. Considering Freud’s distinction between the aberrations in relation to the choice of sexual object (same sex, hermaphrodite, prostitute, transvestite, child, animal) and sexual aim, the latter category provides us with a wealth of information suitable to reading perversions in Jeremy Irons’s films. This is particularly the case in relation to the second of Freud’s categories of perverse sexual activity. These are activities which: (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim.6

These categories not only account for the basic perversions of what is usually considered normal sexual life, from kissing through to all forms of foreplay, but extend to the great mental idealizations of the sexual instinct in fetishism, sadomasochism, obsession and fixation to perhaps the most horrifying perversion of all, ‘the omnipotence of love’.7 In this sense the gyno-fixations of the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers and the ancient Chinese ways of love making in M. Butterfly may point directly to the perversions of Irons’s characters in these 5

Lost Objects of Desire

films but it is their ‘lingering over the intermediate relations’ which marks their ultimate perversion. As we see in Swann in Love, this can take the form of an excessive delay and denial (and then an overcoming by marriage) of emotional submission. Lolita highlights the tendency in Irons’s characters towards seeking satisfaction in proxies of desire, in this case Lolita for Annabel and Annabel for that great feeling of loss that sits at the centre of the melancholic Humbert Humbert. The narcissist Mantle twins look to alleviate that same sense of loss in the originary, maternal relationship by denying it altogether and looking to the self as a proxy for the originary relationship. What these perversions, from fetishism to incest, all really point to is the intense idealization of love in these films. These films are Romantic love stories in the real sense. They are not comfortable comedies of safe and sanctioned mating, but death-defying tales of the pain of love. These films may correspond to nothing we have ever experienced in fact but they achieve their influence in our minds for the way they echo feelings we know well. They seem to ask of us, what utterly despicable thing might we not do, or at least contemplate, in the service of our own love stories?

The Pervert Prepares With the release of The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Brideshead Revisited in 1981, Jeremy Irons became synonymous with the character that I am calling the prince of perversion. The path of my discussion so far, however, has sketched out this character in impersonal terms that appear to contain the pervert prince merely within the workings of film critical practices and Freudian interpretation. This may give the impression that, in the creation of this character, I regard Irons as simply the actor who showed up. In one sense this is true. As Irons himself has observed of the importance both of casting in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and being ‘at the mercy of dialogue and direction’ in Harold Pinter’s script for Betrayal, 6

Introduction

a great deal of my analysis and discussion of this character relies on the way the prince of perversion is the creation of writers, directors and the processes of critical interpretation.8 What is more, there is a range of actors, male and female, who can and do play perversion, hitting performance marks not unlike those achieved by Irons. William Hurt has been mentioned by Irons himself as an actor whose work evokes a very similar quality.9 In the same way Charlotte Rampling appeals to me as an actor equally occupied with the business of the perverse. Certainly, in the discussion that follows in the body of this book, I give evidence to the way that the prince of perversion is a character created by a variety of processes well beyond the personality and performance style of Jeremy Irons. In another sense, however, as Stanislavski would see it, Irons himself and the acting job he undertakes in these films are utterly indispensable to my reading of perverse performance.10 As Sebastian says of Kurt in Brideshead Revisited, ‘I couldn’t go on without him.’ Film scholars such as Richard Dyer, James Naremore, Christine Gledhill, Pam Cook and others following them have developed an important body of theory relating to the issue of stars that suggests itself as useful here. To the extent that stars are the creation of popular discourse, I have reservations about Jeremy Irons’s identity as a star (according to the theory) and therefore about the application of star theory in this case. For all his fame in the 1980s and 1990s there is no real sense of a sustained media, fan and popular discourse across his career as is the case with actors such as Mel Gibson or Hugh Grant. More importantly, however, beyond the role of industry typecasting and mere repetition, there is certainly no evidence of a sustained popular discourse that emphasizes the notion of perversion in relation to Irons himself. If I am engaging with, and contributing anything to, star theory in this book, it is from the position that the lack of a popular discourse should not disassociate a film actor from any notion or performance value that he or she might achieve by other 7

Lost Objects of Desire

means. As Lovell and Krämer point out, star discourse has largely neglected the question of acting.11 What I hope to do is address that gap by demonstrating that there is a category of film star, beyond the presence of obvious media discourse and fandom, that is more substantially the creation of his or her own technique – as well as that of other film professionals. This is why I have focused this book around the characters created by Jeremy Irons and not Irons himself. Whether or not he is perverse I can only imagine. Where I read perversion in relation to Irons lies in that which he and his collaborators put up on the screen. Jeremy John Irons was born on 19 September 1948, the youngest of three children born to Paul (chartered accountant) and Barbara Ann (home duties). The family lived at Cowes on the Isle of Wight and sent Jeremy to the local private school, Little Appley, before he boarded at the Sherbourne School in Dorset from 1962 to 1966. At Sherbourne, playing drums in a rock band called the Four Pillars of Wisdom stands out as one of the more obvious ways the young Irons found to distance himself from the typical pre-capitalist enterprise of this traditional English middle-class public school environment. Not gaining the marks required for university entrance, when Irons left school he worked for the London parish adjoining the school’s metropolitan base, Sherbourne House, and made extra money in the evenings busking with his guitar outside London cinemas. Following a period of working back-stage at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury, Irons trained for two years at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School before being brought into the company in 1969. After performing in the repertory company for three years, Irons returned to London where he worked at cleaning houses before getting his first big break in 1971 playing with David Essex in Godspell, first at the Roundhouse and then at Wyndham’s Theatre. More West End theatre roles followed the two-year run with Godspell, as did television work including The Pallisers (1974) and Love For Lydia (1977), and his first feature film Nijinsky (1980), 8

Introduction

in which he played the celebrated choreographer, Mikhail Fokine opposite Alan Bates as Diaghilev. Irons met the actor Sinead Cusack on the set of Godspell and she became his second wife in 1978. They have two sons, Sam, born in 1978, and Max, born in 1985.12 Aside from the fairly typical array of professional engagements, awards, involvements in public activism and items of gossip that might accompany an actor of international repute, the most interesting thing about Irons’s career is his choice of roles. In their introduction to an edited collection of provocative essays, Screen Acting, Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer raise the issue of the actor’s ability to choose his or her preferred role and the complex and sometimes arbitrary way in which on-screen preferment is bestowed.13 Like all actors, Irons has had a share in these complexities and, to the extent that he has been in a position to exercise choice, his active part in this process has made a significant impact on his career and the characters he has played. In a very real sense, the way in which we read Irons’s work therefore should not merely be about how the pervert prepares, but also about the pervert’s preparedness. Like many actors, Irons has spoken about the obvious dilemmas of being typecast.14 The extent to which he has exercised control over his credits, however, demonstrates the substance to Harold Pinter’s key observation that Irons does not care if the audience likes his characters or not.15 This approach has rarely taken Irons to roles that break the middle- or upper-middle-class gentility he established in his early television roles, such as The Pallisers, Love For Lydia or Brideshead Revisited, but it has enabled him to explore and highlight the perverse dimensions of that very gentility, most obviously in the characters I am considering in this book. Of all Irons’s great princes of perversion that have come along to disturb what might have been his purchase on an acceptable and less industrially perverse Hollywood stardom, it is his choice to play the paedophile Humbert Humbert in Lolita that stands out. In an interview with James Lipton at the Actor’s 9

Lost Objects of Desire

Studio in 2003, Irons alludes to the professionally difficult three years he had after the film, being so obviously associated with the controversy of its production and distribution.16 But the choice to play Humbert was a considered one and, in substance, little more controversial than electing to play Claus von Bulow, the disreputable Mantle twins in Dead Ringers or the treasonous René Gallimard in M. Butterfly.17 If the mould of middle-class respectability was established for his international career with Brideshead Revisited, the path of that career ever since has been dominated by the professional search, not unlike his personal ancestry search in the BBC documentary series Who Do You Think You Are (2006), for a character who is both part of the establishment and at the same time outside it – the rebel of good repute. The best indication of the success of that search that I ever heard came from a female student who described Irons as ‘a nice bit of upper-middle-class rough’. This description seems to contain the essential contrast between external respectability and internal deviance that denotes the Irons screen identity. In Damage, Irons’s character Stephen Fleming, the apparently upstanding MP who pursues an unsavoury private life, immediately comes to mind. Largely based on the inevitable early snapshot typecasting that can so dominate an actor’s career, this screen identity is, however, inextricable from Irons’s background and education. Whatever impact any of these characters have had on the way we read Irons as an actor, they clearly resonate with the pervasively upper-middle-class air about him that we perceive even before he opens his mouth. Tall, dark, attractive and still slightly boyish, even in his early sixties, his entire presentation, in a scruffy pair of jeans or an expensive suit, seems to sign him with a very distinctive mark of English middle-class gentility. As he says of his role as Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, ‘I really think Ryder was the man I was educated to be.’18 In this observation, it is important to note that Irons seems to be talking not simply about Ryder’s middle-class privilege and his education, but 10

Introduction

also the repression and, by implication, the possibilities for the resultant perversion that go along with it.19 Reading perversion as an acting job for Irons involves an analysis of his physical and vocal work, the way in which he establishes character, and the give-and-take process of collaboration with other actors, directors, designers, cinematographers and ultimately editors through which character is achieved. Considered from this standpoint, separating an actor’s own work from that of his production colleagues is a frustrating and, at times, seemingly futile exercise. Attempting to isolate some facets of the division of labour in these films, however, reveals some interesting perspectives on Irons’s evocation of the abstract notion of perversion through simple and concrete performance techniques. For an actor, albeit an English actor, emerging internationally in the early 1980s, the spectre of Robert De Niro’s highly physically manipulative performance style, particularly in Raging Bull (1980), must have loomed large.20 Indeed Irons came face to face with the De Niro phenomenon when they worked together on The Mission, essentially Irons’s Hollywood debut.21 In contrast to the incredible physical transformations of actors like De Niro, however, Irons’s own physical performance emerged and has largely remained bound to the scope of his own essential physique. As he told Nick James in Sight and Sound, ‘I start off with the given: the height I am, the way I look. I can’t do much about that.’22 Certainly he has not shunned the manipulative potential of make-up (Reversal of Fortune, The Time Machine (2002)), costume and dressing (Dungeons and Dragons (2000)) and indeed cross-dressing (M. Butterfly, And Now … Ladies and Gentlemen) but never has he made a radical departure from his own essential physicality to the point where he becomes unrecognizable. For such a self-contained performer, Irons’s perceptions of his own general style are paramount to the basis from which he constructs character. Although rejecting the tag of the ‘archetypal Englishman’, he certainly acknowledges this to 11

Lost Objects of Desire

be a frame through which his characters are read, especially outside Great Britain. Where he interprets his own style he emphasizes his interiority and his interest in the conflict between the apparent singleness of the external character and the ‘thousands of other people and problems within’.23 When speaking with his Brideshead Revisited director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, in 1991, Irons described himself as possessing a ‘dollop of femininity’ and appearing as a ‘thinking actor’.24 These are passing observations gathered from interview material and do not represent any coherently theorized or practised technique for Irons; indeed, at the Actor’s Studio he seemed to distance himself from the very idea of a learned or too much technique. What these snippets of self-interpretation tell us, however, is that Irons’s approach is at once very simple, perhaps even basic, but also intellectual rather than instinctive – as, indeed, he reads De Niro’s approach.25 An example of this simplicity of approach and Irons’s recourse to technical solutions to create performative notions such as femininity and intellect comes from a technique he used to distinguish the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers. As he describes it, to highlight and concentrate on Elliot’s more forward and outgoing nature he created an ‘energy point’ on his forehead. For Beverly’s more retiring personality and attitude he focused the energy on his Adam’s apple, which he describes as a more feminine place.26 As he explains this approach, nothing seems simpler. Although in his conversation with James Lipton he is describing his process with an obvious level of passion and enjoyment, it seems almost too simple, as if he has reduced his entire preparation to its bare essentials. When we reflect on Irons’s performance style in general, however, it so often appears that it is the essentials alone that the actor elects to put in play and that end up on the screen. In this context it appears that such a minimal preparation, as he describes in the Dead Ringers example, not only stands for the whole preparation, but rather than opening up acting choices, this minimal technique actually supports the 12

Introduction

work of containment going on in Irons’s performance. This is a quality that, I suggest, he regularly aims for in his performance, and a quality that makes a significant contribution to the essence of perversion at the heart of his work. In Irons’s essentialism, his minimalism, his internal focus and in the very simple and basic physicality of his approach, we perceive a resonance of those key qualities of control and order that he sees as important to his characters and to his physically reductionist approach in creating them.27 Generally these qualities are achieved by Irons’s economy of movement across a variety of contexts. Born in the gluttony and gormandizing of Brideshead Revisited, the heavily formalized rituals of dining that stand out in Irons’s films are a good example of the way in which the actor can make a great deal of the simple business of the particular task before him. Early in Brideshead Revisited, when Charles Ryder has dinner at Thame with Anthony Blanche (Nickolas Grace), we see a marked contrast between Irons’s contained and upright position and Grace’s physical openness and looseness of gesture. Grace lounges slightly, draping his left arm over the back of his chair, sitting on his side, while his right elbow is placed on the table, allowing his right hand and ringed little finger to gesticulate flamboyantly. All throughout the dinner, however, Irons is contained within the frame of his chair. Keeping his arms locked by his side as he raises a fork or wine glass to his mouth in a pronounced manner, he can barely extend himself so much as to move his head to look beyond his shoulder, even in self-conscious attempt to gauge the shock of some nearby elderly female diners. At the drunken club dinner in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, not even an advanced state of inebriation causes Irons to relax and release his body from a pronounced stiffness. When a fellow diner suggests they drive around town and look for sex, Irons leans forward to express his enthusiasm for the suggestion with the limited physical exuberance of a quiet and morose drunk. When they set off on the escapade, having barely found his feet, Irons 13

Lost Objects of Desire

quickly loses them again, not through a loose and gradual descent to the floor, but all at once, in one swift fall from a stiff upright position to a stiff recumbent one. The containment and inwardness that Irons achieves in the limited movement of dining at table or writing in bed is echoed by his regular use of a more dramatically contained and selfenclosed, semi-frozen pose. Sitting abandoned on the stairs in Brideshead Revisited and M. Butterfly, or sitting hugging his knees to his chest in Dead Ringers and Lolita, he not only emphasizes an inwardness, but, child-like and abandoned, his position places him as desperately trying to achieve a degree of security though a pathetic display of physical self-comforting. Even with the propensity of his characters to swoon, often in public, with the help of framing, shot scale and editing, Irons manages to give just enough of the indication of the turmoil within, while limiting its expression to suit the self-imposed restraint of the character. Early in Swann in Love, Charles Swann is devastated upon hearing a powerful strain of music. With very little movement and limited gesture, however, we must read the battle within simply through the stillness of his eyes and his desperate, although measured, intake of breath. In Lolita, once Lo has jumped on him and kissed him flush on the mouth, all Irons does is raise his hand to his stomach, close his eyes and tilt his head slightly. Perhaps slightly more excitable is Charles Smithson on the point of proposing to Ernestina in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The discreet, clipped and correct diction Irons employs, along with a small range of nervous but stagy movements and vocal intonations, indicate a formality that contrasts strongly with the lazy style of Mike, Irons’s other character in the film. Furthermore this formality in Charles not only appeals to the nineteenth-century etiquette appropriate to his context, but also to the dictates and standard physical tropes and bodily motifs required by Victorian stage melodrama.28 Beyond these relative excitements of characterization, we certainly see Irons playing drunk, hysterical or drug-addled 14

Introduction

characters given to more extreme physical exertion. Even in these cases, however, the relative sense of control, order and minimalism about his performance is always present. This works for Irons’s perverts because such states are manic expressions, temporally limited and restrained reactions, hardly extracted from a profound and fundamental base of loss. In Irons’s performative restraint and its relatively meagre return of a major repression, we can observe a similarity with the work of his colleague and sometime mentor, Meryl Streep.29 In relating her technique to the research of nineteenth-century acting psychologist and playwright, William Archer, James Naremore writes of her performance of grief in Sophie’s Choice (1982) in terms that resonate with my reading of Irons: ‘Streep tries to register a repressed emotion, so that her look communicates something more like “grief held in check by an attempt to remain calm”’.30 This is perhaps why it is the seemingly unflappable Irons, as opposed to the manic Irons, that is more representative of his performance style. We see this in Brideshead Revisited when, in the face of a barrage of insults from Teresa Marchmain, Irons stands calmly, smiles politely and, above all, manages to maintain his poise. In all of his performances, manic or melancholic, there is an echo of those controlled moments of the dressing ritual that we see particularly in Swann in Love and M. Butterfly. Even in these vastly different contexts Irons demonstrates a strong element of finesse, precision and fastidiousness about his performance that seems to echo what I will discuss below as the pervert’s narcissistic but very simply desire to survive.31 What all this manifestation of control really emerges from and reflects upon is the base that Irons is interested in locating through his, essentially Stanislavskian, process of establishing character. This centres upon what Irons sees as the vital importance of finding the subtext of whatever he is working on. Emerging from his general interest in the inner life of a character, Irons’s process comes from the spark of interest in ‘how people cope’, their fears and their very common 15

Lost Objects of Desire

sense of loss or melancholia.32 Ultimately, as in the example of creating Claus von Bulow on the model of his own father, for Irons this approach is largely about establishing empathy for the most troubling or offensive of characters.33 This ultimate ability to establish empathy is the reason that Irons has no fears about playing disreputable characters or indeed any reservations in appearing ridiculous, defeated, humiliated or suborned. The comic absurdity of Charles Swann chasing Odette all over Paris, the public humiliation endured by René Gallimard in M. Butterfly and the private shame and disgrace of Humbert Humbert may threaten the spine of an actor with an international reputation to preserve. In the context of Irons’s work, however, none of these characters is fake or insubstantial and all of their emotions are subject to the actor’s empathy. Representing their debasement is simply part of turning their inner struggles into art. Where this becomes really humiliating for the actor is not in these moments of appearing absurd or ridiculous, but in the moments where we perceive the startling incongruity between the power of the inner life and the minimalism of its performative expression. When, as Humbert Humbert or René Gallimard, we see Irons covered in great blotches of cheap lipstick, we do not experience his humiliation because he looks like a bad drag queen. We experience his humiliation because as a representation of his perversion, his appearance is a pathetic and hopeless attempt to represent a far more substantial unconscious struggle to embrace and internalize his lost object of desire. So much of our experience of the prince of perversion in this book concerns the way he is seduced, suborned and generally imposed upon. Notwithstanding some of the more active measures employed by Irons, we cannot ignore the role of directors, cinematographers, editors, designers, animators (in the case of The Lion King) and other actors in the creation of this character. As Irons revealed in his interview at the Actor’s Studio, his path into the Bristol Old Vic was smoothed by the idea that its director thought he would be able to wear 16

Introduction

costume. Furthermore a key metaphor he employs when thinking about his acting work is the game of tennis and a lot of waiting to see what the other actors are going to send back to you over the net.34 The work of others has been largely intertwined with the examples of character creating I have already outlined. Some more brief examples, however, will complete our picture of the on-set task of creating perversion. The cinematographer’s use of long and extreme long shots in, for example, Brideshead Revisited and The Mission has the effect of rendering Irons’s characters as small and occasionally diminutive figures, dwarfed by the immense natural and artificial splendours of the locations they inhabit. As in the examples of Lolita which places Irons on his knees, chasing Dominique Swain around the room and begging for favours, or in Bridehead Revisited, which has him lying on Diana Quick’s chest, his face partially buried in her breast, or enduring the act of her whipping his face with a thorny rose, the work of actors and directors to establish the blocking of a given scene frequently has the effect of placing the actor in highly submissive positions emphasizing his lack of agency. The combination of high-contrast lighting and a chic but cold, ultra-modernist design and décor in Dead Ringers demonstrates the extremes of cleanliness and decay that coexist in the world of the Mantle twins. Such a mise-en-scène seemingly represents the safe and clinical world they have created for themselves. When the furniture and the darkness close in, however, as in the elaborate, expansive and ultra-protective bright red surgical wear they sport as high priests of the operating theatre, it quickly becomes apparent that they are as trapped by design as much as they are protected by it. From Humbert and his humbling hat to the Prufrockian prominence of stiff shirt collars, frockcoats, ecclesiastical cassocks and Japanese kimonos, costume, whether formal or decrepit, similarly plays a vital role in the containment and subordination of the prince of perversion. Emerging from a critical point of view that seeks to expand the previously marginal interest of cine-psychoanalysis 17

Lost Objects of Desire

in acting and performance,35 my reading of Jeremy Irons as the prince of perversion throughout this book derives from an understanding of issues relating in part to his biography, but largely to his technique and to the broader findings of mise-en-scène analysis. In this context, if not in the context of popular discourse, Irons both creates and stands for the prince of perversion. To his creation of the middle-class rebel, the ‘nice bit of middle-class rough’, is added a performance style emphasizing obscured anxiety and minimalist values of control, interiority and subordination. The result is that Irons creates a character of restraint, economy and containment, in which a little bit of emotional and physical outburst makes a significant impact. This character generally looks nothing like that man whom Hamlet thought of as ‘passion’s slave’, but this is exactly what he is. So when passion comes in Irons’s performance it is manic and seems exaggerated and can be awkward and uncomfortable for the audience. The real perversion in his performance, however, lies in the contradictions, the constraints, the slow-surfacing of unconscious ideas and the delays found, as Freud might put it, in lingering over the intermediate relations between passion and repression.

In Pursuit of Perversion So much about perversion is concerned with environment, setting and, to extend Jeremy Irons’s tennis metaphor, what gets sent back over the net. Irons’s performance is in many ways, as I have indicated, an active process of creating perversion. This performance, however, is so dependent upon values of subordination, submission, enslavement and seduction that the impact of mise-en-scène and the work of others on the Irons presence is of the utmost importance to our pursuit of perversion in these films. In the chapters that follow, therefore, Irons and his characters centre the analysis but do not always provide the driving force of perversion. For this type of male protagonist, perversion is as much a passive experience as an active one. 18

Introduction

In chapter one, I introduce the key critical ideas that contribute to our understanding of perversion in Irons’s films and in cinematic representations of male desire generally. I argue that Irons’s filmic pervert is frequently beset by an experience of seduction leading to an anxiety that he is, in fact, a depressed woman. Picking up on a notion articulated in relation to melancholia made by psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, I refer to this anxiety as the ‘intolerable idea’. This depressed woman anxiety directs the prince of perversion on two courses – narcissism and an encounter in which he finds himself in the dual role of father and paedophile (a condition that I call, after Shakespeare’s great heroine, ‘Imogenism’). Drawing on brief examples from Irons’s films and some examples from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), these ideas are discussed in relation to works by Sigmund Freud, Kristeva, Tania Modleski and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as some key critical readings of the father–daughter dynamic in the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw. In chapter two, I present an analysis of the enduringly popular television series, Brideshead Revisited, which established Jeremy Irons’s career internationally. I demonstrate the way femininity and the maternal, central forces of the prince pervert’s unconscious are represented in the series in architecture and places (Brideshead Castle, Oxford, Venice), key protagonists (Teresa, Julia) and in the institution of the Roman Catholic Church itself. I read Brideshead Revisited here as an Oedipus and the Sphinx encounter between Irons’s character, Charles Ryder, and a series of maternal surrogates playing upon him, ever-threatening to overwhelm him. In chapter three, I outline the way The French Lieutenant’s Woman operates as a parody of the cinema of male melancholia, the concerns of which are evoked in exacting detail. Both in its nineteenth- and twentieth-century plot lines, the film establishes the essential strain of melancholia in almost all Jeremy Irons’s films that would see him become identified as 19

Lost Objects of Desire

the premier male melancholic character actor in international cinema. As Charles Smithson in the nineteenth-century plot, melancholia is the pattern of his obscenity and his perversion. As Mike in the 1980s plot, it is his ‘actor’s melancholy’ that demonstrates the largely performative nature of male perversion. To the great offence of mainstream audiences and neo-Proustian sceptics alike, Charles Swann, Irons’s character in Swann in Love, the subject of chapter four, is highly aware that it does not befit a man to prostrate himself before the altar of female desire. But just as it reveals his obsession for Odette as socially perverse, Swann in Love demonstrates that the repression of the concept of ‘love conquers all’ is itself the real perversion. Swann may well redeem himself in the eyes of his peers by using the lawful institution of marriage as a means of putting out the fire of his love for Odette. In this film, however, the result of this particularly perverse renunciation, if not also the processes of repression and narcissism operative along the way, can be little else other than his own death. In chapter five, I chart the famous Mantle twins’ eradication of the maternal presence in their lives and the depth of their narcissistic attachment to each other. Looking back beyond and destroying the maternal idea altogether may be an outstanding perversion but, as Freud observes, the narcissist’s quest is always one of survival. Like the great Romantic lovers that they are, Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Irons) literally cannot live without each other. The only chance they have for survival lies in each other. Eradicating or deprived of a maternal identification, and the subsequent object identifications of normal psychosexual development, they are alone. Like the one individual ego that they represent, their story seems to reflect the idea that the struggle for survival is ultimately a lonely one, a journey beyond not only the mother but also the father. René Gallimard’s perversion in M. Butterfly is that he cannot love Song Liling, the object of his desire, as a woman, or 20

Introduction

as a man, but only as the ideal of Oriental beauty. This is not to suggest that she is useless to him, however, merely that she is simply an image of sexual desire. Through a comparison with the heroine of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Cio-Cio-San, and by placing that comparison within critical understandings of stage and screen melodrama, I demonstrate in chapter six that René’s use for Song is substantial. From this reading we can see that his real perversion is not that he wants to possess her, but that he wants to be her. Finally, through a detailed and close filmic analysis of Lolita in chapter seven, I attempt to bring together the various critical strains introduced in chapter one and demonstrated in the case studies throughout the book. Unlike the blackly comic figure of Kubrick’s film, Irons’s incarnation as Humbert Humbert is a melancholy one. Annabel is an ideal against which all desire is measured for Humbert. The experience of Annabel’s life and death in Cannes in the 1920s provides Humbert with an original seduction that sets in train a continuous cycle of depressed woman anxieties and intolerable ideas – as we see in his encounter with Charlotte – and Imogenistic fantasies – as we see in his unconscionable and ultimately fatal desire for Lolita. Although I refer to a number of Irons’s more recent films and television programmes throughout this book, the six films under primary analysis here all belong to his work in the period between 1981 and 1997. This book is not intended as a career overview and I have selected these films because they appeal to me as the most interesting and most representative of the key concerns of perversion under discussion. This is not to suggest that Irons’s work in the decade or so since Lolita is perversion-free and my references to films after 1997 attest to this. Nor should my selection of case studies suggest that Jeremy Irons’s work since the 1990s is less interesting. In fact, in many ways, the issue of his casting and his choice of roles, the last decade for Irons as an actor has been equally interesting. Considering my inability to find space or use for detailed analysis of any of the more recent films, 21

Lost Objects of Desire

however, does suggest an important point about the nature of the male screen protagonist perversion I am writing about. Obviously since the late 1990s the focus of Irons’s career has been both out of the mainstream of international entertainment cinema (Callas Forever (2002)) and, when not, into the supporting roles of the mainstream (Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Eragon (2006), Appaloosa). Given my interest in the notion of subordination in this portrait of perversion, Irons’s relative withdrawal from the limelight of his leading male period suggests a tantalizing line of enquiry. The fact that his art-house and supporting roles are, no doubt, more to do with the professional and personal dynamics of his career beyond the age of fifty than some hyper-dedication to the ultimate portrayal of screen perversion suggests caution. These roles, however, and indeed those in films such as the children’s television tale, Danny, Champion of the World (1989), which do not fit neatly into the perversion focus of this book, tell us two important things about male screen perversion as played by Irons or, indeed, anyone else. These are that the portrayal of perversion requires scope and depth of character, and, most importantly, it can never be meaningfully contemplated at an excessive distance from the mainstream – as Freud would concur.

Notes   1. Sigmund Freud. ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)’, in A. Richards (ed), J. Strachey (trans). The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 7, On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works. London: Penguin, 1991, 74.   2. Freud, Three Essays, 80 and 155.   3. Teresa de Lauretis. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, 24.   4. Freud, Three Essays, 86.   5. Freud, Three Essays, 155.   6. Freud, Three Essays, 62.   7. Freud, Three Essays, 63–75.   8. Jim Baker. ‘Interview’, GQ 4 (1984), in Doug Tomlinson (ed). Actors and Acting for the Screen: Roles and Collaboration. London and New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1994, 285; Karen Jaehne. ‘Interview’, Film Comment 10 (1988), in Tomlinson, Actors and Acting, 286. See also Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer. Screen Acting. London: Routledge, 1999, 2. 22

Introduction

  9. Michael Lindsay-Hogg. ‘Jeremy Irons’s Effortless Style’, Men’s Fashion of the Times, supplement to the New York Times Magazine, 17 March (1991). 10. Sharon Marie Carnicke. ‘Lee Strasberg’s Paradox of the Actor’, in Lovell and Krämer, Screen Acting, 80. 11. Lovell and Krämer, Screen Acting, 6. 12. Inside the Actors Studio (2003); Who Do You Think You Are (Clare Lewins, BBC TV, 2006); Janet Cawley. ‘Jeremy Irons: The Man Behind All Those Sinister Characters’, Biography. 4.7, July (2000), 92. 13. Lovell and Krämer, Screen Acting, 7–8. 14. Cawley, ‘Jeremy Irons: The Man Behind All Those Sinister Characters’, 92. 15. Inside the Actors Studio. 16. Inside the Actors Studio. 17. Nick James. ‘Humbert’s Humbert’, Sight and Sound. May (1998), 23. 18. Cawley, ‘Jeremy Irons: The Man Behind All Those Sinister Characters’, 92. 19. Notwithstanding the range of challenging critical writing on stars by Richard Dyer, James Naremore, Christine Gledhill, Pam Cook and others, locating Irons within that particular discourse, while potentially fruitful, is not my concern in this book. 20. Barry King. ‘Articulating Stardom’, in Christine Gledhill (ed). Stardom: Industry of Desire. London: Routledge, 1991, 176–177. 21. Interview from Stills in Tomlinson, Actors and Acting, 286. 22. James, ‘Humbert’s Humbert’, 23. 23. James, ‘Humbert’s Humbert’, 23. See also Cawley and Inside the Actors Studio. 24. Lindsay-Hogg, ‘Jeremy Irons’s Effortless Style’. 25. Interview from Stills in Tomlinson, Actors and Acting, 286. 26. Inside the Actors Studio. 27. Cawley, ‘Humbert’s Humbert’, 23; Inside the Actors Studio. 28. James Naremore. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988, 34–67. 29. Inside the Actors Studio and Martin Torggoff. ‘Interview’ in Tomlinson, Actors and Acting, 285, both show the extent to which Irons feels technically indebted to Streep. 30. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 65. 31. Matt Roth in ‘The Lion King: A Short History of Disney Fascism’, Jump Cut. 40, March (1996), 15–20 indicates how in this animated film Irons’s character is represented as ‘Mannered and aristocratic … pointedly gay’. 32. Frost Over the World (Al Jazeera, 2009). 33. Inside the Actors Studio. 34. Inside the Actors Studio. 35. Lovell and Krämer, Screen Acting, 3.

23

1 Imogen, Narcissism and the Intolerable Idea The past may well be a foreign country in the films of Jeremy Irons, but it is not a distant one. These films exhibit a great deal of anxiety over the meaning of the past and they almost always directly engage with the notion of the past in one way or another. This can take the form of simple ‘once upon a time’ structures, as we see in Brideshead Revisited, Reversal of Fortune and Lolita, where a narrator (usually Irons) tells us about the drama that has passed. More interestingly and more frequently in Irons’s films, we are compelled to read the narrative across more sophisticated temporal structures as in the parallel and inter-penetrating narratives of Longitude (2000), The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Waterland, the reverse narration of Betrayal (1983) which begins in the present and advances by going back two years at a time, the frequently incomprehensible distribution of time matching the experience of two amnesiacs in And Now … Ladies and Gentlemen, the surprisingly clear but still sophisticated Proustian reverie of Swann in Love, not to mention the obvious association between Jeremy Irons and the idea of time travel in his two roles in H.G. Wells films, From Time to Time (1992) and The Time Machine (2002). Beyond these devices of plot and narration, the idea of the psychological past and its burden on the 25

Lost Objects of Desire

present is a dominating theme across these films and television productions of the last thirty years. Obviously Irons’s period melodramas stand out in this context, but more often the past as a dominant theme is invoked through a character or event from the past, the facts of Henrietta’s paternity in The Wild Duck (1983) or Lucy’s in Stealing Beauty, for example, or the death of Guy’s wife in A Chorus of Disapproval (1988). In so many ways, Jeremy Irons’s characters seem arrested in the past by people or events that cannot be easily dismissed. Central to the idea of the past in these films is the issue of seduction. Seduction is also central to notions of neurosis and hysteria in Freud’s ideas concerning perversion. I am using Freud’s idea of seduction which is the fantasy or reality of a sexual and/or emotional assault on, in this case, the film protagonist. This is an assault that resides in that character’s past and has now seen the light of day in the present narrative. Seduction, in these films, operates in a dual context. Primarily, it is experienced as we all experience it, as the original encounter with our mothers. This experience of seduction, we might think of as a literal or emotional encounter that is, by definition, unavoidably profound. This is the great, overwhelming and originary maternal seduction that haunts the characters of these films. It appears most literally in Brideshead Revisited, Waterland and Stealing Beauty. These three productions bear the full weight of a dead, central mother figure of the past. Secondly, there is the notion of seduction (whether fantasy or literal) that takes place in what the film deems the present, or psychoanalytically more recent past. Observing this more generally in these films, we can perceive a great deal of the recurrence of that original relationship in the relationships between Irons’s characters and proxies for their mothers in Dead Ringers (Clare Niveau), Reversal of Fortune (Sunny von Bulow), Brideshead Revisited (Teresa Marchmain), Callas Forever (Maria Callas), Elizabeth I (Bess) and Being Julia (Julia Lambert). Further experiences of seduction assault characters played by Jeremy Irons in the 26

Imogen, Narcissism and the Intolerable Idea

adolescent figures of Annabel and Lolita in Lolita, and the socially diminutive characters such as Vivian in Chinese Box, as well as Song Liling in M. Butterfly and Anna in Damage. In addition to M. Butterfly, male antagonists from Sebastian in Brideshead (‘the fore-runner’) to John Harrison in Longitude also play their part in the overwhelming seduction of Irons’s characters. Finally in both a sexual and emotional sense we can see how this notion of seduction is central to other characters in Irons’s films, most notably to Anna/Sarah, herself seduced by her imagined French Lieutenant, Sebastian and Alex who similarly fall victim to Teresa Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, Lucy seduced by Nicolo Donati on her previous visit to Italy in Stealing Beauty and Song Liling herself who represents the colonization and seduction by the West of an entire race and culture. So what of the relationship between perversion and seduction? Freud himself, popularly celebrated in his day and now as a pervert, was certainly seduced in an emotional sense, and almost certainly in a literal sense by his devoutly Catholic nursemaid.1 I want now to consider this relationship between perversion and seduction and see what it can tell us about perversion in Jeremy Irons’s films. So much of the discussion of seduction, or sexual trauma in childhood, in Freudian thought surrounds the so-called seduction theory. Freud advanced the idea of seduction as the cause of all neurosis in April 1896 and then receded from this position eighteen months later, gradually qualifying it over time. Although renouncing the sweeping notion that childhood seduction is the fountainhead of all neurosis, Freud replaced the ‘all’ with ‘many’ and advanced the idea that the reporting of seductions made by his patients were, in many cases, imagined sexual advances. If, in the face of influences ranging from collegial pressure to his own clinical observations, the theory of a single source of neurosis had to be jettisoned, the idea of fantasy triumphed.2 The usefulness, for our purposes, of the idea of the fantasy of seduction is that it demonstrates how we can read the imagined experience of 27

Lost Objects of Desire

seduction as hovering behind our various subjects of analysis, whether we have textual evidence of an actual seduction or not.3 In terms of the relationship between seduction and perversion, in the Three Essays Freud highlights the observation that many ‘inversions’ in adulthood are the result of ‘sexual impressions’ of early childhood and that childhood perversity is certainly influenced by seduction.4 The problems for reading early sexual history caused by seduction are very useful in considering the films of Jeremy Irons. Freud writes that the ‘effects of seduction … confuse our view of it [early sexual history] by presenting children prematurely with a sexual object for which the infantile sexual instinct at first shows no need’.5 It is this concept of ‘need’ that is particularly useful here in terms of the pervert’s tendency towards sublimation and overvaluation. What Freud’s observation about childhood seduction tells us is that assaulting the child with an experience of sexuality devoid of the child’s own need, desire or hunger for it, the experience of seduction becomes an encounter which would seem to be still present in the mature perverse lover. For him or her, sexuality can easily become an experience unrelated to the need to satiate a pressing sexual desire and so become a practice full with perverse tactics of delay. Given that the original sexual encounter occurred outside the realm of need, sexuality itself has acquired an ideal quality that may even be disturbed by any notion so vulgar as actual needs-based consummation.6 I have mentioned the fact that in Jeremy Irons’s films he plays both the pervert and the protagonist who is pitted against an antagonist who is him or herself perverse. This is an interesting commonality both across the films and within them. As in Lolita, the idea that the pervert/seducer is him- or herself also the victim of a pervert/seducer (if only in fantasy) is elementary to our understanding of such a character, as it is almost common knowledge that victims of child abuse frequently become abusers themselves. In his letter to his great friend and early collaborator, Wilhelm Fleiss, of 6 September 28

Imogen, Narcissism and the Intolerable Idea

1896, while still in the grip of his totalizing seduction theory, Freud postulates a sort of family tree of hysteria. This idea gives grounds for the inter-changeability of the Irons character as pervert and victim, so prominent in Lolita and indeed across the range of his other films. What Freud speculates in this early consideration of the issue is that the hysteria he is seeing in his patients is related to the perversions of a seducer, presumably beyond those of the seducer’s (often the father’s) basic paedophilia. Furthermore he considers this as part of an alternation between generations, where the first generation exhibits perversion and the second hysteria and sterility. In addition, Freud also speculates on a type of generational alternation within a perverse individual, him/herself, who may be ‘perverse during the age of vigour and then, after a period of anxiety, hysterical’.7 These are, of course, the sort of speculations common to his personal letters to Fleiss and by no means represent polished or mature theory. They do, however, provide us with examples of the kind of thinking about perversion and seduction that resonate in the films I am considering in this book.

The Intolerable Idea In narrative cinema after the Second World War there is a particular emphasis on male characters experiencing loss and this tends to make itself manifest as melancholia. In Jeremy Irons’s films this same melancholia is omnipresent and is frequently diagnosed and named by Irons himself, usually as narrator. Indeed, in the New Hollywood it is Jeremy Irons, along with Woody Allen and Robert De Niro, who is the actor most associated with this particular cultural expression of masculine protest. Although this very melancholic loss stands behind Irons’s characters, it is the manner in which it is expressed that distinguishes it from the sort of melancholia in which I have been interested in films such as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard ([Il Gattopardo] 29

Lost Objects of Desire

1963). 8 When psychoanalyst and theorist of melancholia, Julia Kristeva suggests that ‘one could describe melancholia as an unnameable and empty perversion’, she seems to be thinking about the silence of the depressed person and ways of reading the emotions that stand behind the depressed person.9 In their particular perversions, however, Irons’s characters seem particularly loquacious. What we might consider this perverse chattiness to amount to, however, in terms of its relationship to the unconscious, is a similar veil of silence. In these films the perversions may be full but they are equally unnameable. In the context of their melancholia, a consideration of Irons’s characters’ dual and overwhelming experience of seduction demonstrates the male melancholic’s ‘intolerable idea’, as Kristeva calls it, ‘that he himself is a depressed woman’. Furthermore, given the ‘crucial role’ that Kristeva attributes to the mother ‘in all forms of melancholia’ we can well associate this realization of a certain femininity with the incorporation of the depressed or melancholic person’s mother.10 That is to say, because he has been victim to the act of seduction, a mark of loss, he is in some way not fully a man and therefore is, in some way, a woman. His tendency towards melancholia is the emotional scar that proves it. In this context it is worth remembering that Freud, echoing the sentiments of the perverse males in Irons’s films, has no difficulty in associating the seduction-based perversions of children with those of ‘an average uncultivated woman’.11 Supported by Irons’s ‘dollop of femininity’, this experience is contemplated, memorialized, mastered and performed in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, where both Charles and Mike, subject to the power of Sarah and Anna, become the French Lieutenant’s woman’s ‘woman’; Reversal of Fortune, where Claus plays at being her butler; M. Butterfly, where René becomes so dominated by the idea of his Butterfly that he becomes her; And Now … Ladies and Gentlemen, where cross-dressing is central to the performance of his neurosis; and in Elizabeth I where, as Robert Dudley, he must continually and completely 30

Imogen, Narcissism and the Intolerable Idea

debase himself as the servant to his beloved Bess.12 To use the notion of ‘intolerable idea’ is perhaps misleading in that it implies a level of self-loathing on the part of the characters. This is, however, no more so than our use of the word ‘perverse’. In neither case should we consider that these films or characters have substantial moral or value judgements placed upon their behaviour. Whereas perversions and intolerable ideas exist in these films they appear in a moral context of disgust only to those repressed enough to find them unbearable. They do present this effect, which makes them so challenging, but they do not moralize themselves. They do contemplate such disgust, as we see in Dead Ringers where Elliot reacts with hostility to the notion that he is gay or less masculine because of his name and his strange relationship with his twin brother. But ultimately these films provide a space of contemplation for these extreme notions of desire and sexuality beyond moralizing and this is certainly central to their representation of Irons’s characters as literal or mental transvestites. The suggestion of homosexuality is obviously part of this, but the desire of these characters to assume, take on or incorporate the identity of their seducer, whoever it is, is arguably more important. In Scorsese’s Men: Melancholia and the Mob I considered the way in which the Scorsesean melancholic assumes a guise of femininity by incorporating his, frequently female, lost object. That is, the pain of his loss is so great that in order to keep the object of loss alive he must speak for it and represent its concerns.13 Indeed, as Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok have indicated, the melancholic can give voice to his lost object to the extent that he seems to speak of his object’s own grief at having lost himself.14 I argued that this appropriation has a perverse political dimension and in doing so I invoked feminist film theorist, Tania Modleski, who has considered this process of male incorporation of female power in her 1991 book, Feminism without Women. In her earlier book on Hitchcock, however, Modleski has demonstrated the unconscious operation of this incorporation as it is represented in Hitchcock’s 31

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Vertigo (1958) and its ‘fascination with femininity’.15 Through the film’s borderline ‘perverse’ obsession with clothes and the Judy ‘make-over’, the uncanny mirror identification of Scottie (James Stewart) and Madeleine (Kim Novak), Scottie’s role-play as Madeleine in his dream following her death, and his final possession by her (and Carlotta) in the madness or ‘acute melancholia’ which follows her death, Modleski reads Scottie’s experience as plunging him into the ‘feminine’.16 What starts as a Gavin Elster-like attempt at female mastery ends in the realization of resemblance that is ‘intolerable to contemplate’.17 Scottie’s manic pursuit of Madeleine has simply brought about a merging of the two and this has led him not to power but to the feminine condition of ‘unfreedom, to masochism, and to death’.18 Seeing this encounter as common not only to Scottie but also to his audience, Modleski directs us to the political import of the feminine fascinations of the film through the notion of regression that is central to Freudian melancholia at work. What regression leads us to is the mother and the realization that ‘the boundaries between self and (m)other tend to be more fluid for the male than is sometimes supposed’.19 Freud’s most spectacular experience of the intolerable idea was one that he had only in print, namely through Dr Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of a Neurotic published in 1903. Freud had no contact with Schreber in person and yet his analysis of the case, which he published in 1911 as Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia, proved fruitful for its insights into paranoia, emasculation, seduction, narcissism, homosexuality and the father complex. What appeals to me, initially, about Schreber is that, were his life story to be filmed, Schreber himself could be played by no other actor than Jeremy Irons. The son of a distinguished and reforming physician, Schreber was man of high moral code, a distinguished civil servant and presiding judge of Saxony’s highest court as well as a one-time Reichstag candidate on a joint ticket for the Conservative and National Liberal parties. 32

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In private, however, he was a hypochondriac, an insomniac, suicidal and was a patient in the Leipzig Psychiatric Clinic after three mental breakdowns between 1884 and his death in April 1911.20 The greater perversions of his emotional life were revealed with the publication (in the face of strong opposition) of his Memoirs in 1903 which provided every detail of his elaborate and complex delusional system of religion, the universe and his role in redeeming the world, showing him to be, as Peter Gay calls him, ‘a paranoiac of heroic dimensions’.21 The central idea underpinning Schreber’s symptom and his grand delusion was that, in his own words: ‘He believed that he had a mission to redeem the world and to restore it to its lost state of bliss. This, however, he could only bring about if he were first transformed from a man into a woman.’22 This fantasy of being the redeemer of the world represented the resolution of conflicts which revolved around the, at first, disgraceful idea that he was, or should be, a woman, reaching back to the beginnings of his illness in 1893. This idea made itself clear to him in a number of ways. Initially in 1893, during a period of dreams about his first experience with nervous disorder, the thought came to him, ‘in a state between sleeping and waking … “that after all it really must be very nice to be a woman submitting to the act of copulation”‘.23 Freud’s account of the Memoirs spells out that this thought became more grandiosely expressed in his sense of a mission and Freud highlights the fact that Schreber saw that he ‘must’ be transformed into a woman in order to achieve that mission. In Schreber’s mind this was not a question of choice but an obligation.24 The full transformation to ‘femaleness’ would take decades, if not centuries, and the ‘female nerves’ passing over his body in great numbers would produce a new race of men though a process of impregnation by God.25 It caused him to take up a very different attitude towards sexuality and towards God. Once a sexual ascetic and agnostic he came to relate voluptuousness and general sexual enjoyment with his feminine feelings towards God. Polymorphously perverse, able to arouse his feminine 33

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nerves by applying pressure to his body, ‘especially if I think of something feminine at the same time’, he was able to give substance to the most elaborate fantasies of possessing breasts and female genitals as well as achieving a clear sense of the feelings of a woman during sex. As Freud writes, ‘He took up a feminine attitude towards God; he felt that he was God’s wife.’26 This mission did not come without its privations, however, as it is clear that Schreber initially saw the transformation as part of the sense of persecution he was feeling. Initially he believed that his emasculation was to be brought about so that he might be sexually abused (‘my body used like a strumpet’) and the voices he was hearing were treating his emasculation as a disgrace, calling him ‘Miss Schreber’ and saying ‘So this set up to have been a Senatspräsident, this person who lets himself be f[ucke]d!’, and ‘Don’t you feel ashamed in front of your wife?’.27 The transformation of this ‘disgrace’ into a ‘mission’ was obviously charged by the initial sacrifices he felt he was making and the process obviously helped his recovery through making some form of accommodation with those hostile thoughts which Freud names as homosexual feelings, castration anxiety and a father complex.28 This seems to be obvious in the fact that the final incarnation of his feminine assumption (at least that which predates the publication of the Memoirs) comes after his recovery when he speaks of his tendency to stand before a mirror sometimes ‘wearing sundry feminine adornments’. For Freud this marks the primary importance of the transformation to a woman in Schreber’s delusion as it is both its original ‘germ’ and its sole survivor in ‘practical life’.29 Having detailed the dynamics of Schreber’s feminine fantasy, I want to conclude this section by locating Schreber’s fantasy within the scenario that I see as so common to the films of Jeremy Irons. Perversions, of course, dominates the Schreber Memoirs, and we see it most clearly in Schreber’s feminine fantasy, his transvestism and his ‘voluptuousness’, all of which Freud translates into Schreber’s inadmissible homosexuality. 34

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There is also a very detailed note of perversion in Schreber’s obsession and in the detail of his universal system. The translation of his own bourgeois moral code when well into the equation of God and sensuality during the period of his illness indicates a very strong fixation on a worldview which is patently contrary to the expected course. This sense of perversion takes on a greater significance after his recovery when, against great and powerful opposition, Schreber insisted on publishing the memoirs in the interest of science. This certainly placed him in a vulnerable position against action by his physician Flechsig and indeed by the state censors.30 Beyond this, as Freud knew very well, the publication of such a frank and self-revealing book by a well-known figure of the establishment was always going to be met with outrage by the members of bourgeoisie society. In this sense, Schreber’s really great act of perversion came with the publication of the book. Related to his pursuit of perversion and most particularly to feminine fantasies is the idea of seduction that is an important part of Schreber’s delusion. In the persecutions Schreber feels at the hands of Flechsig, and in God himself, there is a very strong note of seduction. Indeed Freud reads Schreber’s delusion as placing Flechsig as his ‘first seducer’.31 Just as in the end his transformations into a woman prepared the way for him to become God’s wife, initially these transformations made it possible for him to be Flechsig’s. The seed of this overwhelming fantasy of seduction at the hands of Flechsig was, therefore, the ‘exciting cause of his illness’, that is ‘an outburst of homosexual libido’ directed at first towards Flechsig.32 From delusions such as these concerning Flechsig and God, Freud had little difficulty drawing the line from Schreber’s feminine fantasies to his homosexual feeling towards his own father. In this context the persecutions Freud read resided purely in the realm of the father complex and the anxiety of castration. As Gay points out, Freud made little attempt to seek out the possibilities of the eminent Schreber senior being a real-life tyrant, as well as the tyrant of his 35

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son’s unconscious.33 Certainly Freud makes no accusations of seduction against Schreber senior because he had no need to. The overwhelming and taboo love Schreber felt for his father needed no active part played by the latter to give Schreber the sense of being subjected to a seduction of great power. In the films of Jeremy Irons this depressed woman anxiety directs the prince of perversion on two courses. As we observe in the Schreber case, the regression to a narcissistic stage is one outcome and Dead Ringers suggests the most potent example of this amongst Irons’s films. In a sense the regression to the narcissistic stage can be read as an extreme attempt to disavow the fact of the maternal seduction altogether. As I have considered in Scorsese’s Kundun (1997), this is perhaps the most effective way of resolving the melancholic cycle of loss altogether – looking past the maternal signifier and focusing on the plenitude of self.34 The second course involves the prince of perversion in the dual role of father and paedophile, a condition that I call Imogenism and which is most obvious in Lolita, Stealing Beauty and The Wild Duck. To conclude this chapter I will make some theoretical observations about both narcissism and Imogenism to establish these ideas in support of my analysis of the films of Jeremy Irons to come in the following chapters.

Narcissism In Schreber’s case there is nothing particular in his father complex to explain his paranoia. What Freud sees as characteristic of Schreber’s paranoia is that he reacted with delusions of persecution ‘as a means of warding off a homosexual wishfantasy’.35 Freud then reads ‘the part played by homosexual wish in the development of paranoia’, via the Three Essays and narcissism.36 The nature of narcissism, Freud argues, originates in the stage of individual development when sexual instincts come together in quest of a love-object. The beginning of this quest is love for the self, one’s own body and then the subject 36

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moves on to a love-object outside the self – another person. Delay in the transition from self to other, Freud considers, can be unusually long in some cases and may provide the foundation for illness in later life. The salient feature in this love of self is the concentration on the genitals as the love-object that then may develop into the choice of a love-object with similar genitals, which is homosexuality. Whether or not there is a delay in the period of genital fixation, Freud’s assumption here is that an early homosexual identification is a common feature in the line of development towards reaching a heterosexual object choice. Furthermore, these early homosexual identifications are not ‘done away with’ but are applied in later life to more socially acceptable practices such as male bonding and public service in the cause of the love of one’s fellow man. In this context it is clear to Freud that repressed homosexuals or heterosexuals with highly sublimated homoerotic desires are particularly busy in public affairs or, as Freud puts it, ‘interests of humanity’.37 Fixation in this stage of narcissism may, in later life, expose the subject to illness at the onset of an ‘intense wave of libido’ that finding no satisfaction ‘may lead to the sexualisation of their social instincts and so undo the work of sublimation which they have achieved in the course of their development’. This may bring about regression via ‘some disappointment over a woman’ or through some disturbance in ‘social relations with other men’ which Freud calls ‘frustrations’. These frustrations can find no outlet in established channels and so this ‘bursts through the banks at the weakest spot’ – at the original arresting in the progression from self-love to object-love, that is in narcissism.38 For Schreber this meant a displacement from his homosexual wish ultimately led to a conclusion in the idea that ‘I love only myself’ and to a consequent megalomania exercised in his delusions of persecution and in the reconstructed world order he creates in order to survive.39 The relationship between the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers is clearly the most literal representation of this narcissism 37

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amongst the Irons films. In any narrative of such intense attachment to another there is always the suspicion that what looks like object-libido love is really ego-libido love. In his 1914 essay ‘On Narcissism’, Freud certainly points to ‘[a] certain reciprocity’ between the two states. But in Stephen’s high-flying political career in Damage and the haughty isolation of characters such as Randall Bragg in Appaloosa, Esteban Trueba in House of the Spirits (1993) and Nowak in Moonlighting, we see an easy confusion between ideas of altruism and self-obsession. In a completely perverse world such as that of Kafka, however, this sort of narcissism is very much bound up with Franz’s essential process of survival, as Freud observed with Schreber. So beyond the megalomania, the appeals to glamour and sartorial fastidiousness and the self-obsession of almost all of Irons’s princes of perversion, there is a very real sense of them undergoing the narcissist’s struggle to survive. Emerging in his reading of Schreber’s paranoia, by 1914 Freud sees this drive towards self-preservation as an essential aspect of narcissism.40 This may well have been a radical slap in the face of his own ideas about the primacy of libido over ego but nonetheless, this distancing of narcissism from a perversion to a more general technique of self-preservation bears out our experience in Irons’s films. Inside every megalomaniac Esteban is an Alex in Stealing Beauty, struggling against physical decay, and a Kafka, struggling against the poisons of the mind.41

Imogenism A more indirect course for the narcissism of Jeremy Irons’s lead characters is through an encounter with a young girl or daughter figure. Perhaps the last great taboo of Western culture, from Katharine Hepburn to Scarlett Johansson – the use and abuse of younger women, daughters and female minors – is, not surprisingly, a persistent cinematic preoccupation. In her essay on Brigitte Bardot, Simone de Beauvoir writes of 38

Imogen, Narcissism and the Intolerable Idea

something very like this preoccupation and calls it the ‘Lolita Syndrome’. What de Beauvoir sees in Roger Vadim’s presentation of Bardot, in a range of films, is a modern version of the ‘eternal feminine’.42 Like Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron in Hollywood cinema, she sees Bardot as the ‘erotic hoyden’, the ‘child woman’, seemingly living in a world of her own, thus creating the sort of distance from the spectator that cultivates desire.43 Given her ambiguous and androgynous nature,44 de Beauvoir observes that Bardot is unpopular at home in France. Frenchmen, it seems, are unwilling to give up their feelings of power over women.45 To the American and the Anglo-Saxon spectators, who will willingly give over all to the charms of the nymph who bears no marks of the wife and mother to come, she is a goddess.46 As I have already made clear, this little girl preoccupation is consistent throughout Irons’s films from The Wild Duck to Being Julia.47 In these films the encounter with a daughter or young girl can take the form of a biological and or legal father–daughter relationship (The Wild Duck), a relationship in which a mature female character is infantilized, or imagined as such by the Irons character whose misogyny, racism and delusions of power places him in the pre-eminent or paternal role (Damage, Being Julia, Chinese Box, M. Butterfly), a platonic but highly charged encounter with a much younger woman (Stealing Beauty) and indeed a full-blown experience of paedophilia (Lolita). Considering the range of films which, like Lolita and The Wild Duck, play around with the line between the young girl as biological/legal daughter and not daughter, I use the word Imogenism because both in its original Irish meaning and in critical interpretation of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1609–10) and Imogen (its heroine), the name Imogen (or Innogen, as it may have been spelled) implies just this sort of ambiguity.48 What the term Imogenism is designed to account for in these films is the relationship between a girl or younger woman and a man. As the bride of an initially secret and then, when her 39

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husband Posthumus is banished, an unconsummated marriage, Imogen is Shakespeare’s most prominent co-mixture of daughter and virginal wife.49 In both roles her constancy is initially over-determined before being instantly suspected and despaired of, according to the perverse logic of her father and her husband. Both men seek to use her for personal gain and, when this is undone, they become wild with confusion. I use the term to relate something beyond the issue of the confusion over the young girl’s identity as daughter or not. The idea of Imogenism in the films of Jeremy Irons is not about the father who forgets himself to his daughter and mistakes her for his lover (in Shakespeare also only Pericles (1608–9) confronts the issue of incest per se), but about the elder man who forgets himself to his younger lover and mistakes her for his daughter. As critical readings of Shakespeare’s father–daughter plays, and indeed those of the great Imogenist, George Bernard Shaw (who re-wrote the last act of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline), have shown, this is very much a relationship dealing with ideas beyond sexuality, that is of the elder man’s personal enlightenment, redemption and fantasies of utopia. Furthermore the term is designed to highlight the way the exercise of power is asserted over, and ceded to, the Imogen figure by the perverse male in order to offset the terror of the intolerable idea and the inescapable facts of the maternal seduction. Diane Dreher sees the father–daughter relationship in Shakespeare as guiding the father towards the Jungian notion of ‘spiritual renewal, individuation and integrity’.50 As we will see in the many similar relationships in the films of Jeremy Irons, these Shakespearean fathers perceive or expect their daughters to be part of themselves.51 They demonstrate acts and feelings of extreme misogyny, fearing their wives and lovers as much as they feel confusion over their own sexuality.52 Just as it is not an explicit part of the tale of the prince of perversion, incest in Shakespeare’s father–daughter relationships is generally not dealt with in an explicit way, as it is in Pericles. There is no suggestion of father–daughter incest 40

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between Cymbeline and Imogen. More often, in all these texts, it lies behind the notion of attraction or compulsion towards these daughters as spiritual guides. In leading their fathers to individuation these Shakespearean heroines also are leading his pilgrimage towards an accommodation with the feminine principle or anima. For Cymbeline this is brought about through his realization of the apparent evil of his queen (Imogen’s evil step-mother) and his reunification with Imogen herself.53 For Posthumus, who allows Imogen to be the object of a bet which might cause her to be raped by Iachimo, it is about freeing himself from his hostility toward women, through an accommodation with his own anima, and his more general lack of trust and ability to recognize human virtues. In her book, Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare and Shaw, Lagretta Lenker makes a similar reading. In their daughter as ‘active verb’ modes, that is in their rendering of daughters who locate ideas of fantasy, role-play and gender reversal,54 the two dramatists represent the father–daughter bond in terms of utopia, equality and freedom from the constraints of the world.55 In the last four Shakespeare romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale (1610) and The Tempest (1611–12), where there is perversion or imbalance in the father–daughter relationship, there is a gradual move away from these states towards a sense of balance.56 In these narratives the daughter is guide, teacher and redeemer, the bringer of order and equity, the advocate of love, patience, mercy and hope.57 Where they represent the daughter as ‘passive verb’, through motifs of sacrifice and incest,58 the sacrificial form, of which incest is an extension,59 occurs for reasons such as the need for male characters to destroy their feminine side before taking revenge, to protect the daughter from rape and to protect the community or family from harm.60 In this context such characters are at pains to bury their unconscious desires and, ultimately, their fear of femininity. What stands out in Lenker’s work, however, is the way in which she sees Shakespeare and Shaw marking perversion 41

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simply in the very act of representing the father–daughter relationship at all. Given the substantial absence of a viable father–daughter discourse in both the Renaissance and Victorian England, she argues, as radicals both Shakespeare and Shaw used the father–daughter relationship as a means of dramatizing oppositional and controversial themes and ideas. This was their method of presenting the clash of the old world with the new, bringing about subversion by questioning the mores of both worlds.61 When this radicalism extends to the representation of actual incest, of course, it attains its most perverse height. Lenker draws on the work of Boose and Flowers62 to demonstrate that as the normal relations within a family are destroyed by the confusions of incest, so too is discourse itself.63 For Lenker however, as we see in the films of Jeremy Irons, the simple idea of father–daughter incest in Shakespeare and Shaw has the power to indicate a radicalism and perversion quite apart from the specificities of the act itself in those rare plays (Pericles) in which it actually occurs. Although a range of work of film and screen scholarship has discussed the father–daughter relationship, the discourse of ‘girl power’ has largely concentrated the discussion on the subjectivity of the girl, and usually the pre-teen girl at that.64 Terrie Waddell’s discussion of Tony Soprano’s relationship with his daughter Meadow in the television series The Sopranos is a rare example of an analysis that seeks to understand the motivations of the male character in this relationship. Considering Tony’s attraction to nightclub strippers and mistresses who physically (if not intellectually) resemble his daughter Meadow and his analyst Dr Melfi, Waddell emphasizes the need for us to ask why the kind of female beauty and independence these women represent holds him ‘in thrall’? For Waddell the idea that Tony desires to incorporate the characteristics of these women is a possible but simplistic reading. Given her Jungian perspective, Waddell sees Tony’s desire for ‘coniunctio with Meadow via the goomah/stripper proxy’ as being a move to redeem the image of his oppressive mother, Livia, in favour 42

Imogen, Narcissism and the Intolerable Idea

of a ‘positive mother energy’.65 This position is derived from Jung’s ideas about incest as a beginning point for ‘the drive for wholeness’.66 In this context, Tony’s problem is that, instead of moving forward towards the goal of individuation, he remains stuck at the regressive point of incest. Here, as Waddell says, ‘he only ever experiences the desire for rebirth’.67 Like Dreher’s work on Shakespeare, Waddell’s Jungian reading of the male character within an Imogenistic relationship is perhaps more optimistic than my reading of Irons’s Imogenism. Where the Jungian sees individuation and wholeness, under the Freudian influence of seduction and perversion, in Irons’s films, at least, I see narcissism. Where the Jungian sees the mother archetype and anima, I see the ‘intolerable idea’ and Imogenism. Nevertheless, in reading the relationship between an elder man and a younger woman (daughter) both positions share ideas of a return to innocence, guiding, enlightenment, exchange and incorporation which, in the unconscious at least, work to free the male subject from the rather more mundane aspects of the perversion. Weighed down by the after-effects of seduction, the idea of his own redemption, and that of his mother, is almost impossible to the Imogenist. If he perceives a Jungian experience of individuation, it represents him not as he is, but as he would like to be. The psychological process of Imogenism I see at work in the films of Jeremy Irons is that, in his encounter with the younger woman, the male character displaces his depressed woman anxiety – the intolerable idea – by fantasizing himself not as a depressed woman but as a young and virginal girl. To stand aside from the films of Jeremy Irons, the example of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) contains a useful summary of the psychological process of both the fear of the maternal seduction and its disavowal, both in the processes of narcissism and Imogenism. These are dynamics which I suggest dominate Bertolucci’s career as a filmmaker and which play a significant part in the film he made with Jeremy Irons and his wife, Sinead Cusack, Stealing Beauty. 43

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The idea of seduction is everywhere in The Conformist where the protagonist, Marcello (Jean Louis Trintigant), derives his perverse attraction to fascism through his experiences of seduction by the family chauffeur, Lino, through his encounter with Anna (Dominique Sanda) and through the powerful ambiguity of his mother’s presence in the film. It is also important to note that on their honeymoon, Marcello’s new bride Giulia reveals that she too had been seduced as a child by the family friend who stood in loco parentis, as one of the witnesses at their wedding. These seductions, as well as Marcello’s paranoia, his delusions of persecution and repressed homosexuality, all place his character well within the psychological realm occupied by so many of Irons’s princes of perversion. A scene in Paris, in which Marcello watches the seduction of his wife Giulia by his beloved Anna, is one of the most important in cinema in terms of what it tells us about male desire. It follows three scenes in which Marcello is forcefully confronted with the female figure who, in the third, he will come to know as Anna. The first two of these scenes are primal fantasy scenes in which Dominique Sanda plays the figure of maternal desire to Marcello’s performance as child. In the third scene she comes to him as Anna, wife to his former university lecturer, Professor Quadri, and very much the figure of the new woman dressed in boys’ clothes and smoking a cigarette in Humphrey Bogart style. The Paris scene, like many others of the film, is presented as Marcello’s fantasy, a fantasy that, I suggest, structures his desire entirely. Excluded from their shopping trip that follows, Marcello pursues Anna and Giulia through the fashion houses of Paris and ends up standing outside his own room at the Hotel d’Orsee. Looking though the bedroom door left ajar, he can observe the scene without being seen, although Anna clearly indicates that she is aware of his presence. Anna’s ploy, at least in his perverted imagination, is to seduce Marcello in order to save herself and her husband from the assassination that Marcello is orchestrating on behalf 44

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of the fascist authorities in Italy. The scene she provides here is part of that seduction and strikes at the centre of his own Imogenism. Looking at the clothes they have bought together, Giulia trying them on with the feverish excitement of a young girl on her first trip to Paris, Anna helps her put them on. For Anna to play the role of the maid to Giulia as mistress is a clear inversion of the obvious mastery and experience of Anna as opposed to Giulia’s obvious childishness. While Giulia is coy about being naked in front of her, Anna is confident, gentle and understanding. She puts the clothes on Giulia and gently strokes her thighs and, we presume, her vagina, in full view of Marcello, until the giggling Giulia protests and the scene fades to the exterior long shot of Marcello standing outside the door. Obviously this scene responds to the commonly portrayed male pornographic fantasy of two women having sex. It also engages with the equally common but perhaps more psychologically obscure male fantasy of a man watching the seduction of his own wife, although in this second fantasy it is usually another man who is having sex with the wife. In this scene Marcello identifies or projects himself into the roles of both protagonists. At once, or alternately, his fantasy allows him to be both Giulia and Anna. Anna, a sophisticated and powerful new woman, is an overwhelming symbol of seduction both in herself and in the very powerful general place of the idea of seduction in Marcello’s unconscious. Giulia, also a victim of childhood seduction like her husband, is childlike, vulnerable and nervous about the experience and yet never disturbed or upset by any feelings of assault. In this sense his fantasy provides Marcello with an experience that works as a corrective to his own specific childhood and general unconscious experience of seduction. In that it allows him to imagine himself in the role of Anna (the seducer) it is about him regaining some sense of power and authority over the past act of seduction in which he lost all. Again allowing him the role of seducer he can correct and perhaps make good the actions of his own seducer by playing that role as a gentle, understanding woman 45

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(Anna). This is not so much about validating the seducer’s act as about making the original experience less painful. Playing the role of Giulia (the seduced), Marcello can overcome his homosexual and incestual anxieties by the fact that this seduction takes place at the instigation of a woman other than his mother, Anna, and not the original man, the perverse chauffeur, Lino, who called himself Butterfly. In this way the scene shows us the essential dynamic of Imogenism operating in the prince of perversion. Feeling himself to be both seduced and seducer projecting himself into such a fantasy, the prince of perversion may be both the little girl as well as her powerful female seducer. In this scenario his desire is in being and wanting both characters. For Jeremy Irons’s princes of perversion this fantasy will leave them not as paedophiles, nor homosexuals, nor the lovers of depressed mothers, but as the beautiful young women their mothers once were, within whose all-encompassing love they feel their only viable experience of redemption, plenitude or, indeed, of existence. Irons’s dying character in Stealing Beauty, Alex Parish, describes the film’s Imogen redeemer (Liv Tyler), indicating the real consequences of this virgin in a Tuscan villa narrative: Oh, she’s searching for something, with those long hands she can barely control, and curiosity, and a little bit frightened. It reminds me so much of me somehow.

Notes   1. Peter Gay. Freud: A Life For Our Times. London: Papermac, 1995, 7. See also reference to nursemaids as part of a group of seducers (93) mentioned in Etiology of Hyeteria (1896) and his relationship with his mother, seeing her nude on the train and her influence in his life, (11). See also Freud’s letter to Fliess in Jeffrey Masson (ed). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985, 268, where Masson’s footnote (270) points to the family nursemaid, Monica Zajic, as the woman in question.   2. Gay, Freud: A Life, 90–96; Freud, Three Essays, 108; and Masson, The Complete Letters, 264.   3. De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, xv and 28. 46

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  4. Freud, Three Essays, 50–51, 108–109.   5. Freud, Three Essays, 109.   6. In Freud, Three Essays, Freud talks about ‘premature sexual activity diminishing a child’s educatability’ (159) and also on the failure of education (115).   7. Masson, The Complete Letters, 212.   8. Mark Nicholls. Scorsese’s Men: Melancholia and the Mob. North Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2004, and ‘Visconti’s Il gattopardo: Melancholia and the Radical Sensibility’, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23 (2006), 97–110.   9. Ross Guberman (ed). Julia Kristeva Interviews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, 80. 10. Guberman, Julia Kristeva, 81. 11. Freud, Three Essays, 109. 12. In 1914–1918 Irons performs the voice-over role of Siegfried Sassoon, the English author and poet who, after highly distinguished active service on the Western Front, publicly protested the conduct of the war and was officially ‘diagnosed’ with shell shock. Elaine Showalter. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980. London: Virago Press, 1987, 178–188, discusses the case in the context of the wider discourse of shell shock, male hysteria and femininity. 13. Nicholls, Scorsese’s Men, 3–5, 6–7, 18–21, 53. 14. N. Abraham and M. Torok. ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, in N. Rand (ed). The Shell and the Kernal: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, 135–136. 15. Tania Modleski. The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory. New York: Methuen, 1988, 90. 16. Modleski, The Woman Who Knew Too Much, 95. 17. Modleski, The Woman Who Knew Too Much, 92. 18. Modleski, The Woman Who Knew Too Much, 98. 19. Modleski, The Woman Who Knew Too Much, 100. 20. Gay, Freud: A Life, 278. 21. Gay, Freud: A Life, 279. 22. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, in A. and J. Strachey (trans). Sigmund Freud Collected Papers Volume III. London: Hogarth Press, 1948, 395. 23. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 391. 24. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 395–396. 25. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 396. 26. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 412–414. 27. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 397–400. 28. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 440–441. 29. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 400–401. 30. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 389. 47

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31. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 422. 32. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 426. 33. Gay, Freud: A Life, 284. 34. Nicholls, Scorsese’s Men, 151. 35. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 444. 36. Freud, Three Essays, 138–140. See also Sigmund Freud. ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914)’, in Ernest Jones (ed), Joan Rivier (trans). Sigmund Freud Collected Papers Volume 4. London: Hogarth Press, 1948, 30–59. 37. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 445–447. 38. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 447–448. 39. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 451. See also Gay, Freud: A Life, 281. 40. Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, 31. 41. This narcissism suggests a fascinating, if hardly perverse, dynamic within the group of Irons’s more recent supporting roles, in films such as Eragon, Kingdom of Heaven and The Merchant of Venice (2004), which have cast him as mentor, guide, teacher and protector to boys and younger men. 42. Simone de Beauvoir. Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome. New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1972, 8. 43. De Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, 10. 44. De Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, 11. 45. De Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, 19. 46. De Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, 23. 47. In Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1977) Diane Keaton refers to Mariel Hemingway as ‘the little girl’ and this is a term which re-appears in another Allenesque New York film, Sidewalks of New York (Edward Burns, 2001). 48. In Shakespeare’s play, Imogen is the daughter of Cymbeline, King of Britain, and she has aroused his wrath by secretly marrying Posthumus. When Cymbeline discovers that his plan to marry Imogen to his stepson, Cloten, has been thwarted by the secret marriage, he banishes the oncebeloved Posthumus from Britain for ever. In exile in Rome, Posthumus brags of the virtue of his lost love Imogen and this arouses a local, Iachimo, to make a bet with Posthumus that he can induce Imogen to forget her fidelity. 49. M.H. Loughlin. Hymenutics: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage. London: Associated University Presses, 1997, 63. 50. D.E. Dreher. Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1986, 143. 51. Dreher, Domination and Defiance, 7–9. 52. Dreher, Domination and Defiance, 7–10. 53. Dreher, Domination and Defiance, 145–146. 54. L.T. Lenker. Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare and Shaw. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001, 51. 55. Lenker, Fathers and Daughters, 73–74. 48

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56. Lenker, Fathers and Daughters, 63–64 and 117. 57. Lenker, Fathers and Daughters, 21–125. 58. Lenker, Fathers and Daughters, 51. 59. Lenker, Fathers and Daughters, 60. 60. Lenker, Fathers and Daughters, 52. 61. Lenker, Fathers and Daughters, 43–44, 142. 62. L.E. Boose and B. Flowers (eds). Daughters and Fathers. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989, 110–111. 63. Lenker, Fathers and Daughters, 61–62. 64. Valerie Walkedine. Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997; Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance (eds). Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice: The Cinemas of Girlhood. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. 65. Terrie Waddell. Mis/Takes: Archetype, Myth and Identity in Screen Fiction. London, New York: Routledge, 2006, 135. 66. Waddell, Mis/Takes, 130. 67. Waddell, Mis/Takes, 131.

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2 Brideshead Revisited Charles Ryder Drowning in Honey

When Brideshead Revisited was first shown on British television in October 1981 the series omitted all mention of Charles Ryder’s mother. From these early broadcasts we could only assume that Charles even had a mother; stranger things than a motherless protagonist were to confront the viewer anyway. From what we saw and heard in the first screenings of the series we had nothing to doubt Charles’s comment, ‘Perhaps I am curious about people’s families, you see there’s only my father and I.’ When the DVDs of the series were released twenty years later, however, the unnamed mother Ryder was present, although in a position somewhat dislocated from her place in Evelyn Waugh’s novel. In the original television broadcast and later VHS release of the Venice scenes the lengthy travelogue-style sequence was presented with a four and a half minute hiatus in Jeremy Irons’s voice-over narration. On the DVD release, however, a monologue of similar length was inserted to fill the gap. This restored much of Waugh’s own description of Venice. Accompanying the sightseeing in the Church of the Frari and San Marco as well as various canals and palazzi, however, a passage from earlier in the novel was incorporated. This passage detailed Charles’s 50

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experience of, and thoughts on, religion. It also referred to his mother’s religious devotion and her death while serving with an ambulance in Bosnia in the Great War. In the novel, this passage occurs not in the Venice chapter but during the golden summer at Brideshead that is the highpoint of Charles’ latter-day ‘happy childhood’. Eradicating Charles’s mother completely, then omitting her from her original place in the novel and finally reinstating her in the Venice episode, ‘Home and Abroad’, is characteristic of the way Brideshead represents the maternal and femininity in general and the way these overwhelm Charles and infuse Irons’s characterization of him – particularly as it is in Venice that Charles’s experience of Arcadia and the supernatural becomes more complex and more troublingly sophisticated. For, like Oedipus, Charles Ryder’s journey is an encounter with ideas of the maternal and the feminine that are represented, and withheld from representation, in a variety of complex and ambiguous ways. Initially ignorant and perhaps wary of what he calls the ‘rabble of women-kind’ that confronts him, as the series progresses Charles gives himself over to it, piece by piece, ultimately reconciling himself with the displaced maternal and feminine drives of his own unconscious. Witness to the resistances of Sebastian (Anthony Andrews), Julia (Diana Quick) and Lord Marchmain (Laurence Olivier), who make the journey before him, Charles appears untouched by perversion. Unlike those who attempt to defy the seductions of Teresa Marchmain (Claire Bloom) and the maternal unconscious she stands for, Charles offers very little resistance and so suffers none of the resultant hysterical symptoms. If we understand anything about perversion, however, we need to understand that point of view is everything. Hardly free of it, Charles’s perversion can be seen from an altogether different perspective. On one level, from the position of pop English Protestant thought, it is in the relative lack of resistance that he offers to a sort of Virgin Mary version of the maternal unconscious and in his ultimate conversion to Roman Catholicism 51

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that we may read his perversion. For, in this context, the act of conversion not only indicates a sense of social rebellion, but it offends mainstream logic by placing him willingly within the arms of his great oppressor. On another level, from a feminist perspective, we may read that same conversion to patriarchal and authoritarian Roman Catholicism as a wholly inadequate response to the far more complex claims of the maternal unconscious. As a response to his confrontation with the maternal unconscious in his quest for love, Arcadia and the realm of the supernatural, this conversion appears as a perverse, almost cynical act of defence and repression. Either way, it seems that in offending the logic of both English Protestant and Anglophone Freudian feminist thought he must be guilty of perversions far greater than the general neuroses he observes in the Flyte family. In that sense he must be doing something very wrong. But if perversion is the opposite to neurosis, as Freud and Teresa de Lauretis would have it, then in offending the logic of these right-thinking forces, Charles Ryder, as one of Jeremy Irons’s great princes of perversion, must be doing something very right.

The Pleasures of Building An outstanding line in the almost once-in-a-lifetime ten million pound budget for the series is its provision for shooting on location.1 It is in those locations, and in their architecture in particular, that the series brings a potent, speechless and overwhelming physical force to Charles’s heroic journey. Buildings and the ‘fierce little human drama’ that takes place inside those buildings have always been central to this story. Indeed, the desertion and desolation of these buildings and spaces, particularly Marchmain House in London and Brideshead Castle itself, is a central concern and preoccupation for Charles. His first encounter with the Tenebrae chant from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, ‘Quomodo sedet sola civitas [plena populo!]’ (‘How doth the city sit solitary [that was full of people!]’), when 52

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Cordelia (Phoebe Nicholls) mentions it as Marchmain House is facing its destruction, is still on his mind at the end of the story ten years later when he finds Brideshead in the possession of the Army and the degenerations of the ‘age of Hooper’. Discussing the use of building with Hooper (Richard Hope) and comparing it with watching a son grow up, Charles laments, ‘I dunno. I’ve never built anything’. What producer Derek Granger and directors Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Charles Sturridge have been able to emphasize in this, most famous example of the English heritage2 series is Charles’s encounter with the idea of building, certain buildings in particular, the characters that inhabit them, and the way the enormity, complexity and the potential for physical containment and subordination of that experience echoes the drama of his unconscious. The picture of Oxford in the series is one that charts the opening and closing of the ‘low door in the wall’ to that state of Arcadia that is, for Charles, a dominant sensibility. The first images we see of Oxford present a visual pattern to the way in which it will be represented throughout the first four episodes. Dissolving from the grey days of 1943 to a sunlit Oxford of 1923, our first sight of the city is a long distance panorama, with the dome of the Radcliffe Camera on the right and Christ Church’s Tom Tower on the left both framed between the foliage of trees – a framing device we will see again in Episode Nine, ‘Orphans of the Storm’, as a feature of several of the paintings from Ryder’s Latin America. From this establishing shot there is a cut to another position high above All Souls from which point the camera pans and tilts to take in its architectural features. This is repeated over another college before the shot concludes with a downward crane shot which seems to take the eye on a diagonal descent to meet Sebastian, in extreme long shot, as he enters Charles’s college. We see a similar shot a minute or so later in which the camera moves from a domed bell tower diagonally downwards to take in Sebastian’s arrival in the front quad and then his entry into Charles’s rooms. 53

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Brideshead Revisited (Granada Television/PBS) 11 episodes, starting January 18, 1982. Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Charles Sturridge Shown: Jeremy Irons (as Charles Ryder), Anthony Andrews (as Lord Sebastian Flyte) Credit: Granada Television/Photofest

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Photographing Jeremy Irons and his fellow actors in long and extreme long shots, in order to place them very clearly in their architectural context, is a persistent motif throughout Brideshead. In Oxford, however, along with the high panoramic establishing shots and the downward and diagonal craning and tilting shots, this motif predominates. Think of the downward tilt lovingly interrogating Tom Tower at Christ Church, just as Charles makes his way towards the first lunch party in Sebastian’s rooms – a tilt that is repeated from another angle as Charles approaches Sebastian’s rooms again on the last Sunday of the first Summer term. Another example is the right to left diagonal crane and pan over Charles’s college that precedes Jasper’s (Stephen Moore) ‘Grand Remonstrance’. In Episode Three, ‘The Bleak Light of Day’, when ‘Sebastian’s days in Arcadia were numbered’, a more gloomy atmosphere accompanies another panorama establishing shot which captures the Radcliffe dome side-by-side with the spire of the church of St. Mary the Virgin. The effect of this cinematography is to match the lightness of spirit of Irons’s first Oxford voice-over that tells of the bells ringing out ‘high above’ the city’s gables and cupolas and the resonance of the joyous laughter of the undergraduates dwelling there. It also, obviously, has the effect of representing Charles’s feelings of discovery and the happiness of that time in terms of Oxford architecture itself and the beauty of the physical environment. In this context, extended by the first summer at Brideshead Castle that makes its own architectural impression, we can easily see the root of Charles’s inclination towards architectural painting. In the way this cinematography seems to show the gables and cupolas looking down on its tiny and callow charges, the Oxford architecture playing the nurturing role of Alma Mater, hovering over Charles’s delayed happy childhood.3 The omnipresence of the dome of Brideshead Castle (Castle Howard), as well as the way it is thoroughly interrogated by the Lindsay-Hogg/Sturridge camera, establishes the importance 55

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of dome and centri-form architecture throughout the series. Early in his first summer at Brideshead, Charles is sketching it and gazing up at its drum in awe. Later we see him and Sebastian wandering around inside and peering over it for Charles’s first glimpse of Bridey (Simon Jones). This is a motif that will be repeated in Episode Three when, from the dome of Marchmain House, they see Julia arriving late for the dinner at Rex Mottram’s (Charles Keating). Beyond the Castle itself, the Temple of the Four Winds and the Mausoleum (featured in the credit sequence of Episode Seven, ‘The Unseen Hook’, following the death of Teresa Marchmain) in the grounds both adapt architectural principles of the circle and square. As at Oxford and Marchmain House, the dome motif extends well beyond Brideshead. Just as the dome is a principal part of the establishing shot at Brideshead, so too the dome of S. Maria della Salute establishes the Venice sequence and those of S. Marco sign off on it. I have written that at Oxford the architecture seems to play a maternal role in the lives of its undergraduates but, beyond the obvious association with the female breast, the proliferation of domes and cupolas in the series recalls an established classical and Renaissance architectural association with femininity and the idea of nurturing. Domes are an obvious consequence of the centri-form architectural theories of the first century Roman author Vitruvius. These ideas were whole-heartedly adopted by key Renaissance architectural authors, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) and Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) and those of their colleagues like Bramante (1444–1514) and Michelangelo (1475–1563) who sought, in particular, to fuse Christianity and Humanism together in the form of the centralized church. For these theorists, and the architects from whom they took and gave inspiration well into the nineteenth century, the circular form stood for beauty, harmony and architectural perfection matching the perfection of God and the universe.4 As Palladio points out in relation to the temples at Tivoli and Rome, which he attributes to the 56

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Roman goddess Vesta (patron of the Vestal Virgins), the ancient use of circular form was particularly made for temples dedicated to female deities of the earth ‘by which human generation is subsisted’, the moon and sun, echoing the shape, rotations and transmigrations of all three.5 Furthermore this idea of the gendering of architecture is obvious in Palladio’s observation (which he gets form Vitruvius6) of the way the ancients used particular orders of column for the particular sex of the deity in question. For Venus, Flora, the Muses and Nymphs the ornamental use of leaves and motifs of blooming in the Corinthian order was seen to be most suitable to these virginal and fecund goddesses.7 The fact that many such circular, domed and Corinthian ordered structures were subsequently dedicated to the Christian Virgin Mary, as was the Pantheon in Rome in 608 CE, indicates a continuum of this association both throughout the early Christian period as well as in the Renaissance when the cult of the Virgin Mary expanded. In Brideshead itself we see that important buildings such as James Gibbs’s Radcliffe Library at Oxford (1739–40), as well as Vanbrugh’s Temple of the Four Winds (circa 1726–38) and Hawksmoor’s Mausoleum (1729) at Castle Howard, reveal a very strong connection to Palladio and his practice and theorizing of Roman circular domestic and temple architecture.8 So, along with the general invocation and representation of domes and centri-form architecture in the series, the emphasis in Brideshead on these buildings shows the way architecture is used as being highly evocative of the Virgin Mary, pagan female deities and myths of maternity and femininity in general. Furthermore, John Summerson’s establishment of the relationship between the Radcliffe Library, the Mausoleum at Castle Howard, Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and Bramante’s renowned Tempietto at S. Pietro in Montorio in Rome emphasizes the theme of martyrdom which has a continued association with domed, centri-formed churches and temples and which plays an important role in 57

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the series in both the representation of Teresa Marchmain and, arguably, in her family and all their victims, Charles Ryder in particular.9

Undergraduate Fantasy As the principal inhabitant of these spaces, Charles’s encounter with the variety of gender positions in his Oxford years is marked by certain pejorative notions of femininity. In Venice, Cara refers to Charles and Sebastian’s relationship in the context of what she calls ‘these Romantic friendships of the English and the Germans’. The two prostitutes, Death’s Head (Sue Jones-Davies) and the Sickly Child (June Page), put no such grandiose nomenclature to it when they meet them at The Old Hundredth, Irons and Andrews performing at their most callow, and call them ‘only fairies’. Antoine, who looms large over ‘the flamboyant aesthetes’ at Oxford, will be poorly repaid for his flair and the power of his insights when, many years later, Charles himself, in hot pursuit of Julia, dismisses him as ‘my pansy friend’. ‘This bad set’, as Jasper calls them, is thus gendered feminine because by traditional standards it is not masculine. But Waugh’s picture of gender at Oxford in the twenties is a rich one and should not be seen as limited to such essentialist notions of masculinity. The ‘hearties of the Bullingdon’, as Antoine refers to them, may well set the standard of varsity masculinity, but as Antoine himself experiences them throwing him in Mercury, they too are clearly in the mercurial grip of ‘an obscure and less easily classifiable libido’. In addition, ‘the middle course of culture’ embodied by Jasper, the Freud-reading Collins (Christopher Good) and the ‘College intellectuals’ as well as the more detached realm of the ‘proletarian scholars’ demonstrates that variety seems to be the dominant notion of gender encountered by Charles. Oxford, in his experience, cannot therefore simply be called ‘feminine’ or ‘homosexual’. As a prominent part of Charles’ Arcadia, it is the proliferation of gender positions at Oxford 58

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that aids its exoticism and not simply the heightened presence of homosexuality.10 Granted, this is certainly nothing if not an all-male and misogynistic space and the ‘invasion’ of women in Eights Week and the attitudes of Sebastian and Lunt thereto emphasize this.11 But within those confines (not unlike the confines of patriarchal culture itself) Charles begins his journey, which is very much about seeking out the paranormal, with a social and sexual encounter bent on inverting the everyday realities of the social world. We may read such an encounter as yet another encounter with femininity, but such a reading is made from the association of femininity with a richness of gender and sexual possibilities, in what Paul Deslandes refers to as the ‘slippage’ between Oxbridge masculine and feminine styles,12 not from a misogynist association with monstrosity. As Episode One, ‘Et In Arcadia Ego’, has Antoine quoting from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), it is the half man, half woman Tiresias, not the Sphinx, nor Narcissus, who establishes the range of gender positions available to Charles as he makes his journey towards the supernatural and back again. In the context of this pansexual Arcadia, Charles’s relationship with Sebastian is hardly a simple one. The history of Brideshead’s television reception, however, is marked, like all clever television, by the fact that each spectator heard their particular dog whistle being set off to reassure them in their own particular comfort zone. When it comes to the question of Charles and Sebastian and sexuality no one was denied. Sharp and textually honed adolescents were triumphant in their knowledge of what was going on. The lavender set, which knew well what was going on, was charmed by the fact that they ‘didn’t actually see anything’. Gay men, accustomed to the suppressed text and the dog whistles buried in the subtext, were even given a bit more than they might have expected in the vaguely queer visuals and the proliferation of camp. No doubt all these spectatorial addresses serve a purpose, but watching Charles’s encounter with Sebastian in the 59

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notoriously family-friendly format of primetime television, the particular perversion of love and sexuality that Charles’s relationship with Sebastian represents, in itself, is a far more accurate reading of the Arcadian love than any which might satisfy the panoply of more healthy desires falling on the gay–straight spectrum. Certainly their relationship is as gay and sexual as it is childish and latent. For all the apparent innocence of Cara’s (Stephanie Audran) remark about ‘romantic friendships’, there is nothing innocent about Cara. A woman of the world, we have no reason to see her summary as ignorant as to what might go on between two Oxford undergraduates in the 1920s, callow though they might be. And yet it always seems foolhardy to me to be distracted by the fact that Charles and Sebastian are being played by thirtysomething actors who, despite their art, make a nineteen-year-old homosexual encounter look far more mature and sophisticated that it might have been. I am not trying to engage in a Clintonesque hair-splitting exercise about the nature and physical acts of gay sex in Oxford in the twenties, but to define their relationship in any mature and concrete terms seems to miss the point.13 Unlike Sebastian, who is gay and goes onto a masochistic relationship with the foul Kurt (Jonathan Coy), Charles moves seamlessly from his relationship with Sebastian to his relationship with Julia. As I have already mentioned, for Charles gay men (or at least men like Anthony Blanche and his friends at the Blue Grotto) become ‘pansies’ and the ‘ancient love’ he found with Sebastian, which he says will be with him until his ‘last hour’, becomes relegated to the confines of his former life with Sebastian, that is merely the ‘forerunner’ to his great love with Julia. Charles’s sexual history may not show him to be straight, but it shows him to be no more gay after his relationship with Sebastian than before it.14 The resemblance between Sebastian and Julia, which is as evident to Charles in the 1920s as it is ten ‘dead years’ later, cannot be divorced from our reading of the Charles/Sebastian 60

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ménage and its inherent perversion. Again Julia and Sebastian seem to come at Charles as another incarnation of the Tiresias figure and the fact that Charles insists on their uncanny resemblance, although Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick look nothing like each other, appears to confirm the fantasy as a perversion of Charles’s unconscious. They are not the same person and as we see and hear of Sebastian’s future suffering we see that he can hardly be read as merely a projection of Charles’s corrupted mind. For Charles, however, Sebastian and Julia are just this. Merging into one they represent the bi or, perhaps, pan sexuality of his vision, perverse, extreme and well outside the norms of the everyday world. To Charles, this double-headed monster is a manic reminder of his own course. All three of them are in the process of coming to terms with, or fending off, the threat of mother seduction by resorting to narcissism. In the early part of the series Julia, first seen as a shadowy figure in the back seat of a car, is kept at bay like every other figure of threatening womanhood except Teresa Marchmain. When she does appear she is cast as the hard and frivolous self-obsessed flapper accepting the cigarette from Charles’s lips and emitting nothing more than the inaudible ‘thin batsqueak of sexuality’ for use when it might come in handy later. But although later we delight in her change, we cannot forget the challenging figure she cut for Charles in Arcadia. Just as Teresa is revealed as both vampire and saint, so too, in Charles’s conjuror’s world, can Julia be a complex changeling of callousness and charm.

The Castle of the Bride’s Head For Charles, Brideshead Castle is very much the site of the Arcadian joys of his replacement ‘happy childhood’ in the first summer with Sebastian. But for all the buoyancy and the joy of the Baroque celebrated in the castle, there is a challenging note of Gothicism in the name itself that implies a 61

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very patriarchal occlusion of the feminine spirit. For lacking the novel’s allusion to the river Bride, the series gives us no account for the name, thus leaving it hanging as complex omnibus title of feminine fears and fantasies. ‘Who, or what, is the bride and where is the rest of her?’ seems to be the question that presents itself. Above all, Brideshead does not seem a very lucky place for brides. Julia went there unhappily as Rex’s bride, and when she sought to be there as Charles’s, that was unsuccessful too. Mrs Musprat’s experience of Brideshead Castle, as ‘the bride leading the bride’, was similarly frustrated. So too were Bridey’s ambitions – for he is bride both by name and also by Mrs Musprat’s allusion to his ‘undoubted virginity’. But above all, the bride in question is clearly Teresa, left there praying in the chapel as Alex went off to war. The imagery conjured by the name of Brideshead Castle is both a sign of Teresa’s power – it is her seat of government and as Mary’s agent she dominates its architectural expression – and the sign of her power to signify terror in men. As the vampire, the blood-sucker, the witch (at least as Anthony Blanche calls her) and the arch manipulator that we will see her be, it is the image of the Medusa-like decapitation of that monstrous woman, evoked in the image of the bride’s head, that is far more terrifying that anything she might do alive. In all senses this bride’s head is the place they all come back to, the place they cannot stay away from. It is the fear and fascination of maternal/female sexuality. Just as Salome produces the Baptist’s head, the head of Teresa the bride is, before he even meets her, constantly part of Charles’s journey and a sign of the Titanic struggle of his unconscious. If Samgrass (John Grillo) and even Rex both become, to an extent, ‘someone of Mummy’s’, her son Lord Brideshead again heralds her power and evokes it throughout the narrative. As we observe her chatting about the eye of the needle with Charles – throwing the stones of hypocrisy (if not ignorance) in her own glasshouse – Teresa is certainly not beyond the irrational. If Cordelia represents this in her childish 62

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‘bird-happy’ faith, Bridey does so in his craziness. Of the odd hangers-on to the religious life that Sebastian and eventually Charles will become, Bridey is the Crown Prince. Sebastian speaks of him as ‘miserable’ and ‘all twisted inside’, but what stands out about Bridey is his flagrant enjoyment of his oddball nature. He seems completely ignorant of his abnormality and completely ignorant of its effects on others. In all things he is completely the creature of Teresa, completely her victim, but he is so utterly suborned that he has no desire other than to be so. In a micro model of Charles’s destiny (and that of Sebastian, Julia and Alex Marchmain), Bridey has been called ‘pigeon pie’ and eaten up and has given himself utterly to it.

The Bride of the Adriatic As we saw in many examples at Oxford, the Venice scenes in Episode Two, ‘Home and Abroad’, maintain the strategy of having the camera pan and tilt or crane down the height of a building and locating the characters in long shot at its base. Indeed, the Venice sequence begins with such a camera strategy as we discover Sebastian and Charles arriving at Palazzo Polignac at the end of a crane shot which began at the dome of S. Maria della Salute and followed them to the Palace along the Grand Canal. Cara’s descent for her first meeting with Charles, where his voice-over explains his ignorance of women, prostitutes and adulterous couples, is the first of seven similar shots. These shots place the three tourists and their ‘little Venetian nobleman’ (Victor Baring) as small, suborned and almost insignificant figures gaping in awe, ‘amid the immense splendours of the place’. This is a visual strategy that completely reverses that of David Lean’s iconic Venice film of 1955, Summertime. In Lean’s film the point of reference is clearly given to his protagonist, Katharine Hepburn, and the camera’s most common way of interrogating any significant landmark is to tilt upwards. This approach emphasizes that there is no Venice awe like Hepburn’s awe. To make the point, 63

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Lean occasionally has Hepburn double the movement of his 35 mm camera with an 8 mm camera of her own. I make the comparison to demonstrate the way in which Brideshead shows the delights of Venice to be almost imposed, rather more like manna from Heaven, than the generally accessible by-product of the more mundane international tourist trade, as is suggested in Summertime. Furthermore, as in Oxford and at Brideshead Castle, this visual strategy gives a very definite sense that these magnificent buildings are hovering over these characters, which are very much in their charge. The emphasis placed on Cara, Alex Marchmain’s mistress, and the persistence of domes as well as churches and paintings dedicated to the Virgin Mary gives a very real sense that this protection provided by Venice, bride of the Adriatic, is feminine and maternal in nature. Visconti’s Death in Venice (1972) is evoked in Brideshead by its final Venice scene at the Lido, a scene that does not occur in Waugh’s novel. This scene may be the international marker par excellence for the seductive delights of boy love but it also carries the weight of a greater Viscontian theme of the devastating presence of the mother or great lady archetype. Evident in films as diverse as Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Bellissima (1952), the devastating and overwhelming presence of the mother figure in Visconti’s work is perhaps represented most potently in those roles played by Silvana Mangano, namely in Death in Venice and Conversation Piece (1974). In both of these films Mangano plays the highly decorous and potent figure Visconti knew so well in his own mother.15 This is the beautiful and serene mother, both as high nurturer and also as the terribly inescapable site of all desire. Whereas in Conversation Piece Visconti interrogates this figure (a garrulous, bombastic, yet still magnificent woman) through the jaundiced eyes of a gigolo (Helmut Berger), in Death in Venice Mangano’s portrayal is virtually mute, observed from Aschenbach’s (Dirk Bogarde) distanced point of view as Tadzio’s mother. The most enduring image 64

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of her is in those scenes where she sits with her brood of children carefully arranged around her and greets Tadzio (Bjorn Andresen) formally but affectionately. What Charles discovers in Venice is that although Teresa Marchmain is not seen there, as a Death in Venice styled grand and potent mother figure, her presence is everywhere. She lurks behind Alex’s refusal to attend the Corombona Ball where her friends (Waugh’s novel tells us) are waiting to shun him and her spies are waiting to note it all down.16 She emanates from the architecture and from the city itself, which has for so long been the strange, proud and exotic place of Italy. She even hibernates in the ‘neat, prosaic figure’ of Cara herself, who speaks for her against the torrent of hatred Teresa has endured from Alex, and which is developing in Sebastian. Finally, it might be said, she is in Charles’s mind already, hovering all around him and inducing the meditation, mentioned above, on his own nurturing, dead mother. Looking out at his son Sebastian wading, intoxicated, in the shallows of the Adriatic, Alex Marchmain is, in a sense, the dying von Aschenbach of Death in Venice. What he sees in Charles embracing Sebastian is the image of his Tadzio. This is the forlorn fantasy of having this first dangerous love not for a women, Teresa, who fatally but unwillingly seduced him, but, as Cara speaks of it, for a boy. This is Charles’s experience of Sebastian as ‘the forerunner’, but not Alex’s nor Sebastian’s. As Charles will experience it, in part, both Alex and Sebastian have been suborned and vanquished by Teresa’s charm. This has left Alex as a devastated victim of perversion.17 A continental wanderer, he wears his ‘Byronic aura’ like a sign identifying him as a leper – the very crown prince of perverts. That sign speaks of the way he lives his life in a state of perpetual repulsion away from Teresa. It tells the substantial monde under her influence that he is to be shunned and nowhere in that world may he appear without being spurned. But the Byronic aura points to a far greater perversion of seduction to which he, like his fellow 65

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continental peer, Lord Byron, has been subject.18 Alex’s experience, as Cara relates it, has the very definite ring of the fantasy of childhood seduction. ‘What has she done to deserve all this hate? Nothing but to be loved by someone who was not grown up’ says Cara. This is clearly an expression of Cara’s understanding and empathy for Teresa. In Charles’s developing picture of Sebastian’s mother, however, such a description plays a part in casting Teresa as a siren with an irresistible song from which the child cannot escape. Like all incarnations of the maternal and the feminine in Brideshead, making a monster out of Teresa is wholly inadequate. It says more about the childish fantasies of Alex, Sebastian and Charles than it says about the women in their lives. Only in such a fantasy as this could Cara be, in Charles’s mind, both prostitute and that ‘neat, prosaic figure amongst the splendours’ of Venice. Dominated by his initial misreading of Teresa, however, it is not surprising that he can merely see Cara as a creature of Madonna/whore opposites. Clearly Cara is neither a tart nor prosaic but something much more. Insightful, understanding, beautiful and, above all, Stephanie Audran, the exotic high-profile French actress, she is a woman who may change before men’s eyes, even to the extent that she can play an Italian. If the Venice episode leaves Charles with another strong encounter with the powerful feminine/maternal it also, through her Byronic victim Alex, leaves him with a palpable sense of loss, sadness and melancholy. For a narrative so much about building this is undoubtedly the Venice of John Ruskin, as English culture understood it for a century after the publication of his best-selling The Stones of Venice of 1853. A sad and strange place, where nothing was certain, nothing could be determined at face value.19 For Charles of the gothic sensibilities, the possessor of his own kind of childhood sadness, this is yet another encounter with tristesse, as emanates from Brideshead’s Venice, leaving him ‘drowning in honey, stingless’. 66

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The Bloodsucker In Waugh’s novel, it could be argued that Teresa is a more sympathetic figure to that which is cut for her by the television series. At least, in the novel, she appears more reflective and therefore more reasonable. In one of her ‘little talks’ with Charles, who also does not hunt, while she assumes Sebastian is ‘in pursuit of the fox’, she admits that she hates hunting and remarks upon her own hypocrisy that she should feel relieved that he is doing the very same. The idea of her self-exposure is that she should think it better, when all is said and done, for her son to be a foxhunting philistine than an inebriate.20 There are a number of such moments of Lady Marchmain’s personal insight studded throughout the novel but very few make their way into the screenplay. As we hear in her theological tap-dancing over the question of the rich man and the eye of the needle, what we are left with in the series is perhaps a harsher and much less genuine character, much more in the figure of a saint whose martyrdom is very lightly worn. The effect of this, however, is significant in that the more undesirable Teresa appears, the more perverse is Charles’s ultimate conversion to everything she stands for. In some early scenes of Episode Three, ‘The Bleak Light of Day’, we see Teresa in motion, often in garden settings and once in the hall at Brideshead from a very high camera position in the dome. In these scenes she moves effortlessly through space with her way cleared by Charles standing aside and opening doors for her. As we see her praying the Rosary, this is a serene picture, emphasizing her power over the diminutive Mr Ryder. For his part, when he is with her, Charles appears frequently uncomfortable and slightly agitated, due both to Irons emphasizing his youth and his concern over being buttonholed by her behind Sebastian’s back. Her authority and sense of matriarchal majesty is emphasized after the Old Hundredth incident when the men walk along as a group behind her, proffering conversation forward as they listen to 67

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her and waiting to be summoned forward, as Samgrass is, to speak with her more intimately. This scene gives a very definite sense of a queen and her train on parade. As we see in all the business of dragging her train off to chapel and summoning people to her rooms among teams of uniformed flunkies, this is also clearly the case in her own house. Teresa’s cold passivity is emphasized in Episode Four when she first hears of Sebastian’s drunkenness and later when she is reading Chesterton’s The Wisdom of Father Brown. When she first hears that Sebastian is drunk, she is affected but shows herself able to recover quickly and move on to the next passage. Wilcox (Roger Milner) calls the family into dinner and Teresa is able to move off as if nothing has happened. She repeats this when Sebastian makes his highly disruptive entrance after dinner. After the disturbance she quickly resumes reading. Her costume contains her arms, allowing her (with the help of servants and Bridey) to achieve an economy of movement. Following the cut-away scene with Charles and Sebastian on the stairs, the scene cuts back to a shot of Lady Marchmain closing the book that tilts up to her in a medium close-up. She sits there for a few seconds, staring serenely into space before saying, ‘I think I’d like to go to chapel now!’ From the placement of Bridey beside her and her two daughters at her feet, we know she is not addressing them directly but some entity of her own out in the distance. The next morning in her sitting room with Charles, we see Teresa similarly staring out the window, not so much looking at the view but at what is beyond sight and comprehension. Perched on a gilt chair surrounded by images of the Madonna and a triptych of her three ‘splendid’ brothers, she conducts her interview with Charles in a manner that reveals both her power and her vulnerability in equal measure. Her frank admissions about Sebastian and her husband make Charles embarrassed and uneasy but she relieves this situation by turning it into something more resembling a love scene. As he is about to leave to catch his train, Teresa jumps up and 68

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blocks him and, placing her hand on his chest, offers him a copy of the book about her brother. She then sits at her desk to write the dedication and to give her speech in praise of her brother and of her aspirations for Sebastian. Charles kneels on the chair that backs onto the desk as she gives her speech, signs and then hands him the book. ‘I prayed for you too in the night’ she says as Charles stares warmly into her eyes, the moment being emphasized and prolonged by a cut away to a wide shot of the two characters staring into each other’s eyes. Only Teresa’s command, ‘Go on. You’ll miss your train’, breaks the concentration and even then Charles remains staring at her, clearly captivated by her performance. His voice-over a few seconds later makes this scene of seduction all the more clear: I was no fool; I was old enough to know that an attempt had been made to suborn me and young enough to have found the experience agreeable.

Beyond this, if there were any doubts as to the sexual structure of the scene they will have been dismissed by the presence of the Sphinx-decorated desk set carefully placed between them. This is a pattern that is repeated in their next meeting at Oxford. The scene has been arranged by Teresa sending Charles a letter requesting a rendezvous (as she has done before). They meet in his rooms and her presence there has an air of the unusual about it. Hitherto the only other woman we have seen in Charles’s rooms, indeed anywhere in Oxford, has been the heavily chaperoned Julia. This seemingly quasi-illicit encounter begins with her, once again, staring out the window, sitting on the very spot where her youngest son once vomited. She is wearing a black veil and, mixing her casual chatter with mention of her husband, she makes her way closer to Charles, looking at him with what might be best described as ‘bedroom eyes’. Stopping very close by, almost touching up against him at the fireplace, she stares blankly at the mantle as she asks him her real question about Sebastian’s drinking. Like lovers they seem to converse freely, with Charles being markedly more comfortable than 69

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in their last encounter. He sees the irony of the situation when, having got what she wanted, Teresa suddenly comments on the time and, like a lover, remarks ‘Sebastian’s expecting us at one’. If the garden strolls and liaison epistolaire hint at a love affair between Charles and Teresa, their break-up is equally romantic. As in so many of their encounters her telling suggestion of generalized affection – ’I look on you as very much one of us’, ‘everyone loves your paintings in the garden room’, ‘you know how fond we all are of you’ – is repeated here to emphasize his act of betrayal. Just as Sebastian’s reaction to Charles’s friendship with his mother implies sexual jealousy, the very same thing is implied by Teresa in the face of Charles’s ultimate gesture of fidelity to Sebastian. This lover’s jealousy, particularly that of Teresa’s, leaves Charles ‘unmoved’. For all his callowness of the past, from Teresa he has learned a serenity and an economy of movement and emotion (essential strains of the Irons performance) that he can now place up against their onslaught of distracted passion. Both are using Charles in their struggle against each other but neither really understands, until this point, that he is playing them both in a game of his own perverse desire. For all the manipulations he has endured at both their hands, here, in the face of Teresa’s accusations of his callousness and wickedness, Charles confirms that it is his perversion that is being exercised, not theirs. When he leaves Brideshead he considers that he is being dismissed by two lovers, two powerful sites of desire encountered on his journey towards some ultimate state of desire. He does not know it, of course. He thinks he has left behind the extremities of desire with the low door in the wall, the enchanted garden, the sunless coral palaces, the world of magic and conjurors, the world of illusion and the supernatural. But his journey will take another and more dramatic and Byzantine route before he finally glimpses that state of Arcadia. 70

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Time to Speak of Julia Under the spell of Sebastian and then Teresa Marchmain, to Charles, Julia initially appears as the quintessential vapid flapper. His first sight of her occurs as she peers from the shadowy rear of a passing car and for the next five episodes barely manages to emerge from the shadows of her own narcissism. Immersed in being ‘nuts about Rex’ and with the business of defying her mother, Julia has no time for Charles beyond the need she has for him to accept her sibling responsibilities towards Sebastian. It is little wonder, therefore, that when she leaves them alone for the first summer at Brideshead, Charles feels ‘a sense of liberation and peace’ that he will not feel again until the ‘all clear’ sirens of the Blitz. For the first half of the series Julia seems to hop about tossing hats and barking imperatives – ‘you two absolutely must come’ – with what Charles describes as a her sense of ‘mild disdain but with air of possession’. When Charles tells her about Sebastian being drunk she dismisses any claims it may have on her emotions by pronouncing it as ‘something chemical in him’ and remarking ‘How very boring!’ She is dressed for dinner in a hideous pink dress with lots of Jazz age flaps and flounces and she completes the 1980s ‘let’s get physical’ look of the ensemble by adding a thin white headband and matching long socks. Eager, as always, to avoid Sebastian’s concerns when they might inconvenience herself, she hops off as if late for a mid-eighties Gatsby retro party and with even less seriousness. Later, when Charles calls her on her indifference, she is slumped in a chair, seemingly devoted more to the concerns of her fashion magazine than to Sebastian’s ‘boring’ unhappiness. What she wants, at this point, is for him to ‘go off to Kenya or somewhere where it doesn’t matter if he wants to be always tight’ and this is essentially the destiny he will assume. If in the two years prior to Charles’s ten ‘dead years’ Julia appears flippant and indifferent, Charles does not find her 71

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completely uninterested and unmanipulative. When he first meets her off the train in the Summer of 1923, it is only minutes before he is seduced into dobbing in Sebastian for his own apparent rudeness at not staying to have tea with her on his first visit to Brideshead in the previous Spring. But this initial suggestion of her Teresa-like power to suborn him will pale into insignificance after her next skilful manipulation. Following his expulsion from Brideshead and what he tells Rex is the end of his dealing with ‘that family’, Charles returns to London from Paris for the General Strike of 1926. He is only in London a few days before he is found and successfully summoned to Marchmain House by Julia. Their interview, in performance, has an intensity about it underlined by a certain degree of anxiety on Julia’s part. Nonetheless, although Teresa Marchmain is dying in her bed upstairs, the encounter has the Marchioness’s teeth marks all over it. From the beginning we notice a definite change in Julia. She is polite, nervous and almost demure – a major contrast to the pompous and self-obsessed figure we have seen her hitherto in Sebastian’s drama. A flash of the old Julia is evident, however, in her demand to leave the library where they first meet, ‘I hate this room.’ Waugh tells us that the library is an ugly and seldom used room but the series suggests nothing of that. All we really know of the library is that it is where Rex seduced her and where their marriage, by now crumbling under the burden of Rex’s politics, money and Brenda Champion, unfortunately began. So it appears, from Julia’s manner, that the weight of her marriage to Rex and the impending death of her mother, to which it has contributed, has brought on something of that sadness which Charles will encounter in full flower ten years later while crossing the Atlantic. Although life with Rex may account for the onset of sadness in Julia, it hardly accounts for her nervousness with Charles. As they cross from the library to the drawing room Julia is clasping and wringing her hands and finally, as she settles herself formally opposite him, she grasps the arm of the couch 72

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with her right hand. The gesture reveals her unease and her need to steady and maintain herself, to find her own economy of movement in the face of the apology she must make for her dying mother. Certainly in her current circumstances and given the gravity of his dismissal by Teresa at their last meeting, one might well expect a little nervousness. But the contrast with her previous arrogance and dismissiveness is obvious. Also her concern, or anyone else’s for that manner, for Charles’s dismissal is hard to fathom when we think of the lonely and wintry departure he made from Brideshead that day, with only Wilcox to close the low door in the wall behind him. What may account for this nervousness is her own initial discomfort at the real advent of the claims of her mother in her life, right at the point of her death. For Julia this is the uncomfortable beginning of her new role as Teresa’s chief apologist, the Earthly wielder of her power and the beginnings of a progress to power which will lead to her, and not Mrs Muspratt, to take, as Alex Marchmain says, ‘what was once my mother’s place in this house’. In this story, it is the conquest of Charles Ryder, and countless other worker bees (‘someone of Mummy’s’, ‘Julia’s people’), that is the key to matriarchal power. In this context, Julia’s nervousness with Charles is read as not so much about any feeling of guilt, nor the initial tremors of love, but an uncomfortable assumption of the robes of power. Her approach with him may be awkward, but in substance it is pure Teresa Marchmain. As we have seen in their rendezvous, Julia shows herself able to spread a little jam on Charles before an abrupt change of tack gets him to do what she wants. Once Charles has let her and Teresa off the hook over the matter of Teresa’s vicarious apology, it is all smooth sailing for Julia. The doleful string arrangement of the series’s main themes on the score stops abruptly; Julia begins to smile and becomes cute and somewhat flirty. Their parting handshake is easily converted into a tender kiss and before he knows it Charles is off to Morocco and sending his 73

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love to Cordelia – so much for the end of his dealing with that family. What he missed in the exchange, of course, was the voice of Teresa barking orders through Julia; ‘Sebastian. She wants him.’ Like Teresa, Julia is well on the way to become that which only Sebastian really knows of as the character of his mother. When Charles finds Sebastian in hospital and tells him of his mother’s illness, Sebastian studies a bedside picture of the Madonna and child and says, ‘Poor Mummy. She really was a femme fatale – she killed at a touch.’ Once Teresa is dead and Sebastian is left in the enclosed house at the end of the alley, having asserted the dynamics of power through which the narrative will proceed, Episode Seven, ‘The Unseen Hook’, can now finish, not with its usual black text on white title sequence, but with a spectacular funeral procession to bury Teresa in the domed and circular form mausoleum at Brideshead. When, after his ten ‘dead years’, Charles meets Julia again on the crossing from New York to Southampton the only thing to have changed is that there should be any question as to their intimacy. In fact their ten-year hiatus seems to have brought them closer together. Life with ‘Rex’s politics and money’ and ‘Celia’s art and fashion’ has hardened him and softened her, so that they can now meet at the mutually convenient point of ‘thwarted passion’, as Cordelia will later call it. Thwarted or not, however, it is certainly a point of complete and mutual understanding. Charles will later question whether it was, in fact, Julia he knew in Sebastian ‘in those distant Arcadian days’, but their meeting in the storm certainly indicates a continuation of something which goes well beyond finishing each other’s dramatic allusions (to Shakespeare and Chekhov) and sharing, unreservedly, their recent and painful histories. Within a moment of their meeting they are completely familiar and mutually engrossed. Within twenty-four hours he is relegating Sebastian to the role of ‘the forerunner’ and kissing her with ‘no phases, no start line, and no tactic at all’. Thus Charles’s solitude with Sebastian, punctuated and then overwhelmed by 74

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Teresa, is instantly reinstated with Julia – her all-pervasive note of loss and sadness providing matter for the ties that bind. Later that evening the camera pans across a sombre dining room featuring mostly lonely men attended to by waiters who, in the absence of the major part of the passenger list, have nothing else to do. From the beginning of the scene we can hear Julia speaking of the irony of her prior plans to have her daughter brought up a Catholic, but it is some time before she and Charles are picked out from the other diners, despite the important self-revelations of her speech. In an earlier voice-over, Charles has spoken of living long days with Julia in her childhood and the theme of her nostalgia for that time is taken up here in relation to the discussion of her daughter. The feelings Julia has for the loss of that time resonate also in her, hitherto unspoken, feelings about her daughter’s death in childbirth. If this is a love story, for Julia to be speaking of such things after their first kiss will confirm the idea about love that Charles expresses later in the episode about love making him hate the world. Her manner of speech here is bitter and the content vicious, stuck, as it is, in her horrendous, but largely unspoken, manipulations by Rex. In this context it is surprising, if ambiguous, that she finishes her speech with, ‘It’s late. Perhaps we’d better go to bed.’ In her manner there is a note of resignation about the inevitability of their union that is emphasized by the seemingly anti-romantic nature of their foreplay – coming together though sadness and not through any sense of the joy and optimism of passionate or ennobling love. This note hinting at a predetermined process leading perhaps to her own punishment is evident in her speech as they move towards her cabin, that they are together as ‘part of a plan’ – that here they are simply playing some part in a ritual of power and when she is confronted with the challenge of his desire for love – a claim he initially denies – she stumbles and defers consummation. Here she is once again expressing an anxiety about that role, or a defence against it, which gave her a similar anxiety with Charles ten years earlier in the drawing 75

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room at Marchmain House. What Charles sees in Julia here is of course the strategy of his own seduction through an attraction to her sadness, loss and her compulsion to the dictates of fate. This is why he denies his own desire for love and why he finds the suggestion so confronting. This is a warning as loud as that issued by Anthony Blanche twelve years earlier but one which neither Julia nor Charles cares to heed. If, as orphans of the storm, their passion began its life as thwarted as it would end, as the protagonists of the play set in a nobleman’s grounds, their structure of desire moves from mere sadness to a more complex cocktail of perversions. Two years after that trans-Atlantic crossing we find Charles and Julia sitting by the fountain at the bottom of a familiar craning shot that begins with the dome at Brideshead and ends with Julia and Charles as almost stick figures in extreme long shot. What Charles will come to fully understand in Julia, as throughout the evening they continually gather around the Atlas-figured fountain, is the extent of her waywardness, her own perversion and the extent to which these will inevitably become subject to repression. Her painful fit of hysteria spells out the details of her neurosis – ‘of course it’s something psychologists could explain’ – and her whipping of Charles with the rose stem announcing the advent of its repression. What this is all about for Charles is Julia’s links to Teresa and her uncomfortable and unwanted assumption of her power. This is what draws Charles to her, as it drew him to Sebastian and to Teresa herself. In this context we need to briefly compare the stories of Julia and Teresa. Like Teresa, Julia married the wrong, powerful (Protestant) man – a man who threatened her own power – and she paid for it. Wearing their sufferings, perhaps a little too lightly, however, their positions would both be bolstered by the eradication of the dominant men in their lives leaving them in sole possession of Brideshead – a bounty which these potent men (including Charles) threatened to take from them. Certainly, in the case of Julia, she restores, her relationships with both her parents 76

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but when Alex leaves the house to her and her descendents it is done under the spell she casts on him just as her mother did. It is also a spell we assume cast on Alex by his mother. In this sense he simply restores that part of Brideshead that is his to give. The power there that she assumes is the sole and lonely possession of Brideshead in the role of matriarch. This is the role of what was once her mother’s and grandmother’s place in the house. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) we believe Norman Bates’s mother to be alive because we think we see her walking across the stairs and landing of the family mansion. As Julia and Charles meet on the stairs at Brideshead, ‘a minute to say good bye’, we might well think similar thoughts. Throughout the final episode these stairs have been the setting for the ultimate assertion of Julia’s authority over the question of her father receiving the last rites. Finally, as she casts away Charles to confirm that authority, she also confirms her fullest assumption of her mother’s place. As Charles is left weeping hot tears we perhaps think of that moment in Episode Four, ‘Sebastian Against the World’, when Sebastian is similarly slumped on the stairs crying, senseless to the comforts of Charles, while his mother and her entourage go on reading The Wisdom of Father Brown then pass beneath him on their way to chapel. Some fifteen years later Julia, dressed like her mother, and walking with that effortless tread which gives the impression that she is floating, similarly passes on in a selfcomposed manner, leaving Charles in a pool of his own tears.

The Bride of Christ When Cordelia first invokes the Lamentations of Jeremiah (Quomodo sedet sola civitas) in Episode Eight, ‘Brideshead Deserted’, Charles is thinking of his paintings as the last record and testament to the beauty of Marchmain House before its imminent destruction. Cordelia, however, is thinking of the de-consecration of the chapel at Brideshead following 77

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her mother’s death, a quiet ceremony that she witnessed in secret. When Charles reinvokes the Lamentations in the last minutes of the series, he has just seen the reconsecrated chapel, a surprising delight amongst the apparent desolations of the Army’s occupation of Brideshead Castle. In his now ‘remarkably cheerful’ mood, he renounces the ‘vanity’ implied by the lament in favour of the symbolism of the flame burning ‘again for other soldiers, far from home’. For Charles, the Jeremiah image of the desolate city as a widow (‘Facta est quasi vidua’) (‘how is she became as a widow’) has become the revelation recorded by St. John in the last book of the New Testament, ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, ‘the holy city, new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’.21 As Lynne Harold Hough describes the revelation: the city is not only a church. It is a radiant bride. The Lamb that was slain is the Lord of the city, and the church is his happy bride. The city of the harlot has vanished, and the city of the living church is the bride of the living Christ. In every way tragedy has been replaced by glory.22

For Charles, the Old Testament widow of destruction and desolation had become the New Testament radiant bride of Christ, the church triumphant, dressed as yet another female incarnation. The emasculating and terrifying image of the castle of the bride’s head, a head without a body (perhaps an apt description of the minority status of the Roman Catholic Church in England) has become a more mollifying image. This new vision is a site of desire irresistible to Charles and one to which, following the examples of all those who impress him, he has inevitably returned. As the Brideshead faith of women, blood-suckers, inebriates, ‘odd hangers-on’, simpletons, crazies and reprobates, Roman Catholicism can easily accommodate Charles, the prince of perversion, and his desire for that state beyond the bounds of decency. It is, perhaps, the extent to which the series presses the insubstantial nature of Roman Catholic claims, the way it is so clear in portraying the mumbo jumbo, the trickery and 78

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hypocrisy, that it reveals the real and unapologetic perversion of Charles’s conversion. Like any of the lives of the saints, the incredibility of Charles’s conversion does not rely only on him witnessing the miracle of Alex’s penance and return to the church. It is also the apparent absurdity (to the non Roman Catholic outsider) of such a conversion, the lack of logic in the thing, that provides the fullest sense of a miracle and of a conversion powered by faith, not evidence and logic. In this sense Charles’s conversion looks very much like an immersion in a realm which is so oppressive, so untenable, so perverse, that it is really the full realization of the longed for feminine/ maternal abyss he first perceives in Teresa Marchmain. The extent to which the Roman Catholic Church and its cult of Mary might claim any purchase on the realm of the eternal feminine/maternal is of course highly dubious to feminist thought. Charles going over to Rome is in many ways a resolution that lands him in the most mundane of the representations of the feminine/maternal. Mundane, because it is the most patriarchal, the most institutionalized, most authoritarian possible incarnation of la femme. Beyond its outsider status in England, it seems to carry nothing of the perverse, nothing which challenges the social world in a way which we might understand to correspond with what Charles calls the ‘supernatural’, the ‘coral palaces’, nor ‘the low door in the wall’ and its enchanted garden. Like Charles’s two years in South America, this long and solitary journey into the ‘strange land’ of Catholicism seems destined to leave him yet again ‘unchanged’. But for all the offence to, so-called, logical thought, all the masochism and sacrifice of Charles’s gesture, for him, this is where true desire lies.23 This conversion, presented as a complete offence to all ‘right-thinking’ people, like his mother’s self-sacrifice in the snow in Bosnia, is made in the truest sense of the death drive, a headlong dive, not into some fake world of three dimensions and five senses, but into the real world of illusion. 79

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Notes   1. Ten million pounds is the common estimate of the series budget. In Lez Cooke. British Television Drama: A History. London: BFI Publishing, 2003, the author cites four million pounds (158).   2. Richard Dyer has written extensively on heritage cinema and television with a particular emphasis on issues of homosexuality and race. See Richard Dyer. The Culture of Queers. London: Routledge, 2002; Richard Dyer. ‘Nice Young Men Who Sell Antiques: Gay Men in Heritage Cinema’, in Ginette Vincendeau (ed). Film/Literature/Heritage: A Sight and Sound Reader. London: BFI, 2001, 43–48; and Richard Dyer. White. London: Routledge, 1997.   3. In Paul Deslandes. Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005, the author outlines the variety of ways in which Oxbridge undergraduates thought about their university in maternal terms. These included seeing Oxford or Cambridge as ‘a stern but nurturing mother … worthy of both adoration and respect’ and as due lifelong ‘feelings of veneration and love’. Deslandes extends the range of these associations quoting a letter from the mother of Edward Jupp (of Christ Church, Oxford) in which she expresses feelings of jealousy and maternal envy (27–28).   4. Peter Murray. The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance. London: Thames and Hudson, 1986, 59; Andrea Palladio. The Four Books of Architecture. New York: Dover Publications, 1965, 81.   5. Palladio, Four Books, 81 and 94.   6. Murray, Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, 126.   7. Palladio, Four Books, 81.   8. See particularly Palladio’s plates for the Roman temples of Vesta, plates xxv (Four Books, opp. 96) and lxvi (Four Books, following 104) and his own Villa Rotonda plate xiii (following p. 42), upon which Vanbrugh’s Temple (once referred to as the Temple of Diana) was based. See Sebastian Conran. Castle Howard. Surrey: Fulmar Colour Printing Company Limited, 1997, 70.   9. John Summerson. The Classical Language of Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985, 50. 10. Deslandes describes this proliferation of gender/sexual positions, ‘masculine styles’ and the ‘boundaries of masculinity’ in detail in Oxbridge Men, 9, 66, 72–79, 171, 178–179. 11. Cf. Deslandes’s picture of Oxbridge ambivalence towards ‘womankind’ between 1850 and 1920 in Oxbridge Men, 172–177. 12. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men, 73. 13. In Tison Pugh. ‘Romantic Friendship: Homosexuality and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited’, English Language Notes 38.4 (2001), 64, dealing with the novel, Pugh similarly argues against narrow interpretations of 80

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Charles and Sebastian’s relationship, while also giving substance to the notion of the ‘Romantic Friendship’ amongst English public school and Oxbridge undergraduates at the time. 14. David Higdon. ‘Gay Sebastian and Cheerful Charles: Homoeroticism in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited’, Ariel 25.4 (1994), 77, demonstrates the extent of the controversy in the literary criticism world. 15. Gaia Servadio. Luchino Visconti: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1982, 198. 16. Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1982, 66–67, 116–117. 17. Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, 28, points out the ‘marked absence of strong father figures’ as common to heritage texts of the early 1980s such as Brideshead Revisited, Maurice (1987) and Another Country (1984). 18. George, Lord Byron (1788–1824), who has been attributed with a dazzling array of perversions, was subject to physical and sexual abuse by his nanny, May Gray, over a two-year period from around the age of eight. See Fiona MacCarthy. Byron: Life and Legend. London: John Murray, 2002, 22–23. 19. Jan Morris. Venice. London: Faber and Faber, 1993, 12–24. 20. Waugh, Brideshead, 188. 21. John, 21: 1–2. 22. Lynn Harold Hough. ‘The Exposition of the Revelation of St. John the Divine’, The Interpreteras Bible, Volume xii. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1987, 551. 23. Cf. Nancy Mitford’s final analysis of Waugh’s own experience of conversion in ‘My Friend Evelyn Waugh’, Arts et Loisirs, April, 1966, reprinted in Charlotte Mitford (ed). Nancy Mitford: A Talent To Annoy: Essays, Journalism, and Reviews 1929–1968. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, 177–179: ‘But what wounded him most deeply was Vatican II. It was agony for him to listen to the liturgy in dull, flat English. One has the impression that he took refuge against the ugliness of the world in the Catholic church and then, suddenly, was delivered up to his worst enemies.’

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3 The French Lieutenant’s Woman Charles Smithson beyond the Pale and Mike beyond the Run

Citizen Kane (1940) is quite possibly the beginning of male melancholia in international cinema. Whether or not Charles Foster Kane’s yellow journalist mania, mixed with his ‘Rosebud’ memorialization of loss, starts the melancholic tendency, certainly such a tendency is highly visible at the point where international art cinema meets Hollywood after the Second World War. These films, by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, 1958), Douglas Sirk (There’s Always Tomorrow, 1956), Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959), Luchino Visconti (Il Gattopardo, 1963), Andrei Tarkovsky (Nostalghia, 1983), Woody Allen (Stardust Memories, 1980) and Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence, 1993), are a celebration of male loss. They present their male characters in masochistic pursuit of something they have already lost. Narcissistic, vain and certainly perverse, these melancholic men are nevertheless celebrated in these films and paraded for our pleasure, or at least in order to win our understanding. 82

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Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman is based on Harold Pinter’s screenplay of John Fowles’s 1969 novel of the same name. One particularly notable aspect of the film is that it is a parody of the cinema of male melancholia, the concerns of which it evokes, anticipates and summarizes in exacting detail. Both in its nineteenth- and twentieth-century plot lines, the film establishes the essential strain of melancholia in almost all Jeremy Irons’s films which, following this film, would see him become identified as the premier male melancholic character actor in international cinema. As I have made clear in chapter one, no one in dramatic cinema has played ‘melancholy’ more consistently than Irons. Beyond the somewhat campy invocation of the psychological discourse of melancholia through Irons’s nineteenth-century character in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Charles Smithson, there is also the story of Mike, Irons’s character in the 1980s part of the picture. Mike plays Charles in the story of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which is presented as a film within the film. Victim to a disease, which we might call the actor’s melancholy, Mike evokes a sense of loss, which is well known to anyone who has ever taken part in a film or a play or, indeed, any collective and extraordinary endeavour of an intense and limited life. This feeling of loss is fed by the anxiety that it is all going to end. Mike concentrates his anxieties of loss upon his fellow actor, Anna (Meryl Streep), and in his state of denial he is ultimately unable to distinguish her from her character in the film, Sarah Woodruff. Just as Charles Smithson parades his obscenity with Sarah for all to see, Mike seeks to offset his particular circumstances of loss by attempting to extend his filmic engagement with Anna beyond its appointed season. The French Lieutenant’s Woman acts as a sort of premonition of the course of Jeremy Irons’s career. In character terms, the role of Mike, if not also the role of Charles, is the role Jeremy Irons has been playing ever since. Perhaps more significantly, as a purely filmic creation, we can read Mike as 83

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The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981). Directed by Karel Reisz Shown from left: Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons Credit: United Artists/Photofest

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a protagonist contributing the idea of the actor’s melancholy to the expanding discourse of melancholia in the cinema. The actor as melancholic, however, tells us more about the representation of loss in the cinema than that which we might learn by the mere variation of melancholic character types. The actor’s melancholia, as in the example of Mike, helps us to see the essentially performative and therefore perverse nature of loss in the example of more common-garden variety male melancholics such as Charles Smithson, Charles Swann (Swann in Love) and Humbert Humbert (Lolita). This idea of the public performance of loss seemingly stands in contradiction with cultural, psychoanalytical and clinical diagnoses of melancholia, which are so intimately connected with the resignation and aphasia of depression.1 Nevertheless, since Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as Freud himself understood very well, melancholia has frequently demanded an audience, particularly when affected by men. The French Lieutenant’s Woman has a great deal to say about the consumer of the films of Jeremy Irons and, by extension, the author and the readers of this book. Rather than dismissing the consistency of the melancholic character in Irons’s career as mere typecasting, this film, which will establish that type, will also establish the existence of the insatiable desire of the audience for exposure to that type. In so far as the film shows us the actor’s melancholy (and points to the melancholic’s acting), it shows us that, as spectators, we have a very great desire to place the actor, and the contemporary male, in melancholy’s way. The career of Jeremy Irons and its longevity suggests the continuing viability of his audience’s desires for a regular encounter with the performance of male loss and psychological impairment. Given that in the psychoanalysis of loss, the idea of a public performance of melancholia is something of a contradiction in terms, Irons’s constant invocation of the melancholy prince also suggests that the nature of the cinematic collaboration between the male melancholic and his audience is essentially perverse. 85

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If the performance of melancholia represents a perversion of substantial loss, then its eager audience is equally implicated.

Charles Smithson: The Pattern of Perversion I have suggested that the portrayal of Charles’s melancholia in the film is rendered by Irons in a somewhat parodic or campy manner. Possibly this campiness is the result of what Vincent Canby criticized as the film’s insertion of ‘show-business wit’ in place of the novel’s ‘philosophical reflection’.2 This may be the case, but highlighting the parody of the adaptation is really just to observe that, in his screenplay, Harold Pinter has caught the irony of John Fowles’s modernism and that Karel Reisz has induced a performance from Irons that renders it faithfully.3 As I have indicated in the Introduction, the comedy of Charles’s proposal to Ernestina Freeman (Lynsey Baxter), for example, is evoked by a combination of Carl Davis’s allegro musical score, Jeremy Irons’s nervous and somewhat stiff movements, the mannered formality of Pinter’s language and the fact that Mrs Tranter (Charlotte Mitchell), Ernestina and their servants are all quietly laughing at him. This comedy is only one strategy for the cultivation of an amusing remove in the spectator that is similarly created by the excesses of melodramatic form in almost every scene of the 1860s narrative. This is especially the case with the encounters between Charles and Sarah, as in their first encounter on the Cobb, when his formality of speech and bearing are placed against her mysterious and intense behaviour, a wild landscape and a swelling orchestral score. Both techniques of comedy and melodrama in the film are, of course, augmented and dated by the contrast of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives in the film as a whole. Placing the narrative of one century up against that of another is a technique that Pinter uses in The Go-Between (1970), which also swings between the present and a late Victorian past. It is most particularly evident, however, in the style in 86

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which the dialogue is written and delivered in both films. It is a clipped and ironic style. Even the most banal of utterances seems superficially antique, strange and yet containing a variety of meanings, all of which seem instantly recognizable.4 One particular outcome of this modernist remove is to allow the full exposure and anatomization of Charles’s melancholia to all but the most intoxicated romantic spectator. Indeed the comedy and the irony of the representation of male melancholia in the film poses the question as to how any filmmaker could attempt to draw such a character again, at least in dramatic form, without the risk of absurdity. Needless to say this is a problem that has not bothered contemporary filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci or Peter Weir since the release of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981, let alone contemporary players of the melancholic narrative like Irons himself or Jim Carrey. In both the films of Martin Scorsese and those of Jeremy Irons, we can see that the absurdity of the idea of melancholia, never far away from the perversion of masochism, is at the forefront of their concern. Perhaps more so in Irons’s films than in Scorsese’s, there is an obsessive search and yearning for loss, the dynamics of which are established and described in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, just as they are parodied. In this particular film, however, it is Sarah who is diagnosed as suffering from melancholia not Charles. This is highly consistent with the history of representations of melancholia from Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melancholia (1514) to Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia that has so often rendered male loss in the guise of a woman, for Freud a jilted girl not unlike Sarah Woodruff.5 In fact, throughout the nineteenth-century narrative, the origins and symptoms of Charles’s melancholia appear to be just as obscure as any mystery surrounding Sarah’s experience of loss. It is, perhaps, only in the commentary provided in the twentieth-century section of the film, where we can view the more languid ennui of Mike’s situation, that we gain any insight into the substance of Charles’s 87

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melancholy. When Charles and Dr Grogan (Leo McKern) meet as men of science over cigars and brandy, however, all Charles’s symptoms are effectively described by Grogan’s description of Sarah’s condition. Her melancholia, although attributable to the occasion of her jilting by the French soldier, is obscure, stubborn, persistent, aphasic and driven by a masochism that inclines her to resist cure. Aroused and active in pursuit of her, therefore, we can see that Charles desires to emulate her condition to the point of appropriating her masochism and, more importantly, her position as a jilted lover. Charles highlights the idea of the unsuitability of his status, as a scientist and a gentleman of leisure, in the mind of Ernestina’s father (Peter Vaughan), an arriviste industrialist. In fact, both before and after his discussions with Mr Freeman, Charles acknowledges that Freeman considers him not only idle, but also almost anti-social in his attachment to Darwin’s theories of evolution. Despite this, in their meeting at Freeman’s office we see nothing of Freeman’s supposed hostility towards Charles. Indeed Freeman is clearly impressed with Charles’s financial situation and effectively embraces him as the heir to his industrial empire. Later when the ultra-conservative and bigoted Christian Mrs Poulteney (Patience Collier) is complaining of the ‘rise in the animal’ on the streets, she easily converts his Darwinism, and indeed his progressive social humanism, into something of a polite parlour game joke. Such is the pattern of Charles’s acceptance within the small and conservative social world of Lyme Regis that we can be in little doubt that he will look for the next opportunity to exercise his non-conformism. His first encounter with Sarah provides Charles with everything he requires in pursuit of the melancholic, rebel-outsider status for himself.6 In contrast to the primly proper Ernestina and her ‘daring’ offer to allow Charles the opportunity of holding her hand as they walk by the windswept Cobb, Sarah is the pattern of perversion. It is Sarah’s isolation on the Cobb, her mystery and, indeed, her reputation for longing 88

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and sexual scandal that provides Charles with the very model of separation from others that he requires for himself. Later he describes Sarah’s situation to Ernestina as ‘banal’ but he is only bluffing. Far from the banal, Charles will come to understand Sarah’s story as the most fundamental and guiding narrative of his life. Indeed, he will pursue the pattern of her life at the risk of his own infamy. In their first conversation on the undercliff she almost immediately establishes a bond of intimacy between them when she asks him to tell no one that he has seen her there. The effect of this is to entice him into a minor social conspiracy that she will broaden three scenes later by daringly passing him a note when the Poulteney and Freeman ménages meet for tea. In both scenes Charles chooses to be drawn further into her status as outcast by effectively becoming her defender. He insists on confronting her openly with the ‘unspeakable’ facts of her own story, not allowing them to fester like ‘wounds’. Later he defends Sam and Mary before Mrs Poulteney. Both actions have the effect of demonstrating that he is willing to side with her, both privately and in public, against the stifling and prejudiced social order. These minor moments of social protest are the beginnings of a process that will hurl him willingly along a course, culminating in the moment where he agrees to sign the confessio delicti to publicly acknowledging his moral turpitude. Charles’s first conversation with Dr Grogan, which follows, introduces the strain of masochism in Sarah’s story that will become such a large part of his own. As Grogan relates the story, citing comparisons in the case studies of a certain Dr Hartmann,7 in Sarah’s unwillingness to leave Lyme, her refusal to let go the memory of her French lover and her willing employment as the virtual slave of Mrs Poulteney, it is ‘as if her torture had become her delight’. This clearly fascinates Charles. When Grogan begins to tell him of the finer points of Sarah’s psychological condition we see Charles lying back on his chair, his right arm placed just behind his head in a pose 89

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of contemplation not unlike that melancholy picture of Sarah he encountered on their first meeting on the undercliff. It is a pose resembling the Hellenistic sculpture of The Sleeping Ariadne in the Vatican Museum, which Irons will repeat later when lying in his bed despondent at the thought of losing her. Beyond this simple comparison, Charles will work to further emulate Sarah’s masochism by obsessively pursuing her love to his own social and, particularly, emotional discomfort. In this he will become Sarah. That is, he will become that social outcast and masochist who will put himself, as Sarah herself says, ‘beyond the pale’ into a situation of emotional decay and cling to it beyond all reasonable bounds. Following their brief meeting in the churchyard by moonlight, Charles keeps the appointment to meet her once more on the undercliff. There she relates the full history of her encounter with her French lover. As Sarah looks out over the sea and tells her story, Charles sits, confined in the shot by a group of trees, increasingly tightening in on himself, as if for warmth, as her tale becomes more lurid. As she becomes more frank about her sexual encounter with the French Lieutenant, Varguennes, however, and indeed more explicit about her own complicity with his seduction, she becomes physically looser – swinging herself around the trees and untying her hair.8 To Charles her bravado is shocking. When she makes it clear that she slept with Varguennes, in order to be never the same again and to be seen for the outcast she is, Charles, perhaps perceiving in her both a wantonness and a profound psychological disturbance, jumps up in apparent disgust. He then studies her as she speaks the devastating words that encapsulate her life. She was not ordained, she says, to be like other women. Not destined to have a husband and the pleasures of home and family, but to be an outcast living on shame. What her life really amounts to is the active pursuit of a ‘freedom they cannot understand’, isolation from castigation – a life ‘beyond the pale’. For Charles, this is yet another attractive quality of her melancholia which he covets, that is a freedom beyond 90

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the constraints of what one of Federico Fellini’s melancholic characters described with horror as ‘an organized life in a civilized society’.9 Later after the love making in Exeter, and once Charles discovers her recent virginity, he takes on her advocacy for a life of freedom by saying immediately, ‘I must make myself free’. This of course relates to his engagement with Tina but it also refers much more widely to a style of life within which he feels trapped and from which he sees Sarah as an agent of escape. Even more perversely, perhaps, is the underlying suggestion, which she makes at the undercliff, of her description of herself as ‘nothing’ and ‘hardly human anymore’. This indicates that, however severe the consequence of her actions, they are based on a personal drive which takes her through the experience of mere freedom to a place of ultimate personal disintegration. When he moves to break off his engagement after Exeter, Tina, perhaps already suspecting the reason for it, speaks of her ambitions for their marriage in this way: Charles, I know I am spoilt. I know I am not unusual. But under your love and protection I believed I would become better. I would do anything, you see. I would … I would abandon anything to make you happy.

In its pleading and helpless tone and in its self-deprecation, this is a speech not unlike the one Charles will later make to Sarah to describe his pain during the intervening three years. For this moment, however, Tina sees the effect it has upon him and it shows her that the story he has concocted for her is a lie. What he reveals at this point is that the values of a woman who is ‘unusual’, who would give over all for love are precisely those he desires, precisely those he sees in Sarah. The fact that she speaks of him as being the source of that change in her is also important, as it is just how he sees Sarah’s role in his life. When Tina realizes his lies, however, she alludes to the other role that he covets in Sarah and emphasizes that the result of her actions will be his shame. He will have his name dragged through the mire and he will be hounded out of the country. Like the mention by the Freeman lawyer of the 91

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possibility that she might publish his confessio delicti in The Times, this threat is meat and drink for the melancholic. The Victorian gentlemen’s predilection for prostitutes, discussed by Anna and Mike early in the film, is taken to its logical extent in Charles’s attachment to Sarah. Given this discussion, and that with Dr Grogan, it is, in one sense, hardly surprising that when Sarah escapes from him he should look for her among the destitute women and the prostitutes of London. In another sense, however, it is slightly surprising, given the ego-mollifying experience of her true confession in Exeter, that she had not actually been Varguennes’s mistress. The inappropriateness of looking for her among the prostitutes and fiends of London would seem to be emphasized given the happy and modern family situation he finds her in at the end of their story. But the full explanation for this lies in the moment when he believes he sees her on the street. He quickly discovers that it is not she but another woman, a nameless prostitute. Nevertheless, by following her as she moves off, he then appears to agree to have sex with her anyway. As in the case of Charles Swann in Swann in Love, which I consider in the next chapter, it is an essential part of Charles Smithson’s desire and his perversion that he should see her as just such a ‘fallen’ woman. As a ‘whore’ she is truly ‘beyond the pale’. In pursuing such a woman he indicates that this is the life he wants to lead. Apparently a descent into Hell, this is all part of his greater quest for sexual and personal freedom. The end of Charles and Sarah’s narrative is a fantasy, placing them in paradise where the castigation promised earlier is completely absent. When Charles arrives at Weymouth he finds Sarah as a New Woman in a modern and understanding milieu. She has gained her freedom as a result of the sacrifice she made of her love for him. For Sarah this is an act of self-punishment born of the madness that possessed her and perverted her mind against a union with Charles, the very thing she most wanted. Her cause was to do to him what had, in her fantasy, been done to her. This set him off in the same 92

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direction with Tina and placed him in the role of Sarah in that relationship when he was playing Tina’s role in his own relationship with Sarah. In this new context, however, all can be forgiven and all neuroses have been alleviated. Now that Sarah has found her prized freedom, Charles can also rest in that very freedom. The essence of his perversion was the ultimate belief that in such a society that type of freedom could be seen as nothing but a perversion. That, in such a world, there could be no place for them to find rest. Their final meeting place seems to contradict such an assumption. The journey of this prince of perversion has come to a fantasy ending that seems to sweep away all unpleasantness, leaving an earthly paradise based on liberty and treasured values of decency and humanity.

Mike and the Actor’s Melancholy The nineteenth-century narrative is such a parody that it takes Charles’s melancholy for granted. It does not provide any real source for Charles’s perversion or any speculations on his ultimate site of loss. Such a diagnosis is simply buried in the manic business of pursuing Sarah. As a story, Charles’s narrative merely sets up a model of loss, or a description of male melancholia, that the actor creating him may incorporate. If we are looking for the origins of perversion it is to the actor that we must look. In quite simple terms Mike’s story is merely that of an actor who becomes so immersed in his role that he cannot, ultimately, distinguish between his own life and the life of his character, Charles Smithson.10 Despite the somewhat unseemly performance this entails, before an audience of not only his colleagues but also his wife and daughter, Mike refuses to relinquish his hold on Anna and what she represents. The superficial similarities of the film’s two narratives – the mysteriousness of both Sarah and Anna, the Frenchman in both their lives, the correctness and serenity of both Tina, Sonia and their gardens,11 as well as the wanton 93

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destructiveness of both Charles and Mike – fosters our perception of this over-engagement on the part of Mike. We must remember that the Mike/Anna plot is Karel Reisz’s creative solution to deal with the issues of the narrator in the original novel and how to transfer this vital voice to the screen.12 Just as the narrator of the novel editorializes on the action of 1867 from a 1969 perspective, there is a strong tendency to see the Mike/Anna relationship of the film as merely a contemporary perspective on the tale of Charles and Sarah. Certainly the fact that the 1867 plot dominates the film in terms of screen time tends to occlude the story of Mike and Anna from the spectator’s memory. Possibly as a result of this and, indeed, as a result of its absence from the novel, the 1980s plot tends to be the part of the film that spectators have the most trouble remembering. Despite being, in one sense, a device which serves to bring this nineteenth-century story into a twentiethcentury mindset, it seems that is has the opposite effect. Like Mike, the spectator can easily lose him or herself in this seductive narrative of desire and the past. Despite the ‘reality testing’, as Freud puts it in Mourning and Melancholia, that is provided by the 1980s plot, neither Mike nor his audience seem willing to let go of the past.13 What I have tried to show above is that in the film there is something hollow about the 1867 plot. Although it is deeply engaging both for Charles and for the spectator, this plot almost mocks us in our willingness to give ourselves over to the charms of its narrative movement from despair to happiness. Considering the way the 1867 plot is put against the contemporary story of Anna and Mike and looking at their story in greater detail, I suggest that the film provides a perfect example of the notion of the actor’s melancholy as a performance of perversion implicit to the cinematic representation of male melancholia itself. Furthermore, this reading of melancholia in terms highlighting the idea of performance demonstrates the melancholia of the spectator who, in the case of the films of Jeremy Irons, consistently consumes and collaborates with 94

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the actor in the proliferation of myths of male loss, perversion and masochism.14 For Mike, this is a very particular occupational perversion. It seeks to protect the almost anti-social space of art and creativity against the demands of the more mundane reality surrounding it. Furthermore, it makes a very public performance of loss. However, Mike’s example of the actor’s melancholy sheds light on the fact that the melancholic himself is an actor. That is to say, the actor’s melancholy is a metaphor for the perversion that sits at the core of melancholia itself, which can exist, stubbornly, to extend the public performance of grief, loss and idealization once mourning has outstayed its public welcome. In this way we see that the melancholia of Charles, the common-garden melancholic, is mixed with both the mourning that is supposed to be superseded by melancholia and the mania which is supposed to mark melancholia’s resolution.15 In short, the melancholic that lets the world know of his loss is a perverse actor and the world that acts as spectator to that performance, engages in and requires that performance is, itself, equally perverse. The Mike/Anna plot is very simple, consisting of some thirteen brief scenes distributed throughout the film. In terms of its story much is implied but we see enough of it plotted to construct a simple scenario. The film itself begins with the on-set business of filming the 1867 story but it is seven minutes later before we see Mike take a phone call in Anna’s bedroom one morning when she has overslept. For the rest of the film we see them sleeping and discussing the Victorian prostitution scene in their hotel room, rehearsing alone in a sunroom and lying on the local beach. As the shoot moves to an end they meet in more public situations, primarily at the lunch party that Mike and Sonia throw for the actors and, finally, when they almost meet at the wrap party at Windermere, before Anna leaves him without discussion and returns to America. 95

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In the 1867 plot Charles’s social momentum is away from the world of respectability and conformity towards an ideal existence with Sarah of freedom, art and, presumably, the liberty to follow their own desires. In the 1980s story, like a nightmare for Mike, the movement is in the opposite direction. There we find Mike and Anna in the middle of a tiny little cocoon of art, initially free to love without consequences but ultimately destined to have that cocoon disturbed by the inevitable wrap-up of the film and the return to real life. In the 1867 plot, Charles seems to be looking about for the presence of Sarah to disturb the beginnings of his stable family life. Mike, however, is increasingly disturbed by the onset of the call of that stable family life which lies on the other side of the window of the tiny, comfortable crypt he shares on location with Anna. The plot of their scenes together demonstrates the gradual and frustrating opening up of their crypt to the outside world. Their first scene, which I will discuss below, establishes the almost hermetically sealed off space which will become increasingly threatened. The scene in which they discuss the prevalence of prostitution in Victorian London has a similar cosiness about it but there is an odd interruption when Mike is disturbed from their discussion, and his crossword, by the sounds of a helicopter that incline him to close the window. Later rehearsing one of the scenes from the undercliff they are in a sunroom working closely together as it rains outside. Again as Mike looks out to the rain beyond, the film places a great emphasis on the idea of the cosy situation for them inside and the threatening world beyond. The window motif and the noise of a motorbike outside the hotel begins their next scene when Mike moves from the window to watch Anna sleeping. When she is disturbed she initially thinks it is her husband, David, and Mike must tell her it is he. Finally, an empty (but not deserted) stretch of coastline is the location for their last really private time together. In this scene Anna appears sad and, in contrast to their previous scenes, strangely 96

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preoccupied by something beyond the moment. After this they will only have the relative privacy of meeting on the set and in a train corridor before they will find themselves once again in the bosom of their particular domestic ménages. Trying to tell Anna he loves her on the phone, while David is sitting next to her, and sneaking a furtive embrace at the Sunday lunch with Sonia in the next room leaves their crypt almost completely open and exposed. For psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, it is at this point that melancholia begins and, more importantly, becomes performative in nature.16 Their life together on the shoot, however, is an ideal and frictionless space. Indeed, it is a space that is well considered in the film and gives us a detailed and extensive indication of the comfort it provides Mike right up until Anna leaves the shoot temporarily after their scenes at Lyme. This is evident in Mike’s relaxed attitude in her bed and particularly by the sea when all seems right in their little world. It is also a comforting space for Mike because it is sealed off from the rest of the world and seems to be sealed off from its moralizing. It is a sign of that comfort that when Anna is concerned that he has been discovered in her room Mike is delighted, saying that he wants them to know. Her passing reference to her morality clause is a joke not only because it really refers to behaviour freely undertaken in the world at large and less so on the set, but because anyone who knows anything about film sets, especially after Cleopatra (1963), knows that an intra-cast romance (preferably between the leading man and woman) is almost a standard dramatic sub-plot of any production – whether it is true or not. What is comforting to Mike about this shoot context is that, although in his domestic circle his relationship with Anna, if known or, more accurately, brought out into the open, would be viewed as an abomination, on the set itself it is accepted almost as a matter of course. When the second assistant director (Richard Hope) interrupts them, as thick as thieves, before Anna leaves the set, he does so with an ironic smile because he knows what is going on. He may 97

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even feel empowered by it. Later, at the lunch party, the unnamed actor played by Patience Collier (Mrs Poulteney in the 1867 plot) and Anna are alone and Collier comments on the serenity of the garden and ‘the wife’ as well as the loveliness of ‘the daughter’. The meaning here is obvious and Collier’s character wants there to be no doubt that she is fully aware of the almost unbearable irony of the situation. However, she does not appear to be moralizing it or condemning Anna. In this sense the affair is condoned and it is the extra-filmic domestic scene, with ‘the wife’ and ‘the daughter’ as stock figures in a domestic comedy or melodrama, that is rendered as a construction and unreal. Sonia is referred to as ‘the wife’ and the daughter as ‘a pretty little thing’, a clothes-horse for a dress that Patience Collier admires. It is as if Mike’s real family are providing the action and the cast of characters in a country house drama by Chekhov. Nevertheless, as experienced performers, they know full well that in terms of the fantasies and desires they have concocted on location, it is they who will never make it to Moscow. Fully aware of the hopelessness of Mike’s desires, his colleagues who understand it show no intolerance for his pathetic demonstration of loss. In a sense they may even find it comforting. Against the frictionless space of the film shoot it is the life of accommodating wives, husbands and children that is the ultimate threat. Both Sonia and David seem to possess a sense of serenity that is born of a long history of tolerance of the perverse infants they have for partners. Unlike the moralizing Mrs Poulteney and the screaming and vindictive Freeman family of the 1867 plot, the response of David and Sonia to their partners’ exploits is much calmer. They respond more in sorrow than in anger. David rolls his eyes when Mike calls up to invite them to lunch. He is obviously well aware of what is, or is rumoured to be, going on between them and his small gesture makes this silent protest against Mike’s indelicacy at ringing up. But when he turns up at the lunch party he is amiable and accommodating. Sonia, for her part, 98

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sees right through Mike’s wish to have the cast to lunch and his pathetic ploy to spend some time with Anna. In spite of this she agrees to have the party and no doubt provides the lunch. Rather than raising Cain, both David and Sonia seem to make allowances for the perverse, parallel play-world that their partners inhabit. It is almost as if, like Jeremy Irons’s melancholic constituency of fans, they have some perception or concern that it is the actor’s world of make-believe which is the truly moral world and a fear that it is that their world of petty middle-class domestics and marital fidelity that is the perverse aberration. But the fact that, as spectators, David and Sonia are willing and able to play along sounds the real death knell of Mike’s exclusive little crypt of art and free love. Given their willingness to participate, the key to any good game of charades, Sonia and David seem to provide a more chilling emotional constraint upon Mike and Anna. Once the partners in real life get involved it can only be a matter of time. This will ultimately defeat Mike’s ambition to preserve the furtive liaison with Anna in its frictionless and dreamlike state. In a polite but awkward exchange between Mike and David at the lunch party there is an amusing moment of confusion about which of the book’s endings they are going to film. Indeed, in Mike’s mind, there seems to be confusion about which ending is which. The logic of my discussion so far implies that the 1867 ending is the happy (if fantastical) ending and that the conclusion of Mike’s tale is the sad ending. This all relies on the idea that what Mike wants is what Charles gets. But the male melancholic is nothing if not ambivalent about his own desires. If he is perverse at all, his perversion lies squarely in the fact that he loves loss more than anything else. It is the threat of consummation that is often his real enemy. With this in mind we cannot ignore the fact that Mike has himself been complicit in bringing about his ‘unhappy’ ending. If Mike had really wanted to be alone with Anna, a London hotel charging an hourly rate might have been a 99

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more secure route to happiness than the act of parading her around in the bosom of his family. Were he serious about Anna, rather than playing at being serious, discretion in front of their colleagues on location might have been a better way of achieving their eventual happiness. Certainly as the shoot comes to an end it is clear that so too has their liaison. In this context Mike’s actions, particularly at the lunch party, look like his last ditch attempt to give a semblance of reality to that which has passed. When he does speak briefly to Anna at the luncheon, the tone of his agonizing and his speculations about their future looks more like Irons in light comedy mode than in pursuit of melodrama. His tone is not unlike that of Charles’s proposal to Tina at the beginning of the film. In many ways the whole lunch at home idea, indeed his entire indiscreet and obsessive lover act, seems designed as a vaguely masochistic performance anticipating and inducing the eventual pleasures of loss. That is, it is all performed, not to achieve union with Anna, but to make sure it does not happen. That what he wants is not Anna but the loss of Anna. His actions thus stand as a sign of his ultimate allegiance to the love of loss, as a sign of the ambivalence that dominates the struggle of melancholia in the unconscious, and also as a sign of his collaboration those forces of real life (Sonia and David) – which is why he gets them involved in the first place. A sense of sacrifice is essential to this delusion, but as a fantasy it does not go unrewarded. Mike’s final and, according to some critics,17 seemingly deluded call to ‘Sarah’ as Anna leaves the party at Weymouth and the resolution of the film with the fantasy ending for Sarah and Charles actually gives him what he wants – the fantasy scenario of a perfect and undisturbed sense of plenitude. Undisturbed because its public performance has come to an end and ‘reality testing’ has driven it into the realm of fantasy where it belongs and where it can be truly savoured and enjoyed.

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Notes   1. Sigmund Freud. ‘Mourning and Melancholia (1917 [1915])’, in A. Richards (ed), J. Strachey (trans). The Pelican Freud Library Volume 11, On Metapsychology. Middlesex: Penguin, 1984, 252.   2. Vincent Canby. New York Times, Section C4, 18 September 1981, cited in Stephanie Tucker. ‘“Despair Not, Neither to Presume”, The French Lieutenant’s Woman: A Screenplay’, Literature Film Quarterly 24.1 (1996), 64.   3. Tucker, ‘Despair Not’, 64 places Fowles’s work in the modernist mode through a comparison with modern theatre.   4. In Colin Gardner. Karel Reisz. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, 229, the author discusses Pinter’s language in an Althussarian/ Lacanian context and through an excellent reading of a range of issues to do with performance in the film.   5. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 253.   6. Nicholls, Scorsese’s Men, 5–6.   7. Steven H. Gale (ed). The Films of Harold Pinter. Albany: State University of New York , 2001, 71, discusses the way Pinter created and inserted this doctor according to his practice of inventing elements in his scripts to aid the appearance of reality.   8. Gardner, Karel Reisz, 232–233.   9. La Dolce Vita (1960) 10. See Tucker’s argument in ‘Despair Not’, 67–68, that Mike is trapped in the world of the set and loses sight of the difference between art and real life. 11. Alison L. McKee ‘She Had Eyes A Man Could Drown In: Narrative, Desire and the Female Gaze in The French Lieutenant’s Woman’, Literature Film Quarterly 20.2 (1992), 152–153, makes the point about these two women and their garden settings. 12. Harold Pinter. Collected Screenplays 3. London: Faber, 2000, vii. 13. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 253. 14. I have raised this idea in relation to Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Cape Fear (1991) in Nicholls, Scorsese’s Men, 71–2, 138–141. 15. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 262. 16. Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, 135–136. See also Nicholls, Scorsese’s Men, 7. 17. See Tucker, ‘Despair Not’, 67–68.

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4 Swann in Love Exceptional Feelings

To Proust, the task of filming Remembrance of Things Past would probably have seemed not only futile, but perverse.1

Male obsession for a woman is a delicate subject in popular cinema. It is not something we expect to see amongst our more mainstream heroes, such as Bruce Willis or Tom Hanks, because of the fear that it may be read as a sign of weakness. While we frequently observe these characters in situations of temporary impairment or disability, such a lapse in the ideal of masculinity is predicated upon the promise of a speedy manic resolution to the apparent crisis. A muscle-stacked antagonist packing major firepower or a gang of bikers who have just run over Mel Gibson’s wife and daughter are sources of emasculation that can, apparently, be easily overcome. Anything that can be shot, chopped down or blown up presents few problems. A blonde in a grey-flannel suit, however, or Proust’s Odette de Crécy, with her breast-hugging bodice of orchids, is another thing all together. It is rare (and I am tempted to say rarer these days) to see any one of our great box-office heroes really debase himself, even temporarily, before the assault of a powerful and highly desirable woman. I suggest that not since Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo have we seen a really major box-office male star completely lose his marbles over a woman. 102

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The reason for this is that we seem to be living in another one of those eras where for men to desire a woman to the point of obsession stands as one of the great perversions. Such moments of this particular strain of misogyny dictate that while it is permissible, in fact incumbent, upon a man to desire and then to possess a woman, any delay in the process is viewed as highly abnormal and socially undesirable – that is to say, any delay caused by his emotional subordination and outside the standard Hollywood plot line requiring him to save the world first and foremost. For a man to follow his desire for a woman past a certain point of what is considered comme il faut (the done thing) threatens to place him outside the bounds of what can be tolerated. That is to see the successful sublimation of his self-obsession (through busying himself in public affairs) at risk in favour of a complete regression into narcissism.2 Furthermore, such actions threaten to cast him as altogether emasculated and, therefore, something less than a man. Jeremy Irons may never be considered in quite the same way as Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise and certainly his box-office status has waned from what it was in the 1990s. In 1984, however, on the back of his major successes in Brideshead Revisited and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, he was well on his way to assuming the A-list box-office power he would enjoy following Reversal of Fortune six years later. So although Swann in Love could have hardly been expected to play any significant role in displacing mainstream cinema’s contemporary penchant for less obsessional male lovers, Irons certainly brought a matinée idol star power and attraction to the film and its study of obsession. This may have had little impact on what the ideal, general audience were going to the movies to see that summer, but Irons’s presence in Swann in Love certainly made sure that the film and its particular perversion was going to be seen by an audience beyond the small brand of art-house reviewers and outraged neo-Proustian sceptics who summarily dismissed it.3 103

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The idea of Swann in Love so blatantly flying in the face of mainstream taste on questions of male desire is interesting in that this is the very subject that the film is concerned with. Jeremy Irons’s character, Charles Swann, is highly aware that it does not befit a man to prostrate himself before the altar of female desire. This is why, short of shooting Odette (Ornella Muti) or blowing her up, he can announce that the termination of his obsession has been achieved by simply marrying her. ‘That’s no lady,’ Swann seems to say, ‘that’s my wife!’ Beyond the perversion, in this sense, of marriage itself, the film is a catalogue of measures and denials put in place by Swann in an unsuccessful attempt to shield himself against desire for another and to reach the happy conclusion where desire need play no part at all. In this sense, as in many other respects, Swann in Love bears a striking comic resemblance to Vincent Minnelli’s Gigi, a film released in 1958, the same year as the cinematic template of melancholic denial, Vertigo. Like Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938), where Katharine Hepburn complains to a German psychiatrist that Cary Grant is always following her around and then when she talks to him he fights with her, Swann in Love, Gigi and Vertigo all deal with male characters engaging in extreme perversion simply to deny the possibility of consummation. Although none of these films approaches the screwball comic stuff of Bringing Up Baby, all bear a certain resemblance to its study of male perversion. If, in this context, Swann in Love demonstrates the perversion, as it is generally understood, of male heterosexual obsession, and in doing so manages to throw the odd banana cream pie in the face of its perverse prince, it does so in a manner far from the comic. Swann himself, like Scottie in Vertigo, is not simply distracted by his love for Odette but genuinely paralysed by it. The source of an incredible phobia, his love seems to be, quite literally, killing him. Listless, bored, melancholic, manic, delusional and possibly paranoid, he is seen in the film as not merely subject to the censure of his social milieu, but also to the constraints 104

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Swann in Love (1984 France/West Germany) aka Un amour de Swann Directed by Volker Schlöndorff Shown from left: Ornella Muti, Jeremy Irons (as Charles Swann) Credit: Orion Classics/Photofest. Photographer: Georges Pierre

of its own arbitrary sense of perversion. Just as it reveals his obsession as socially perverse, the film demonstrates that the repression of the concept of amor omnia vincit (love conquers all) is itself the real perversion. Swann may well redeem himself slightly in the eyes of his peers (not his betters) by using the lawful institution of marriage as a means of putting out the fire of his love for Odette. In this narrative, however, the result of this particularly perverse renunciation, if not also the processes of repression and narcissism operative along the way, can be little else other than his own death.

The Ritual of the Orchids Swann’s first moment of reflection in the film is a memory of his first sexual encounter with Odette, an encounter that established their ritual foreplay based around him straightening the 105

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orchids pinned to her bodice. We do not know that this is their first sexual encounter until we see the scene again, in full, an hour and a quarter later when she asks him why he ‘waited so long’. The fact that ‘playing orchids’ becomes part of a number of their sexual encounters gives us no real reason to place this first plotted encounter in any particular chronological context. The suggestion of the orchids and the ritual over them that Swann and Odette will sometimes enact always refers back to the first time but it equally carries a very definite sense that the present encounter is also to be understood, in one sense, as ‘the first time’. Just as the ritual, like any ritual, is based on a mutually understood game that relies on role-play and the suspension of true knowledge about the situation, so too the original encounter carried a very real sense that they were playing a game that they both fully understood. The only distinguishing feature about the original encounter is that it carried just a few seconds of doubt before both partners were assured of the final outcome. When we see the scene in full, near the end of the film, again it comes, for Swann, at a moment of reflection. His anxiety expressed through a manic dash around the Paris Opera district to find Odette dining with the Verdurins has been allayed by her kindness to him at that dinner during yet another rendition of the Venteill andante that she reminds him is the National Anthem of their love. Satisfied and set to take her home in his carriage Mme Verdurin (Marie-Christine Barrault) steals Odette into her own carriage, much to Charles’s chagrin, and takes her off into the night. Raging around Paris a little while longer he curses his feeling for Odette before collapsing again in his carriage and driving off.4 This is the point at which he will ponder the original orchids encounter. That moment is delayed, however, by a short but important scene involving his friend, Mémé, the Baron de Charlus (Alain Delon). Mémé and his toy boy (Nicolas Baby) are seated in a carriage in a gay beat when Nicolas Baby jumps out of the carriage yelling, ‘You said we were going to look at the moon.’ Mémé descends 106

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and castigates him for his insensitivity and lack of imagination, before dismissing him with a Victor Hugo inspired gesture of bravado that barely hides his wounded pride. Then, as Mémé freshens up his make-up in his carriage, the scene cuts to two gay men cruising each other in a little pre-sex ritual of their own. What Mémé has not been able to achieve with his toy boy, the two gay men and Swann and Odette will; that is a successful fantasy and slightly comic narrative of seduction. Putting the two versions of the orchids scene together we can read its cheap and comic pornographic narrative in a similar way to the fantasy seduction sequence of The Conformist. Sitting beside her as they drive Charles says: Those orchids really need to be fastened or they’ll fall out. May I straighten the orchids on your bodice? Like that, by tucking them in myself. Truly, I’m not being offensive? What if I smelled them. I don’t know the scent.

Jeremy Irons’s politeness, his mock fastidiousness and studiousness as well as his deference to her comfort and sense of decency are the real jewels of this performance. What they do is demonstrate Irons’s familiar performance of containment, restraint and even a note of repression. This provides the great and titillating force to the pretence of the scene that is all about clothes and flowers and deportment and not their mutual desire for Swann to kiss and caress her breasts. But despite the clothes and the pretence of propriety, this particular scene of seduction, echoed by the homosexual encounters of Mémé and the inhabitants of the beat he visits, also shares an interesting implied power structure with The Conformist over the delicacies of seduction and submission. In their scenes both Charles in Swann in Love and Anna Quadri in The Conformist are the seducers but both play this role as the servant, effectively dressing their objects of seduction. But just as they are both playing the seducer’s more powerful role through the pretence of being the servant, the servant role also points to the way in which the entire fantasy is very much about their personal feelings of subordination and their attempts to overcome their own substantial experience of seduction 107

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and loss. In The Conformist the scene is structured around Marcello’s point of view and, as I have argued in chapter one, Anna is just as much the proxy of his desire, as she stands as Bertolucci’s characterization of her own sense of melancholy and loss. In Swann’s case, he is thinking up this scene at one of his many moments of anxiety over the effect of Odette in his life. His thoughts are acting as an antidote to his own anticipation of loss and his assumptions that his liaison with Odette is leading to the very pain and suffering he speaks of in the orchid scene when she asks him why he had waited so long to make his move. Given Jeremy Irons’s predilection for period melodramas, and for narratives of subservience, the character of the servant abounds. We see the power of the knowing servant in the insubordination of Sam in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Hooper’s fear of his own servant, Desmond, in Brideshead Revisited and, indeed, through the backchat of Swann’s own coachman, Rémi, whom Odette detests. We can also see the way in which masters can make fools of themselves over their social inferiors through the apparent indifference of the liveried Geurmantes flunky to Mémé’s advances, whether that particular scene is Mémé’s joke or not. In T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) the poet suggests something of the anxiety induced in the bourgeois prince of perversion by his own servant: And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.5

Just as they serve, nurture and protect, like the prince of perversion himself, such servants also assert the power of their position when they withhold or corrupt their services. That power thus appears all the more potent in the humiliation and fear it inflicts on the master who, paying for service, is supposed to receive perfect satisfaction on demand. This is, no doubt, the essence of the enduring popularity of the P.G. Wodehouse Jeeves and Bertie Wooster stories (dramatized for the screen with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry as 108

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recently as 1990 6) amongst lawyers, doctors, politicians and other upper middle-class potentates and perverts.7 These master/servant roles act as outrageous metaphors for the fears and insecurities of dominance and submission that the neurotic prince of perversion endures and exchanges with his partner. The master/slave relationship, an ironic trope since Aristophanes,8 demonstrates the thin line separating key oppositions contained within the prince of perversion’s structure of desire: seducer–seduced, sadist–masochist, male–female, heterosexual–homosexual and father–lover. Beyond all other opposites, the aberration of the master–servant relationship in these films points to the normality–abnormality binary that drives the entire question of perversion, and the way we read and understand perverse acts. As the prince of perversion generally has to deal with his own confusion over the power values of the terms ‘master’ and ‘servant’, he is constantly engaged with the question of the value and the distinction of all the aforementioned binary oppositions. So here, not only does Swann endure the eyeball rolling and criticism of his coachman, in what is essentially a comic touch, but he also must contemplate the more significant master–servant assertions of authority and humiliation in his liaison déclassé with Odette. The first version of the orchids ritual comes at the beginning of his day and immediately precedes his lengthy and fastidious dressing ritual. We may know of Proust’s own topsy-turvy domestic regime,9 and hence assume that celluloid Swann has a similar one, but we are not surprised to learn that by the time he has finally finished his morning routine it is, in fact, three o’clock in the afternoon. However long he may have spent writing (the work which he claims to have been interrupted by the presence of Odette in his life) it is obvious that it is his attention to dress and make-up which has occupied nearly four minutes of screen time and, indeed, more than half the day. It need not be thus for Swann. Wracked with anxiety over Odette’s visit to the opera with the Verdurins, we see later 109

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in the film that Swann can change from an afternoon suit to evening clothes, have the recently stabled horses re-harnessed and be off in seconds. For all his dandyism and his sense of Jeevesesque punctiliousness, his luxuriant sartorial performance here is far more a reflection of his state of mind than of his gentlemanly common practice. It speaks of the oceans of time he seems to have between one encounter with Odette and another. It reveals the need for reflection and the quest for control in the face of the Odette-inspired chaos surrounding him. Above all, it refers to Swann’s chronic narcissism that, as I have considered through Freud in chapter one, points to a desperate struggle for survival in the face of a painful, maternal-like seduction, at the hands of Odette. Similar to the logic of the orchid and bodice ritual, however, the dressing performance also suggests the anticipation of pleasure ambivalently intermingling with this fear of seduction. In its extreme attention to the detail of dress and appearance it invokes the first part of the orchid ritual in which Swann appears so concerned about the position of the flower on her bodice. Swann’s morning routine, in fact, operates to prolong that moment, to place it within a sphere where he can control it in comfort. That moment, both actually with Odette and in his fantasies, is so important to Swann’s melancholy structure of desire. It is the treasured moment of supreme, if abstract, pleasure just before it reaches over into the satisfaction of desire and all the promise of pain and suffering that that final moment brings. In this sense, this drame des vêtements reminds us of the perverse anticipation of pleasure and the foreplay-like ritualization of desire in Charles Ryder’s fake and meaningless pre-Julia courtships, as he describes them in Brideshead Revisited: I recalled the courtships of the past, dead, ten years; how, knotting my tie before setting out, putting the gardenia in my buttonhole, I would plan an evening of seduction …

The cinema and its audience, like P.G. Wodehouse’s great gentleman’s personal gentleman Jeeves himself, love these 110

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perverse moments of distraction. Just as Jeeves will never let his young master loose on the West End of London with garish Old Etonian spats, or without a bow tie sporting the perfect butterfly effect, the cinema loves to render visually its need to delay the satisfaction of desire through the performance of the rituals of dressing. In The Gay Divorcee (1934), for example, Fred Astaire delays his apparently desperate search for Ginger Rogers by taking an age over ties, cuffs, shirts and one or two glasses of port, while singing and dancing to the song, ‘Needle in a Hay Stack’. It is a similar pleasure of the moment that Cole Porter and Bing Crosby caught so well in High Society (1956) when Bing, himself a divorcee, sings of the ‘some distant day’ when the eponymous Samantha might abandon him. Depending on the way you look at it, Samantha is the film’s most romantic song – ‘even if you leave me I am still going to love you’ is the sentiment – but it is accompanied by the apparently banal activity of getting dressed up and accessorized for the big party. It is, however, Evelyn Waugh’s friend Nancy Mitford’s character Fanny in Love in a Cold Climate who seems to put her finger on the essential pleasures of the anticipation of unsatisfied desire when she confides to her friend, Polly Hampton, that it is not so much the actual dances she enjoys so much as the dressing up.10 I conclude my examples of this dressing-delight with a female example, Fanny Logan, because her observation points to the aspect of womanliness, based in the ambiguities of the intolerable idea, which provides the undergarments of Swann’s sartorial regime. Certainly this kind of attention to male dress and its detail frequently connotes homosexuality in the cinema – this is why the Tiresian Stephen Fry can play both Oscar Wilde and Jeeves without batting an eyelid11 – but in this arbitrary association between homosexuality, narcissism and femininity, at least in Swann’s case, something is lost. What is really important here in the case study of the prince of perversion is Swann’s unconscious desire – running contrary to his manic 111

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actions – to become, to incorporate and to introject Odette, his object of desire. As I have indicated in chapter one, Tania Modleski’s excellent reading of Vertigo highlights many of the ideas of feminine and maternal incorporation that are vital to our understanding of the process in the prince of perversion. The first of these feminine fascinations for Modleski is ‘the film’s preoccupation with female clothing [which] borders on the perverse’.12 Scottie begins the film wearing a corset due to the injuries we assume he sustained in chasing a criminal at the beginning of the film. Whether the corset is the result of these injuries or some mark of his newly acquired feminine status (he has been retired from the police force), it rather clumsily places him in a costume of womanliness at the beginning of the film to indicate the position he will occupy, without need of a costume, at the end. The bra Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) is painting is also a source of fascination to Scottie. With its ‘revolutionary uplift’ and associations with the cantilever bridge, Modleski sees this as an amusing association between Scottie, who spends a great deal of time in high places and by the Golden Gate Bridge, and the idea of femininity. Finally, in his obsessive makeover of Judy and his fastidiousness over the choice of clothes and hairstyle, Scottie demonstrates his ‘woman’s eye’ for what makes up a man’s ideal image of femininity. Like Scottie, Swann plays out his obsession for Odette largely on the level of costume. The fact that Scottie pays more attention to female clothes and Swann his own is of little consequence. At the core of their desire, Swann, Scottie, Marcello and, indeed, René Gallimand in M. Butterfly are all dressing and paying that Jeeves-like attention to the deportment of not their object of desire, but that part deep within themselves where s/he now dwells. Swann’s tragedy is that he can never really bring this emotional cross-dressing off. As the playwright Alan Bennett, in a parody of Wilde, puts it: All women dress like their mothers, that is their tragedy. No man ever does, that is his.13 112

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Perversion Publique Swann is certainly well aware that his obsession for Odette is publicly regarded as perverse. Both Oriane (Fanny Ardant) and Bazin (Jacques Boudet)14 de Geurmantes, despite their own flagrant and illicit affairs, are implacable when it comes to Swann’s intensions towards Odette. Echoing the anti-Semitic gossip of Mme de Cambremer (Charlotte de Turckheim) and her friend minutes earlier, Bazin pronounces judgement on Odette, telling Swann that, should he marry her, they will not receive her. This is a promise they keep when, years later on the verge of his death, Swann appears at the Geurmantes but must leave his and Odette’s daughter Gilberte (Emanuelle Rosenthal) waiting outside in the carriage. Clearly, despite their obvious self-interest in keeping Swann around to brighten up their dull lives, Odette is the subject of a serious prejudice and a prohibition that the Geurmantes are determined to enforce. The details of the taboo are imprecise at the point in the film when Bazin issues his ruling. So far our only glimpse of Odette has been in the few seconds of the first version of the orchid scene. The fact that we know she has dined alone with the homosexual Mémé, and, in Swann’s jealous mind, might be capable of sleeping with him, points to a certain reputation for waywardness that Odette has acquired. In the final minutes of the film, two male onlookers see Odette and recall, in vulgar fashion, the former prices for her sexual services. As in Swann’s manic and outrageous jealousy over his best friend, however, and his obsession with her sexual encounters with other women, the greatest suspicions of this waywardness in the film are more obviously and powerfully the product of Swann’s distracted mind. This is well demonstrated in the scene later at her house when Swann believes he is chasing out Odette’s late night lover but he is really chasing out a rival that exists nowhere but in his own mind – as Françoise Bonnot’s editing makes clear. Apart from these, relatively dubious, stains on her 113

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reputation, all we really know of Odette, at this point, is that to this assemblage of tired and dull ancient aristocrats she is considered merely as ‘a woman like that!’. Certainly no one questions Swann’s right to sleep with her. What the taboo is really about is more to do with him and the role he is required to play in le monde. His place is fixed within the Geurmantes circle and just as he and Oriane laughed at Mme de Cambremer tossing her head about, with ‘music in her bones’, so too Cambremer, Oriane and their set disapprove of Swann’s performance of Odette-inspired aphasia and melancholy. This is the case both in general terms and specifically at the first Geurmantes party in Irons’s enraptured but restrained response to the performance of the Vinteuil Sonata. He may be a man of great taste and artistic sensibility but any suggestion that his emotions are subject to an obsession inspired by a woman who may not be touched is clearly considered pas comme il faut. Outside the Geurmantes set, the Verdurin faithful experience no sense of this taboo. Some of their number may suspect that Odette is a ‘loose woman’ but in general they simply enjoy mocking Swann at his overly serious attitude towards her and his lack of a sense of humour. This is made patently clear in his mad dash around the Opera to find Odette and, having found her, his deathly indignation at having her snatched away by Mme Verdurin at the end of the night. Like Swann’s own servants, the Verdurin faithful simply stand back and observe his obsession not so much with a sense that it is pas comme il faut but that it would normally be expressed pas devant (not in front of the servants). Neither for the Geurmantes, nor the Verdurin, nor the servants does Swann make any apology or account for his behaviour, however personally humiliating it may be. In one sense, he does not care what they think. He may smart at the mockery of the Verdurins whom he considers beneath him, but as with the disapproval of Oriane and Bazin, he simply registers their ridicule. His attitude, like that of Charles Smithson when confronted with the idea that his crimes might be published 114

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in The Times, is simply that such mockery and disapprobation are part of what he must endure in his pursuit of his grand amour. With the grand, narcissistic desire of the melancholic to place himself in the splendid isolation of the man apart, the satisfaction of his real desire is assured rather than frustrated by such opposition. This is, no doubt, what is so abhorrent to the conformity-seeking Geurmantes and Verdurin tribes. In his public displays of emotion and foolishness over Odette, what we see is Swann’s hysterical registration of the conflict between the drives of his unconscious and the necessary public imperatives against which they are played out. This is not unlike the display of the mourner who has not yet allowed his or her grief to become hidden to public scrutiny through the operations of melancholia. Jumping ahead to a premature resolution of that budding melancholia, Swann’s performance of obsession and loss is driven both by a bumbling and premature mania and a triumphalism completely disregarding the social censure surrounding it. In his apparent disregard for the effect of his masochistic display on others, he looks like the melancholic who takes his loss into the sphere of his own unconscious mind and only allows a discreet and fashionable expression of it to confirm his reputation as an aesthete and a man of great understanding and sensibility. The problem Swann provokes here, however, is that his performance of melancholia is perceived to have no concrete and acceptable object of loss other than his own narcissism.

‘Pas que je sache’ In Brideshead Revisited it is Anthony Blanche who is inserted into the narrative in order to tell Charles Ryder the truth about himself and his situation, at moments when he is about to do something foolish. Swann in Love also uses the character of the homosexual seer, Mémé, both as a foil to Swann’s absurdities and to point out the truth of his situation. As another invocation of Tiresias in the story of the prince of perversion, Mémé is 115

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licensed to understand the truth in this film because he is obstructed by none of the repressions and subsequent perversions that restrain Swann and get in the way of what he really wants. Like Swann, Mémé may endure some pain at in the course of his affairs – the footman at his brother’s house, to whom he has written requesting a rendezvous, barely acknowledges him – but this does not lead him along a course of self-destruction as it does Swann. Mémé’s healthy understanding of the nature and importance of desire above all things is demonstrated in Mémé’s breakup scene with his young, unnamed, protégé. This is placed in amongst Swann’s horrendous night chasing around after Odette for good reason. Following this young man, as he leaps from the carriage, Mémé delivers a speech of great passion mixed with hurt, sadness, arrogance and bravado. Above all it is a speech of great understanding of the human heart: The greatest of follies is to despise feelings you don’t share. I love the darkness. You fear it. Goodbye. My affection for you is dead and beyond resuscitation … Who said I was offended? Don’t you know what an exceptional person I am? For the best of us studying the arts, our collections, our fine gardens are all but substitutes. Like Diogenes in a barrel, we are seeking a man. We grow yews and begonias, but we’d rather tend to a human shrub, if he were only worth it. Sadly, you are not worth it. Farewell, sir. We will never meet again. I am not ashamed to admit I regret it. I feel like that Victor Hugo character. ‘I am alone, a widower, and evening is upon me.’

Mémé’s liaison is parallel to that of Swann.15 Both men are indiscreetly pursuing lovers who are outside the warm embrace of propriety (Odette for her dubious morality and Mémé protégé for his Jewishness), virtually despised for what they represent to the established social order – ’human shrubs’. The problem for Swann is that despite sharing Mémé’s will to desire, he does not share his insight. Swann’s feelings for Odette have the mark of, what Mémé sees as, the exceptional about them. They are, however, like the feelings of Mémé protégé (with whom Swann is aligned for his Jewishness), much too dominated by the feelings of those who do not share, and therefore despise, them. 116

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For Swann such depth of feeling is blocked by other sensations of offence, shame and regret, whereas for Mémé this depth of feeling is a source of pride. Such sensitivity is what makes Mémé ‘an exceptional person’. The arts, philosophy, gardens – even the Victor Hugo one-liners – are nothing but toys and distractions, ‘substitutes’ for the real thing. But Swann cannot allow himself to see beyond the idea that Odette is one of these toys, cannot give himself fully to the claims of desire, because he too fears the ‘darkness’.16 Possessed of such insight, Mémé can easily see through Swann’s defence that he does not really love her, that he finds her ugly, that she is not really his type. This, however, does not stop Swann from employing his most manic defences when confronted with Mémé as the model of psychosexual insight. When the two friends first meet at the Geurmantes’ party, Swann is explaining that he is nearly free of Odette’s influence on him. Mémé’s response is to taunt his transparent friend, obviously still so much in love with Odette that he fears that even his gay best friend could become his rival. Mémé continues knowingly to provoke Swann, for the latter’s own good, by warning him against the surveillance of the Verdurin, whom he rightly sees as ‘trash’, at least in relation to their deficiencies in the area of what we might call exceptional sensitivities. Finally at the end of the film when Swann tells Mémé of his genuine freedom from Odette, Mémé knows instinctively that this has been achieved through her eradication, not quite as Muhammad II achieved it, so Mémé reminds Swann, by stabbing his impossible love, but more elegantly, by marrying her. The realizations of this substitution came to Swann in a spirit of self-mocking amusement. The expression on Mémé’s face is more disturbed. He realizes that his friend has ultimately pursued his desires via the most perverse route possible and that such a route can only lead to death. This is an acknowledgement by Mémé of the way he knows Swann has completely given himself over to perversion – that, rather than being a gesture of love and desire, a gesture matching his exceptional sensitivity in matters 117

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of the heart, Swann is using marriage as a method of stamping it out.17 This repression of desire is the thing that is killing Swann from the moment he meets Odette. But it is not the love he has for her as such, but the way that his love can only be expressed by being intermingled with the frisson of its repression. Commenting on Odette’s infidelities, furthermore, Mémé also introduces a more pathetic notion into the scene. That not only was Swann’s great love, his most intense and ‘exceptional’ expression of feeling, unutterably corrupted and contaminated by his own perverted mind, but that if Odette was, in fact, a ‘human shrub’, like his insensitive young protégé, she might not have been worth it.

Swann’s Way Swann’s social position, the overwhelming nature of his love for Odette, his sartorial penchant, his paranoia and, indeed, his final illness all indicate a Schreber-style narcissism. This adult sublimation of the effects of the delay in the infant transition from self-love to object-love is initially apparent to us in the success of its pre-Odette sublimation as outlined by Bazin. Swann’s lofty friend, the Duc, acknowledges Swann’s high standing in their community as a gourmand, a connoisseur – a man of taste and distinction. The apparent scandal of his Jewish background to the lesser creatures of this world is, to the Duc and Duchess de Geurmantes, simply part of his attraction, hardly worth mentioning. It is only when the taboo Odette threatens Swann’s position amongst the Geurmantes circle, when in Freud’s terms the fact of Odette threatens to ‘undo the work of sublimation’,18 that a sense of social disapprobation rears its head. In this sense Odette elicits Swann’s ‘intense wave of libido’ that has hitherto been completely restrained and channelled into his attention to the pleasures and the dictates of the Geurmantes world. The presence of Odette in Swann’s life may appear to threaten his social standing, but, through what we see in the 118

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film, it is of far greater threat to his health. At the end of the film the Geurmantes are still receiving him, but he is dying. It is not the social stigma of his liaison with Odette but his own neurosis that brings about the frustration, the disappointment and the failure to satisfy the libidinal demands she induces. In this context, the social taboo attached to the affair and his own paranoia seems to help Swann rather than hinder him. Above all it is his fears and anxieties over giving himself to Odette that are the greatest forces in his libidinal blockage, causing both a return to what we might consider his infantile state of narcissism, and also his developing illness.19 Swann’s denials of the desire stimulated in him by Odette are, in this context, made in the service of his narcissism which, as we considered in chapter one, is ultimately concerned with the neurotic’s fears for his own survival.20 There is no source given for Swann’s illness at the end of the film so it is tempting to read its origin in the symptoms of his infantile narcissism, as Freud might see it. The irony here is that it might be the narcissism that is killing Swann, the denial of other-directed desire in narcissism, not the intense pain and suffering that Swann suspects in the intrinsic power and destructiveness of the emotion itself. In this context, it is Mémé’s model of desire that is upheld in the narrative, despite Swann’s tragic self-destruction and Odette’s potential unworthiness. As we see so often in the work of Jeremy Irons, in Charles Ryder particularly, and to an extent Charles Smithson, for the masochist, the melancholic and the pervert, the frustrated love story of the self-destructive narcissist falling for someone or something even less than the unworthy shrub might be the most romantic of all.

Notes   1. William Costanzo. ‘The Persistence of Proust, the Resistance of Film’, Literature Film Quarterly 15.3 (1987), 169.   2. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 445–447. 119

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  3. John Simon. ‘Swann in Love: Movie Reviews’, National Review 36, 16 November (1984), 55–57.   4. Cf. Swann’s two mad dashes around Paris with those of Gaston (Louis Jordan) in Gigi, debating with himself the importance of Gigi and the impact she has on his life, and is likely to have should they come together first in an ‘arrangement’ and then in marriage.   5. Allison Barrows et al. The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd Edition. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1983, 996.   6. P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster (Granada Television, 1990).   7. Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974) shows us something of this dynamic in the way it represents the Dirk Bogarde character, a former Nazi concentration camp officer, as a most servile hotel desk clerk, subordinating himself not only to his customers but also to the desires and humiliations he finds in a former camp inmate played by Charlotte Rampling. This particularly and mutually perverse coupling demonstrates the way in which the neurotic’s sense of guilt, shame and disgust, that which brings forth the sado-masochistic impulse, employs the positions of master and servant as roles to be played.   8. Anthony Quinton. From Wodehouse to Wittgenstein: Essays. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1998, 325: ‘The clever servant of “survus dolosus” was standard equipment in the new comedy of the ancient world.’ The tradition has persisted ever since.   9. Proust’s habit of sleeping by day and working at night is legendary but noted in a recent edition of the novel, see Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1. London: Everyman Publishers, 2001, xxxviii. 10. Nancy Mitford. Love in a Cold Climate. New York: Random House, 1949, 31. 11. See Dyer, ‘Nice Young Men’, 46. 12. Modleski, The Woman Who Knew Too Much, 90. 13. Alan Bennett. Forty Years On. London: Faber, 1969. 14. In Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 331, the name is spelled ‘Basin’. 15. Costanzo,’The Persistence of Proust’, 172 also sees Mémé as something of a ‘foil’ for Swann in the film but is, perhaps, more pessimistic in his reading of Mémé’s reaction to being rejected by Nicolas Baby. 16. Costanzo, ‘The Persistence of Proust’, 171. 17. Again the comparison with Gaston in Minnelli’s Gigi is interesting. So disturbed with Gigi’s immersion in the ways of the courtesan is Gaston that after his own (and his second) mad dash around Paris, he resolves this dangerous conundrum by proposing marriage. 18. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 447–448. 19. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 445–447. 20. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 451.

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5 Dead Ringers The Flight from Strange and Unloved Women

In Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego there is a passage in which the opposition of group ideals and individualized feelings of love are demonstrated to be entirely incompatible. The model of such groups for Freud comes from that all male band of brothers which, in his foundational myth of civilization Totem and Taboo, is instituted in the confusion following the murder of the primal horde father. Having murdered their father (so the story goes) the rebellious sons recognized that no one of their number could, or should, hold the rights of exclusive sexual access to the women of the tribe that their all-powerful father once held. Fearing the outbreak of destructive and pointless violence, the group established the rules of sexual access that reflected the power-sharing arrangement upon which social order might be achieved. Needless to say, these rules primarily reflected concerns over what the modern world might recognize and abhor as incest, that no brother might have sexual access to any woman (mother or sister) of his own totem group. To avoid jealousy over the potential for such access, all of the brothers would need to look for sexual partners outside their common totem group.1 These rules, therefore, led to a situation in which, as Freud 121

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explains, ‘the sensual needs of men had to be satisfied with strange and unloved women’.2 Freud’s turn of phrase is amusing, but beyond this, it does suggest the very real potential for feelings of alienation and loss that can lie at the heart of any love relationship. Most lovers, of course, circumvent these problems of estrangement by finding love within a partner who simply resembles their beloved mother, father, sister or brother. What Dead Ringers does is to take the threat of this kind of estrangement, the endurance of which lies in repression, and resolve it at the logical extent of the tendency (in the unrepressed mind) to look for a partner in that person who is closest and most familiar. To the extent that this is actually a film about two brothers (two separate entities) the narrative moves towards the ultimate unification or marriage of Elliot and Beverly. In so far as this helps us read the film as really a story about one entity, one narcissistic, perhaps schizophrenic, ego, as Claire calls Beverly, it shows the lover’s real goal.3 That is, when seeking solace from the estrangement of object-identification, the lover seeks unification with none other than the self. As I have considered in relation to Scorsese’s Kundun, in so far as such a narrative seems to achieve the pro-fraternal band and pro-social objective of avoiding and disavowing the dangers of maternal seduction by looking to some fantasy place beyond it, the saga of the Mantle twins appears to be one of fraternal band conformity.4 The explicit connotations of homoeroticism in the film merely fortify such an apparent contract of misogyny with the regime of the brother that Freud describes in Totem and Taboo. It is, however, in the Mantle twins’ complete eradication of the maternal presence and in the depth of their attachment to each other (or the extreme narcissism of the implied central ego, that is, what they call ‘Mantle Inc.’) that the film achieves its essential perversion. This type of love, as Freud demonstrates, is the enemy of group sublimation because, in the exclusive attachment to the other (which in this case is the self), it implies a compromise 122

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of one’s attachment to the group ideal – a perverse act of going it alone.5 Stripped bare of the base structure provided by the reclaimed figure of the virgin mother and replaced by a structure provided by narcissism, the individual, opposed to the group, can fully emerge. The practice of holding the mother safely to the side, or in the past (as the melancholic does), as a referent is highly useful to patriarchal culture and its notions of order. Looking back beyond or destroying this referent altogether and replacing it with the self can be seen as nothing other than excessive and perverse. The overwhelming feeling of desperation in Dead Ringers, however, suggests that the pursuit of the narcissistic perversion is also the quest, as Freud and film theorist Barbara Creed see it, for survival.6 Like the great Romantic lovers that they are, Elliot and Beverly literally cannot live without each other. The only chance they have for survival lies in each other. Eradicating or deprived of a maternal identification, and the subsequent object identifications of normal psychosexual development towards the name of the father, they are alone. Perhaps like the one individual ego (Mantle Inc.) that they, in part, represent, their story seems to reflect the idea that the struggle for survival is ultimately a lonely one, a journey beyond not only the mother but also the father.7 The title sequence and prologue to Dead Ringers establishes the pattern of the narcissist’s fantasy journey backwards from the denial of the maternal function towards the glorious time before the mother, when there was only the self.8 The title sequence of eleven illustrations shows the surgical tools for working on women’s bodies and various cross-sections of occupied wombs and organs isolated from the woman who owns them. Only two full drawings of women are present in this sequence. The first drawing, which accompanies Genevieve Bujold’s title card, is the figure of a seated or backward-leaning women who has the skin around her stomach pulled back to reveal her internal organs. The second drawing, accompanying the title card of the director’s sister, Denise Cronenberg, is 123

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the figure of a reclining woman, perhaps minutes after giving birth. Her stomach is similarly revealed but empty of its baby who lies apart from its mother, to her right, in an oval-shaped object which is perhaps a womb or amniotic sack still housing the unborn foetus. Like the isolated organs these women are represented as merely the sum of their organs, merely vessels for the birthing of babies. Their substantial presence is overwhelmed and figuratively cut away in the sequence by the horrific surgical instruments and the implied discomfiture of their use. The instruments make up six of the eleven illustrations and begin and end the sequence. The only illustration that links an occupied womb to the rest of its maternal host (in any sense at all) is the eighth illustration of female organs un-encased by skin, bones, arms, legs or a head. Even the illustration of, apparently hermaphroditic twins makes clear that the point of the sequence is to emphasize the desire to separate the male child from the fact of the female. These hermaphrodites, one boy and one girl, have been read as twins and misread as though they are joined. They are, however, separated and this is where the film will lead us, towards the separation of the Mantle twins, not only from a maternal function, represented in the figure of Claire (Genevieve Bujold), but also from the fact of femininity all together. In the 1954 scene that begins the film, the assertive child, Rafaella (Marsha Moreau), bluntly disturbs the boys’ pursuit of touch-less reproductive science before the triumph of that idea is re-asserted when the sequence concludes with the boys playing their game of ‘intra-ovular surgery’. Finally, the pattern of female assertion and redundancy is once again repeated when the boys are told by a lecturer that their vaginal retractor will not work with a living patient only to have it become ‘the standard of the industry’ before they finish their medical degrees. What these medicalizations and challenges to the science, foreshadowed in the title sequence and prologue, amount to in the body of the film is the Mantle twins’ quest not simply to cut out the maternal function, but to 124

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uncover and inhabit a place before the mother. By delving into the womb and seeking to peel back the body surrounding it, as the drawings of the title sequence do, Elliot and Beverly work to externalize the interior of the woman’s body and to leave it with little suggestion of the mother herself other than as a space for them to inhabit. The title and prologue sequences seem to fulfil this fantasy scenario by disavowing any threats to their science of safe sex and placing them, finally, alone together, tenderly embracing, in a tiny college room away from their adoring peers at the dining hall reception. ‘Beverly, you should have been there,’ says Elliot, to which Beverly simply replies, ‘I was.’ In her excellent chapter on the film, Helen W. Robbins reads the Mantle twins as possessed of ambivalence between phallic drives and womb envy, masochistic desires for ‘fusion with the maternal body’.9 Robbins’s reading of the Rafaella prologue scene as reflective of the Mantles’ ‘regressive desire to return to the pre-symbolic connection with the maternal real’ indicates that she sees their nostalgic journey as halting one stop before I do.10 Nevertheless, Robbins’s observations about the Mantles’ phallic/fusion ambivalence, their ‘desire to incorporate her womb, to be the woman’ and to surrender their ‘male subject hood to the maternal body’ are familiar territory for the prince of perversion.11 How I distinguish my reading of the Mantles from those of Robbins and Creed, and indeed my own readings of others of Jeremy Irons’s princes of perversion, is around the idea of womb envy. Jacobowitz and Lippe have written about the generally underdeveloped characters of the film, outside the empathy-inducing point of view given to the twins, and the redundancy of Claire’s character in particular.12 Pam Cook considers that Claire ‘only makes sense if she is seen as a maternal fantasy figure’ and Mary Russo points out her limited scope in Dead Ringers, particularly in the second half.13 In her emphasis on the importance of narcissism in the film, Creed draws an effective and detailed picture of the lonely space the twins occupy through 125

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retreat from and the displacement, if not the eradication, of Claire and the threat of femininity.14 To my reading this sense of redundancy, and also displacement, counts against what Robbins and others consider as Cronenberg’s characters’ ‘prioritisation of the female, maternal body’, at least in Dead Ringers.15 This intolerable idea may well haunt the Mantles, but I suggest that their narcissism is such that neither the maternal nor paternal signifier has any significant hold on them. As Beverly says, ‘we don’t do husbands’, and I doubt they care about their female clientele at all. Elliot may not be far from the truth about their interest about anyone else when he reminds the hospital board chair that they have ‘been planning to ease [themselves] into pure research anyway’. Therefore Robbins’s use of the Eva Kittay idea of ‘womb appropriation’ sits better to my mind than does the idea of envy.16 The Mantle twins certainly want a womb, but they want to live in it and be birthed by it themselves. Perhaps so disavowing of the intolerable idea of surrender to the maternal body, they want the womb but not the mother that comes with it, nor the father that succeeds it. I do not doubt for a second that the emphasis of my reading of the film, on the Mantles’ successful eradication of the ‘monstrous feminine’ (to borrow Creed’s phrase), implies a performance of almost completely successful repression by the twins, Cronenberg, if not also by myself. But the male spectator reads the film in a particular way and, I suspect, in a particularly different context to the female spectator. No man watching the film can be insensitive to the various levels of victimization and pain that the female patients endure. Despite a sense of this pain, however, the male spectator can never really know it. Presented in the film, as horrifically as it is, he may come to understand that pain, at least in terms of the perverse logic involved in the denial of it, for which he is culturally attenuated. Similarly, I suspect, that for the female spectator this perverse logic is, ultimately, unthinkable. But perversion is my theme and if I favour a reading of female 126

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Dead Ringers (1988). Directed by David Cronenberg Shown: Jeremy Irons Credit: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation/Photofest Photographer: Attila Dory

eradication here, beyond simple displacement, it is because I see the Mantles guilty of perhaps the greatest perversion. So complete is their repression of the maternal function, by the end of the film the sight of the Medusa’s head has no power to turn them to stone. From the introduction of Claire at the beginning of the film, the major part of her narrative concerns her efforts to bring about the disruption of the Mantle brothers’ private space. She begins this attempted disruption by invoking the idea of Imogenism. After her first sexual encounter with Beverly she bemoans her lack of fertility because, never being able to have a baby, she will never be a real woman and only a ‘little girl’. It is the clearest sign of the ultimate triumph of narcissism in this film that, for this incarnation of the Jeremy Irons prince of perversion, the prospect of a paternal/seducer’s redemption fails to take hold. In the clear suggestion of what is being disrupted, however, and from the resolution of the narrative itself, the film provides a very real sense of what this private 127

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space is. Furthermore, its delineation casts this film as a very tender and tragic love story.17 Despite the horrors of its many violent attacks on women and their bodies, the perversions through which Elliot and Beverly pursue their romance simply enlarge the sense of their struggle for, not only happiness, but survival. As the film begins with images of twins in the confines of a womb, it also shows the various spaces of confinement that the Mantle twins seek to protect against the attack of the world around them. Within the explicit logic of the film, this is a space for Elliot and Beverly to pursue their exclusive love. Implied by the narrative is the ultimate space of confinement where the individual ego may pursue its own desire, as Freud sees it, under no authority other than its own narcissism.18

‘Is That You, Byron?’ When Claire leaves Beverly for a ten-week film shoot in Georgia, his unhappiness and drug addiction are such that he is driven to great acts of perversion. Telephoning her suite he is disturbed to find a man, Birchall (Damir Andrei), answering. Fearing he is her lover, Beverly explains to Birchall how easily he can clinically examine Claire and discover her three cervixes. Totally ‘grossed out’, as Claire later describes him, the ‘defiantly gay’ Birchall responds by asking, ‘Is that you, Byron?’ Given this allusion to that nineteenth-century prince of perversion, we can see that this is the very question that Claire and other forces external to the Mantle dyad are putting to the brothers. That is to say, Claire is putting it to Beverly that he and Elliot are perverse and that they should be separated. In a similar way Cary (Heidi Von Palleske) puts the same proposition before Elliot when Beverly is in the middle of his drug and paranoia problems. As the means by which the narrative works to separate the brothers, Claire exists to show how different they are. If Claire introduces a ‘confusing element into the Mantle brothers’ saga’ 128

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it is in the way she nominates these differences that she is most effective. What her presence brings out is a thinly drawn picture of Beverly as the sweet and sensitive soul. Elliot, on the other hand, is the cad. In this, Claire’s description of the twins increases our initial perceptions of Elliot as the public moralist and the private radical. The scene of Elliot’s major out of town lecture and his employment of twin prostitutes who visit him in his opulent and chintzy hotel suite indicate something of this. But while Elliot puts a politic and presentable face on his apparent outrages, Beverly does the opposite. His bookishness and awkward public face easily gives way to moroseness and ultimately to the persona of the defiant and dangerous radical. This character type of the mad scientist is familiar to viewers of science fiction horror such as The Thing.19 Claire’s attraction to Beverly, if, in fact, she is not simply hustling him for drugs, is obscure. When she suggests he has schizophrenia she tells him that, as opposed to being ‘an amusing lay and not much more’, she likes him very much. When finally she discovers the truth about them, all of a sudden, she appears obsessed to know everything about him. She must see Elliot and, what is more, she must see them together. Later she will accuse Elliot of not being able to ‘get it up unless little brother is watching’ but from her desperation to see them together it seems that she too takes a similarly perverse pleasure in the freak show of their lives. Beyond this, there is very little in her scenes with Beverly to suggest any real and enduring reason for her attraction to him. Indeed with his possessiveness and his apparent inability to separate himself from the tragedy of his own life, Beverly is, in many ways, a highly undesirable lover. Despite this, Claire’s attraction to him is simply taken for granted as perhaps is a mother’s love for her son. She is content simply to have him in her life and in her bed because he is ‘the sweet one’. Elliot is the greater challenge to Claire because they have so much in common. Not the least of this is that they are both in love with the same person – at least both at war over the 129

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same person. Beyond this, however, it is their mutual use for glamour and ‘the art of glamour’ which demonstrates their similarity. Like Claire, Elliot is a performer. The public face of Mantle Inc., it is Elliot who accepts the accolades, makes the speeches, writes the papers and woos the chairman’s wife (usually) so they can get their grant. When Beverly is accused of malpractice it is Elliot who must front the medical board. For Claire, and possibly for the spectator too, this makes Elliot look vain, manipulative of his quietly industrious brother and not at all serious. Indeed Beverly’s impersonation of Elliot as a smooth operator with the Contessa (an act which Beverly obviously can also do) and his drunken indignation levelled at Elliot at the award ceremony encourage the spectator to have similar feelings about Elliot. Claire obviously does and her reaction to him, both in the restaurant and in her dressing room, paints him as a private pervert for all his public charm. For all his smarminess, however, the designation of Elliot as cad is hardly accurate. In his response to the onset of Claire in the Mantle brothers’ saga, we certainly see him located by Claire as public moralist and private pervert, whereas in her view of Beverly, the exact opposite is true. This may account for Beverly’s frequent reference to, and his embodiment of, their radical professional reputation. In this it appears his public radicalism is a cover for his high-minded personal sensitivity and morality. Earlier in the film, Elliot had teased him about his sense of professional ethics that for Elliot (as for Freud’s narcissist) are something of a joke.20 The scene in which Elliot visits Claire on set stands as a major clash in the battle over just how much difference there is between the two brothers. Outlining the threat she poses to ‘the Mantle brothers’ saga’, by offering himself to her as well Elliot is relying on her coming round to the point that there is really no difference between them. He seems to have lost the battle when she refuses his offer. His desperate look into the mirror highlights the fear and almost fatal significance this has for Elliot. While Elliot, and ultimately Beverly, work to 130

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deny their difference, it is Claire’s role to emphasize it. When Claire tells Elliot that she cannot sleep with him too, her line, ‘I’m sorry but I can’t’, has the force of a very definite prohibition rather than simply being a matter of her casual personal preference for Beverly. There is a definite sense that she is working on behalf of those strong forces of anti-perversion, seeking to normalize Beverly by the eradication of Elliot. This also allows her to be the Elliot figure in Beverly’s life – that is, to be the other half of this twin-set and to control Beverly for herself. Given the similarities between her and Elliot, however, it is clear that she is looking at a model for her relationships in which opposites attract. She, who is capable of coldly insulting her ‘wardrobe person’ as if she does not exist, seeks the sweetness and the sincerity of Beverly who is almost completely without guile. Elliot, on the other hand, is pressing for the fact that he and Beverly are one in the same. What he needs from Beverly is not completion but mirroring, which is, of course, perverse to Claire and indeed the world around her.

‘It Can’t Be Love If It Does This to You’ Despite the fact that Claire’s departure for Georgia seems to have eradicated the threat to Beverly and Elliot, the final fifty minutes of the film appear to be moving their saga disconcertingly towards their separation and reconciliation with the world. Initially Beverly’s addiction seems to be destroying his career and his health and Elliot looks as if he might survive at Beverly’s expense. During this phase Elliot is required to play the stable, model physician and Cary encourages him to abandon Beverly to a rehabilitation facility in order to save his own career and reputation. Spurning this idea, however, Elliot’s dream of synchronization sparks his own addiction and by the time Beverly returns from his reunion with Claire, it is Elliot who is self-destructing, seemingly leaving Beverly as their sole survivor. This is formalized by the ritualistic operation 131

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of separation, after which Beverly wakes up thinking the whole thing was a dream. As he did formerly upon Claire’s return, Beverly shaves and changes (an Irons character yet again luxuriating in the rituals of dressing and deportment) and the man in the grey flannel suit emerges into the world to call Claire from a phone box. The fact that when she answers he cannot speak to her and leaves the phone box and his briefcase behind shows his separation from Elliot to be as untenable as the separation of Chang and Eng in the story of the Siamese twins. Although their perverse union cannot be reconciled to the world their ending is the classic Romantic resolution of unification in death, which the social world has for so long liked to read about. As Elliot cannot quite say, they will always be together. The idea that there can be reconciliation to the world and its normalist values is exposed as impossible and, as far as the Romantic lovers themselves are concerned, insignificant.21 While Elliot may fear losing the battle with Claire over Beverly, her anxieties over this are no less pronounced. Her initial reaction to the news that he has a brother and a twin seems, in one sense, out of place. One could well understand her revulsion at the realization that she is, as she says, ‘laying’ them both. When she confronts Beverly about Elliot, however, she seems more concerned over the closeness of the two. She wants to know all about their life, their apartment and whether or not they sleep in the same bed. The latter is a strange question but not one that is totally beyond the realms of the audience’s imagination. It is quite common for identical twins to live together and this sometimes challenges the prejudices of outsiders. What lies behind Claire’s fascination, however, is the perception of perversion in the twin that uncovers something like it in herself. It must be said that if we fail to blink at this question it is because, as spectators, we must at some level share such a perverse imagination. As in the example of the ‘surgical tools for working on mutant women’, we may be horrified by them but, like the artist, Wollock (Stephen Lack), who seems devilishly fascinated by Beverly’s proposal, they 132

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easily arouse our own macabre fascination as they do Claire’s. Beyond this, however, it seems that Claire’s initial concerns are far more to do with her fears about separating them than anything else. Beverly’s dream of Claire separating the brothers by tearing at their attached bodies with her teeth plays a very significant role in bolstering her fears in so far as such dreams highlight Beverly’s attachment to Elliot. This causes Claire to give Beverly the very same sleeping tablets she is taking and this (as in earlier scenes) has the effect of synchronizing their drug taking in a way that Elliot will seek to do with Beverly later in the film. So as the dream gives us one of the initially rare insights into Beverly’s attachment to Elliot, it also has the effect of demonstrating Claire’s fear of the very same. Certainly Claire may be concerned that Beverly’s initial secrecy about Elli’s identity is due to the fact that they are attempting to deceive her. More importantly, however, I think we can read her fears in terms suggesting that Beverly is keeping Elliot a secret because in this way he can keep Elliot all to himself and not break the cycle of narcissism which she is so eager to break. The pose they adopt after the dream – Beverly lying in her lap with the bedclothes enfolded around them – is similar to that which will be the last shot of the film that shows Beverly lying in Elliot’s lap. It is only in the scenes of Elliot and Beverly alone together that we see these differences, as outlined by Claire, to be virtually meaningless. This is mainly seen through Elliot’s compassion for the struggling Beverly. Elliot may play the cad in the role he is given by Claire, but with Beverly we see him to be caring, affectionate and loving. When Beverly expresses, what are to Elliot, dangerous feelings of attachment to Claire, Elliot responds with understanding and compassion. His response to Beverly’s perception of infidelity in Claire is similarly understanding. It seems that Elliot’s compassion, and perhaps his greater feelings of security about the relationship, is inspired by the certain knowledge he has of their inseparable destiny. While Beverly, it seems, can keep alive 133

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the dream of separation, Elliot seems more certain and perhaps more secure, even resigned to their mutual fate. Secure in the ultimate redundancy of Claire, Elliot seems to have a clear understanding of the classical sense of predetermination that Cronenberg wanted to give the film.22 He may fear Beverly’s attempts at separation – because these can only end in their mutual destruction – but when confronted with Beverly’s defiance he seems genuinely sad at the hopelessness of his brother’s desires. Sad that he knows that what Beverly seeks he can never have. Sad also in that he knows that should either one of them attempt such a separation, as in the Chang and Eng story, the death of one will inevitably bring about the death of the other. Accordingly, Elliot may well seek to break or impinge upon Beverly’s relationship with Claire, but this is no more than Claire seeks to do with Beverly’s relationship with Elliot. What is more, the film demonstrates clear reasons for Elliot’s possessiveness. The reasons for Claire’s attachment to Beverly are never articulated, but simply, according to the logic of the love story, taken for granted. Elliot seeks an end to Claire’s involvement because he loves Beverly and literally cannot live without him – acknowledging his debt to Beverly’s research is simply an easy manifestation of the fact that not only is Beverly’s research the basis of his own success, but that Beverly’s very existence is the basis of his own being. The resolution to this is that they are finally seen as synchronized. These externally constructed differences in their personae are eradicated. This is why we see them revert to childishness. It reminds us of them playing ‘intra-ovular surgery’ – the bliss of their childhood narcissistic union, the bliss of the dream of a sexless science where ‘everything is required’ is achieved. The threat Claire presented has been totally overcome. The phone box scene merely confirms this. The fact that, following Beverly’s final return to Elliot, Cronenberg has them mockingly revert to the different coloured suit jackets which they wore for the meeting with Claire in the 134

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restaurant, highlights the fact that they are now to be seen as more substantially inseparable than ever, whatever they wear. The final image of the film, with Elliot lying dead against the wall and Beverly lying dead across his lap, reminds us, as Creed points out, of Michelangelo’s Pieta.23 The two poses are, it is true, very different. In Michelangelo’s sculpture Jesus lies on his back in his mother’s arms. The pains of crucifixion are evident on his face and his sense of pathos is in marked contrast to Elliot’s peaceful sleep of the dead. Perhaps in his study of anguish and pity, the Pieta bears a slightly closer resemblance to a shot of Beverly and Claire straight after his nightmare of separation. In this shot Beverly has fallen to the floor in a seated and reclining position against the bed and side table while Claire has her arms around him. So in this sense, beyond the rough figure positioning and the use of drapery, the final shot possibly reminds me of the Pieta because the shot is the resolution of the incest anxiety which haunts the sculpture just as it drives the narrative of Dead Ringers itself. While the narcissist may find peace in the warm embrace of self and death, the Oedipal hero that Beverly threatens to become under the influence of Claire is beset by the anxieties of incest. Forever yearning for the mother, he cannot possess her (or be possessed by her) without crossing a line of perversion and taking himself beyond the pale. Jesus lies on his back, in great discomfort, because he may not fully envelop his mother. It is true that Beverly does embrace Claire at the conclusion of this scene but only after they have both taken anti-dreaming sleeping pills. Beverly can never be at rest with Claire, without sleeping pills, because she will always be that ‘strange and unloved woman’ to whom he is allotted by the rules of social organization formed under the shadow of patricide. But in death, if not in life, Elliot and Beverly may enfold each other, re-attach and live together peacefully and undisturbed in complete unity. Separated by nothing they are each other’s mother, child and possibly father too. Despite all the horrors they have inflicted and all the perversions they 135

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have pursued, I read the final shot as leaving no doubt as to the ultimate empathy that the story of the perverse narcissist can induce.

Notes   1. Sigmund Freud. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. London: The Hogarth Press, 1949, 120–124 and Sigmund Freud. Totem and Taboo: Some Point of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, 140–146.   2. Freud, Group Psychology, 122.   3. Barbara Creed. ‘The Naked Crunch: Cronenberg’s Homoerotic Bodies’, in Michael Grant (ed). The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg. Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000, 87 and 90. See also William Beard. The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006, 237.   4. Nicholls, Scorsese’s Men, 147–151.   5. Freud, Group Psychology, 120–124.   6. Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’, 451. See Barbara Creed. ‘Phallic Panic: Male Hysteria and Dead Ringers’, Screen, 31.2, Summer (1990), 129–142 on the links between narcissism, male hysteria, signification and symbolic castration.   7. In Beard, The Artist as Monster, 237, 261–263, 270, the author argues for the importance of the Mantle brothers’ search for their mother.   8. See Creed’s description: ‘an earlier time in one’s history: a time beyond that of the symbolic union with the mother, a time beyond even that of the beginnings of consciousness and awareness of objects, a time which reaches back to pre-birth when the embryo existed in total harmony with the body of the mother, suspended in the waters of the womb – an intrauterine haven’. Creed, ‘Phallic Panic’, 145.   9. Helen Robbins. ‘More Human Than I Am Alone’, in Steven Coen and Ina Rae Hark. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge, 1993, 134. See also Pam Cook. ‘Dead Ringers’, Monthly Film Bulletin 56, 660, January (1989), 3. 10. Robbins, ‘More Human’, 140. 11. Robbins, ‘More Human’, 135–136. 12. Florence Jacobowitz and Richard Lippe. ‘Dead Ringers: The Joke’s On Us’, CineAction, Spring (1989), 66–67 and 68. 13. Cook, ‘Dead Ringers’, 4. Mary Russo. ‘Twins and Mutant Women: David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers’, in The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 1994, 126. 14. Creed, ‘Phallic Panic’, 127–129, 134–136, 140, 145–146. 15. Robbins, ‘More Human’, 139. 16. Robbins, ‘More Human’, 135. 136

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17. Jacobowitz and Lippe, ‘Dead Ringers’, 67 and 69 link the film to the Romantic traditions of Tristan and Isolde but argue against the extent to which Elliot and Beverly accept this dimension to their relationship. Cook, ‘Dead Ringers’, 4 also sees this film as a ‘doomed love’ story. 18. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 259. 19. Creed, ‘Phallic Panic’, 133–134. 20. Freud, ‘On Narcissism’. 21. Jacobowitz and Lippe, ‘Dead Ringers’, 68 see this yearning for death as persistent throughout Cronenberg’s work. 22. Creed, ‘Phallic Panic’, 143. 23. Creed, ‘Phallic Panic’, 144.

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6 M. Butterfly René Gallimard and the Flair for Melodrama

I despise this costume, yet for the sake of our great helmsman I will endure it, along with all the other bourgeois Western perversions.

For all the classical Freudian aberrations present in Song Liling’s psychosexual make-up, it is René Gallimard who is the outstanding pervert of M. Butterfly. René’s perversion is that he cannot love Song (John Lone) as a woman, or as a man, but only as the ideal of Oriental beauty, a role she plays opposite his role as the ‘Western devil’ for the major part of the film. When they first meet at the Swedish embassy performance of selections from Madama Butterfly, she instantly diagnoses the symptoms leading to his perversion. It is a ‘favourite Western fantasy’; a pure, submissive Japanese virgin is seduced and then deserted by a white man, only to establish a shrine to his memory before killing herself when she discovers that he has violated their wedding vows. René finds this story tragically beautiful, as Song explains, until she points out how exploitative and absurd it is. This is the first of a number of occasions in which her role as his guide and teacher is made clear. Instantly he admits to seeing her point, just as, throughout the film, he will continue to downplay his role as her appointed lord and master, assuming a subordinate role and deferring 138

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to her superior position as his instructor. For the rest of the film, however, he will ignore his new understanding in favour of re-enacting the very same Western fantasy that Song has diagnosed. By the time he is explaining the substance of this first encounter to his wife, Jeanne (Barbara Sukowa), later that night, he is already dismissing Song’s deconstruction of the narrative as ‘sour grapes’. We will see him recant this ignorance again later in the film, frequently deferring to Song’s wisdom, but this is merely posturing. Song Liling is really nothing to him but a sort of generalized agent through which he may pursue his desire. This is not to suggest that she is useless to him, however, merely that she is simply an image of sexual desire. What I want to argue here is that, through a comparison with the heroine of Puccini’s opera, Cio-Cio-San, and by placing that comparison within critical understandings of stage and screen melodrama, we discover that René’s use for Song is substantial. From this reading we can see that his real perversion is not that he wants to possess her but that he wants to be her. To an extent Song Liling collaborates with this perversion. Whatever she understands about the Western colonialist devil with a wife in every port, with René it is a condition of her own desire, as well as the deception of the Chinese Communist Party she is about to play on him, that she willingly accepts a role in that fantasy.1 Furthermore, at their next meeting, it is evident in the complexity of her feelings towards him that she seems to confirm the possibility of Oriental complicity in this fantasy. This, more than anything in the film, shows the inadmissibility of concepts such as ‘exploitation’ and ‘absurdity’ in stories of love and desire where perversion is permitted to run free. Far beyond her penchant for the Freudian aberrations of cross-dressing, anal sex and her entirely invented ‘ancient Oriental ways of love’, it is her indulgence in games of sado-masochism with René, so often sending him away and then calling him back again, that marks Song Liling as a fellow traveller in those perversions. In another sense, 139

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as Cronenberg has pointed out, she has similar relationship with the Communist Party itself. She is forced to put herself through this experience of great perversion, but, all the while, like Claire Niveau in Dead Ringers, she wants and needs the humiliation in order to undergo the essential transformation of her life; to become her true self.2 René’s exploitation of Song has very little to do with being a Western capitalist and everything to do with those perversions that forbid the male melancholic from making a commitment to anything outside the cause of his own narcissism. This may conceivably be a symptom of the disease of Western capitalist ideology, but if it is, it is a perversion not unknown in Song’s understandings of her own culture. Both Song and her female controller, Comrade Chin (Shizuko Hoshi), know this. It is clear in their mutual recognition of the reason why female roles are played by men in the Beijing Opera – ‘because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to behave’. For René, it is desirable that his woman is supposed to behave in such a way as to give form to the Butterfly deep within himself. What he sees in Song is a quality he can use in order to bring this out. His desperate and repeated plea, ‘Are you my Butterfly?’ really means, ‘Are you the Butterfly that lies deep within me, struggling to get out?’ The extent to which this is exploitative and perverse lies in the fact that it has really very little to do with her. It is not only for reasons of state that Song practises her deception on him, however. In this, she joins a stage and screen fiction tradition of Cold War espionage (Another Country (1984), An Englishman Abroad (1984)), one that has frequently represented the exploits of the openly gay Guy Burgess, in which the spy’s reasons for treason and national betrayal are firmly based in emotional origins. She knows what any woman whose husband has grown disinterested knows. Once the facts of the beloved threaten to overcome the fantasy they may temporarily embody, love cools. In this context, the fact that there is a man in a suit under the Butterfly image of make-up, clothes and 140

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feminine performance is immaterial. When finally René loses his Butterfly, and he cannot see her in the man in or out of the suit underneath, the facts and substance of his exploitation become clear. His momentary discomfort in the police van and, ultimately, in his prison performance gives way to triumph and popular adoration. More than her shadow, her very image has cast itself over his ego and he becomes her. Finally and fully enabling his own Butterfly to come out, he can leave Song in his own suit, desolate and disconsolate. They have swapped not just places but costumes.3 René has found his very Butterfly and can make a beautiful and tragic sacrifice before all the world. Song makes a less glorious departure, surrounded by Communist cadres in suits, escorting ‘him’ (as she now appears) back to a fate doubtless no better than the abuse and condemnation he suffered at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Like René, the Communist Party has

M. Butterfly (1993). Directed by David Cronenberg Shown from left: Jeremy Irons, John Lone Credit: Geffen Pictures/Photofest. Photographer: Takashi Seida

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used and is now done with Song. Like her Cold War fellow travellers, Burgess and Maclean, when she comes in from the cold she finds herself less highly regarded than she imagined – more prisoner to her emotional needs to enact the role of double agent than ever before. In Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis), like René Gallimard, longs for Japan. With or without his beloved Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), he sees Japan as a place of escape from his manipulating wife, a place where he can go to fully indulge his ‘secret heart of woes’.4 M. Butterfly was released in 1993, the same year as Scorsese’s film and there is a profound sense of melancholia that the protagonists of both films share. Cronenberg’s film is a lot shorter, however, and there is less time to celebrate, or indulge René’s loss. This is one thing that separates the two films. Irons’s articulation of loss in M. Butterfly is less profound and Cronenberg’s edit allows less time for his melancholic to bustle in. When Song points out to René that it has been three weeks between their first and second meetings, we are surprised. Certainly in their early courting we see Irons indulge in some of the mooning about that we see in The Age of Innocence. Generally in M. Butterfly, however, the pains of loss experienced by René have a less profound effect on the spectator. When Song leaves René for the country, supposedly to have their baby, René leaves the station, pauses for a moment outside and enjoys a half smile of contentment as his surveys the scene around him. There is little devastation at what promises to be months of separation from his Butterfly. Standing in the street before climbing into his diplomatic car and getting on with his work, he more closely resembles the summer bachelor immortalized in Axelrod and Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955) than the depressed lover. In fact, if we read any sense of loss at all in the brief period they seem to experience between meetings – about six and a half minutes of screen time – it is projected beyond René’s thoughts of Song onto the political upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. 142

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There is a nice moment of allusion (at least for the hardcore Jeremy Irons fans) to Brideshead Revisited, when Song is finally forced to leave him on the stairs of his apartment block. Anyone who remembers the endless scene of Charles Ryder’s parting with Julia in Brideshead Revisited, when Irons seems to dissolve in a flood of tears and pity, will have noted this scene of parting as a point of contrast. When Song leaves, however, Cronenberg lingers on René’s suffering with a reverse shot of no more than two seconds, before cutting to René coming into work the next morning. Once he learns of his fate at work – to be sent back to Paris – he spends a minute lurking around Song’s house, momentarily devastated at the fate to which it has come with the social realities of the new China. Finally back home he is allowed a brief sob at the Paris Opera performance of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and a short drunken whinge about his loss in a bar. But even here that personal loss is quickly transferred into the public sphere and onto the street where the demonstrations and riots of May 1968 are taking place. The interruptions of these political and social upheavals in China and Paris, I suggest, are more indicative of René’s narcissism than the impact of these events on him. It is not as if this film suddenly tries to suggest that it is not a melodrama, a genre which has always resolutely refused to read the political in terms other than the personal,5 by directing our attention to political events. Certainly these events take him away from his explicit mourning for Song, but that says more about the limitations of his dedication to her than his dedication to his own narcissism. Barbara Creed aptly captures the method and mode of Cronenberg’s hero by describing him as ‘a kind of sleepwalker in relation to politics’.6 Wandering past these sparsely sketched events with a mildly regretful stare, René, like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939), is little more than our tourist guide through them. Their impact on him, like that of Song herself as a person, is only significant insofar as they strike a chord with his own fantasy. Any sense 143

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of loss we may experience at the decline and fall of the old Orient, or indeed the vieux Paris after the events of May 1968, is simply mediated by René’s perspective as the melodramatic hero. They are merely the set design and expression of his desire, that which Teresa de Lauretis refers to as ‘[t]he imbrication of the personal in the political and the projection of private fantasies into the public sphere’.7 Cronenberg speaks about his anti-David Lean approach to cinematography on this film. The effect of adopting this position is to not allow the Great Wall of China, for example, to overwhelm the need to concentrate on the emotions of the picnic scene between René and Song.8 In a way this act of de-emphasizing the ‘stunning visuals’ of China and its Cultural Revolution gives a visual equivalent to Cronenberg’s attempts to de-politicize the story. As he says: Revolutions are used by people … That’s why I wanted to play down the politics; what you see in the movie is politics in the service of unstated individual will and desire. The whole Red Guard thing is exactly what René is trying to do – sweeping out the past; viciously, violently, cruelly, completely. It’s a political manifestation of a very personal impulse. We create politics. There is no politics without human desire and madness, so to me it makes perfect sense that the two go together.9

Like René’s boss, the French Ambassador (Ian Richardson), in the scene in which he is dismissing René, we are not concerned here about the state of René’s analysis but the state of his mind. As Kristeva points out, social and political upheaval can easily be converted into melancholia.10 Whereas Scorsese indulges Newland Archer’s private responses to his loss – largely performing them only to the spectator – the melancholic of Cronenberg and Irons’s must perform in public. René’s most explicit and enduring performance of loss is saved until the end and his great prison finale. This is, of course, his angst-ridden contemplation of the fact that he has finally found his lost Butterfly. René begins his performance by speaking of his ‘vision of the Orient’. Following a cut away to Song, in suit and tie, being escorted back to China, however, René then speaks – perhaps more 144

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to himself – of himself as a Japanese woman who has sacrificed herself to an unworthy man. This is, however, a brief personal meditation. Soon returning to what James Naremore might describe as a more presentational performance style, he speaks with utmost clarity of his dual identity.11 Unlike Norman Bates in Psycho, he has not been taken over by the woman of his dreams. This is no passive submission to an overwhelming and identity-eliminating maternal seduction. Earlier in the film René is confronted with the bare facts of the intolerable idea in the naked body of Frau Baden (Annabel Leventon) and must work to distance himself from it by returning to Song, whom he has Imogenisticly described as ‘a young, innocent schoolgirl waiting for her lessons’.12 Announcing himself here, however, as ‘René Gallimard, also known as Madam Butterfly’, René confirms that this is more a celebration than a wake. It is a point of fusion, as Cronenberg sees it, with the character he has created.13 This leads to a triumphant final public performance of the fact that René Gallimard is also (but not only), as he spoke of earlier, a ‘fat woman in too much bad make-up’. This may be a performance invoking Kristeva’s notion of intolerable idea, but it is in no way intolerable to him. The satisfaction associated with this realization and assumption of the role of Butterfly within René and the comparison with Scorsese’s melancholic tells us a great deal about the Irons prince of perversion and his experience of loss. I have suggested that René’s loss is less profoundly felt by the spectator – more publicly expressed within the diegesis, but less personally felt by René. This is not to suggest that René does not flirt with the idea of loss, but that to the spectator it is a more distant and less profound experience. As in the example of the Mantle twins, who are perhaps even more directly engaged with the idea of loss, it seems the more alienating milieux of Irons’s style of masculinity disinclines us from identification in that way that Scorsese’s men, even those as perverse as Travis Bickle and Jake La Motta, seem 145

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to attract our empathy. Given that Travis is an assassin and Jake a wife beater, our inability to empathize with Irons’s love-struck diplomat and two deluded gynaecologists, in relative terms, seems less to do with Cronenbergian alienation than something else. In essence, what I think distinguishes the Cronenberg/Irons melancholic from that of Scorsese is the way in which they end. As Scorsese argues against the common audience assumption that Charlie (Harvey Keitel) is dead at the end of Mean Streets (1973),14 the Scorsesean melancholic does not die, but goes on. The key thing about René, Elliot and Beverly is that they embrace death with open arms and their experience of loss is therefore somewhat curtailed, both literally and metaphorically. The ‘nuptials of suicide’, as Kristeva phrases it,15 releases them from an essential part of their bond with life-bound melancholia, into a perhaps joyful state beyond loss and beyond care.16 Song knows from the beginning that there is a deathdefying, or cyclically re-birthing caterpillar/butterfly within René which she must bring out. When she tells René that she is pregnant and that he has saved her life, her admission is not just recognition that she is still secure in her dealings with the Party. Her final words to him in China, ‘never forget what our love has brought to life’ and ‘the days I spent with you were the only days I ever truly existed’, speak of the way René has saved her life in the most substantial way. Their games of ‘tit for tat’ affection and betrayal, which range in seriousness from the way they both beg for and withhold affection – as in their letter exchange – to the larger betrayals of their espionage activities, are games of sado-masochistic exchange. Throughout the film, they swap roles of power over, and subjection to, each other before finally completely swapping clothes. These exchanges play to their mutual needs and desires. The almost total lack of regard they play to the diplomatic situation in which they are embroiled emphasizes the way in which these desires are the overwhelming obligations towards the satisfaction of their true identities. 146

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Melodrama A further point of comparison with The Age of Innocence, and Scorsese’s male protagonists generally, lies in the way M. Butterfly more explicitly demonstrates the importance that the Scorsesean melancholic places on the guiding narrative of female melodrama that he carries around with him.17 In a sense, Newland Archer never leaves home without a mental copy of Dion Boucicault’s The Shaugraun and is always careful, we discover, to see it in performance when he travels. At a performance of the play he tells Ellen Olenska that he always leaves the theatre after the scene of the lovers parting because he likes to take the picture of deferred desire away with him. In René’s conversion to Puccini’s opera we see an equally potent expression of the way the male melancholic likes a narrative of female loss to act as an instruction manual telling him how to better pursue his own. The discourse of incorporation, introjection, feminization and alienation that we see so often in the prince of perversion’s story expresses his melancholic longing to become that very object that he desires and to share in her experience of loss, sacrifice and punishment. By incorporating what we can read as significant narrative tendencies of the Hollywood woman’s melodrama within his own narrative, René empowers himself with a further experience of loss. This is a story line of his fantasy narrative that he can endure briefly before converting it into a beneficial condition of personal (if not also cultural) legitimacy and power. If, as we see in René’s example, the melancholic pervert appears to carry around a guidebook to direct his fantasy narrative, it is certainly Madama Butterfly. It is from such a melodrama of female desire and punishment that he derives the structure of his own fantasy. As Cronenberg says, ‘Gallimard is in the process (unknown to him) of creating his own opera. He is creating the opera of his life, preparing to become the diva of it.’18 As in almost any stage or screen melodrama, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly confronts René with three pillars of the 147

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genre that are essential to the construction of his fantasy: socio-political disease, utopia and sacrifice. Cio-Cio-San, the heroine, begins the opera as the poor and fatherless victim of an oppressive social regime, the values of which soon localize themselves in Cio-Cio-San’s family when she seeks release from this dystopia in her foreign marriage. The presence of this type of social illness and disease as a result of totalitarianism and personal oppression has attracted wide critical attention as a common element in various strands of stage and screen melodrama. Considering what he calls ‘the sophisticated family melodrama of the 1940s and 1950s’, film theorist Thomas Elsaesser locates the origins of the idea of social decay in the romantic drama that thrived in the years leading up to and following the French Revolution. The pre-revolutionary sentimental novel also played an important role in ‘depicting very explicitly certain external constraints and pressures bearing upon the characters, and by showing up the quasi-totalitarian violence perpetrated by (agents of) the “system”’. Characters of high moral idealism faced the overbearing forces of ‘a corrupt yet seemingly omnipotent social class (made up of feudal princes and petty state functionaries)’. Families and the rites of intermarriage brought further pressure to bear on the individual in an environment of depravity, abused aristocratic privilege and the corrupt necessities of the day. Furthermore, Elsaesser notes the coincidence of this form and its themes of decay ‘with periods of intense social and ideological crisis’.19 It is this notion of crisis that abounds in the corrupt world order represented in Puccini’s opera and which finds resonance for René, both in the upheavals of Cultural Revolution China and in the emotional and psychological biography presented to him by Song Liling. In her American husband, B.F. Pinkerton, Cio-Cio-San sees the embodiment of her own moral and just view of the world, which stands apart from the diseased and corrupt environment that she inhabits. Peter Brooks’s discussion of the ‘moral occult’ provides insight to further our understanding 148

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of this heightened sense of morality and how it operates in melodrama. According to Brooks the moral occult is: the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality. The moral occult is not a metaphysical system; it is rather the repository of the fragmentary and desacralized remnants of sacred myth. It bears comparison to unconscious mind, for it is a sphere of being where our most basic desires and interdictions lie, a realm which in quotidian existence may appear closed off from us, but which we must accede to since it is the realm of meaning and value.20

In this sense the melodrama is not so much a style or a genre, but a mode, an attempt to find the terms of expression for ‘a fundamental drama of the moral life’.21 The world of melodrama represents a ‘post sacred era’ responding to the ‘loss of the tragic vision’, seeking to uncover ‘the essential moral universe’. In its struggle between clearly defined antagonists, Brooks sees melodrama as representing the ‘urge towards resacralization’ but this is a drive that can only be achieved in personal terms. Transcendent values have become irreconcilable to the world represented, swamped in the mire of the social order. It remains merely for this order to be ‘purged’ and ‘a set of ethical imperatives to be made clear’.22 For the individual ‘renunciation’ can only operate as victory within the moral occult and therefore in restricted, personal terms. This relies upon that which Brooks calls the ‘individual’s “sacrifice to the ideal”’.23 Brooks’s notion of the melodrama as ‘desperate effort’ to re-attain the sacred and the melodramatist’s refusal ‘to allow that the world has been completely drained of transcendence’ helps explain the social and moral universe of the heroine of melodrama and Cio-Cio-San in particular.24 It also helps explain the apparent perversion, lying behind her disastrous choice of Pinkerton to embody, or at least to provide access to, the values of this haven, this utopia. Cio-Cio-San’s story largely operates to define that transcendent aesthetic but to deny it as a social and political option for her beyond her own yearning. Although the nomination of such transcendent values are almost immediately represented as both unreachable 149

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in the social sphere and mired in the corruption of the world she inhabits, this nomination serves to distinguish Cio-CioSan as somehow in contact with and sensitive to such values. As Brooks observes in the melodrama generally, in seeking to flee the world, Cio-Cio-San must immediately confront the necessity of sacrifice and renunciation. She experiences this initially, following her marriage to Pinkerton, in the relatively mundane form of abandonment by her friends and family. More importantly, however, she experiences it in the form of her own ultimate sacrifice to her son’s future and to the emotional abuse of Pinkerton who represents the perverse cause of her own desire. It is in these standard melodramatic notions of a corrupt, diseased political and social world, the heroine’s moral struggle against that world and her ultimate encounter with sacrifice that René sees the essential charm of Madama Butterfly.25 Song Liling sees this too and, although she despises this melodrama, she has clearly succumbed to its essential ‘melos’, that is to say, its music and its heightened mode of expression; as she says, ‘the point is the music, not the story’. Where this love story derives its perversion, however, lies in the use to which both René and Song put Puccini’s guide book. For Song Liling, the story may be more complex and ambivalent, but no less melodramatic. In her observations about gender roles in Beijing Opera, Song highlights the patriarchal oppression that is as alive and well in the new society as in the old. At the Cultural Revolution we see that the dramatic costumes change but the roles remain the same. As we see in the very fact of Song’s employment, the new society and the Party are not above aping the decadence of the West and the feudal past of China itself to achieve its aims. When it has done with Song, it has no hesitation in condemning her to hard labour in the mines. Song’s response to the new society and its brand of oppression is to mourn the past. When René spots a picture of her father, Song shudders to think what might have been his 150

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response, and his fate, under the new regime. She is grateful that he is not around to see it. As we see the passing of that world, it becomes a world of nostalgia for Song and the audience perceives it in a mournful manner. For all its faults, she turns to the old society with a fresh sense of respect. This is partly why she embraces a lipstick and rouge femininity, at least in a political sense, despite the fact that it implies something of the oppression of women practised by the society old and new. In the face of the corrupt and diseased world she inhabits, however, her expression of her true identity as Butterfly is much more about the dictates of her desire than an expression of social and political rebellion. This is the very essence of melodrama – when faced with an odious and oppressive socio-political world, the heroine turns further towards the personal. It is as Butterfly to René’s Pinkerton that Song achieves her release. Just as oppressive as the Party and Chinese society around her, however, his selfish demands call to her own needs, however perverse this response may be. As Isabel Archer is drawn to the tyranny of Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady (1996), so Song seeks release and escape in being René’s slave. This will lead to her ultimate damnation – in which she is sacrificed by both the Party and by René. In the service of her own desire, however, no cost is too great. René observes the melancholy passing of the old Orient by the new, but is not touched by it. In melodrama, the tide of human events and the whirlwind of history are as nothing to its protagonist as the tempest of his own soul. If he shares any sense of a corrupt and decadent world experienced by his heroine, it simply takes the form of the narrow and closeted domestics of the embassy culture surrounding him. The embassy, its ambassador and its slothful, corrupt and indulgent staff are for René, the last gasp of the decaying French colonial power. Cast as the petty accountant by his peers and as mentally unstable by his superiors, this demi monde opposes 151

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him and ultimately disposes of him, which is why he can so easily betray it on his return to Paris. His escape to a world of higher values lies, initially, in his devotion to Song and the beauty of his vision of the Orient. He uses this dream initially in naive political terms. His analysis of the American war and Chinese cultural responses to the West is very much that of the optimist and the fantasy of the dreamer. When this analysis is summarily dismissed by his Ambassador it finds a place where it truly belongs, deep within his own unconscious. It is not that Song and her world offer him an external escape from the Cold War cynicism of the decolonizing world around him. They simply show him his own Butterfly – that thing which is in him and which he may use to raise his spirit beyond the mundane and desacralized world. The validity of that vision, for René, is confirmed in his final sacrifice. I have written briefly above about Cio-Cio-San’s experience of sacrifice but I want to expand that discussion critically here because, in the way it challenges melodramatic expectations, I think her sacrifice bears strong comparison with René’s. Furthermore, it is at the generic pillar of melodramatic sacrifice that we see both the point at which the male melancholic pervert departs from the narrative that runs parallel to that of his female counterpart in melodrama, and the essential use that the prince of perversion makes of his experience of melodrama. Laura Mulvey’s distinction between the ‘two dramatic points of departure for melodrama’ isolates the ‘beneficial sacrifice of unrestrained masculine individualism in the interests of civilisation, law and culture’ that is at issue in the ‘‘masculine’ or family melodrama’.26 It is in just such grandiose terms of social beneficence that the male protagonist’s sacrifice is made. The terms of the heroine’s sacrifice are much closer to home and are somewhat lost in the expectations of gender roles. Various theorists have pointed out the centrality of sacrifice in the melodrama. Chuck Klienhans sees it as ‘a pattern 152

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of woman sacrificing her own goals – which may be defined as personal achievement, a career, happiness, independence – for the happiness of another person’. Female sacrifice thus caters for the good of the family, ‘keeping the man ready for the world of production’ – his sacrifice for civilization.27 From the confines of the family, Peter Brooks directs our thinking on sacrifice further inward, leaving sacrifice as ‘restricted to the individual consciousness’.28 Brooks does not limit this idea of ‘sacrifice to the ideal’, ‘a victory of the moral occult’, to female sacrifice – and this is a critical opening for my discussion of René and many of Irons’s great perverts – but I argue that there is a distinction. For René, this very personal, inner vision, the lonely heroism of his fantasy somehow slips into, and is validated by, the public realm. Only the woman’s ‘sacrifice to the ideal’ in melodramatic narratives remains substantially submerged. If, as Barbara Creed points out in her discussion of the woman’s melodrama, ‘the heroine atones for her sins through self-sacrifice’ these sins are very often sins of a personal, domestic nature.29 Even in the case of Cio-Cio-San, which I argue suggests a more substantial notion of sacrifice, her reasons remain very much her own and the unification of her son with his father at the end of the opera seems to quickly outweigh them. These are sins of the family first, as opposed to the representation of male ‘atonement’ through sacrifice, not just for his many personal sins but intermingled with the ‘sins of the world’. Cheered on by hundreds of men, René’s escape to that better place is witnessed and validated. His final assumption of the persona of his heart’s desire is achieved and publicly acknowledged. This is an important achievement he shares with Cio-Cio-San but not with Song Liling. Cio-Cio-San’s vision may be deluded but it is forcefully pursued. In Madama Butterfly Pinkerton, I suggest, leaves us cold. Only Cio-CioSan is real because she is the only one to express and act upon her desire. The fact that she makes her own sacrifice is essential. What Madama Butterfly, as a spectacle, is about is 153

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that sacrifice. No one is interested in what motivates Pinkerton. The fact that we only see him in Act Two for about ten minutes renders him almost as much as a Barbie Doll as his American wife, Kate. What fascinates us, and Pinkerton, are the depths to which Cio-Cio-San pursues her desire. The common story line of the heroine’s confinement to a nunnery (Morte d’Arthur) or to death-inducing illness (La Boheme, La Traviata) demonstrates the way that in melodrama the female protagonist is sacrificed whereas her counterpart hero makes a sacrifice. Cio-Cio-San’s suicide is, accordingly, more forceful and impressive because it suggests a high degree of female agency. Song Liling has no such agency. Whatever perverse desire she achieves in her work for the Party, it is achieved at the Party’s pleasure and under its control. When she departs, ‘she’ becomes ‘he’ and wears the suit of the Chinese cadre that the Party wishes him to wear when he is not in its service. She is quietly removed, under the veil of night and diplomatic immunity. René’s sacrifice is, like Cio-Cio-San’s, his own. Or rather, it is the sacrifice that Song longed for herself. As Song returns to China, somewhat like The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), in his bodily self-destruction René has stolen Song’s Butterfly, made it his own and turned it into a mark of public celebration. Puccini’s melodrama (Madama Butterfly, Tosca) may allow his heroines some degree of sacrificial agency but Song’s melodrama ends in a more traditional fashion. It tells us a great deal about melodrama that even when the role of the heroine is taken by a man, the hero’s sacrifice will be of his own making and it will be validated with public precedence. The question about this notion of public validation is, in the realm of melodrama which is so contemptible of impersonal history and politics, what can it possibly mean? If, for René, the Cultural Revolution and the events of May 1968 in Paris are little more to the experience of the melodramatic moral occult than the representation of his own state of mind, what then of the crowd of men sitting, almost comatose, in the 154

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prison? What, indeed, of the dumbstruck men and women in the film’s audience? In essence, for René, it means very little. He may seek public approval in the most superficial form of performance, but he has very little need for it. He reminds me of those stage actors, like Richard Burton, who disavow stage fright by standing behind the curtain and yelling at the audience beyond, pouring scorn on them for their lack of talent and their inability to do that which he is about to do. With René, however, there is no stage fright. His performance may make use of an audience, but his perversion requires no validation beyond his own narcissism.30 At the beginning of M. Butterfly, as in the beginning of this chapter, there is an emphasis upon the way in which René is destined to re-enact that ‘favourite Western fantasy’. Ultimately, his relative indifference to Song herself and the way in which he lets her go to her final punishment suggests that René takes Pinkerton’s part with ease. What I think the role of melodrama in narratives of male melancholia brings us to understand is that if we read Pinkerton’s and René’s conquest and exploitation as the essence of this Western fantasy, we are quite wrong. René and Pinkerton do not want to have Butterfly; they want to be her. Unless we read Pinkerton as an unreflective barbarian there can be no other account of his departure and the callous indifference. What René sends off in a suit and with a diplomatic escort is that part of himself he now no longer requires. This is the part of the man who, like Pinkerton, can return to work and to a wife and to doing his duty. Whatever M. Butterfly tells us about Western colonialist fantasies, it is that they are underpinned by anxieties of being overwhelmed. What is more, these feelings can come in many forms and guises. Singing of the day in which Pinkerton will return to her, despite her longing to see him, Cio-Cio-San says that when he appears she might hide from him for two reasons; to tease him and, more significantly, to avoid being overwhelmed altogether at seeing him return. In perversion, as in melancholia, it is better for ghosts of the past to stay dead. 155

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Notes   1. Teresa de Lauretis. ‘Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in David Cronenberg’s “M. Butterfly”’, Signs 24.2 (1999), 313 and 319.   2. David Cronenberg. Cronenberg on Cronenberg. Edited by Chris Rodley. London: Faber and Faber, 1997, 176.   3. Creed. ‘The Naked Crunch’, 93.   4. George Darley (1795–1846): ‘It is not beauty I demand’.   5. Christine Gledhill. ‘Melodrama’, in Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink. The Cinema Book, 2nd Edition. London: BFI Publishing, 1999, 157–171. See also Assuman Suner. ‘Postmodern Double Cross: Reading David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly as a Horror Story’, Cinema Journal 37.2, Winter (1998), 49–64, who refers to the film as a ‘political melodrama’ and indicates its relationship to a similar strand in contemporary Chinese cinema.   6. Creed, ‘The Naked Crunch’, 92.   7. De Lauretis, ‘Popular Culture’, 320.   8. Cronenberg, Cronenberg, 177–178.   9. Cronenberg, Cronenberg, 184. 10. Julia Kristeva. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. L. Roudiez (trans). New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, 8. 11. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 27–33. 12. Leighton Grist. ‘“It’s Only a Piece of Meat”: Gender Ambiguity, Sexuality, and Politics in The Crying Game and M. Butterfly’, Cinema Journal 24.4, Summer (2003), 13–16. 13. Serge Grünberg. David Cronenberg: Interviews with Serge Grünberg. London: Plexis, 2006, 128. 14. M. Scorsese. American Film Institute Seminar with Martin Scorsese, February 12 1975. Los Angeles: Seminar Collection, Louis B. Mayer Library, AFI, 1975. 15. Kristeva, Black Sun, 14. 16. See de Lauretis, ‘Popular Culture’, for discussion of the interrelated dynamics of melancholia and suicide in Cronenberg’s films. Michael Grant in ‘Cronenberg and the Poetics of Time’ in Michael Grant (ed). The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg. Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000, 129, sees René’s death as somewhat lacking in mystery and transformation, ‘merely emphasizing the absurdly theatrical and operatic excesses of his story’. 17. Nicholls, Scorsese’s Men, 73. See also Mark Nicholls. ‘My Victims, My Melancholia: Raging Bull and Vincent Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful’, in Kevin J. Hayes. Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 117, 132. 18. Cronenberg, Cronenberg, 174. 19. Thomas Elsaesser. ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family 156

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Melodrama’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed). Film Genre Reader II. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997, 280–281. 20. Peter Brooks. ‘The Melodramatic Imagination’, in Marcia Landy (ed). Imitations of Life. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 53. 21. Brooks, ‘The Melodramatic Imagination’, 58. 22. Brooks, ‘The Melodramatic Imagination’, 61. 23. Brooks, ‘The Melodramatic Imagination’, 53–54. 24. Brooks, ‘The Melodramatic Imagination’, 65. 25. In Callas Forever Irons’s character, Larry Kelly, is determined to resurrect the career of his old friend and business partner, Maria Callas (Fanny Ardant). She rejects his offer in such offensive terms that he gives up on the idea. Later, however, when he watches her, through a halfclosed door, miming Cio-Cio San’s death scene to her own recording of Madama Butterfly, this moves him to such an extent that he determines to see his plans through to fruition. 26. Laura Mulvey. Visual and Other Pleasures. London: Macmillan Press, 40. 27. Chuck Kleinhans. ‘Notes on the Melodrama and the Family Under Capitalism’, in Marcia Landy (ed). Imitations of Life. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991, 201. 28. Brooks, ‘The Melodramatic Imagination’, 53–54. 29. Barbara Creed. ‘Structures of Melodrama’, The Australian Journal of Screen Theory 4. Shepparton: Waterwheel Press, 1978, 28. 30. In de Lauretis, ‘Popular Culture’, she writes of his performance as reaffirming his narcissism.

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7 Lolita The Two Basic Laws of Totemism

The first sight we have of Humbert Humbert in Lolita is of a blood-stained, spent murderer, still grasping a hairpin as he drives away from the scene of the crime. If you had never read Nabokov’s novel, nor seen Kubrick’s 1962 film or Edward Albee’s stage play, you might think that Humbert has just killed Lolita herself. Such a misconception could well be fostered by Ennio Morricone’s mournful cue and especially by the first words we hear Irons utter: She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta.

Of course Clare Quilty (Frank Langella) is Humbert’s victim, but the virgin spectator has no way of knowing this. Certainly with a story like Lolita there will always be fewer virgin spectators than we might expect to see at a lot of other films; especially if we are receptive to the idea, as parts of the Hollywood establishment seemed to be, that Lolita is really just a film for a small cohort of dirty old men in rain coats.1 This, however, does not diminish the uninitiated spectator’s usefulness in helping us to see, with fresh eyes, what is important about this story. Beyond the rhetoric that directors and producers like to pull out to justify re-opening any old 158

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story line in contemporary cinema, any film surely deserves this opportunity. Adrian Lyne’s film requires it. It is a very different film to that which Kubrick made in the sixties, mainly because – under the spell of the melancholic Irons – it largely eschews Nabokov’s comedy for his melancholy.2 This is not to say that Nabokov’s comedy is absent from Lyne’s film. As we see in A Chorus of Disapproval, Jeremy Irons’s comic technique is given full scope in Lolita and anyone who has seen any of Adrian Lyne’s work knows that it is essential to keep a sense of humour handy. In this film, however, with its invocation both of Annabel and of Humbert’s childhood, it is the ideas of guilt and loss that predominate and outweigh the more satirical values of Kubrick’s film. Swerving from one side of the road to the other, desolate, indifferent to the world but also regretful, Humbert has killed Lolita, in a sense. He knows it within hours of the first time they have sex, when he describes sitting next to her as like ‘sitting next to the small ghost of somebody I had just killed’. He also knows it when he seems to escape his police pursuit at the end of the film, only to face the real punishment of hearing ‘the melody of children at play’ and realizing that ‘the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that chorus’. Humbert has killed that child and the image of her that is the film’s last, the sight of her collapsing into bed like any over-tired child. Just as he lost Annabel and his own childhood with her, this image of Lo marks her loss both in the tragic and the parental terms that play such a strong, and perhaps uncomfortable, part in Lyne’s film.

Annabel The image of the fourteen-year-old Humbert (Ben Silverstone) genuflecting before Annabel (Emma Griffiths-Malin) and stroking a piece of braid from her underwear is the image of Humbert’s ideal self. Set in the middle of the fleeting, almost 159

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sepia-toned reverie of Annabel, as he knew her in Cannes in 1921, it is perhaps the height from which everything else in the narrative will descend. It is certainly the foreplay to a sexual encounter and, therefore, a classical perversion. This is a production, however, where, due to the vagaries of US censorship law, so much depends upon what we see and what we do not see.3 Young Humbert’s chivalric gesture, therefore, implies an element of innocence and a level of unsatisfied desire that lends it a type of purity, at least in the terms we have become accustomed to in the cinema of the prince of perversion. This gesture and the souvenir of that summer show the high point of Humbert’s romantic vision: a childish and un-self-conscious, ‘all at once’ adoration for Annabel, not as forerunner, but as the original, the ultimate and the unsurpassable sight of desire. In time this vision becomes not dulled but sharpened by her death, as mourning gives way to melancholia and Annabel’s shadow casts itself over Humbert’s impressionable ego.4 The tragedy of Lolita to come is, in one sense, explained by the apparently simple need to replace one fourteen-year-old girl with another. But Annabel is never mentioned again in the film and, as will become patently clear, Lolita of the movie magazines and the Magic Fingers hotel bed massager is no Proustian Annabel de Cannes. At the centre of whatever expression of loss Humbert may endure is, of course, himself. Thinking back on the death of Annabel, his apparent apologia for his love of Lolita is presented as the more personal loss of himself as child and the romantic vision of that self: The shock of her death froze something in me. The child I loved was gone. But I kept looking for her, long after I left my childhood behind.

Irons’s voice-over accompanies a dissolve-based montage of young Humbert being told the sad news, presumably by his father, then a close-up of Annabel smiling, a medium closeup of young Humbert in tears, a long shot of him walking pensively by the sea, a shot of Annabel jumping waves and, 160

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finally, the previously seen shot of the smile she gives him as he follows behind her, walking with her parents and the family dog. Gender, context, voice-over and montage give a clear indication in this sequence that Annabel is the object and Humbert the subject of loss. However, the intermingling of images and the potency of young Humbert’s reaction to the death emphasize that he is the true sight of loss and that the child he loved and lost was, in essence, young Humbert himself. Our primary designation of ‘the child’ in his voice-over as Annabel helps us and the mature Humbert to explain his adoration of the child Lolita. But there is no reason to suggest that Humbert ever saw Annabel, his exact contemporary, as a child, either during their childhood or later. Do we ever think of ourselves, or indeed our contemporaries, in childhood as children? Indeed Annabel’s sophistication and the elegiac presentation of Cannes in the twenties as a private universe, ‘That Hotel you see, the Mirana, that belonged to us’, suggests they felt that they inhabited a much more adult world and had little self-perception as being children. Potential nurses and spies may be children, but they do not see themselves as such. As for the phase, ‘I kept looking for her’, although this clearly indicates Annabel, it is useful to explore an interpretation of it as referring, not to Annabel, but to Humbert’s own unconscious as overshadowed by the lost and introjected Annabel. Later referring to himself as ‘Humbert the happy housewife’, he shows clearly that he has no substantial commitment to the polarities of gender. The child he loved and once was, who existed only with Annabel, has now gone. His memories of himself as that child have become so intertwined by her loss that the child he loved and once was has become almost indistinguishable from her – that child and Annabel have merged. From here on he has no need to mention Annabel because, just as in M. Butterfly René Gallimard becomes Song Liling, Humbert has become Annabel in a very real sense. 161

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We tend to read the idea of something freezing in Humbert at this point in terms of his arrested development. Adrian Lyne has made significant comment about the way he sees Humbert as the boy who never grew up.5 This again suggests the psychological rationale behind the mature Humbert’s attraction to the fourteen-year-old Lolita. But if something is frozen it is inactive. Although Humbert does tend to wait for Lolita to come to him, as we see in the first time they have sex, the way he creates the opportunities for sex with her shows him as anything but frozen. Rather than being the boy who never grew up, he seems to be the man who grew up with that beloved moment of childhood and its romantic vision frozen inside him. Rather than acting, as a mature man, with the instincts of the child, he acts in relation to that moment ever-present inside him but frozen solid and inaccessible. It is the perverse by-product of that Romanic vision, perhaps the child he did not love, which leads to child rape, not a simple playing out of the instincts of a fourteen-year-old boy still present in the mature Humbert. In this context it is, perhaps, feasible that it is something beyond a pure notion of the child Annabel that Humbert takes away with him and against which everything else is played out. In a primary sense, this love in that place becomes the ideal against which every other love will be measured and against which Humbert’s rape of Lolita will be found wanting. But in another, less obvious sense, the origin of that rape comes from the very same time and place. For in Humbert, from the beginning, there is that other side of his personality, the side in which sexuality is inextricably bound up with the pursuit of perversion. This is all part of the double life of the boy who ‘wanted to be a spy’ and the mature man who will be pursued by that part of him which lurks in the figure of the chiaroscuro Quilty. This is Humbert, the prince of perversion, forever in conflict with Humbert of the Romantic vision. Why should it be that this memory of Annabel should contain the germ of his perversion? Precocious sexuality is generally considered a perversion. His sexual encounter with 162

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Annabel seems to take place in a bathing box not divorced from the context of the heavily circumscribed society passing by on the beach just outside. Indeed his first sight of Annabel seems to have her being hurried away by her parents from his somewhat unwanted pursuit. The moment in which he is being told of her death, happens in the scene following their sex scene and may, at first, be taken for a parental admonition for that indiscretion. Humbert’s last glimpse of Annabel is, as she was, in that moment of being hurried away. The furtive and the taboo nature of their childhood sexuality is an unspoken sentence in the sequence but it coats this memory with a sense of dread as to the death that will be the outcome of the affair. Quite simply if whatever happens in the summer of a boy when he is fourteen can mark him for life, the sex and the death he experiences with it can be fatal to his sense of guilt. Later on in life his talk of going into the priesthood, his comically disguised plea of sexual immunity to the pillsupplying doctor and, indeed, his murder of Quilty, all point to his mature attempts to displace and repress those sexual drives which are the enemy of his preferred image of himself as the ephemeral artist, glimpsed in that moment when he plays the chivalric knight to Annabel’s lady. What these more socially acceptable perversions all suggest is a guilt-related sexuality driven by his feelings of responsibility for Annabel’s death. Had she lived, things might have been quite different. Given that she died and that he had had sex with her, the two notions, like Freud’s ‘two basic laws of totemism’,6 become linked, just as they are in his response to his first sexual encounter with Lolita twenty-six years later. So we see that the mature Humbert is a sexually divided creature. In so far as he mourns the loss of Annabel, his ideal self, he is, or contains, the child he loved, the child of the Romantic vision, the child of the chivalric gesture. In so far as he associates his lust with the death of Annabel, he is also the great pervert. His tragedy is that in striving to be the former he is inevitable threatened by the superior claims of the latter. 163

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Imogen If Humbert was looking for Annabel he did not find her greening in the Haze Woman’s ‘piazza’. What he found there was someone quite different. He found not a salty and sandy brown-skinned mermaid in hat and floral dress, but the postwar cultural phenomenon of the American Teenager. From Humbert’s first sight of her, any claims Lo had to represent the vision of Annabel are instantly and repeatedly undercut. These claims are dismantled by the pop and tacky-teen scene of post-war America, a cultural backwater for the Baudelairean Humbert, which Lo wears as easily as she wears cherry red lipstick. Furthermore her comparison to the sophistication and simple chic of Annabel is offset by her childishness and awkward innocence. That is to say, Humbert sees her from the start as the child she really is. These imperfections are not entirely divorced from the beauteous vision of Annabel, but they do compromise it significantly. Nothing in his image of Annabel suggests anything tacky, childish or awkward. Indeed she remains the vision of grace and elegance. If the vision of Annabel by the sea was Humbert’s personal incarnation of Tazio in Death in Venice, his vision of Lolita looks more like the eponymous heroine of Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961). Nevertheless, it is this vision of Lolita as Lolita that Humbert celebrates in his story. This is evident in their last encounter of the film when, despite the physical and emotional distance she has travelled away from being the nymphet he once loved, he still longs for nothing other than to live and die with her.7 As I have argued, the role of Annabel in this compulsion is far more complex than merely to represent the object of desire for whom the teenage Lolita will become surrogate. Early in the film there is a pattern established to the way in which Lyne presents Lolita to Humbert’s gaze. This pattern initially conjures up a picture of beauty not unlike the beauty of Annabel only to sharply differentiate it by way of some illusion to Lo as a gauche child. Lying in the grass, her dress 164

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wet and clinging to her body, she might well be Annabel having just emerged from the waves, were it not that she is lying beneath the spray of a garden sprinkler, not reading poetry or looking at a book of paintings by Botticelli, but dreaming over Burt Lancaster in an American movie magazine. Later, as she is eating ice cream from the fridge, brushing her teeth, sitting on the toilet and answering back to her mother about making her bed, Humbert is consumed not by her lyrical and ethereal beauty, but by her childish unselfconsciousness. The pleasure he takes in her, in this context, cannot be so far divorced from the pleasure any parent or adult might take when confronted with such an image. This is not to say that these images are not charged with a type of sexual energy. The wet and clinging dress, Lo’s pyjama top draped to show just enough of her thigh, her dress raised enough to show her leg while she sits on the toilet – all these images are invoked by the most standard of Hollywood sex strategies and are there to be fetishized if that is your thing. But as in Humbert’s gesture of picking up Lo’s pyjama bottoms, which were falling off in the previous scene, and folding them over the stair rail, all these images can be consumed in the manner of either the parent or the pervert. In this case the pyjama bottoms can be seen as a sign of his perverted lust or merely as a sign of his parental housekeeping. Beyond his first thrill when he sees Lo in the garden – seconds before he has been thinking of Baudelaire – there is nothing overly eroticized in Humbert’s reaction to any of this. This is, after all, what Jeremy Irons does. For the most part during these scenes, he watches her intently, captivated by what she is doing. The stillness of this captivation is always interrupted by a moment of childish activity. Draining the last ice cream from the punnet, she leaves an ice-cream moustache on her top lip. Brushing her teeth in the room next to him, she spits the toothpaste out with excessive and exaggerated guttural vocalization. At both actions the pensive Humbert breaks into a smile. It is as if his captivation by her as a woman of beauty is constantly interrupted by the charm of her childishness. 165

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In this sense we can clearly see that the ice-cream moustache tends to deflect from the suggestively draped thigh. There can be no doubt that Humbert is thinking of Lolita in sexual terms. This is emphasized in the voice-over, perhaps more so than in the action of these scenes, where Humbert distinguishes himself from the ‘normal man’ by referring to This ambiguity between Lolita as daughter and lover is present in the scene of their first real physical encounter. Lo saunters into his study and flops into a chair, her knee raised to expose the dark underside of her dress just beyond the thigh. She fondles her gum, sticks it to her knee before replacing it in her mouth and approaching his side of the desk. She stands for a second beside him, before dropping into his lap and sticking her glowing pink gum onto the open page of his diary. All the while Humbert seems more nervous than aroused. Not knowing what she will do, he tries to pretend nothing unusual is happening, sharpening his pencil and moving some papers from the desk and wiping away the shavings. When she drops into his lap she stares at him for what seems like a long time before breaking the moment by asking him, ‘Am I getting a zit?’ Humbert the exotic foreigner does not know what that means, but when she explains he becomes comically engaged in the hunt for a pimple before realizing it as an opportunity to tell her how beautiful she is. The scene of serious screen romance is once again interrupted when Lo asks him to watch her chin wobble. Dominique Swain herself suggested this chin-wobbling gag, no doubt after long hours of practice before the mirror and with her friends at Malibu High.8 It emphasizes the way this scene, and many others in the film, work to place the erotic and the childish up against each other – the way Humbert is placed in the position of both lover and father.9 There can be no doubt that Humbert is thinking of Lolita in the nymph-hunter as ‘an artist, a madman, full of shame and melancholy and despair’. When he first wishes for the eradication of Charlotte, leaving Lolita in his arms, he must also 166

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Lolita (1998). Directed by Adrian Lyne Shown: Jeremy Irons (as Humbert Humbert), Dominique Swain (as Dolores ‘Lolita’ Haze) Credit: Samuel Goldwyn Company/Photofest

wish for the eradication of ‘everyone else for miles around’, in order to keep his perversion wrapped in social obscurity. His desires are clearly perverse. But in Lyne’s vision, this does not exclude the paternalistic. As Humbert will find when he becomes her legal father, the role of ‘willing corrupter of an innocent’ is not so far removed from his ‘dual role’ also including that of ‘Humbert the happy housewife’. This is no mere Nabokovian gag for Lyne. His Lolita is very much about that strain of the Imogen relationship that predominates in the cinema of the prince of perversion. This casts further doubt on the idea that his relationship with Lo was about him still looking for Annabel. Lo is both girl (lover) and daughter to him. It is not Annabel he sees in Lo but perhaps something more like himself as the child he loved and lost in the death of Annabel – a desperate attempt to master and overcome the original seduction of his beloved, lost childhood. 167

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If we consider that the pervert in him wants to possess Lo, the child frozen in him wants to be Lo. The high action sequence when, before leaving for summer camp, Lo charges back into the house, jumps on Humbert, wraps herself around him and plants a kiss on him is an over-whelming moment for Humbert. He puts his hand up to his stomach feeling the remaining warmth of the place where Lolita was but also overcome by her embrace and the slightly queasy feeling it has left there. At the moment of her departure we see the beginnings of another experience of the plenitude–lack alternation that he first encountered with Annabel, and will, of course, experience again by the end of the film. When, finally, she is driven away he sits desolate in a chair. Lyne has the film fade to black, which he holds for such a long time, as we hear the end of Morricone’s cue, that the audience might expect the next scene to be set some significant time later. This is not the case as when the scene fades up it seems that only minutes have passed, Humbert is still in his pyjamas wandering listlessly around Lo’s room. Here he is playing out (in miniature) the melancholia he has experienced since the death of Annabel and which he will experience with the loss of Lo. The somewhat comic sequence which follows tells us something about that longing and begins a series of situations in which Humbert will strive to place himself into a secret space with Lo, much like the melancholic’s crypt of loss within the ego,10 whether Lo is actually there or not. Indeed, in many ways, this is very much his project, as we will see in their car travels and locked hotel rooms, ­to keep Lo in his own private space of loss. The extent to which this project is very much about incorporating Lo within his own ego is made clear by what he does next. Desperate to overcome his feelings at her departure, he dives headlong into her closet, throwing himself to embrace her clothes only to have this gesture comically undercut by the entrance of the maid Louise (Pat Pierre Perkins). Reading Charlotte’s letter he then instinctively gets into Lo’s bed, pulls the covers over him 168

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and picks up her doll. In his commentary, Lyne says that this was the only take in which Irons picked up the doll and his inclusion of it is interesting.11 Like the previous moment with the clothes, this gesture seems to place Humbert in Lolita’s persona. He has become so consumed with her that the proximity of her clothes, her bedding and her doll are becoming the essential accoutrements of his unconscious. This is not so explicit as M. Butterfly, where René literally performs the shadow falling over his ego by Song Liling through dressing as her, but it is no less evident in its subtlety. What Humbert achieves with ‘taking on’ Lo relates to the child he loved and lost – himself. Placing himself as Lo he achieves three things and they all relate to the emotional seduction that he experienced with Annabel. As Lo (a fourteenyear-old child on the verge of a sexual life) he may relive his own feelings of seduction by Annabel. The very fact that this notion places him as both seducer and the seduced is even better because it provides a safer and more controlled experience. In part he longs for that experience again and for the part of that seduction which he has control over (as opposed to that which is driven by the dead Annabel) in which he is able to protect himself, perhaps shield himself from the ensuing trauma. This is the experience of Marcello Clerici’s fantasy in The Conformist. Secondly, the incorporation of Lo serves the simple desire to re-live his own childhood. Lo’s childhood is very different, but in its gaucheness and in the aches and pains of childhood angst (to which he is a major contributor) he sees an important and salutary echo of his own experience. Her teenage inconvenience, not to mention trauma, serves as a comforting experience in response to his own. Finally, acting out his melancholia though Lo he is able to relive that experience but with Lo’s sexual confidence and precociousness which stands in stark contrast to his own history of naivety and general inexperience. Nothing in the reminiscences of that time suggests any such sexual inadequacies during Humbert’s childhood as we see it. These anxieties came later 169

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with his more mixed, guilt-ridden feelings over the original seduction. The death of Annabel thus stands at the threshold of the sexual inadequacies he will experience in adulthood and then project back into his experiences of childhood.

The Intolerable Idea If Humbert ever thought he was embarking on an old world, European-style marriage of convenience with Charlotte, he is quickly disillusioned. In the first scene after he reads her letter he is already reduced to mowing the lawn in tandem with his male neighbour adjacent.12 By the second scene, Charlotte, having discarded her usual make-up, is determined to interrupt those ‘meditations’ she was once so concerned about by a full exploration of the sexual side of married life. Staying up late with the dishes and plying Charlotte with pills, however, proves not enough to avoid his husbandly obligations. He must enlist the willing and understanding support of the family doctor to prescribe some new pills designed to relieve American husbands of their obligations for at least eight or nine hours a night. The mute communication between patient and doctor in this case suggests that, in this desire to opt out of marital sex, Humbert is not alone. On the wall in Lo’s room we see that she has fixed an advertisement featuring a model family where an ideal husband in suit and hat (‘HH’ scrawled over it in a love heart by Lo) hugs his daughter while an apron-adorned housewife looks on approvingly. The man in the grey flannel suit, it seems, shares this vision and finds the rigours of married life more easily relieved in the comforting affection of daughters than in their bombastic mothers. The idea that Humbert might be one of the shell-shocked impotent is further played out in the two interviews with the headmistress and her chaplain at Beardley Prep. The second scene rings with irony when Humbert, the corruptor of an innocent, first suspects his own discovery and then chokes with an obvious relief when informed that Lolita’s sexual 170

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problem is perceived to be not her defilement but her innocence. Humbert’s anxiety is, rather, taken as embarrassment and as evidence of his prudery that is the perceived basis for Lo’s own sexual backwardness. The irony here, as Irons spits out the cake he is eating and almost chokes to death, relies upon the audience equating perversion with a liberal attitude towards sex. Based in repression, however, we might consider Humbert’s paedophilia as evidence of that very sexual backwardness and prudery that we see parodied in this scene. After all, Humbert’s desire is, in part, a quest for innocence. Perhaps the most obvious parallel to the emotional seduction of the Annabel encounter is Humbert’s genuine ambivalence over the idea of seduction. Throughout the film we observe Humbert’s penchant for seduction at the hands of Lolita as well as his apparent anxiety at the prospect of being overwhelmed by Charlotte. This anxiety is further played out by the fear of being overwhelmed by Lolita herself when her power becomes irresistible towards the end of their liaison. Twice before he sleeps with Lo she indicates what she has done with Charlie. Humbert is genuinely shocked. We never hear the details and only see Humbert’s reaction when she finally whispers in his ear as part of their foreplay in the bedroom at the Happy Hunters. Humbert’s apparently genuine ignorance about teenage sexuality strikes as surprising because we know what he got up to in his own day and we know what he is thinking of doing now. Somehow we assume that such a perverted character should have little difficulty in recognizing perversion when he sees it in others. On the other hand, however, we all know how easily parents forget. My reading of Humbert as parent is reinforced by his easy assumption of the selective memory that parents possess. Beyond this, however, it is easy to read Humbert’s response as indicative of his own fears about sexual perversity. His express nostalgia for that time in his own life has given ground to the phobia that has come about and attached itself to his notion of a superego as if to protect his unconscious from the painful associations of that nostalgia. 171

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By the time Lolita fully realizes the power of her position­­­­ ­­ – ­forcefully and finally expressed in the film by the scene at the Lake Point Cottages motel – she has put on too much make-up as Charlotte had previously. Sitting on the bed when he returns to their room, her face smudged with lipstick, obviously having just been with Quilty, she is the parody of both prostitute and the child who has run riot with her mother’s make-up. In a very real sense she has. Dragging Humbert to make love to her as he bursts into tears she literally covers his mouth and lips with the very lipstick which reminds us of Charlotte. In this way Humbert is almost literally devoured by that force which he so fears, but now, wearing the make-up himself, once again he finds himself sharing the multiple roles of child, seduced and seducer that his version of Bertolucci’s Conformist fantasy determines. Covered in lipstick he is Lo as child, Lo as mature and powerful seducer and, most disturbingly, Charlotte as overwhelming ‘Mamma’.13 When Humbert returns from the pill-popping doctor he finds, for the only time in his story, that he has been found out. Charlotte has given into the temptation to break open his private drawer and has read his journal. In it she finds herself describes as ‘the Hays woman, the fat cow, the obnoxious Mamma’. Indeed earlier, when she and Lo are swinging on a seat with Humbert, drinking wine, she refers to her childhood dream of being a ballerina and how it was made impossible by the fact that she was ‘a tad too plump’. Lyne has commented on how Melanie Griffith put on weight for the role and considering the film as a whole, it is easy to see why. In Humbert’s world, it seems, if you are not a nymphet, you are probably a ‘fat cow’. All the women of consequence in the film are big and imposing like Louise the maid, the screaming building superintendent at Beardsley and the hospital nurses. If not plump they are aged and forthright (especially about sex) and we see this especially in Miss Pratt and the counsellor at Lo’s summer camp. Clearly in Humbert’s mind women fall into these two categories, the nymph and the fat old cow, and this 172

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is comically reaffirmed at the end of the film when, having seen all his romantic delusions go down the drain, he ends his story in a field full of real cows, who have been while disturbed minding their own business.

Enchanted Hunters One of the film’s clearest statements about Humbert’s dual vision and the conflict resting therein is the extended sequence at the Enchanted Hunters Lodge. Here Humbert and Lo have their first encounter with Quilty and their first experience of coitus. When they arrive at the hotel Lo calls it ‘swank’ and this recognition satisfies Humbert’s ambition on two counts. Certainly Humbert sees it as the beginning of their honeymoon, of sorts, and so her appreciation of it satisfies his agenda in that. Beyond this, however, with its formal dining, gold-buttoned bell boys and its middle-class clientele, the Enchanted Hunters is the closest thing to the old world chic which Humbert knew at the Mirano in Cannes and which, in a sense, he seems to be trying to recreate here. It is a pale evocation of that time but, even so, it stands out grandly in comparison to the Magic Fingers and the Tee Pee themed motels that will dominate the rest of their road trip. Leaving Lo locked in their room upstairs, Humbert descends and his voice-over tells of his happiness that, had it been able to talk, ‘would have filled that hotel with a deafening roar’. What that happiness consisted of raises an interesting point. His only regret, he tells us, is that he did not abandon Lo then and there. This suggests that the basis, or at least a small element, of his happiness was something other a sexual encounter with Lolita, which at that time had not happened. The recreation of the Mirano in the Enchanted Hunters, and the fact that at dinner he achieves something of his desire for his lost childhood when Lo comments, ‘I feel like we’re grown up’, and he agrees, begins to replace Humbert within the territory of his lost romantic vision. 173

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What we see in the scene that precedes Humbert’s contented voice-over is perhaps the most direct re-enactment of his romantic vision that we will see in the film. The scene begins with him removing her white cotton sock. This is doubtless meat and drink to the foot fetishist but as we have seen no such tendencies in Humbert we can conclude that this moment has little significance for Humbert beyond this foot’s more general association with his love object, Lo. The rest of the scene is largely played up to Humbert’s role as parent. It is Lo who sexualizes the scene by taunting him with the threat of tales of her sexual exploits at camp. Even then, at first she offers these in a way that reinforces the parent–child relationship. As she sits on the bed, almost falling asleep, she asks, ‘If I tell you how naughty I was at camp, promise you won’t be mad?’ Humbert responds in a manner typical of any parent trying to get his or her children to bed, ‘tell me later’, ‘when I come up I want you to be asleep’ and then smiles at her as she lies down on the pillow on the point of sleep. Like any child testing boundaries, Lo persists – ‘I’ve been such a disgusting girl’– before finally giving into sleep and saying, ‘Good night, Dad.’ There is always a great deal of poignancy in the moments when Lo calls Humbert ‘Dad’. The same is true when he refers to her as daughter, and this is true at this point. Humbert pauses slightly when she says it, before quickly moving off towards the door. ‘Night, night’ he says before he leaves the room. Certainly there is an element of struggle within Humbert during this scene. He stumbles over and cannot really say the words ‘while you get undressed’, an action which is very much at the forefront of his thinking. In this sense we may well read his paternal instructions, ‘tell me [your dirty story] in the morning’ and ‘I want you to be asleep [so we won’t have sex when I get into your bed]’ as attempts to hold sex at bay. Nevertheless this does not counteract the fact that, without the explicitly sexual undercurrents, this is exactly the scene played out in children’s bedrooms every night, all across the 174

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world. Again what some may well read as an expression of Humbert’s Byzantine strategies of seduction looks to others remarkably like the end to what every parent of young children knows as the crazy part of the day. Locking the sleeping Lolita in their room and fixing the ‘do not disturb’ sign to the door handle, Humbert has literalized what the melancholic knows as a crypt. This perfectly safe and undisturbed place is what he has longed to create in reality since the loss of Annabel. This is a confined space, like the beach box at Cannes or the car, where Humbert can be alone with his lost object and where he can be with that object outside the censure of public scrutiny. It is a literal manifestation of an edifice of the unconscious.14 It carries a brief and potent sense of Humbert’s longed-for paradise and one which is apparently, if momentarily, validated by a meeting of clerics, one of whom shouts ‘the Lord knows all, the Lord sees all, the Lord forgives all’ as Humbert passes by, beneath a large painting of semi-naked, bathing nymphs. It is, after all, something like this type of validation that is revealed as being so important to Humbert. At peace in his crypt upstairs and at peace with man and God below, he seems to have a glimpse of that redemption which he has sought since he acquired the sin that resides in the guilt part of his memories of Annabel. This is, of course, the very redemption that he accuses Quilty of having stolen from him as he murders him at the end of the film. The happiness of this melancholic crypt operates, however, not in spite of the perversion underlying it but in tandem with it. Whether Humbert has really admitted it to himself or not, for all its celebration of the innocence of childhood, the happiness at the bottom of this sequence is born in the delaying and the anticipation of raping this defenceless child. This leaves it as a premeditated rape that dismisses all moral concerns (reading them as ‘forgiven’) and is sharpened by them, and which requires no other validation than that of Quilty, his fellow paedophile. With his little girl upstairs, Humbert can 175

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begin his liaison with Quilty and start swapping notes about their ‘art’. Quilty himself plays with the idea of ambivalence in his famous doubling phrases, ‘where the Devil did you get her/ the weather’s getting better’, ‘you lie – she’s not/I said July was hot’. These establish and relieve an anxiety in a direction that is opposite to our reading of Humbert’s actions with Lolita in the bedroom in relation to his almost certain intentions. Humbert and Quilty have very little need to stand on ceremony, however, because almost everything about the representation of Quilty in the film suggests that they are as one. Humbert is shocked by Quilty’s apparent boldness but not outraged. He responds to Quilty’s questions courteously and seems to be somewhat at ease with them, even sharing an intimacy with him in telling him of Charlotte’s death, which he has not yet told Lo. This ease between them demonstrates Humbert’s complete ambivalence over the whole Enchanted Hunters episode. For all that it signifies his one brief moment of romantic redemption and bliss, it is immediately and thoroughly underwritten as also a moment of his own perversion of that romantic vision. The first thing we see when Quilty challenges him on the veranda is Humbert’s left hand, Jeremy Irons’s own gold ring on his little finger, moving to straighten his tie. The next shot of Quilty swigging from his hipflask, like the very first shot of him in the film, holding his dog’s lead, shows that he too has a similar (if slightly bigger) gold ring on the same finger. As morning dawns and we see Humbert and Lo in a medium shot asleep we see this ring, which unites both men, and indeed many of Irons’s other characters, prominently displayed. When Humbert returns to room 342, removing the ‘do not disturb’ sign from the door, it is with Quilty’s blessing ringing in his ears. The sinister aspect of their encounter quickly fades as Lyne and Irons move the scene into a comic mode, charting Humbert’s bumbling attempts to induce a sexual encounter with Lo without forcing the issue. The temporal 176

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ellipsis that jumps Humbert fully suited into his pyjamas (top button fastened) in a flash highlights his anxiety in a highly amusing way. Trying to make room for himself in the bed – another sport well known to anyone with young children – the pathetic pyjama-wearing figure he cuts is emphasized in the little pitiful groans he utters as he notices Lo’s body thought the sheets. Despite the opportunity in front of him, he cannot quite bring himself to be so perverse as to force himself onto Lolita while she sleeps. The sequence reaches its high point when he gives Lo a drink and she wipes her mouth on his shoulder before collapsing again into sleep and putting an end to his ambitions at least for the next few hours. Lyne has commented on her total indifference to him at this point, but this does not stop him including a Morricone music cue that emphasizes the devastating effect of this sensual but also senseless gesture on Humbert. When he wakes next morning and Lo wakes almost simultaneously, Humbert pretends he is asleep. This is a highly childish ruse but it is intended to bring on Lolita’s seduction of him rather than a sexual encounter that is to be viewed as at his instigation. All along, wanting nothing else, he has refused to bring it to this point directly. As I have already observed when she tells him of her exploits at camp he appears to possess a certain degree of sexual ignorance that bolsters his passivity. Exhibiting this ignorance, he opens the space for her to take the initiative, which she does by sitting on top of him and beginning proceedings as he lies with his hands behind his back. As I have already pointed out, Humbert’s penchant for seduction clearly serves the maintenance of his crypt of loss in so far as it restages his childhood encounter with Annabel. Beyond this, however, allowing himself the personal indulgence of being seduced props up the romantic vision of his ‘art’ in favour of the perverse reality with underlines it. If she seduces him, he is not Quilty, as he fears. His vision is not that of the paedophile but the romantic artist. 177

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Something Quite Special Driving away from the Enchanted Hunters, Humbert asks Lo, unsuccessfully, for the details about her liaison with Charlie before giving his voice-over concerning his feelings of having killed her. The idea of Charlie as a rival has been a preoccupation for Humbert since he collected her from camp. Without resolving this issue, however, he speaks of his feelings of sitting next to a small ghost. This is, however, not simply an expression of guilt. For Humbert the discomfort of that feeling was ‘something quite special’. It is a moment, like so many others in the film, in which Humbert fully appreciates the pain that he has caused, while savouring the pleasures of it at the same time. This is perhaps the expression of a sadistic strain in Humbert that serves the purposes of his fantasy and acts as a necessary complement to its essential masochism. This first blow is marked by Lo complaining about her vaginal pain, ‘I was a daisy fresh girl’, which is also gratifying to Humbert in that it asserts his ultimate victory over his initial rival, Charlie. It is soon after this that he chooses to tell Lo about her mother’s death. Sitting waiting for her in the gas station as the attendant, who appears like a threatening spectre, he chooses his moment. When she returns Lo wants to call her mother, but he tells her she cannot because her mother is dead. The question of why it took Humbert this long to tell her is, in a sense, simple. Certainly, given his intentions to have sex with her, he might have elected to delay the awful news in order to avoid spoiling the moment. But the moment is not over for Humbert. If he suspected that his news might spoil the moment he had plenty of scope for further delay. The question is perhaps better seen in terms of the opportunities this news provides Humbert to enrich and enhance the special feeling he enjoyed sitting next to his little ghost. This is to observe the way in which this news, and its consequence, further supports his perverse fantasy and its comedy of transference and introjection. Without any apparent information 178

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about her response to the death of her father, we can take the death of her mother as Lo’s great childhood trauma. Leaving the telling of that news until after he had ‘killed’ her, Humbert ensures that Lo’s experience of childhood trauma is similar to that of his own. In this way for Lo, as for the young Humbert, the great trauma of death is preceded by the original and overwhelming sexual act. This common experience will bind them through necessity, as Humbert later observes, ‘she had nowhere else to go’. It will also further allow the scope of his fantasy that places himself as Lo, her abuser and also her comforter. Later that night we see them separated in two different parts of hotel room. She is howling on her bed and he is listening to her while sitting on his. Eventually she comes to him and he can embrace her, comforting her in a way that he was never comforted. Through the bizarre machinations of his fantasyscape, however, it is his own grief and sense of loss that is being comforted, for not only is he the ‘murderer’ of Lo, as he was of Annabel, he is Lo and therefore his own comforter.15 The scene, some minutes later, in which they have sex on a rocking chair, emphasizes the notion of Lo and Humbert as one person, just as it enhances his sense of guilt over his victimization of Lo. In its hot and steamy, Southern bordello mise-en-scène, the sequence is set up like a sleazy pornographic narrative. Lo sits on Humbert’s lap, reading the funny papers as eventually he penetrates her and they both reach orgasm. The cheap fantasy then seems to dissipate quickly to a lonely and disturbing nightmare scene. The sex scene is followed by a cut away to an empty street exterior shot outside the hotel. The film cuts back to the room where Lo puts money in the radio and casts a remorseful glance towards Humbert before she lies down on the bed and buries her head between two pillows. All this Humbert watches, like Marcello in The Conformist, from behind the half-closed door. Apart from this turn from wet dream to nightmare, what stands out in the scene is the sense in which is shows Humbert’s fantasy of himself and Lo as a single entity. Sitting 179

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on top of him, she is wearing his pyjama top as he wears the bottoms underneath. In this scene we never see both Irons and Swain in the same shot. We see both of them individually and we always see a complete set of pyjamas and yet this apparent separation induces doubt that both of them are having this experience (if only an acting experience) together. In fact, under the US Child Pornography Prevention Act (1996), the law did not at that time allow it even by the use of simulation or body doubles.16 In the language of cinema, however, we are used to reading such a scene as if they are both present – clearly this is the director’s intention. What stands out in this context, however, is that if both of them are present we can only deduce this by the fact that one seems to imply the other. Given that Humbert’s pyjamas are a central and complete image in the scene I think we can read this as a representation of their unity – at least in Humbert’s unconscious. The separation that follows sharply indicates that a common experience seems quickly to have turned to two different experiences perhaps challenges this reading. And yet in the way it echoes the guilt aspect of Humbert’s fantasy and the way in which it turns almost horrific may well be read as an emphasis of the original unity. The final shot of the sequence is of Lo lying on the bed in both parts of his pyjamas, sobbing. Another way in which we see the interconnection of Lo and Humbert is in their common engagement with sado-masochism. We see the beginnings of this in their second scene together where Humbert, and possibly Lo, derive a great deal of pleasure when she steps on his trouser leg. Indeed she repeats the game some minutes later when she brings him his breakfast. Mocking the ritual of a serving girl bringing her master his breakfast, she rings the bell, announces ‘Breakfast Professor Humbert’, puts one foot (in sneakers) beside his right foot and puts the other (naked) on his left foot. Thus standing over him in a positions of dominance she further asserts her growing power by engaging him in a self-serving 180

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conspiracy against Charlotte, ‘Don’t tell Mother but I ate all your bacon’, all this to Humbert’s evident delight. If Lo demonstrates rudimentary sadism in the early part of the film we will see that she learns from the master once they become sexual partners. What is interesting about Humbert’s victimization of Lo is that it ultimately serves his masochism. The previously discussed steamy sex sequence demonstrates the point, as does the sequence of their first experience of coitus that ends in him telling her about the death of Charlotte. Beyond any legal definitions, Humbert clearly sees that when he engages Lo sexually he is undertaking an action of victimization and violence. Clearly he derives great pleasure from these acts of sadistic violence. As we have seen, however, both moments are followed by scenes that increase Humbert’s sense of guilt and regret. Thus Humbert’s sadism is a key source of his masochism. This could also be said about his choice to be with Lo in any case. As she demonstrated in the scenes before her mother’s death, Lo continues on with her own acts of sadism as in the scene where she flushes the toilet while Humbert is in the shower. Humbert also sees the whole thing as a great source of masochistic pleasure, as when they are playing tennis and he instructs her to aim for his head. As to the contentious issue of Lo’s own masochism we must read her sexual involvement with Humbert as at least personally, if not legally, consensual. From such a position, and taking into account the way she uses sex with Humbert to achieve her own ends, engaging in sexual relations with him in any reading of the situation always involves some level of masochism. This is emphasized in the sobbing scenes that inevitably follow.

Perverts and Murderers The arrival at Beardsley is really the end of Humbert’s honeymoon. If he was ever able to maintain the veneer of his romantic vision with Lo it is at Beardsley that that vision begins 181

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to break down under the intensely anti-Romantic pressure of public scrutiny. Nothing disturbs that vision quite so much, however, as Lo herself. For it is here that she begins, in earnest, to assert her power over him. More importantly, it is here that she names his perversion, the very thing that he has been fighting to eradicate since the death of Annabel. Beyond Beardsley, Humbert’s life-long struggle to assert his Romantic vision over his perversion will prove completely fruitless. It is with Humbert’s encounter with Miss Pratt and her school, both so intent on fostering Lo’s sex life, that a tide of world perversion begins to wash over him. Increasingly pitting himself against the perversion of the world at large, his encounter with Lo’s perversions and, of course, those of Quilty himself, lead him to the inevitable recognition of his own. From the moment he enters the apartment block after his first meeting with Miss Pratt and her chaplain, he cuts, more and more, that dark and shady, chiaroscuro figure we associate with Quilty.17 Teenagers experimenting with sex are perverse by definition.18 Lolita’s experiments with power and money and sex are, in this context, merely an extension of that perversion which began with the games she played with Charlie at camp and the natural curiosities of developing children. It is as these perversions become more sophisticated that Humbert finds himself overwhelmed and his Romantic vision totally undermined. In arguing her way into both the school play and into a one hundred per cent allowance increase, Lo employs a strategy of sexual seduction she can barely understand but which she will find increasingly effective. It is an elaboration on such a strategy that will lead her to demand money for her ‘favours’ and to reward the suborned Humbert when he gives her what she wants. Her objectives of escape betray her perversion, but it is her sexual sophistication as well as her scheming that are highly confronting to the adult Humbert and go a long way to revealing or naming something very much like it in himself. The scene of confrontation, after Humbert discovers that Lo has been missing piano lessons, highlights his perception of 182

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her perversion as well as naming his own. When he begins to manhandle her she calls him a pervert and confirms that she is trying to run away from him. With Humbert increasingly losing his balance, it is when she screams ‘I earned that money’ and alludes to her prostitution, and his part in it, that he strikes her. What he cannot countenance is that his Romantic fantasy is being exposed. His dream of a harmonious reunion with the child he loved and lost (in the affair with Lo) is revealed as merely a cheap pornographic narrative that places Lo as the hooker and him as some sleazy client. This is further emphasized in the scene at the Lake Point Cottages motel that I discussed above. The thing that cements his distasteful assumption of perversion comes with her retort of calling him ‘murderer’. She pleads with him to ‘murder me like you murdered my mother’ and at this point Humbert virtually collapses. Clutching his head and cowering slightly as she beats him, he is registering all the feelings of guilt that go back to his feelings about Annabel. He does not deny killing Charlotte and this is akin to his feelings earlier about having killed Lo. Although he is not guilty of either crime, as the breaker of these great taboos on virginity and incest, like Sophocles’s incestuous hero Oedipus, he feels himself to be also the breaker of the taboo against murder and therefore does not demur at her suggestion. Lo’s pleading, however, simply reinforces his growing fear of repeating his original crime of the symbolic murder of Annabel through the destruction of Lo. This symbolic murder was, after all, the origin of his perversion. Striking out at this inevitable fate, Humbert grabs Lo, trying desperately to keep her in his grasp before she charges madly down the stairs. Adrian Lyne has cheated the shot when Humbert and Lo race downstairs, repeating each single shot of Lo and Humbert running down twice.19 This is a highly effective way of making their descent seem longer and deeper. Through this device we have reached the antithesis of Humbert’s great happiness at the Enchanted Hunters where he was able to descend casually and calmly while Lo was safely asleep and locked in upstairs. 183

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The outcome of this confrontation is the second road trip and the advent of Quilty. Although Humbert’s perversion is destined to be confirmed fully by comparison with Quilty and other lovers of nymphets like him, Humbert’s fantasy makes one more attempt to offset the horror of this realization. Primarily he does this by denying the existence of Quilty himself despite his obvious presence (particularly on the omnipresent radio) and Humbert’s obvious acknowledgement of the fact. It is an expression of his own narcissism that the character that Humbert believes is pursuing him is some phantom of his perverse self. All of Humbert’s descriptions of the pursuer (and kidnapper) bring him back to himself. At first he is described as looking like Humbert’s uncle Gustav and Humbert describes his presence as ‘as real to me as my own breath’. Then he has a confused picture in his mind of a man who might take advantage of her (as he has done) and a cop or detective who can well be seen to spring from his own unconscious as an expression of his superego. After the ‘kidnap’ it is Humbert who becomes the detective hounding the kidnapper whom he feels he knows and whose movements and motivations he understands. What this all leads to is, of course, his narcissistic delusion, which he believes us to share, that it is not Quilty and that no other like Humbert could actually exist. This is to place Humbert as not pervert, not criminal, not murderer but artist and Romantic hero. The narcissistic and self-preserving delusion reaches its pathetic apotheosis once the trail has gone cold and once Lo seems lost to him for ever. Back at Beardsley, cleaning out the car, their erstwhile, mobile fantasy crypt, Humbert detaches a lollipop from a mirror, the reverse of which contains a photo of Lo and the inscription ‘Forever Yours’. Sitting in the back seat with the door open and his legs outside the car, Humbert regards the picture and its message and sighs at his predicament. This is, perhaps, the moment of real loss in the film. It is the moment when Humbert’s manic pursuit of Lo breaks down and the reality of her loss registers in the dedication 184

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on the mirror. The mirror marks Humbert’s melancholia but, within that melancholia, it highlights the structures of narcissism and introjection that are essential to the make-up of his fantasy. This image of Lo could be the conclusion of any standard narrative of male melancholia. Contained within a frame, generous and pleasing, this picture of Lo is a highly suitable one for Humbert to take with him, back into his fantasy crypt – there to memorialize his loss for ever, or at least until another Lolita comes along to momentarily drive the fantasy into the open light of day again. But although this might well serve Humbert’s fantasy, this is hardly its purpose. As an artefact, we know nothing about this mirror. We never see Lo with it and even if we assume she had it made up, perhaps at an amusement park or carnival stall, we have no idea about her intentions for it. Humbert may well think of it as a sign sent up from her deepest soul to reassure him, or merely even taunt him once again, but given their recent history, it is hard to believe. It is possible to think that Lo intended it for him, but it is far more likely that she thought to give it to Quilty, or even that it dates back before these great sexual eruptions in her life and was intended for her dead mother. But if it was intended for anyone else, we first see it with Humbert as an undelivered gift, neglected or forgotten and ending up with other items of childhood detritus. I think we can read all of these possibilities into Humbert’s sigh, all of them playing such a vital role in his emotional make-up. As an undelivered mirror, however, the only certainty we can have about it is that it represents Lo’s narcissism. It is quite possible that Lo meant it for no one but herself. In the world of a parentless child, beset with no companionship but predatory rapists such as Humbert and Quilty, the mirror provides a comforting image for Lo. When she holds it, it provides an image of her self on either side – a message of love and reassurance on one side to make up for the lonely and comfortless image of self on the other. As we considered in 185

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the narcissism of Schreber in chapter one, this mirror stands for Lo’s desperate struggle for survival.20 Little wonder that it was never given or even brought out into our sight. But giving Humbert further insight into a corner of her psyche, we can see why Lo kept it concealed within a private crypt of her own.21 When Humbert holds it, it performs a similar function, as I have already discussed. But it also serves that pleasure that Lo enjoyed at it being a mirror on both sides. We do not see Humbert’s reflection on the mirror side, just the mark left by what we might think of as Lo’s Lolita-pop. This then looks very much like evidence for Humbert’s fantasy of final introjection with his beloved object – that, his ego entirely overcome by the shadow of his lost Lo, this novelty has become for him, too, a mirror on both sides.

Paedophiles like Us Three years later at their reunion, Lo considers that his offer of money and asylum is an inducement to go with him to a hotel room. He tries to correct this devastating assumption by giving her the money with no strings attached. But Lo is used to taking his money for sex and emphasizes the essential perversion of his thoughts by saying, ‘I’d almost rather go back with Quilty’. It is testimony to the extent to which Humbert is delusional and neurotic about sex that this is the final straw for his romantic vision – at least in so far as it contains himself and Lo. The bare fact of sex with Lo has always been unavoidable as it has always been irresistible. At this point, however, it is fully exposed as the thing which has perverted that romantic vision and which has denied him his final peace. More than anything in the film it confirms that he has become, once again, that thing which he most fears – not Quilty but something even worse than Quilty, a child murderer. As they part, although she has alternated between calling him ‘Dad’ and ‘Honey’ in their final scene, she gives him a 186

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certain manumission by referring to him as ‘Dad’. This is her response to his question, ‘Can you ever forget what I’ve done to you?’ She does not forgive him, but by calling him ‘Dad’, in one sense, she makes it worse. In the perverse and disturbed world of the Imogen relationship this is what dads do. It is to be expected and, what is worse, it is to be endured. Ultimately with his part desire to be parent, it is the only way out for him, to simply accept this for the feint moral forgiveness that it allows him. This is why he must eliminate Quilty and deflect his offer of gifts of women, their grand-daughters, pornography and seats at executions, in short a list of every perversion imaginable by a man on the point of death. He must kill Quilty because Quilty has robbed him not just of Lolita, but of his redemption. His redemption is not the perverse desire of the paedophile but the love that is the remedy for his guilt over Annabel. A love that is as pure as the love he felt for her before he ‘killed’ her, the love of a parent for a child. And so it comes about that Humbert stands overlooking a village of children at play but cannot hear Lolita’s voice. The end of the film thus leaves him with that vision finally thwarted. As Lolita’s sexual violator, Humbert also believes himself to be her murderer. The repetition of his psychological relationship with Annabel, his sexual desire for Lolita, but, more importantly, his desire to consume and become Lolita, has left Humbert with an overwhelming sense of guilt as her symbolic murderer. His apparent violation of the rights of fatherhood, his anxieties over being consumed or sacrificed himself and his dreaded brotherhood by association with Quilty all contribute to a psychological scenario very much like Freud’s ‘civilizing’ narrative drama in Totem and Taboo. This comparison places Lolita, and the Imogen figure generally, as the great totem object of our society, who may neither be murdered nor sexually violated.22 As guilty of the latter and therefore the former, Humbert threatens an omnipotence that appears to go unchecked. In this sense he appears to covet the majesty of the primal father, Freud’s Darwinian 187

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horde master, who is able to engage in such violence without restriction. The presence of Quilty, however, provides a tempering restraint on this idea. Just as Freud’s rebellious sons band together to murder the primal father, the fact of Quilty shadowing Humbert throughout the film provides reassurance that Humbert’s act of taboo violation, despite the dictates and desires of his personal fantasy scenario, is happening neither outside totem law, nor in secret.23 We all despise Quilty and his presence in the film does have the effect of shoring up support for Humbert in the audience, particularly as Quilty’s own perversions are so much more extreme than Humbert’s and apparently frivolous. Quilty’s presence, however, does have the effect of indicating that Humbert does not live in a morality-free zone and that his actions do not go unnoticed. Since the death of Charlotte, no one but Lo and Quilty seem to be even aware of Humbert’s outrages, much less disturbed by them. Acting not only as an outrageous foil for Humbert, but also as a kind of moral spotter, Quilty makes sure that Humbert is not acting alone. Furthermore, he stands as a bridge between us and Humbert’s narrative. Quilty’s presence strengthens the sense that we are not indulging in the perversions of pornographic stimulation, but that we are participating in a communal and, therefore, socially sanctioned ritual. As I was writing this book, a new instalment of an old story came to dominate the media as Australian photographic artist, Bill Henson, was threatened with prosecution over an exhibition of the sort of parentally sanctioned images of nude teenagers that he has been making and publicly exhibiting and selling for many years. Images of sexualized teenagers dominate our mediascape, of course, but again we face the trauma that an individual may be testing the limits of this prohibition in the relative seclusion of his studio and selected public and private galleries. En masse, in the mass media, we feel at ease in violating the taboo of teenage and child sexuality, but should we suspect that an individual is working alone in this, casual violation soon becomes taboo. 188

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Given the proliferation of images of what de Beauvoir calls the ‘Lolita Syndrome’, the level of hypocrisy often apparent in consideration of the representation of mature male encounters with young girls or daughters is regrettable but understandable given the level of psychological ambivalence that is built into our systems of prohibition. Despite the cant and the hype that surrounds individual artists like Bill Henson, and Jeremy Irons over his participation in Lolita, it is clear to anyone who opens a magazine or watches any form of screen entertainment that, as a culture, we remain ambivalent at best as to what we think about the sexualization of teenage girls. If we are inclined to take Freud’s mythology of taboo and incest as a universal story guiding our unconscious it does offer us one key idea: paternity, in Freud’s scenario, does not appear to exclude any female (or male for that matter) from the sexual designs of the father. The totemic picture that Freud builds seems so concerned with the prevention of sexual relations between a man and his mother (who are of the same totem group) that it is silent on the fact that for the daughter, being, like her mother, of a different totem group from the father, she is not forbidden to him.24 Whatever we may think of the use of Freud’s mythscape, it does seem to provide a useful account for that psychological sense, so developed in our culture, that the Imogenistic ambivalence we have for relationships between mature man and younger girls is linked to the idea fathers and daughters are not quite related. The prince of perversion, mandated by this truism of the unconscious, may resolve his anxieties over seduction and the intolerable idea by having sex with, consuming or becoming Imogen, not only without punishment but with general sense of validation. As the former Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, enunciated at the time of the Henson affair, it is the protection of a child’s innocence that is so often the cause of those crusading against the alleged representation of children in pornographic form.25 This idea of innocence leads me, finally, to Freud’s 1918 essay on ‘The Taboo of Virginity’. Here Freud 189

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argues that the taboo on virginity, beyond the ‘horror of blood’ and the ‘fear of first occurrences’, is largely due to the apparent hostility aroused in the female by the act of defloration. It is to protect the future husband against this great danger that virginity is subject to such a taboo.26 Thus the core anxiety associated with this taboo accounts for the various ancient rites of substitution by elders, priests or holy men who take on the burden of defloration not only to spare the future husband the trouble but also as a substitute for the supposed rites and obligations of the father in this matter.27 The idea that not only can this initial act induce the woman’s hostility towards the man who first has sex with her but that her ‘immature sexuality’ may be discharged on him accounts for the priestly role assumed by our very own Humbert, prince of perversion.28 So bound up is Humbert with anxieties over murder, incorporation, impotence, so desirous is he of the pleasures of introjection and the rites of the father, and the obligations of he who stands in for the father, Humbert thus begins to assume a taboo of his own. This is very much the role of the prince of perversion. Outrageous, intolerable and frequently to be shunned, like the irreconcilable gun-slinging hero of the Hollywood western, he does our dirty jobs for us.

Notes   1. James Bowman. National Review 50.15 (1998), 50–51; Jack Kroll. Newsweek 130.14 (1997), 72.   2. Stanley Kauffman. The New Republic, 5 October (1998), 26; Devin McKinney. ‘Review: Lolita’, Film Quarterly 52.3 (1999), 48–49.   3. Bowman, National Review, and Richard Schickel. Time 121.11 (1998), 91, both discuss this production’s problems with the 1996 US laws which prohibited the simulation of sex with minors.   4. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 257–258.   5. Adrian Lyne. ‘Director’s Commentary’, Lolita. Hollywood: Twentieth Century Fox, 2001.   6. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 32.   7. James, ‘Humbert’s Humbert’, 22, sees Humbert’s final glance at Lolita as a ‘coy tribute’ to Death in Venice.   8. Lyne, ‘Director’s Commentary’. 190

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  9. Kroll, Newsweek, 72, refers to Humbert’s ‘paternal pride’. 10. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 266–267. 11. Lyne, ‘Director’s Commentary’. 12. Lyne, ‘Director’s Commentary’, comments on the difficulty of getting this shot. 13. Richard Corliss. ‘Lolita: From Lyon to Lyne’, Film Comment 34.5 (1998), 38, comments on how both Humbert and Lolita seems to be in competition to see who will ‘metamorphose’ into Charlotte first. 14. Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 267; Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, 135. 15. Just as he fears he killed Annabel and he speaks of killing Lo ‘as little ghost’ does he assume guilt for the death of Charlotte. She certainly puts this up to him later in the film. 16. Kristen Hatch. ‘Fille Fatale: Regulating Images of Adolescent Girls, 1962–1996’, in F. Gateward and M. Pomerance (eds). Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002, 179. 17. Until at the end of the film he becomes this dark man knocking on Lo’s door. 18. Freud, ‘Three Essays’, 62. 19. Lyne, ‘Director’s Commentary’. 20. Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, 31. 21. In contradistinction, Humbert (like the melancholic) shows his loss all the time. This relates to his whole thing of an open crypt and his total escape from punishment. 22. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 32 23. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 140–141. 24. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 5. 25. Matthew Westwood. ‘PM Says Henson Photos Have No Artistic Merit’, The Australian. 23 May (2008). 26. Sigmund Freud. ‘The Taboo of Virginity (Contributions to the Psychology of Love III) (1918 [1917])’, in A. Richards (ed), J. Strachey (trans). The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 7, On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works. London: Penguin, 1991, 272–275. 27. Freud, ‘The Taboo of Virginity’, 277. 28. Freud, ‘The Taboo of Virginity’, 280. The taboo of virginity and anxieties over the rights of Lucy’s true father may be said to be the entire concern of Irons’s character, Alex Parish, and his friends in Stealing Beauty.

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Conclusion In the hands of Jeremy Irons and his collaborators the prince of perversion stands as a highly recognizable and impressionable male screen type. Adapted and derived from literary and visual arts characters as diverse as the nineteenth-century bourgeois gentleman and the mid twentieth-century Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, the prince of perversion is, however, very much an emblematic figure of the 1980s and 1990s – the period covered by the major case studies in this book. Intersecting at times with the Sloane Ranger, the Yuppie and, to an extent, the American Preppy, this darling of Vanity Fair is best considered in the discourse of contemporary screen representation as an alternative to the prominence of the action hero and the common man (both separately and in combination) since World War Two. Indeed, in earlier and frequently gay and/or sinister incarnations such as Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in Laura (1944) or Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich) in The Portrait of a Lady, he has been frequently pitted against the more garden-variety hero as antagonist. Well-educated, well-dressed and professionally or profitably employed, for all his flamboyance he represents, I contend, nothing less than ‘middle-class man’. Despite our collective sense of that character’s banality, we understand him in the context of the advent of economic rationalism and 193

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corporate professionalism since the 1980s. Shunning the good intentions of popular working-class heroism and Armanied rather than armed, the prince of perversion derives his authority from his automatic privilege rather than from his ability to self-make, to physically assert and to ascend. For all his automatic privilege, however, his life is dominated by loss, the inescapable anxieties of bourgeois decline and the potent threat of the defeat of his desires. As a dramatic hero and central protagonist, the most significant impact of the prince of perversion lies in this, perhaps unwelcome, resemblance to and resonance with his audience. Not impossibly muscle-stacked, divinely empowered nor psychotically violent, this male type simply looks and responds to life in a way that is much more like the experience of his audience. Grey flannelled, tailored or off the rack, it is the suit that anchors him to most of us. From the impeccably presented and pressed Charles Swann to the shabby and blood-stained Humbert Humbert, it is the suit, and the vast spectrum of middle-class values and aspirations that it implies, that speaks more clearly and directly to an audience, male or female, than a bare chest, a belt of bullets and a shotgun. For better or for worse, in capitalism and its film culture the Terminator always ends up as the Governor of California, no matter how often he makes a brief return to the fray of unrestrained masculine endeavour. The source of the prince pervert’s attractiveness, his appeal and his heroism lies directly in the perversion that lurks beneath the suit and, indeed, in the way he deals with loss. In general terms I have argued that the prince of perversion, as we know him through key films of Jeremy Irons, is dominated by anxieties of seduction that lead to, not so much feelings of emasculation, but an encounter with or an experience of feelings of femininity that are associated with depression and inadequacy. Where he does not simply wallow and indulge in this experience, his attempt at resolving these feelings lies in his resort to the perversions of narcissism and young girl/ 194

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daughter identification, or as I call it, ‘Imogenism’. While these ideas of seduction, narcissism and Imogenism inform our reading of these films and many like them, as a group, I have not offered them as an air-tight formula for reading either the films of Jeremy Irons or those of middle-class male perversion more generally. What I have tried to relate is that, just as there are a variety of behaviours and perspectives that amount to our understanding of the notion of perversion, there are a variety of subtle screen representations of the same. In Brideshead Revisited the experience of Charles Ryder is virtually a passive encounter, in which fellow protagonists, environments and institutions work to suborn him as the series emphasizes his tendency towards willing abandonment to the pleasures of maternal seduction. The practice of the ‘radical, sullen atheist’,1 melancholia is the perversion of Charles Smithson and Mike in The French Lieutenant’s Woman who, in their individual narratives, demonstrate the way that the very public performance of loss is not only the prince pervert’s crime but also his pleasure. In Swann in Love desire is fully articulated for Charles Swann in the figure of Odette and the extent to which his obsession for her is marked as socially perverse presents him with a perfect method for pursuing both her and it. Lingering over the intermediate relations between his true feelings, and the way in which he gives expression to them via marriage and bourgeois respectability, demonstrates the vital dynamic at work in these films between perversion and repression. In almost total opposition to the experience of Charles Ryder, the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers not only deny the notion of maternal seduction but they seek to eradicate the notion of the mother as referent for psychosexual development altogether. Patriarchy may seek to make the maternal marker generally subservient but the Mantle twins test the boundaries of the perverse by replacing even the cultural primacy of the father in their radical and desperate narcissism. Given the prince of perversion’s attraction to sameness and like in narcissism, it is a general testament to his substantial ambivalence 195

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in all things that he pursues his Imogenism through what is foreign and alien. Both Song Liling in M. Butterfly and Lolita are culturally far away from the Irons characters they disturb and heal, but as the pervert narcissist flees his fear of feminine or maternal desire, the Imogenist renews his contract with the maternal in his identification with an idealized form of childish and subservient femininity. As we read this submission to the feminine in Brideshead Revisited through the gendering of mise-en-scène, it is the genre of melodrama in M. Butterfly and the nurturing and parental confusions of Humbert Humbert in Lolita that sign the maternal as the inescapable referent of desire in this story of perversion. Unlike the mania of the action hero, the dignified resignation of the common man or the renegotiation and re-empowerment of the male melancholic, what stands out about the prince of perversion is the fact that he refuses to button back up or to reconcile himself with loss. He may give himself over to loss, deprivation and even death but, unlike the melancholic, he refuses to make terms with loss through some socially ameliorating act of self-sacrifice. Like René Gallimand in M. Butterfly he pursues desire, love and even the simple narcissism of survival (as he defines it) without that brand of restraint, or ‘charm’ as Anthony Blanche calls it in Brideshead, which is the great curse of middle-class life. Rarely requiring the use of a weapon, he wears his lack of restraint like a suit of protective and impenetrable armour. Covered and be-suited in high Prufrockian style, he nevertheless demonstrates the complete ability to shun protection and to let go. In this way, the prince of perversion stands for that which in the middleclass man is anything but banal. Surrounded by, hounded by and implicated with both the conservatism and criminality of late capitalism, he is, however, the true anti-materialist. The consequences of his actions are genuinely immaterial and like Norman Bates in Psycho, his crimes are committed from motives of passion and not profit. 196

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Of Jeremy Irons’s more recent work, his role as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice stands as an important example of the personification of the mix of middle-class privileges and status anxieties that I consider essential to our understanding of the prince of perversion.2 Indeed Antonio’s casual financial ease and his equally casual anti-Semitism establish the very comfortable, charming and good natured bonhomie that is so common amongst Irons’s creations and highly typical of the class and psychological heights from which they start their inevitable descent. Like so many of his roles, Antonio played properly is not the role for an actor who cares about what audiences think of him. In this sense Antonio’s anti-Semitism is unattractive to his audience but it is not for his religious intolerance and prejudice that we consider him perverse. Nor is it simply a matter of his implied homosexuality and his love for Bassanio (Joseph Fiennes). What is perverse and most abhorrent to the logic of late capitalism is the impulse lying behind his fatal investment in Bassanio’s embassy of love to Belmont and his marriage to Portia (Lynn Collins). Whatever the nature of his love for Bassanio, it is Antonio not Bassanio who will follow the dictates of Portia’s leaden casket at Belmont and ‘give and hazard all he hath’. As we see clearly in Irons’s emotionally generous and moving ‘parting’ speech before being given up to Shylock’s (Al Pacino) knife, Antonio’s love is such that he will give testament to it, literally, ‘with all [his] heart’. In Shakespeare’s play, much less in Irons’s characterization, there is no sense of error about that which Antonio offers for his friend. His expectations of continued financial surety may embolden him against the villainy of the initial terms of the bond but clearly he is no fool. His melancholy at the beginning of the play, the substance of his love for Bassanio and his clear understanding of the vagaries of mercantile wealth and security are evidence of that. Against the opposition of Bassanio and his friends, Antonio takes the bond and finally welcomes the prospect of paying the debt. In the context of commerce, debts, bonds, marriage bonds and 197

Conclusion

securities, as another Irons prince of perversion, Antonio the anti-Semite opts for love and romantic desire. His privilege and his prejudice are appalling to us and the ultimate resolution of his narrative, at the expense of Shylock’s basic dignity, leaves a bitter taste in our mouths. But in the age of protectionist capitalism and the slight smugness and security of the overly-mortgaged, Antonio’s willingness to ‘give and hazard all he hath’ in the name of desire reveals the very substance of his heroism and, indeed, our enduring attraction to Jeremy Irons and his prince of perversion.

Notes   1. Kristeva, Black Sun, 5.   2. The film was released theatrically in 2004 but opened in many countries in the years following, and as lately as March 2009 in New Zealand and June 2009 in Australia.

198

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204

Filmography 1914–1918 (TV, Episode Five ‘Mutiny’, Carl Byker and Lyn Goldfarb, 1996) The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993) And Now … Ladies and Gentlemen (Claude Le Louch, 2002) Another Country (Marek Kanievska, 1984) Appaloosa (Ed Harris, 2008) Being Julia (Istvan Szabo, 2004) Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1952) Betrayal (David Hugh Jones, 1983) Brideshead Revisited (TV, Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg, 1981) Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) Callas Forever (Franco Zeffirelli, 2002) Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991) Chinese Box (Wayne Wang, 1997) A Chorus of Disapproval (Michael Winner, 1988) Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1940) Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970) Conversation Piece (Luchino Visconti, 1974) Danny, Champion of the World (Gavin Millar, 1989) Damage (Louis Malle, 1992) Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988) Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1972) Die Hard: With a Vengeance (John McTiernan, 1995) La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) Dungeons and Dragons (Courtney Solomon, 2000) An Englishman Abroad (John Schlesinger, 1984) Elizabeth I (TV, Tom Hooper, 2005) Eragon (Stefen Fangmeier, 2006) The Fourth Angel (John Irvin, 2001) 205

Filmography

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981) From Time to Time (Jeff Blythe, 1992) Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) (Luchino Visconti, 1963) The Gay Divorcee (Mark Sandrich, 1934) Gidget Goes Hawaiian (Paul Wendkos, 1961) Gigi (Vincent Minnelli, 1958) The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1970) Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) High Society (Charles Walters, 1956) Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) House of the Spirits (Bille August, 1993) Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006) Inside the Actors Studio (TV, Jeff Wurtz, 2003) Kafka (Steven Soderberg, 1991) Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, 2005) Kundun (Martin Scorsese, 1997) Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944) The Lion King (Roger Alles and Rob Minkoff, 1994) Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962) Lolita (Adrian Lyne, 1997) Longitude (TV, Charles Sturridge, 2000) Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1977) Maurice (James Ivory, 1987) M. Butterfly (David Cronenberg, 1993) The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Nunnally Johnson, 1956) Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) The Merchant of Venice (Michael Radford, 2004) The Mission (Roland Joffe, 1986) Moonlighting (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1982) The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974) Nijinsky (Herbert Ross, 1980) Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983) Ohio Impromptu (TV, Charles Sturridge, 2000) P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster (TV, Granada Television, 1990) The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, 1996) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980) Reversal of Fortune (Barbet Schroeder, 1990) Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960) The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955) Sidewalks of New York (Edward Burns, 2001) Sophie’s Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982) Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980) Stealing Beauty (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1996) Summertime (David Lean, 1955) Swann in Love (Volker Schlöndorff, 1984) 206

Filmography

There’s Always Tomorrow (Douglas Sirk, 1956) The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951) The Time Machine (Simon Wells, 2002) Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) Waterland (Stephen Gyllenhaal, 1992) Who Do You Think You Are: Jeremy Irons (TV, Wall to Wall, 2006) The Wild Duck (Henri Safran, 1983)

207

Index

1914–1918, 4, 205 Abraham, N. And M. Torok, 31, 47, 97, 101, 191, 209 abuse, 34, 28, 81, 141, 150, 189 Academy Award, 1 Age of Innocence, The, 82, 142, 147, 205 Albee, Edward, 158 Alberti, Leon Battista, 56 Allen, Woody, 29, 48, 82, 206 ambivalence, 80, 100, 125, 171, 176, 189, 205 And Now … Ladies and Gentlemen, 11, 25, 30, 205 Andresen, Bjorn, 65 Andrews, Anthony, 2, 51, 54, 61, Another Country, 81, 140, 205 Anti-Semitism, 197 anxiety, 18, 19, 25, 29, 34, 36, 43, 72, 75, 83, 106, 108, 109, 135, 171, 176, 177, 190 Appaloosa, 38, 205 architecture, 52–8, 65 Aristophanes, 109 Ardant, Fanny, 113, 157 Audran, Stephanie, 60, 66

Baby, Nicholas, 106, 120 Bardot, Brigitte, 38–9 Barrault, Marie-Christine, 106 Bates, Alan, 9 Baxter, Lynsey, 86 Being Julia, 2, 3, 26, 39, 205 Bel Geddes, Barbara, 112 Bellissima, 64, 205 Bennett, Alan, 112 Benning, Annette, 2 Berger, Helmut, 64 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 19, 43, 87, 108, 172, 205, 206 Betrayal, 3, 25, 205 Bloom, Claire, 51 Bogarde, Dirk, 64, 120 Bujold, Genevieve, 123–4 Boose, L.E. and B. Flowers, 42 Bramante, Donato, 56–7 Brideshead Revisited, 2, 6, 7, 9–19, 25–7, 50–81, 103, 108, 110, 115, 143, 196, 205 Bringing Up Baby, 104, 205 Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, 8, 16 Brooks, Peter, 148–53 Buonarotti, Michelangelo, 56, 135 Burgess, Guy, 140, 142 Burton, Richard, 155

209

Index

Byron, George (Lord), 66, 81 Callas Forever, 22, 36, 157, 205 Cambridge, University of, 80 Cape Fear, 101, 205 Caron, Leslie, 39 Carrey, Jim, 87 Castle Howard, 55, 57 censorship (regulation), 160, 180 Chekhov, Anton, 74, 98 Chinese Box, 3, 27, 39, 205 Chorus of Disapproval, A, 26, 159, 205 cinematography, 53, 55, 63–4, 67, 75 144 Citizen Kane, 82, 205 Cleopatra, 97, 205 Close, Glenn, 1 Cold War, The, 140–2, 152 Collier, Patience, 88, 98 Collins, Lynn, 197 Conformist, The, 19, 43–6, 108, 169, 172, 179, 205 Conversation Piece, 205 Cook, Pam, viii, 7, 23, 125 Creative process (collaboration), 11, 85 Creed, Barbara, viii, 123, 125–6, 135, 143, 153 Cronenberg, David, 123, 126, 134, 137, 140, 141–4, 146–77, 205, 206 Cruise, Tom, 103 Cusack, Sinead, 2, 9, 43 Damage, 4, 10, 27, 38, 39, 205 Danny, Champion of the World, 22, 205 Day-Lewis, Daniel, 142 Dead Ringers, 2–5, 10, 12, 14, 17, 26, 31, 36, 121–38, 140, 195, 205 Death in Venice, 64–5, 164, 205 de Beauvoir, Simone, 38–9, 189 de Lauretis, Teresa, 5, 62 Delon, Alain, 106 De Niro, Robert, 2, 11, 29 210

depression, 85, 194, depressed woman anxieties, 19, 21, 30, 36, 43, 46, 142 Die Hard: With a Vengeance 3, 205 Dolce Vita, La 91, 205 Dreher, D.E., 40–41 dressing ritual, 11, 15, 30, 109, 107, 110–112, 132, 139, 169, Dungeons and Dragons 11, 205 Dyer, Richard, 7 editing, 14, 45, 53, 68, 69, 113, 168, 179, 144 Eliot, T. S., 59, 108 Elizabeth I, 2, 4, 26, 30, 205 Elsaesser, Thomas, 148 Englishman Abroad, An, 140, 205 Eragon, 22, 48, 205 fantasy, 26–8, 33–6, 41, 45, 46, 58, 61, 65, 66, 92, 93 100, 107, 122–3, 125, 138, 139–40, 143, 147–8, 152–3 155, 169, 172, 178–80, 183–8 father-daughter relationships, see Imogenism Fiennes, Joseph, 197 Fleiss, Wilhelm, 28–9 Fourth Angel, The, 14, 205 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The, 2, 3, 6, 13, 14, 19, 25, 30, 82–101, 103, 108, 195, 206 Freud, Sigmund Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 121–3 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, 85, 87, 94, 95, 128, 160, 168, 175 ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction (1914)’, 36–38 ‘Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, 32–8, 186 ‘The Taboo Of Virginity’, 189–90

Index

‘Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality’, 4–5, 28, 30, 36, 182 Totem and Taboo, 121, 122, 163, 187–9, Fry, Stephen, 108, 111 Gattopardo, Il (The Leopard), 29, 82, 206, Gay Divorcee, The, 111, 206 Gay, Peter, 27, 43 Gibson, Mel, 7, 102 Gidget Goes Hawaiian, 164, 206 Gigi, 104, 206 Go-Between, The, 86, 206 Godspell (stage), 8–9 Gone with the Wind, 143, 206 Good, Christopher, 58 Grace, Nickolas, 13 Granger, Derek, 53 Grant, Cary, 104 Grant, Hugh, 7 Griffiths-Malin, Emma, 159 Grillo, John, 62 Hamlet (character), 18, 85 Hanks, Tom, 102, 103 Hawksmore, Nicholas, 57 Hemingway, Mariel, 48 Henson, Bill, 188–9 Hepburn, Audrey, 39 Hepburn, Katharine, 38, 63–4, 104 High Society, 111, 206 Hiroshima Mon Amour, 82, 206 Hope, Richard, 53, 97 House of the Spirits, 38, 206 Hugo, Victor, 107, 116–7 Hurt, William, 7 Imogenism, 19, 21, 36, 38–46, 127, 145, 164–70, 189, 196, 205 Inland Empire, 206 Inside The Actors Studio, 9–10, 206 Intolerable Idea, The, 29–36, 111, 126, 145, 170–3, 189 introjection, 31 146, 178, 185–6, 190

Irons, Barbara Ann (mother), 8 Irons, Max (son), 9 Irons, Paul (father), 8 Irons, Sam (son), 9 Jones, Simon, 56 Jones-Davis, Sue, 58 Jordan, Louis, 120 Jungian Theory, 42–3 Kafka, 4, 38, 206 Keating, Charles, 56 Keaton, Diane, 48 Keitel, Harvey, 146 Kingdom of Heaven, 22, 48, 206 Kristeva, Julia, 19, 30, 144, 145, 146 195, Kubrick, Stanley, 21, 158, 159, 206 Kundun 36, 122, 206 Lack, Stephen, 132 Langella, Frank, 158, Laura, 193, 206 Laurie, Hugh, 108 Lenker, Lagretta, 41–2 Lindsay-Hogg, Michael, 12, 53–5, 84, 205 Lion King, The, 206 Lolita (Kubrick, 1962), 21, 158–9, 206 Lolita, 3, 6, 9, 14, 17, 21, 25, 27, 28, 29, 36, 39, 85, 158–92, 206 Lone, John, 138, 141 Longitude, 25, 206 loss, 4, 6, 15, 16, 29–31, 36, 66, 75–6, 82–7, 93–100, 108, 115, 122, 142– 9, 159–61, 163, 168, 175, 177, 179, 184–5, 194–6 Love For Lydia, 8, 9 Lyne, Adrian, 159, 162, 164, 167–9, 172, 176, 177, 183, 206 Mckern, Leo, 88 Maclean, Donald, 142 Malkovich, John, 193 Manhattan, 48, 206 211

Index

mania, 2, 4, 15, 18, 32, 37, 38, 61, 93, 95, 102, 104, 106, 111, 113 115, 117, 184, 196 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The, 206 Marlow Theatre (Canterbury), 8 marriage, 2, 6, 30, 48, 72, 76, 91, 104, 105, 118, 120, 122, 148, 150, 170, 195, 197 masochism, 3, 32, 60, 79, 82, 87–90, 95, 100, 115, 120, 125, 139, 146, 178, 181 Masson, Jeffrey, 46 master/slave relationship, 109 maternal desire, 6, 19, 20, 26, 36, 40, 43–4, 51, 52, 56, 62, 64, 66, 79, 80, 110, 112, 122–27, 145, 195–6 Maurice, 91, 206 M. Butterfly, 3, 5, 10, 11, 16, 20, 138–57, 206 Mean Streets, 146, 206 Melancholia (Albrecht Dürer, 1514), 87 Melancholia, 4, 6, 15, 16, 19, 20, 29, 31, 32, 36, 40, 85, 86–8, 90–100, 115, 119, 123, 142, 146, 159, 185 Melancholia (Male), 29–31, 82–3, 85, 87, 104, 140, 142, 144–7, 152, 155–6, 185, 196 see N. Abraham and M. Torok; Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’; Kristeva Melancholy, 21, 76, 83, 88, 90, 108, 110, 114, 151, 159, 166 Actor’s Melancholy, The, 20, 85, 93–100, 108 melodrama, 3, 14, 21, 26, 86, 98, 100, 108, 138–56, 196 Milner, Roger, 68 Mission, The, 2, 11, 17, 206 Mitchell, Charlotte, 86 Mitford, Nancy, 81, 111 Modleski, Tania, 19, 31–2, 112 Moonlighting, 4, 38, 206 Moore, Stephen, 55 212

Morricone, Ennio, 158, 168, 177 Mulvey, Laura, 152 Muti, Ornella, 104, 105 Nabakov, Vladimir, 158, 159, 167 narcissism, 2, 4, 19, 20, 32, 36–38, 43, 61, 71, 103, 105, 110, 111, 115, 118–119, 122–8, 133, 140, 143, 155, 184–6, 194–6 see Freud, ‘On Narcissism’ Naremore, James, 7, 15, 23, 145 Nicholls, Phoebe, 53 Night Porter, The, 120, 206 Nijinsky, 8, 206 normality, 4, 5, 109 Nostalghia, 82, 206 Novak, Kim, 32 Obsession, 3, 5, 20, 32, 35, 38, 87, 90, 100, 102–5, 112–5, 195 Oedipus Tyrannus (Sophocles), 19, 51, 183 Ohio Impromptu, 2, 206 Olivier, Laurence, 51 Oxford, The University of, 19, 53–69 Pacino, Al, 197 Page, June, 58 Palladio, Andrea, 56–7 Pallisers, The, 8, 9 Pantheon, The (Rome), 57 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 142 Pinter, Harold, 6, 9, 83, 86, 101 Porter, Cole, 111 Portrait of a Lady, The, 151, 206 Proust, Marcel, 102, 109, 120 Psycho, 77, 206 Puccini, Giacamo La Boheme, 154 Madama Butterfly, 21, 139, 143, 147, 148, 150, 154 Tosca, 154 Quick, Diana, 17, 51, 61

Index

Raging Bull, 11, 206 Rampling, Charlotte, 7, 120 Reversal of Fortune, 1, 4, 11, 25, 26, 30, 103, 206 Richardson, Ian, 144 Rocco and His Brothers, 64, 206 romance, 6, 20, 58, 60, 75, 87, 97, 111, 119, 123, 128 132, 137, 148, 160–3, 166, 173–177, 181–186, 198 Rome, 48, 56, 57, 79, Rosenthal, Emanuelle, 113 Rudd, Kevin, 189 Ruskin, John, 66 sacrifice, 34, 41, 79, 100, 141, 147–54, 187, 196 Sanda, Dominique, 44 Sassoon, Siegfried, 47 Schreber, Daniel Paul see Freud, ‘Psychoanalytic Notes’ Scorsese, Martin, 29, 31, 36, 82, 87, 122, 142, 147, 205, 206 Screwball Comedy, 104 seduction, 18, 19, 21, 26–45, 51, 61, 65, 66, 69, 76, 90, 107, 110, 122, 145, 167, 169–71, 175, 177, 182, 189, 194–5 Seven Year Itch, The, 142, 206 Shakespeare, William, 19, 39–43, 74, Cymbeline, 39–41, 48 Hamlet, 85 Merchant Of Venice, The, 58, 197– 8, 206 Pericles, 40–2 Tempest, The, 41 Winter’s Tale, The, 41 Shaugraun, The (Dion Boucicault), 147 Shaw, George Bernard, 19, 40–42 Sidewalks of New York, 48, 206 Silverstone, Ben, 159 Sleeping Aridne, The (Vatican Museum), 90

Sophie’s Choice, 15, 206 Stanislavski, Constantine, 7, 15 Stardust Memories, 82, 206 stars, 7, 23 Stealing Beauty, 3, 26–7, 36, 38, 39, 43, 46, 206 Stewart, Jimmy, 32, 102 Streep, Meryl, 2, 15, 83, 84 Sturridge, Charles, 53–55, 205, 206 subordination, 2, 16, 17, 18, 22, 53, 63, 65, 69, 72, 103, 107, 108, 182, 195 Sukowa, Barbara, 139 Summertime, 63, 64, 206 Swain, Dominique, 17, 166, 167, 180 Swann in Love, 3, 6, 14, 15, 16, 20, 25, 85, 92, 102–120, 194, 195, 206 Time Machine, The, 11, 25, 207 Tivoli (Italy), 56 trauma, 27, 169, 179, 188 Traviata, La (Verdi), 154 Tyler, Liv, 46 Vanbrugh, John, 57, 80 Vaughan, Peter, 88 Venice, 19, 50–1, 54, 56, 63–6, Vertigo, 19, 32, 82, 102, 104, 112, 207 Visconti, Luchino, 29, 64, 82, 205, 206 Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus, 56–7 Von Palleske, Heidi, 128 Waddell, Terrie, vii, 42–3 Waterland, 2, 26, 207 Waugh, Evelyn, 72 Webb, Clifton, 193 Weir, Peter, 87 Wild Duck, The, 26, 36, 39, 207 Wilde, Oscar, 111, 112 Willis, Bruce, 112 Wodehouse, P.G., 108, 110, 206 Wren, Christopher, 67

213