My body was stiff from having sat so long, rapt and motionless and remarkably low to the ground: the springs of the old couch had wilted and become permanently depressed, so that lounging upon it at length was akin to settling into the bucket seats of a coupe for a country drive. I weighed emailing Garrett with early impressions of the football game, or else a gloss of the swatches—he’d not written back about them yet, perhaps he was more easily thrown than I’d guessed—as these were among the few things I could do from exactly where I was, with my phone, without first having to negotiate a way out of the hole I was at the bottom of. I made it only as far as the salutation before drawing a blank.
It was noon already, I considered, and I’d had nothing to eat yet. I didn’t feel hungry, even if I should have been. I would need to have something small then, something you didn’t really need to be hungry to get down. I rocked my way out of the sofa and in the kitchen discovered a lone egg, its terracotta shell speckled lightly at one end. Smashing it into an oily pan already on the burner. I twisted the dial sharply and the metronomic clicks of the igniter sounded over the invisible rush of gas until an anemic blue flame appeared.
The meals I prepared at home were uncommonly limited for someone five years removed from college. There were eggs, and toast, and penne served without even jarred sauce, just butter and salt. Thinking of my various acquaintances, perhaps this wasn’t so unusual, given how dependent anyone living in the city becomes on takeout and delivery, services that induce the sort of deskilling the cellphone does vis-à-vis our capacity to find our way around (through its GPS), or even to count (with its calculator). What made my case unusual was only that my kitchen skills were in fact quite developed, and that my reasons for leaving them unexploited had not even a little to do with the shrewd management of time.
Not long after arriving in New York, while I was living alone in Bushwick, I spent nearly six months giving myself a course in the preparation of grains, after thumbing through some ancient cookery guides at the bookstore on my block. My initial interest flowed mostly from the mathematics of the enterprise, I think, the way that the various doughs and batters and puddings were defined largely by the application of distinct ratios to a few common ingredients, which functioned almost like the colors of a palette: eggs, milk, sugar, salt, flour, yeast. Breads, not crepes or cakes, quickly became my focus. I started in earnest with a spiced Moroccan loaf, big and round with a yellow-green crumb, prepared to accompany the tagines John had taught me to cook in college; for a Dakota roughneck, he could be rather refined in private. Irish soda bread came next. I’d go on to make it regularly for Claire, who was charmed by my baking habit, the one bit of domesticity she could depend on from me, even if my take on this particular bread was too austere for her, too rough on the palate. Then there was the bread I’d been most proud of, and most ravenous for. If I ever started baking again, if taste could once more stoke my interest, it’s what I’d make first: a chocolate boule that didn’t smack of chocolate, not in any ordinary sense. It was almost savory, like a distant cousin of the Moroccan. It could go proxy for breads as robust as rye, though with a pad of butter it sweetened and offered up little glints of cocoa. Cut into points, with ham or raclette, it couldn’t have been more at home.
Baking wasn’t the end of my culinary forays. Stews interested me, too, all kinds, not just tagines, whether bouillabaisse or gumbo or more exotic things, say, a mango kadhi made with uncultured buttermilk. I always enjoyed returning to classics like English stew, which was hardly more than meat and potatoes, carrots and onions, conjoined through a forever-simmer. Barbeque held a privileged place in my diet, particularly ribs. I’d spent some time mastering the complexities of dry rubs and the proper use of a smoker, with more than a few fires along the way to show for it. What else? Coffee and the niceties of its preparation had briefly obsessed me, though it wasn’t until meeting Garrett that I’d found an occasion to concern myself with the nuances of whiskey or wine, probably owing to the way I took them, the inevitable unpleasantness to which it led.
For all that the metropolis crippled you through its conveniences, then, it had a countervailing tendency, at least in New York, a place in which headlong engagement was the only kind that seemed to make sense to anyone, of encouraging productive infatuations. Cooking, furniture making, surfing—Half Moon Bay had planted that last seed in me, though it needed the rather poor soil of the East, the pathetic ripples of the Rockaways, to make it sprout—in the city I undertook each of these with sufficient zeal that, after just three- or six-month excursuses, I grasped enough to make such avocations a permanent part of my repertoire, if not quite my lived life. Which of these skills I actually deployed depended almost entirely on circumstance. Claire, really. Perhaps this was the great favor she’d done for me: she was exceptionally clever at engineering contexts in which the full range of my abilities might be activated. If I had the idea to paint outdoors, she’d make sure the session occurred near a beach, so that later, as I was packing my brushes away, I could be drawn into renting boards and perhaps giving her lessons, too, though all of that would appear to me entirely by the by. If a friend of hers was putting on a dinner party, my competence in braising duck would somehow, in her telling, become essential to the evening, the very thing needed to make the night. Part of this, I know, must have been about me. She thought I might be happier this way, if I were spread a little thinner, and not quite so concentrated. But part of it—and as time went on, I suspected this factor was growing—had to be that it made her happier, this version of me, in which something more than my artistic bent was manifest. For myself, I don’t know which version I preferred.
These days, without Claire’s delicate string-pulling, I was in purer artistic air. Michelangelo may have had his stale crusts of bread, but I had my ageless pastes: peanut butter, Nutella, lemon curd, rhubarb jam, and, sometimes, pâte. I had cheeses, too; I used to have exquisite ones. This was another pastime I’d plunged into, two summers after college, curating gorgeous cheeseboards, mostly for myself. But the story had changed since, especially after Claire’s departure. My selections were careless now, or else governed by the wrong criteria. I’d go to Whole Foods and buy mostly with longevity in mind, knowing I wouldn’t be making another trip—couldn’t, really—for a while. Most blues can last forever: you’d have a hard time distinguishing the mold in the caves of France from the mold in the fridge, especially if you had an interest in not knowing the difference. Firm goat cheeses, like Village Green, also do well in the long haul, I can attest. And so it was these, and even barbarities like American cheese, that came home with me
If the cheeses and pastes I consumed these days were nearly imperishable, for the sake of bulk I paired them with a staple that had a much shorter shelf life and thus needed to be sourced locally, usually from the bodega. Yet what kind of bread would suffice? One way to guarantee a certain standard of quality, even a poor one, is to buy the most visible brand. Any consumer knows this. In the case of bread, that’s Wonder Bread, the starch with the most recognizable logo in the business—that luminous cluster of polka dots—and, more important, an otherworldly resistance to mold, staling, or decay of any kind. I imagine the precise medley of preservatives is no less carefully guarded than the formula for Coca Cola.
In the last half year or so, it seemed I might have exceeded even Michelangelo in my devotion to draftsmanship, inasmuch as I could only occasionally be bothered with the bread, crusts or no; indeed, recognizable food products had come to seem optional. So it was on to powdered shakes and protein bars, stocked away by the carton from Walgreens. Whenever I managed to summon the patience to face people before meal time, and I found myself able to organize delivery, which meant, first, clothing myself in a manner that didn’t risk giving offense as I opened the door for the driver, lunch or dinner generally was a matter of Thai or Mexican food. If I didn’t mind adding shoelace-tying to my trials, something from the deli across the street could make the menu. The place was run by a rotating cast of Chinese, an extended family whose outermost branches grew, over the course of a decade, from Guangzhou to New York. I counted on them mostly for carnival fare—freezer-burned chicken tenders and burgers that bled grease—though once they got used to me shuffling in several times a day, I was quietly granted the right to purchase whatever Cantonese finger foods were sustaining the staff that shift.
Some days, though, I couldn’t help wanting my simple cheese and bread restored to me, but with someone else doing the work, even transforming it. Baking it, say. For those times, there was a pizza joint up the street. It had a narrow counter and just four tables crammed in front of it, and overhanging two of them was a beefy CRT on a flimsy metal arm I had no faith in. Setting eyes upon it filled me with dread, but then so did the clientele, with their sweat-stained bandanas and shiny oversize jackets worn in all seasons. No matter where you sat in there, you were going to be on edge.
The egg hadn’t yet come together in the pan when I gave up and I dribbled it onto a plate. Only then did I realize, with more disappointment than anyone has a right to, that the Wonder Bread was finished. I did have stone wheat crackers and a small jar of spicy relish. I always had these two. They’d been sitting on my counter for almost a year, remnants of a gift basket I’d been sent by my mother shortly after I’d moved in (an in-person visit wasn’t in the cards). I pulled the tawny wicker basket toward me, unfolded the colorful tissues swathing the final items, and began to consume it all right there, standing up, just by the sink streaked with paints and inks. I scooped up the relish and the runny yellow mass with the crackers and their salt studs, which could hold a coating of yolk and made seasoning unnecessary, and dutifully polished off the egg. However well I may have felt—and I did feel quite well, considering the hangover I’d woken with—I had a kind of proprioceptive intimation that my body was somehow wrong about its needs. My limbs were trailing ever so slightly behind my mind, my will, with the lag of a poorly dubbed foreign film.
Mildly fortified, with the box of crackers tucked under my arm and the last two bottles of Theria, which I’d left in the freezer, in my hands, I returned to the film room and sank onto the couch for the afternoon session. I clicked the second of the links Garrett had sent me and a title card broke up the screen’s black: The Sort. I’d not heard of it. Soon I was informed it was the work of Bruno Dumont. This was a name I did recognize, and only because of Claire. His oeuvre, she’d once explained, vacillated between realistic narrative and something one might have fairly called, several generations back, the avant-garde. What was the word for it now, when the possibility of radical social renewal through art, probably always a fanciful idea, was no longer seriously upheld by anyone? Many still believed in socially charged art, of course. But socially transformative art, the kind that might catalyze historical reformation? That was, after all, the sine qua non of the avant-garde proper—the Futurists, the Suprematists, the Dadaists, the Situationists. That level of ambition had lost plausibility since at least the mid-seventies and probably earlier. The very meaning of avant-garde had shifted; now the term was interchangeable with unconventional, though most of the works lumped under this heading were hardly that, as they generally borrowed their techniques from previous eras of genuine invention. So, then, what did avant-garde or experimental denote now, except for one more ossified form, in this respect on all fours with the great bugaboo, realism?
Claire held Dumont’s films to be essentially French, and she didn’t place scare quotes around the national modifier, which I appreciated. What she meant, I believe, is that Dumont’s lexicon derived from a Gallic literary tradition going back at least as far as Sade. It’s a tradition preoccupied with form and ritual, unafraid of wandering from the story—from cause and effect, I mean—for the sake of moments of pure visual spectacle; and, in the vein of Burke’s Sublime, it’s in thrall to calamity, to violence, to bodies and their functions and the purposes to which they can be put, by oneself or another. Claire had expounded on all this as a lead-up to our watching Camille Claudel 1915, Dumont’s picture about Rodin’s spurned mistress, a sculptress who spent the last three decades of her life in an asylum, vainly turning over the master’s plots—that’s what she believed them to be—to poison her and steal her work. Claudel was Juliette Binoche, and Claire relished her; much of my film-watching tracked Binoche’s career.
Claudel, I recall, is shot staidly, even drably, in quiet colors, and, except when indoors becomes outdoors, within a narrow band of contrast. The camera rarely moves, hanging on every wide-angle shot, as if only a steady hand could comprehend such scenes. Claudel, though paranoid and prone to tears, is hardly psychotic, not like the lunatics surrounding her. She is so collected, in fact, that she’s often asked by the nuns running the sanctuary to help corral the flock when they stray. Things are different with the others. They’ve come so unglued it’s actually cured them: universally happy, elated by banalities; merely tapping their spoons against the lunch table can fill entire afternoons with satisfaction. What I remember best of this film, though, is how matter-of-factly Dumont enters the realm of the phantasmic. This is plain old realism, there’s nothing magical about it. The laws of nature, and of neurology in particular, go tragically unbroken here. Certain subject matter seems to make departures from sober mimicry gratuitous. This is what other asylum films Claire had shown me demonstrated: Shock Corridor, The Ninth Configuration.
More substantively, what I was left to puzzle over after Claudel was the way the sick—not Claudel herself, who seems crippled by her illness, but the properly ill, who are somehow liberated by it—spent so much of their time testing the capacities of their bodies, especially their voices and faces, twisting both into terrifying shapes: shrieks and hoots, smiles and grimaces. Their bliss in such exploration is for Claudel a great nightmare. The expressive possibilities of the body consume them, the manner in which faces and voices are instruments at our disposal, even though they themselves have no particular use for them, having nothing much to communicate as such, given their scattered souls. You might say, as Claire once had said, that the patients are formalists, but of the body itself. For them, every day is an act, a joyful experiment in what they can make this thing do. The most discomfiting scene in the film is of the patients’ rehearsing for an asylum rendition of Don Juan—community theater of a rarefied sort. Naturally the players prove incorrigible, though the nuns go on hopelessly admonishing them until Binoche, who at first finds herself wracked with laughter at the inanity on display, flees the room, screaming for these creatures to leave her be.
If there was one central influence on the whole of this film, it had to be Rabelais, the most philosophical and phantasmagoric prose writer of his moment—not Cervantes, as Claire held. The relevant tradition was anyway older than Sade, I contended, and Claire, I remember, gleefully conceded the point, pleased she’d drawn me into meditating on feature films and narrative. She knew literature better than I did; it was her first love. In a way, it was also why I knew her at all: it was the bond she shared with Karen, who seemed to be turning further toward text every day.
I swigged profligately from the bottle; the crackers had drawn the water from my mouth. I was curious to see, with The Sort, what Dumont had learned in the few years since Claudel. The screen remained black for some time as the soundtrack ran and I settled the sketchpad onto my lap. The tune was familiar to me, the way the voice hovered between speech and song, and mingled with plangent piano and strings: Sprechstimme from Pierrot Lunaire, the final scene. But the poems, which had been translated into German for Schoenberg’s landmark drama, were here returned to their native tongue, the nascent musical vocabulary of the second Viennese School put in service of French letters. Dumont’s first essentialist touch, I could hear Claire saying while patting my thigh, and this before we could see a thing. Finally, though, the camera rolls; and the first thing that vision makes clear is that the music is diegetic. We’re privy to a live performance, at a music hall whose structure the camera steadily lays bare, everything but the stage and the performers, though, so there’s still a sort of denial going on. A heterodox collection of tiers confronts us, several of them having been built off to one side, in a tower more precarious than imposing, which manages to blur the aims of its makers, though it does reveal the period of the film to be roughly contemporary. Since today’s architecture is so fraught with realized vaguenesses like this—one balcony almost overhung stage right—my eye isn’t detained for long before acquiescing in the geometric confusion.
As the camera pans around the audience, instead of an isolating darkness appropriate to a concert hall we are given twilight, with grays standing in for blacks and visual details easy enough to discern. Which means one of two things must be true here: either the whole of the hall is actually softly illuminated—an odd arrangement for a performance—or the stage and the performers, which Dumont never directly lets us see, are under lights so bracing they cast a penumbral glow throughout the space. The latter possibility quashes the strongest desire I have, which is to look upon the stage and seek out the source of the music, the plaintive voice especially.
The camera makes several passes of the lowest balcony, slow passes. These are first-tier seats, the ones of season-ticket holders, generational wealth. There’s a man in a suit jacket size too large; the pads of his shoulders extend farther than his own, in a manner more appropriate to football than to theater. Beneath the coat is a substantial sweater, cashmere or a very fine wool, by the looks of it, and the only bit of his dark tie that we can see is the simple four-in-hand, the unobtrusive knot which I have always found genuinely confident men prefer to the effrontery of, say, the Windsor.
There is another man three seats away, at the other end of a very short row on the balcony, who by this criterion would appear to have no self-belief at all. He sits with his blazer still buttoned, lapels ballooning, and around his wispy neck hangs a knot so overweening it can only be the Balthus, a comical monstrosity dwarfing the Windsor that was named, yes, after the slight artist who invented it. (Claudel’s brother, the effete poet, would have looked just right in one arriving at the sanitarium to visit the sister he’d had committed.) Clustered in the same box are several men more stringently attired. Tuxedos. A season-opening gala is the immediate impression I receive, not unlike the ones I’d attended the last few falls with Claire’s family at Carnegie. But as the camera pulls back, this audience shows itself to be considerably younger, late thirties or early forties, not the sorts that tend to pack openers. Hair color is a part of the story—there isn’t much gray in evidence—but mostly it’s the way their faces still cling tightly to their skulls, proving that time has had no opportunity to loosen bonds. That’s not to say there aren’t a few pointy-nosed patricians here and there, heavily jowled and bearing an air of sober rapture, but in aggregate, the group looks homogenous. Unusually so. For the sameness goes beyond age or demographic truisms concerning the sort who goes out to hear Schoenberg. The unity is deeper, phenotypic, and for me, reminiscent of certain Degases, his dancers, for instance, a handful of which are often recycled throughout the pictures. How had Dumont managed to cast this crowd of several hundred, I began to wonder. What kind of effort would have been required to find so many who together resembled, well, one large family, or better, a clan? There is something discomfiting in this, proto-fascist almost, which is also to say utopian—no less than the avant-garde orbit in which Schoenberg operated.
Strangely, though, the women, who are, as it happens, nearly all dressed with more care than the men they sit beside, cut against this impression: they don’t appear to be part of this clan, nor do they form one of their own. Their stock varies extravagantly; they are each themselves. I note this while mentally marking all those with hair that could plausibly be regarded as red. Six or seven fit the bill, given how low the light is, from a strawberry blonde to two older women in adjoining seats with hair that appears black yet carries enough rogue tints to suggest at least the possibility of red under stronger light. I am seeing things discontinuously, selectively, while the eye of the camera scans the crowd more like a flâneur, refusing to track any one set of figures, casually moving from one to the next without much pattern. This gives the shot the same unstable, decentered character as the music, making it impossible to say which of these seven women might be the one I am hoping to find.
The drive to seek out a center, a thread—I could combat it here and there but never extinguish it, even while knowing Dumont to be content with taking his time establishing motifs, or just basic narrative coherence. At this early moment, a good share of the interest lies in coming to grips with the elementary contours of the film. And the rest? Chiaroscuro, more than anything, form and tone reacting to low light, the tiny gradations of navy and black, the various patterns of wool in the suits, all interrupted by the brighter finery of women’s wear, flares of green charmeuse and crimson taffeta. As for what can be heard, the soprano hews decidedly closer to speech than to song, lending the poetry a recitative air; simply returning it to the original French does half the work of softening Schoenberg’s German.
The performance begins to wind down, and searching my mind I recovered only Symbolist tropes of urban ennui. They clung to Pierrot, and the towering presence of Schoenberg himself, who peeked out from behind everything he wrote. As did the first-generation avant-garde he represented, against which every serious artist like Dumont in some way took the measure of himself, if only to make sense of how far and in what direction he had traveled to get to where he was.
I guzzled from the bottle sweating in my hand until my tongue lost all sense. The drink had sat in the freezer a long time, and anyway the machine was perennially kept too cool, so that among other misdeeds it habitually turned ice cream into granite, forcing you to chisel away at it with an increasingly disfigured spoon. My teeth would ache for an hour at least after crunching these little chips that might as well have been bone for all the flavor they retained. But frigidity wasn’t always a problem. It hadn’t really ruined the Theria in my hand, for instance, just changed it, as a splash of water will cask-strength whiskey. Once my mouth began to acclimate to its arctic temperature, the drink seemed to come into proper focus for the first time, and it was immediately clear to me why. The cold had stabilized it, as it does so many things. A few more minutes, a few more measured sips, and I was certain the ambivalent quality that had flummoxed me earlier had more or less vanished. Theria, now, spoke with one voice: acrid, medicinal, still complex but determinately so, its flavor frozen in place. What would you call it? Plantlike? Berrylike? I suppose that’s where you’d start, though I still had no certainty as to which berry or which plant. Given Garrett’s purposes, this was probably a virtue. If the drink was supposed to have breakthrough effects, why shouldn’t its flavor be equally novel? In any case, it was solidly good now, in the way, perhaps, of fruited beer.
The more of it I drank, and by this point I’d emptied many bottles, the more I settled into its depths. Though depths wasn’t quite right, really, as repeated sampling produced in me a distinct feeling of growing transparency, of all mediation collapsing into direct contact with its flavors, which registered more as a surfacing than a submergence. The most remarkable thing was the way it seemed to bring this sense of immediacy, and of fineness of grain, to whatever I looked at, as if there were a whole spectrum of worldly detail that a stimulant like coffee only began to reveal before making one’s senses overreactive and less precise. Not so with Theria, not so far at least. The choreographed grotesquerie of the football game had shone through in every particular. And now it was happening with the film: we’d just jumped from the city to the country, to a vast and sturdy house radiating a kind of materiality and firmness alien to the concert hall, which had seemed, through the liquidity of its architecture, to be permanently unsure of what it was or wanted to be, so that every time you looked you saw something different, some new geometric projection that was sure to vanish just as soon as it failed to do its job, its primary one, really, of convincing you of the wisdom of having great numbers of people crowd together in a confined space—space for a thousand, in this case—something human history had generally shown to end in disease and misery and vice.
While city architecture was always contorting itself in apology for the brutishness of mass congregation, the way in which people, rich and poor alike, lived all over each other, here, in this forested place, at midday, under a thick and undulating white sky, a family, I assume it’s a family, is sitting around the dining table. I strain to find, among this group, anyone from the concert hall, but quickly I see that Dumont isn’t offering that kind of continuity. Instead, what binds the first two scenes together is a distinct poverty of dialogue, though it must be said that the family looks to be in good spirits, even if we’ve only gotten as far as aperitifs.
I count without seeming to count, I seem just to know, though I will go on to verify it by arithmetic deliberately applied—the camera eye lingers long enough for this—that there are fourteen at this broad blackwood table. I shouldn’t be able to visually apprehend more than seven items at once, if I remember the relevant cognitive science correctly, but I’ve managed to double this total, or Theria has, the drink in my hand I swig again and again until I’m opening the last freezing bottle.
Lunch comes out of the kitchen through double doors held open by thick, worn books: French dictionaries, I can see from their covers, which are so battered they must have spent more time as doorstops than anything else. Prim servants, their hands wrapped in cloth, carry in the meal as the camera orbits the table. Steam trails from the consommé as if from the nozzle of a jet engine as the soup is briskly shepherded to the table in a heavy crystal bowl. The plates of julienned vegetables and long-grained black rice, the partridges roasted until the skin has drawn back from the flesh: each dish gives off a curiously thick updraft of vapor, which, once everything has been laid out on the table, seems to cast the whole scene in a fog.
It must be quite cold there. The profusion of steam is itself evidence of this, but so are the frosted trees outside the bay windows near the table, and the darkened fireplace on the opposite side of the room, beside the kitchen doors. Reappraising the diners through waves of steam, I can see that they are rather heavily dressed, as if they are eating outdoors, with wooly sweaters and long coats. Attire like this wouldn’t have been abnormal in earlier times during winter, when indoor heating was spotty, though Dumont’s setting appears in most ways contemporary: one frail woman wears a chunky digital watch with a face wider than her wrist, just one modern tension among many in the film.
Four minutes, clock minutes, of genial banalities ensue while the consommé vanishes to the tinkling of silverware on china. The few things that get said are mostly left unrepresented in the subtitles, and knowing a bit of French myself, I concur with the judgment of the producers. What’s put forth here—thoughts about the weather, broad praise of the food—matters little as assertion; what’s questioned matters little as interrogation. This is human birdsong. Sprechstimme. Tone and rhythm prevail.
Halfway through this sequence, the camera stops gyring and the machine eye settles into a gap between two of the guests, as if taking a place at the table. From here there are no cuts, no movement, just steady observation of the emptying of soup bowls. Before the diners can finish the first course, there’s a knock at the front door. Technically it occupies the top left corner of the frame, this mahogany door, though it does so almost invisibly, blending smoothly with the wood of the entryway; which means that it takes me a moment to recognize the door for what it is, a portal to this house that by now seems like all the world. The knock—it comes again—doesn’t really undermine the hermeticism, though, as no-one rises from the table, no-one even appears to hear the knocking, the consommé is too transporting for that, and the steam so very thick. Is there any knocking? I begin to wonder. Maybe what I hear are only the thuds of knees against the table’s underside, a game of footsie gone—there’s a young woman standing in the open doorway now. I hadn’t noticed her enter, she’s just there, and something in her posture gives the impression that she might well have been there awhile. The belated proof of the contrary comes from the squeak of tires: the faint silhouette of a car is visible through the mesh blinds as the vehicle pulls away sharply. One feels Dumont toying with perception here, although, by this point, I can’t help suspecting Theria of manipulating my senses more profoundly than any auteur.
This woman, for instance. Her hair is dark, nothing like red, yet it’s obvious to me she’s the redhead I’m seeking. I stare down into the bottle in my lap and wonder. There is an Americanness to the way she stands, I suppose. A frankness in her hips. Perhaps that’s it. She’s striking, yes, that head of hair and the leonine frame holding it aloft, but somehow, well, what exactly? She’s eminently everyday, at least from this distance, from the table, where we’ve sat with the camera—as the camera—for five minutes and counting. This unstable blending of the singular and the common I’d already begun to associate with Garrett; it made sense that he’d have an affinity with this woman, or at least the Dumontian version of her. She’s standing there on the threshold in a double-breasted peacoat that’s built so softly the jacket accentuates her form rather than obscures it. Unlike her hair, the fabric is red, or maroon, which camouflages her against the entryway. Against the long cut of the coat, she wears black leggings, which gives her an adolescent quality, and from her fingertips dangles a pair of translucent blue sunglasses with miniscule lenses. You wonder how strange those glasses would appear framing her face, if she ever wore them properly and not, say, pushed back over her hair as an ornament; they’d never succeed in circumscribing those broad eyes, which along with the rest of her countenance keep shaping up to convey something without quite succeeding at it.
Finally, finally, her presence, or just these small failures of expression, begins to register with the others. Perhaps it’s only because everyone has by now finished their soup. As the bowls are cleared, a man wearing silvery stubble and long brown hair, combed back, is the first to act as though he can sense her aborted intentions. His mouth stretches into an ugly, irregular smile with not enough bend to it and too much tongue. Yet this doesn’t upset the progress of his meal in the slightest; he goes on heaping spoons of green beans around his partridge. He can’t seem to stifle this smile on his face, boorish as he seems to know it to be, so the dam bursts and now his teeth are showing, white and blockish, along with his stained gums, and the scene has only gotten uglier. Eventually his gaze pulls away from the plate of beans and lands heavily on the woman, the girl, this princess interrupting his lunch. The man finally takes possession of the smile, it is no longer something happening to his face, no, now it is he who is doing the smiling, and he couldn’t be less attractive.
A chain reaction runs around the table like a burning fuse: the clatter of cutlery ceases and everyone turns to the girl with an air of respect, or fear, or unwelcome surprise, but without any of the condescension of the first man. A third of them rise from their seats, some only part-way, some standing tall, and the rest grip the table to suggest that they might rise. The young woman shrinks from this, increasingly mortified by each new person who stands or half-stands or makes as if they will stand but does not. As for the stubbled man—the rest are notably clean-cut, except for one with a true beard—he never rises or gives any indication that the thought has crossed his mind. He simply returns to piling up beans on his plate. But as he does this, and this is his special contribution, the gesture that none of the others is quite able to make, he greets the woman flatly, in English that seems multiply inflected, so that I can’t easily say much about his origins.
Her name is Anne, we learn. She doesn’t respond to his words; she doesn’t even make a move. You feel she’s considering putting those tiny sunglasses on and retreating. Had she been wearing them when she’d first arrived, or were they already in her hand? I don’t bother to run the tape back to find out. The diners are standing around the table, at least half of them. You assume they’re a family; there is a unity of appearance to them, as there had been at the concert hall. Most begin to sit down again, as if standing up were enough of a greeting, but two of the older women and one of the younger men give the stubbled man, still seated and no longer smiling, his mouth is stuffed with beans and fowl, something sharper than a smile. You suspect, by the mute censure in their eyes, that Anne’s presence at the house is somehow improper. She’s his young lover, is my first thought—the first thought, I would hazard, of anyone watching. But somehow she can’t be. Is it merely that I know to expect more misdirection from Dumont? Would any director Claire talked up not throw in a wrinkle here? Or is it some onscreen cue I’ve not identified yet?
An elderly man with a bristly white mustache blanketing his mouth gently motions to Anne from the table, urging her forth. Her lips open and this time you think it will finally happen—speech, it’s right there on the tip of her tongue—but only a rictus appears, one I can’t decipher, except to say there is no suggestion in it that she’s experiencing even a trace of pleasure. The impression is reinforced by the way her visage too quickly returns to neutral, where it always seems to end up. She shoots off into a hallway adjoining the dining room, leading someplace we can’t see, as a sense of disquiet falls over the onlookers.
One woman who has until now been firmly in the background of the picture, merely a small piece of the mis-en-scène, really, no more distinct than the drapes or the china, this woman wearing a blue taffeta dress and long silver earrings that brush her shoulders like chimes, she turns and addresses the woman beside her rather gravely, with a weary gaze, in what appears to be the first real bit of dialogue in the film, something uttered that isn’t mere placeholder speech:
Súpa verður að koma næst.
Naturally, these are words of a language known to few, and Dumont offers no subtitles, so either you understand it or you don’t. Remarkably, I do, and I owe this bit of chance knowledge to a summer I spent outside Reykjavík, with John and a couple of his friends from Rapid City. John’s grandfather was a Danish emigrant, and John had cousins who’d decided to live in Iceland, the former colony. Visiting them didn’t make for an impressive summer, I recall. The destination seemed too self-conscious to me, even accounting for the abject fantasies of college. Drunk on certain myths, as we all were, however much some of us believed ourselves immune, from where I stood now I could see the imperfection of my resistance. John himself came by this journey to a mountain village fairly honestly. Leif Erikson, the Sagas, there was at least a case to be made that they had some bearing on his life. Perhaps I should have simply excused myself; my own ancestors came from farther south. But he’d insisted I go with him, just as he’d insisted I drink the Theria with him, and at that time I hadn’t yet developed the habit of baldly refusing my friends’ beseechments. Now, of course, I could nearly get in a fistfight with John over trivialities. Whatever else it was, my willingness to decline without much justification was, to me, a kind of progress, a marshaling of spiritual resources, a frank acknowledgement that dialectic had its limits. Strange: no-one would say there was even a touch of the religious about me, yet to the degree that most creeds placed a premium on silence, on action without explanation, on faith, I suppose I was starting to see its merits.
Back then, though, when I could still be persuaded to do things that didn’t agree with my instincts, I went off to Iceland with the others, so that now I have just enough of a handle on the language to know that what this woman in The Sort is offering is entirely of a piece with the banalities that have come before in French. She’s merely expounding on table manners, etiquette: specifically, about which course ought to be served first—evidently not the soup. The exchange between the women doesn’t touch at all on Anne, who’s still off-screen, doing something or other in the back of the house, though Dumont’s team has carefully cut the film to give the impression of import, as though the Icelandic speakers simply must be appraising Anne and her presence at the house. In fact you could easily believe something critical to the plot is being disclosed here, simply by the way the camera lingers over the women, finds them speaking intimately, though this is only because one is mildly criticizing the host and therefore has reasons for discretion. What we have, then, is a peculiar cinematic joke, a red herring meant for an extraordinarily small audience of viewers acquainted with Icelandic.
The others have taken their seats and seem ready to resume their meal, but Anne reappears in the foyer, sans coat. She looks less stricken now—quite relaxed, in fact. Finally, without strain, she speaks, and when she does it’s in, yes, an American accent. Midwestern, I believe. Certainly it isn’t redolent of the coasts. How does this particular way of speaking English strike French audiences, I wonder. What she says, anyway, is that she’s very sorry she has to go, but please, please, enjoy the house. Is this a twist? She speaks as if the house is hers. And although it will take another hour of film time before she herself comes to know this, it actually is hers. The man with silver stubble, we learn a bit sooner than that, his name is Sidney and he’s no lover. He’s American-born, as are several of the men at the house, though he’s the sole expatriate, splitting his time between France and Belgium. All the rest are either European members of the gathered family—the family of Anne’s stepfather, Michel—or intimates of the family, on vacation from the States.
Sidney is Michel’s right-hand man in Europe, a close business associate and dear friend. Anne and Michel have been estranged for some time, and giving her the run of the house, shortly after she graduates college, is his way of compensating for a past in which he was often absent and occasionally cruel, though the nature of this cruelty is never revealed. In truth, as the stepfather is quite old now, and Anne’s mother is dead, the property itself and several others to boot have already been deeded over to her, though she doesn’t know it, not at this early stage in the film. When Anne’s not in France, Sidney often entertains the patriarch’s relatives at the house; he lacks a family of his own—he’s an inveterate bachelor, for reasons that emerge—so these gatherings are the closest things to family reunions he knows. This afternoon’s meal, and this explains the snow and the fowl, is also an ersatz, that is, a Europeanized Thanksgiving, which Michel, French himself, has made traditional among his continental family. Anne barely knows anyone here, even the Americans among them; since Michel hasn’t mingled his two families, old and new, only a few of the guests are in any position to recognize her, much less know of her ownership of the house. But it is just this piece of information, grasped of course by Sidney, that briskly circulates around the table, sotto voce, after Anne’s declaration from the doorway.
Not knowing what else to say, Anne simply turns and leaves. Sidney rises—finally—and follows her out, but not before a last bite of partridge, which is doing duty for turkey. Dumont and his cinematographer continue to present the two of them under a veil of illicitness, as if they have a sort of deep past they shouldn’t, or a silent understanding where, again, none should exist. In truth, Sidney hardly knows the girl any better than the others do, though he’s spent time with her on various occasions, particularly when she was very young, when her mother and stepfather were still living together.
Sidney crosses the threshold and we see his silhouette through the blinds. Then we’re with him outside, where Anne is sitting in the car with a lithe young man who has all the appearances of a sleazy boyfriend. Adrian, we hear her call him. The three of them drive away as the camera spins back to the window and those hazy blinds. The diners are mere shadows from here, but judging by the dishes being cleared away and the new ones coming in, as well as the faint tinkling of silverware and porcelain, they have already forgotten the episode, or want to.
Anne eventually learns quite a lot about the situation: that she’s the deeded owner of the country house, though Sidney is the one who handles operations, of this and a number of European properties belonging to Michel (chalets, hotels, office buildings, museums); and that Michel will not live much longer. (It’s suicide, not disease, that finishes him off.) He’s only sixty or so, and his death won’t be further explained, though there’s the suggestion, just at the end, that the girl has an inkling as to why. All the same, two hours after its beginnings in the concert hall, The Sort can only be said to end on a note of incompletion. And so the file closes on my laptop, the video-player window minimizes itself, and I’m left beside empty bottles wedged into the cushion cracks, with my eyes shut, just in front of the darkened plasma that continues to hum, and I’m pondering the film’s possible meanings, which seem, now that my supply of Theria has filtered entirely into my body and blood, to branch and branch without end.
It strikes me that Dumont almost loses interest in the train of events he’s set in motion here. But is that just because Anne’s fate is only a subplot and hence unworthy of narrative elaboration? Looked at this way, Sidney becomes the true center of the film, and his ultimate interest, judging by the later scenes of the film, lies not in Anne or her inheritance or her sex, but—curiously—in discharging any obligation to oversee his friend and mentor Michel’s businesses on the continent. Still, Sidney has plans for Anne, and though his concern with her doesn’t appear to be sexual, he certainly seems keen to dominate her new postgraduate life in Europe. He achieves this by proxy, controlling Adrian, her impoverished quasi-boyfriend, through hinting at the windfall that will be his if he does as Sidney asks and draws close to Anne romantically.
Dumont has studiously removed all natural motives for Sidney’s deceit and control, so the man’s interest in manipulating the couple comes off as sheer caprice, or else some sort of fetish that Adrian (and I) never come to understand. Naturally enough, in a French film—and, Claire would have added, in a Dumont film especially—the female lead must be terrorized in some way by the male principals, just as Binoche was in Claudel. Here in The Sort, sex has become a further domain of terror. The film’s many carnal intimations take on a hallucinatory quality familiar to me from those asylum patients screaming at Binoche, though hardly any actual sex is depicted. The erotic potential of bodies is curiously de-emphasized: the characters are rarely seen in recognizable sexual poses, the kind that might produce pleasure. Priority is given instead to the precursors and after-effects of sex—its surrounds, as it were. This is where its real meaning lies, Dumont suggests: in veiled conversations about apparently unrelated matters, conducted in cafés and parks, over stale coffee and pastries, steak and eggs and aperitifs.
In fact, most of Anne’s appearances, after the initial scene at the house, amount to freighted conversations, predominantly with Sidney and Adrian. It’s as if we are watching a kind of sinister, psychosexual My Dinner With Andre. Not that Anne says all that much in these conversations. What Dumont highlights are the particular ways she absorbs what’s said or suggested to her, that is, how matters register in her. The simple acts involved. Trivial ones, even. How she stirs her coffee, twists her hair, tilts her chin. Somehow, and this is the remarkable thing, these tics seem to evolve over the course of the film, to develop a grammar and enact a narrative movement of their own, though I couldn’t explain just how or explicate their significance, not yet.
These, anyway, are the impressions I had after six bottles of Theria, bottles I discovered all around me, in the cushions but also on the floor at my feet, as soon as I opened my eyes again and was returned to a room ambiently lighted by the afternoon. Strangely, I noticed these remnants first and not my sketchpad, which was still right in my lap. For an instant I was startled, frightened even, as I began to make out an image. Then I recalled the obvious with a jolt: I’d been intermittently working in the pad during the film, although with hardly a conscious thought, I’d been so involved with the film and my Theria-fueled reflections on it. How odd it felt, how alienating, to lose track of that, if only for a moment.
I was tempted then to peruse the sketchbook for any aid it might offer in parsing this film that was so scrambled, not temporally but spatially. Events take place in international locales across Europe, and even a few in North America, when Anne, a bit too predictably, makes a sojourn home. The opening concert hall scene, for instance, occurs not in France but in Germany, in Cologne, which means, for one thing, that Pierrot Lunaire is performed in French simply for the benefit of the French film audience. Or did this choice hold some further meaning about the original source of the poems? Why, too, must every scene take place in a different country, with another language functioning in the background of the characters’ French?
More to the point, how to understand Anne’s changing mien, her way in the world, so to say? What details had I set down, what tenor had I transposed, that inevitably failed to register with me while I’d half-consciously assembled these pictures? Before that, though, it seemed to me worth my while, and Garrett’s too, to discover what my Theria-soaked mind could dredge up in the state I was in.
I knew that Anne’s kinetic transformation throughout the film wasn’t any simple devolution, some fragmentation of the body brought on by the malice of men. That would have been too easy. But, I realized, Anne also doesn’t really seize the upper hand. What we get is simply dialectic. There’s a fragility to Anne that Adrian’s machinations destroy, that much is certain. But her hardening doesn’t come across as a diminishment, only a concentration of her essence, a stripping away of the superfluous. Take her early sense of nervy surprise: what she evinces when she enters the country house. This quality wanes in the face of Adrian’s increasing demands on her time (he needs her at all hours, seemingly all over the country) and her money (how is he going to get his motorcycle garage off the ground without her help?). But this dawning of reality is gradual, and her naiveté, so endearing and sympathy-winning in the first half of the film, comes to seem less like delicacy or grace or a purity of perception than a kind of feebleness only stress can feed. And so we begin to see her suspicions belatedly take hold, which alters the tone of the film.
As with horror movies, there is something irritating in how long it takes Anne to recognize the real danger Adrian’s parasitism presents, though her slowness is partly explained by the gilded life she has led, which is also what brings her to Europe in the first place: an editorial assistantship, too easily acquired, at the New Statesman and then, more recently, the same position at La Liberación. Meanwhile, Adrian, whose sleaziness, even when it’s not much masked, is actually quite compelling—perhaps something in the spirit of a Jean-Pierre Melville character—is suffused by a vague air of sophistication, as if he’s spent some time in elevated circles. And he has. That is, after all, how he and Anne meet, at a cocktail party in Paris for the French paper. Certainly he’s more difficult to pin down for Anne than the guests at the country house, who are simply her European counterparts; which is to say, Adrian and Anne are instruments of difference for one another, though whether Adrian grasps the situation as such is unclear. His understanding is presented as more instinctive than intellectual, and this can only redouble his appeal for Anne. Sidney, however, does understand Adrian’s appeal perfectly well to the girl, and by taking him on as a mentee in manipulation, decides to use his knowledge against Anne, who for him can only be the feckless American daughter of his boss. (There must be some resentment here, but it’s never developed; perhaps this is a shortcoming of the film.)
Adrian has a lot of women in his life, but it’s Sidney who encourages him to court Anne more seriously. Under Sidney’s guidance, the young libertine draws her away from her natural orbit among the well-heeled and well-schooled, more so than he actually wishes to—he’s by nature a playboy, not a romantic. And as a man used to following his drives, Adrian can only somewhat clumsily act the role given him by Sidney, which helps Anne catch on not only to his disingenuousness (which she wrongly takes to be harmless), but to the role he’s attempting to foist on her: the dizzy but earnest American girl redeeming the louche Frenchman. It’s not long before she’s anticipating Adrian’s words. His grand gestures seem less grand all the time, his French cool, his jealousy too, they all appear just a bit dutiful to her. Yet this only forces Adrian, who senses Anne’s gamesmanship—or is it Sidney, his quasi-mentor, who senses it?—to an ever-greater wiliness in projecting authenticity: not only do their trysts turn stranger and less predictable, but his entreaties for gifts and money and social access become more oblique. As does his very manner of speech: the less articulate he is, the more believable, apparently, and Anne is seduced, at least intermittently, onto this almost animal plane. In the long dialogue between them that at least partly defines The Sort, key volleys are often expressed subsententially, as if ordinary grammar is too cramped for their designs, their feelings.
Anne’s hair, I remember, gets longer in the film; its growth is one way I mark time’s progress, the gaps between scenes. It’s always pretty, her hair, but it grows ever wilder, which Anne knows Adrian considers a small defiance of his wishes. In one shot more than halfway through, the wind’s blowing hard and the sun is at full strength; we are in Marseille, a weekend trip on the water. You can see the ships in the yard, and Anne’s abundant hair is whirling about, and finally you can see the red of Garrett’s forewarning as the wind separates the strands in brilliant light. It was only then that I could be truly certain that Anne, whoever played her, was the one I was looking for. Her hair had—has—is—the sort of red that manifests only under uncommon circumstances. Once the wind drops, and we are back in the marina café, her hair draws together again, one long, continuous flow, and it returns to that deeper hue one couldn’t quite have said was red.
What else changes? Adrian’s seductions become subtler, yes, but often enough Anne proves up to the challenge, sussing out the thrust of his vague talk—a plea for yet more money, say, or an excuse indirectly offered for an absence—and beating him to the spot. Her way of dressing, in contradistinction to her hairstyle, simplifies, which he approves of at first, until, as in one of Claire’s notebooks, it becomes too simple, abstract and invariant, and his pleasure seems to evaporate—to her delight, I feel. She’s toying with him, in her way. For every wish of his she grants, whether sexual or material, she collects a tax: for each act of compliance, something is withheld. On the surface, it looks as though he’s progressively succeeding in annexing her life—that’s what Sidney believes, at first at least—but emotionally, she manages to take back many of these gains. You would have thought Adrian didn’t have an emotional life, to judge from where things start, but by the end, owing to Anne’s discreet work upon his soul, its frazzled edges are on full display. She’s summoned it, or even created it, like a therapist implanting childhood memories: the slights endured but never much contemplated, the mother whose kindnesses were equally jabs, even the dear friends who quietly romanced his girlfriends, including her, she’ll suggest, setting off, late in the film, a brutal fistfight between old chums.
There’s a genuine cruelty in Anne. You don’t feel sorry for her, as time goes by. She’s inflicting a psychological torment on Adrian that might exceed his crimes, which are ultimately orthodox in outline, symptoms of the domineering male. She’s starting to win the battle of possession between the two, and her actions come to seem like more than mere score-settling against one man alone—which leads me to wonder how strongly she suspects Sidney’s far uglier role behind the scenes, pulling the strings for who knows what sort of gain, other than sadism. Whatever the case, a breaking point comes. Sidney coolly persuades a reluctant Adrian to reassert his position in the relationship, physically if need be. Eventually he acquiesces, striking her—not in bed, where any previous violence has occurred, but while she’s getting into the car carrying coffee and sandwiches for them. It’s nonsensical, this act, a spectacular, unmotivated bit of outrage concocted, one senses, by Sidney. She stews in the coffee in her lap. Adrian’s left humiliated by what he has done. It’s all of this, rather than the plot, that gives The Sort its power. Sidney’s role in Anne’s misery—his senseless role—is ultimately made plain to Anne, though Dumont never clarifies his motives; and although we watch Anne abused by Adrian, Sidney himself witnesses none of it. As he’s not cast as a voyeur, it’s difficult to read him as a fetishist.
Relations are definitively altered, in the last quarter of the film, by Michel’s suicide: it’s an event potent enough to free Anne from Adrian’s increasingly violent grip, as well as an opportunity for Sidney to pass the reigns of the business on to Anne, thereby freeing himself from the burden of assisting his late friend. Ultimately, Sidney’s deeper designs concern a woman his own age, from Cologne, and not Anne, who fades from the last eighth of the film. He has real feelings for the older woman, and their romantic encounters are tender, nothing like what he asks of Adrian in relation to Anne. At the end, she’s the woman for whom he leaves France to resettle in Germany. But all this—the aspect of Sidney that has little to do with Anne or Adrian—is never rendered compellingly. Worse, it doesn’t shed much light on the rest of his character: his sadism, for instance. Sidney’s psychic world is too compartmentalized for that. And so he remains more or less inscrutable—a real problem if, as most signs suggest, Dumont means The Sort to be Sidney’s film, not Anne’s. But could this be precisely why Garrett wanted me to watch it? To observe the gravitational pull Anne exerts, deforming the crafty director’s best-laid plans?
I hadn’t recognized Anne—the actress playing her, that is. She was clearly young, early twenties, possibly younger, with the sort of dewy complexion suggestive of incipience. I re-ran the credits, anxious to identify her, and there in the first few names gliding down a still frame of the German forest, Sidney’s final destination, was Anne—or rather, Daphne Simmel. Instantly I thought of the famous Simmel, Georg, the sociologist and critic. Had I heard of Daphne? Had Claire ever mentioned her, among so many others? A dozen snippets filled my head, of Claire telling me how nimble or transfixing she’d found some little-known actor’s performance in a film we’d just watched. It could be someone who’d spent all of ten minutes on screen. Oh, but those were the most important moments of the film, this maid cleaning the tub while the murderer picks the lock, or this fry cook lifting up chicken nuggets, grease streaming from them, as the protagonist and his wife have a meltdown at the register. My first feeling was always that Claire was being precious about it all, preciousness being a kind of generational affliction. Yet whenever she skipped the movie back to one of these segments to demonstrate her point, I nearly always found she’d been right. Somehow, the maid really had made the scene, and in turn the movie. The strongest evidence of her cinematic judgment was this: half the people she picked out ended up in bigger roles in later films. She should have been a talent scout.
But Daphne Simmel? Claire had never mentioned her. Probably I simply wanted to have heard of Daphne before, to make sense of Garrett’s thinking she was fit to lead a campaign, namely, that she was already tipped for big things by cognoscenti like Claire, and that The Sort was going to be her Ghost World. Was that his wild hope?
Reflex had me entering the woman’s name into my browser’s search bar, but I managed to catch myself just before clicking and turned instead to thumbing through my sketchbook, as I’d intended to. Nine pictures—I counted them as I flipped through it—nine had taken form on these pages, executed with the stub of red conté I’d found cradled within a gap in the frame of the television—a manufacturing defect, I think, the way the frame came apart at the bottom. It was still remarkable to me that all the drawing I’d evidently done here was hardly distinct from my experience of simply watching the film, but by now, with the bottles all empty, I was in little doubt as to the cause of this lapse.
I often liked to draw during movies, which probably had some role, too, in my paying this habit hardly any mind today. Or really I should say I came to like drawing during movies, because of Claire. Usually it happened late at night, so that the room would be deep in darkness while the film played. I could hardly see the pad, which was one of the reasons my blind drawings had improved so much in the last twenty months. It was also a way she could entice me into watching more films: they were opportunities to hone my skills, she’d imply, when her own interest lay in our sharing a certain narrative (and physical) closeness, sitting side by side, if not closer than that, our attention being mutually enclosed within a story unfolding on-screen. It was something she seemed always to crave. It could bring me back from spells of aloofness, when even in our happiest days the very idea of narrative, in life or art, could disgust me, and I would tend toward a non-narrative isolation in which nothing was explained and nothing connected. She was right: film was good for us, even if it wasn’t enough.
Looking over these drawings confirmed that indeed Daphne’s bearing had been subtly shifting beneath manifest alterations like changes of clothing or hairstyle, right down to the bones, it seemed, her posture, the way she tensed her frame. Ordinarily I would have only apprehended these mutations through careful study of the drawings; that’s why I spent so much time sketching, to glean information like this. But in this case, remarkably, I’d noticed the differences without needing to make retrospective assessments of the pictures. Simply experiencing the film had been enough, even if I couldn’t verbally articulate them; language can do only so much. Here was a new feeling, then: being able to perceive so fully in the moment itself, before ever involving my hand. Could Theria really have had this effect on me? A fanciful thought, I suppose, but I was in a fanciful mood, and Garrett had spoken of a true breakthrough with Theria, not just an incremental improvement over its rivals in the market. He was a trained chemist, too. He ought to know.
My sketches featured not just Anne, of course, but Adrian and Sidney, as the identities of all three of them were woven together. This was true as well of various scenic elements, which functioned as physical extensions of Anne, their forms melding into hers. For instance, at a café in Strasbourg where she meets up with Adrian, she slips into a chair so fully as to appear almost braided into its ironwork, delicately enmeshed in its embroidery, the tendrils fountaining outward, graceful yet unbending.
A couple of the sketches showed Anne in repose, just a few telling squiggles suggesting her torso along with the axis orienting her now elongated form, which no longer curled in on itself, as it so often seemed to when she stood upright. In one picture, her legs were severely foreshortened, as in medieval works, and my gaze was held fast by, of all things, her feet, which poked out over the lip of a lush hotel-suite sofa—Adrian’s. (He lived well, for a man without much of a job.)
I doubted that any of these images corresponded very closely to actual frames from the film, as I’d not really fixed any tableau in my mind while composing them, nor paused the film to prevent entirely different scenes from playing and inflecting the imagery as I drew. But what would be the worth of these sketches if they failed to diverge from the stills? Only if my hand and my memory together managed to transmute whatever my eyes received into something else—only then, I thought, was there a chance that the resulting picture, or some version of it, might be worth revisiting, by me or someone else.
The middle three drawings in the pad had the feel of comic-book panels. They were sexual yet inert—pleasure or lust was nowhere in sight, for anyone—and this was really to Dumont’s credit, as the film was far from the erotic cool cultivated by European actresses (Garbo and Dietrich) and directors (Malle and Godard)—which was almost a cliché at the time of its introduction in cinema, pointing back even then to a long tradition of retaliatory sexual aggression against remote and unreachable women; and, for the women driven to this remoteness, this alienation from their own feelings, by a world that anyway punished them simply for having an emotional life, something impractical in the extreme, the way it led away from the useful and profitable into an untamable inner realm without any obvious yield. These three pictures, anyway, they picked up some of Adrian’s impotent aggression toward Anne, toward most everyone in his life, including Sidney, who certainly presented a deeper sort of difficulty for him than did Anne.
Here, then, was her somewhat childlike face, one that retained the expressive powers of an even earlier youth, thrust by Adrian straight into an Art Deco lamp on a nightstand of dark wood. He holds a fistful of that hair, the darkest of reds, I knew, but here on my pad it was just the sanguine of the crayon, though I’d applied it with the heaviest pressure I could muster. He tugs on it, right at the scruff of her neck, and pulls it both upward and forward, throwing her porcelain visage, upturned to a degree the neck doesn’t naturally allow, into the lamp, while her naked body hangs limply below. Limply but purposefully, it seems. The more passive she appears, the more it infuriates Adrian, who’s not so stupid as to fail to recognize his own barbarism.
That upward lift of the neck. I traced it with my finger, blending the sanguine. If the drawing had an essential gesture, Anne’s progress through the lamp—a progress induced by Adrian’s force—had to be it. The shade of the lamp itself, actually, is partly displaced by her head striking it, though the base remains stable, unmoved by Anne’s plight. Yet because the shade has been violently tilted, an excess of light is pouring out of the bulb within, which finds itself too exposed, viciously brightening the whole scene, flashing light across the low ceiling, even throwing it directly into the viewer’s eyes.
As I thought back over the film, I had to acknowledge the inventiveness of Dumont’s choreography. So many of the sex scenes had taken place under unnaturally bright light, whereas much of the rest of the film had been more discreetly lit. These effloresences were induced organically by various happenings: a fireworks display outside a Toulouse penthouse, a lightning storm in Budapest, and this toppling lamp in the center of Paris. Enstrangement, I suppose that was the word for it, even if this was an atypical translation of Shklovsky’s notion. Dumont had exploited the camera and setting to disclose the sexlessness of rough sex. Was he a Romantic, then? Claire would have had better judgment on that matter. What I can say is that, for me, the intriguing aspect of the sex in The Sort was something altogether different: the delicate evolution of Anne’s and Adrian’s manner of addressing each other physically, in and around bed, and farther afield, too, in public spaces. These developments formed a second narrative, a sort of maturing cadence between two bodies counterpointing the couple’s fraught dialogues.
The most remarkable thing about this film—and the football game as well—was the anonymous star power (not an oxymoron) on display. Here was the mystique of the star in the making, the ordinary turning extraordinary, which I couldn’t help but associate, yes, with Degas, particularly his portraits of Thérésa, the queen of the Parisian café-concert and possibly the first true pop star, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. There was the towering figure of Sarah Bernhardt to consider in this regard, of course, for the stage and very early film, and there were the many celebrated touring opera and theater stars of the era. But I mean the truly popular star, the low star, the kind that would come to dominate a mass culture which was still only finding its footing. My interest in Thérésa was first roused by Degas, the grand bourgeois always dipping his toes in the new entertainments of the street. If this woman could capture his eye, the eye of an artist who stood both with and against his historical moment, as I often fancied I myself did, well, then, why not mine? It seemed to me now that, like Thérésa and Bernhardt, Daphne and Duke could bend the framing context, transcend the plot or the game, as power centers in paintings and photos exerted a pull on everything around them. Figures, of course, were always the most powerful magnets in any visual field. Evolution had made sure of that. They defied the rules of ordinary composition; almost anywhere you placed human forms, even deep in shadow or far in the distance, the eye would lock onto them, and indeed make you overlook other facets of the scene by fully saturating your attention. Faces, even more than figures, took things further, with a pull that overwhelmed all else except for one: eyes, which exerted the greatest force of all, true black holes.
These were truths that held quite generally. But the specific presence (there is no smarter word for it) of some bodies, faces, and eyes, along with their particular gestures and movements and leaps—this presence, or substance, if you like, carried its own powers of attraction, drawing the eye to places within the frame that would ordinarily be accessible only with difficulty: events occurring on the margin of the picture plane, for instance. This is how certain apparently secondary figures can overthrow the central subjects of paintings, minor characters can steal shows, fringe players can win games. It occurred to me that Daphne, like Duke, was one of these uncommon substances, evidenced in all aspects of her: her body, her face, her eyes—but especially her face, its striking elongation that didn’t bespeak sorrow or petulance, or any of the things it might so easily have, but merely, in the lithe lines that its length allowed to unfurl, the expressions it seemed to make possible, a fine receptivity to feeling tout court. It was only an accident of nature that the world as it was—just like Dumont’s; in this he was absolutely as much a realist as Rabelais—happened to contain significantly more sorrow than anything else, as the earth’s surface was mostly covered by water. This contingent fact was why she’d been so frequently called on to express grief as Anne, although even then, infinite gradations of the feeling had surfaced, and this alone—the ability to make these depths known—cut against the sense of pity one might otherwise have felt more completely for her. She wasn’t pitiable, and this distinguished the peculiar force she exerted.
Slowly I flipped backwards through the nine pictures and Dumont’s drama unspooled in reverse. I could see that it would never be possible for Daphne to play a truly faceless part; character acting wasn’t in her future. She seemed, simply in her person, before it came to the matter of acting, to elide the boundaries of her role, and I knew this without having seen anything else by her. Eventually I came to Duke’s picture in the pad, the first one I’d drawn, and felt a fundamental continuity with the previous nine, a certain semiotic density, though visually he couldn’t have been more distinct from Daphne, the way he occupied space. These two, Duke and Daphne, might yet fulfill Degas’ stated ideal: to die illustrious and unknown.
Such, anyway, were my feelings, which I’d learned to trust for straightforwardly empirical reasons: at least in certain domains, like art, my hunches had tended to be borne out. Was there an observer effect in play? Well, so what? I was deluged by hunches now, more of them than I’d thought it possible to experience at one time. They felt slightly irresponsible, but then, in a secular age, that was in the nature of such things. I wouldn’t be prepared to defend them to anyone, not full-throatedly, but that didn’t negate their power for me, nor others’ intimations for them, although most wouldn’t admit to this, especially non-artists, who weren’t tacitly permitted to allow such shadowy things to play a significant role in their lives.
I tore out the sketches of Daphne one at a time and laid them end to end, as if they were panels not in a comic but in a frieze or an altar ornament. I photographed each quickly and sent the snaps to Garrett attached to a blank email. I did the same with my drawing of Duke, though I left it in the book. Not one of these pictures was anything close to finished; they were only hints at future work, nothing more, and I was tempted to frame them in those terms for Garrett. Did he really require such disclaimers, though? If he did, he’d need to find someone else for his campaign. A brash thought—a foolish one, too, given the terrible state of my finances—but, as I say, that was the mood I found myself in, foolish and fanciful, even if my head had never felt clearer.
It would have been harder to be cavalier had I any actual experience having the lights shut off, the phone go dead, the creditors call—all quotidian affairs for my neighbors, not just that boy screaming six two in the street, not just the Beckers below, but the family upstairs as well, still somehow clinging on to their share of the palace. Kiver, our landlord, wasn’t quite successful enough to qualify as a slumlord, though he yearned to become one. You could tell by the way he played the role every chance he got: the uncharacteristic efficacy, for instance, of his response to my complaints about the semi-feral dogs and the media (radio, television, anything) blaring into our quarters from below, how swiftly he’d yoked this infraction to the more serious one of the Beckers’ being in arrears by a few months in order to have these longtime rent-control neighbors of mine evicted. We even saw the family on their way out, the mother and boyfriend and two little black girls, all collecting their belongings, and neither Claire nor I could look them in the eye—well, except for the dogs, who appeared most aggrieved, and for whom we hadn’t the slightest sympathy. Ever since then, I could barely glance at the Beckers’ old door on the ground floor as I passed to my entrance above. It raised too many questions: Where exactly had the clan had gone? Had they been funneled into the growing sea of the homeless I saw all around the neighborhood? I felt apprehensive now whenever I looked at one of those people of the street, for fear it would be a Becker. I even avoided the glares of dogs.
Kiver—he insisted on being called Kiver even though he had a perfectly serviceable forename (Bob)—he would have delighted in getting rid of the other black family, the one above me, under any pretext. He used to call me regularly fishing for complaints, hinting at a complicity between us that didn’t exist, or anyway that I would not accept. I never gave him anything to work with, after what had happened with the Beckers. Not because there wasn’t a problem. To my chagrin, it was noise again, even if this time it was less of a nuisance to me, for being occasional, than the constant intrusions that had once come from below.
Yet these higher disturbances—of things breaking, fingers tightening, voices choking, and later, slow, unfettered tears falling—chilled me, given what they meant for Tanya, who lived on the top floor with a hard man and three teenage boys, one of whom was his. What could she do about things, exactly? If she left Rod, she would have to take her two boys with her, and she couldn’t possibly afford that, not as a salon receptionist. She needed Rod’s blue-collar cash, and as long as that was true, nothing was going to change above. For myself, having never tasted Tanya’s kind of hardship nor even seriously contemplated its possibility, it was easy to indulge a devil-may-care attitude, which was, in its essence, a kind of ignorance about how badly things could turn out, and one that had in fact opened many doors for me. I only wished I could share some of my blindness with her.
Having sent the pictures off to Garrett without explanation, I settled down for a nap, right there in the film room, exhausted from the sheer density of a day that had been driven by the drink, but also, I suspected, by the genuine peculiarity of the two characters I was charged with tracking. I doubted that more Theria was likely to pull me out of this torpor, but then I had no more Theria left with which to test the hypothesis.
When I awoke, in the early evening, little had changed. The unyielding curiosity I’d felt hadn’t really abated, even if rest or time had lent me greater authority over the progress of my thinking. As Garrett hadn’t yet responded to any of my emails—should I have expected him to, given the obliquity of my notes?—I finally gave in to my instincts, modern instincts, for data, for search. On my computer out in the library, a sizable generic screen wired up to another old laptop of mine, I opened a pair of tabs. Where to search for what I needed? For Daphne, IMDB. For Duke, ESPN.
Daphne, it turned out, was just nineteen but not unknown. Before The Sort, she’d starred in some shorts that had done well in Toronto and Telluride, one even with Guy Maddin behind the camera. Another of them had scored an honorable mention in Budapest; she’d played the role of a theater student, which was, I discovered, exactly what she was in real life. Perhaps this was how she came to the attention of Dumont. The Sort had been Daphne’s first feature, which I found a bit strange, a US actress making her proper début on foreign soil. In the States, it had been released earlier in the year, screening at Lincoln Center. I couldn’t help wondering whether Claire might have seen the film there, given her interest in the director. She might even have thought of me and the “insane” Claudel while she watched.
Duke was three years older than Daphne, and the game I’d watched on tape earlier in the day had to have been played last season at the earliest. I was surprised to find he’d gone undrafted back in April, in what was a relatively soft class. Several teams had worked him out privately since, and apparently he was close to landing with a team. I’d seen enough pre-season football this past month to recognize most of the players who were thriving, even the younger ones whose greatness was wholly ahead of them if it was anywhere at all. But Duke was new to the league. No, he wasn’t even in the league yet, though the fact that I’d already heard of this undrafted player signaled he was something, or might be.
Beneath the window of my living room I took another long look at the swatches as the fading sun headed off to service other lands to the west. Though these dabs of paint weren’t at their most brilliant now, I’d put enough white into them that they still held light. White did that to anything you folded it into. Simple smears of color, that’s what they were: not logos as such. Could smears be made distinctive enough—or just the colors themselves—to function as identities for the drinks? Of course, there were brands that had colors associated with them: that Pantone blue of Citibank, say, or Smythson’s own blue. Doritos was now playing with the idea that there was a Dorito red, and so they might go logo-less. But I doubt whether any of those color chips would be enough for anyone to know which brand was being advertised without the associated logomarks. Perhaps if one began from the colors, though, and refused words and shapes from the very beginning, things might turn out differently. I leaned on the stool above that stained sheet of paper. Neither Daphne nor Duke had much marked American consciousness; neither was implicated in any public narrative that might overcome Garrett’s worries about the privacy of my vision, the narrowness of my profiles. And those weren’t just his worries. Naïve though he was of the history of art, there was something right in his thinking. He’d said it all in the funniest tone, as if he were discovering it as he spoke, but I didn’t really believe that. It was too considered. Perhaps it was just his Midwesternness, that enforced plainness designed to tamp down the excesses of intellection, the way such speculation could sabotage a person, a town, a nation—a legitimate concern—that concealed just how much thinking he’d actually been doing.
It’s hard to find much agreement in contemporary art, but the value of ambiguity, or mystery, seems more or less universally celebrated. It’s democratic, letting the viewer fill in the gaps, supply his own meanings and make the work his own. How can this not be a good thing, overcoming the tyranny of intersubjective significance? But I wondered then, along with Garrett, or indeed because of Garrett, whether such mystery was partly destructive, severing the work from the public world, blunting its point. There is a pleasure one can take in privacy, in pure form. Degas’ ballerinas always come to mind for me. They are creatures with a bodily existence but hardly any interior life, though they do manage to express something deflating about debased middle-class entertainments: the ballet of the period was of course also a place of procurement for well-to-do gentlemen looking for sexual toys. But there are at least two exceptions in the Degas corpus, for two stars of the Paris Opera: Eugenie Fiocre and Rita Sangalli. Even here, the differentiation is primarily formal, not psychological. You can recognize these flesh-and-blood people in Degas’ pictures by comparing them with photos from the time, say, but I don’t know how much else you can tell about them as subjects. For Degas, they were subsumed by their various roles on stage. What, though, of his pictures of Thérésa? Perhaps they aren’t as interesting, purely poetically, as his dancers. She’s somewhat fat, really, not classically seductive. And, from today’s vantage, she’s nothing more than a picture without narrative content. No story remains permanently intelligible, and some lose their sense quicker than others. Yet even the brightest stars of the era, like Bernhardt, the subject of all those Art Nouveau posters of Toulouse-Lautrec and Mucha and Chéret, are at best almost nothing to us now. And who is Joan Crawford or Jayne Mansfield at this point? Can you recognize either? But then our twenty-first century entertainers will also be nothing for the future, and they will in all likelihood meet narrative oblivion far quicker than Bernhardt.
Still, Fiocre and Thérésa clearly meant something to the society of their time, so that even if we no longer occupy the world in which they mattered, we can certainly be drawn into it without too much trouble. Any knowledge of the mass culture of the era can open up their stories, their lives, to us. The cult of celebrity, too, a cult that has by now matured into a religion, also links us to that historical moment. The real shortcoming of the Bernhardt pictures of the era was just that they were conceived functionally by their creators, as mere advertisements for dated performances, like the flyers I’d been knocking up for museums and bands. Such ephemera struggle to speak through time. But what of Degas’ Thérésas?
You can properly scoff at Art Nouveau for its mechanistic borrowing of Japanese visual ideas, its ham-handed exoticism. These simply aren’t the most telling pictures, supposing it’s fair to demand that art tell: not that it tell truly, or virtuously, or beautifully, only that it tell something all the same. But a popular star, a Thérésa, who was, unlike international opera divas like Fiocre and Sangalli, a genuine omen of the future—that is, of the triumph of low culture, our common possession—becomes something more when put in the hands of a historical talent like Degas, my lodestar, rather than a virtuoso hack like Toulouse-Lautrec.
What resulted went beyond the merely informational or aesthetic. The master’s pictures of Belle Époque cafés wreathed in gaslight, of bawdy singers serenading patrons who are at best half-listening, are a portal to a world in embryo: our world. Compositionally these images are ingenious, having the rough-and-ready feel of throwaway snapshots, which heightens the sense that we are seeing ourselves being birthed. Here is the long inheritance of the selfie. You don’t recognize Thérésa, of course, not today, not by name or face, but it is her absolute social reality that offers you port of entry. She cannot be faked.
We did have our own celebrity portraitists. Elizabeth Payton, Kehinde Wiley, Kadir Nelson: their images had spread widely. You could see them on the covers of toilet reading like the New Yorker, or in the National Portrait Gallery, which occupied roughly the same plane of taste. Some were made with skill and verve, but hardly with the tellingness, as I would call it, of a Degas. They didn’t make a civilization available to you. These artists were Toulouse-Lautrecs and Chérets at best, probably not even that: profoundly limited in vision. So the shortcoming wasn’t in the subjects per se; it was in the artists. Degas had his own hang-ups, of course: the naturalism he spoke of, his preference for truth over beauty. For myself, I’m not sure I cared for either anymore, nor even for virtue in any ordinary sense. And, no, Daphne wasn’t Thérésa or Bernhardt, obviously, not yet and very probably not ever. Nor was Duke going to be Bo Jackson. They were more private than public and might well remain so. What mattered to me, though, was this melding of the two realms, the joining of the private with something public enough to offer access to the deeper, murkier, long-tailed narratives beneath the culture.
Future generations would have a farharder time reconstructing these two, Duke and Daphne, compared with Thérésa and Bernhardt, or even Marilyn Monroe and Elvis—people whose lives had become converted almost solely into their outward dimension, into form. But this was actually an advantage, I thought. In life as much as in art, too much exhibition tends toward an unbecoming flatness. Mystery had its rightful place; it wasn’t all alienation and isolation. What is too known, what is felt to be understood too clearly, what we too stably receive over time, invariably begins to wash out. That was Hamilton’s and Warhol’s point so long ago. But that was also why their pictures can be so visually drab, worth one look and no more. Their meanings, as with most advertising, were rapidly exhausted. Pop was an art of exhaustibility, an excess of light; it took publicity too far, at the expense of complexity and depth. While I wanted depth, it had to be knowable depth, not the black-box variety that left you all alone in the shadows with your fantasies. That was just a different kind of impoverishment. Could Duke and Daphne be the right fodder? I wondered. They were known unknowns, I suppose you could say, unknown knowables that had the kind of concrete, obscure, contingent existence we could no longer imagine for figures as overexposed and mythic as Elvis. They might well let me present our world in both its generality and its specificity.
It was good, I thought, that one of the two was an athlete, the kind of figure who wasn’t nearly as luminous, or possessed of the necessary generality, back in 1870. (The Olympics wouldn’t even be restarted for another quarter-century.) Could there be any national narrative now, any intelligible picture of modern life, that didn’t give as important a place to sports as to acting? I couldn’t see how. What good did it do Garrett, though, that Daphne and Duke were near unknowns? Did he like the two-sidedness of the story himself? Was he betting they’d become superstars? Or was there something else going on?
I dozed again on the couch and awoke quite late to the swoosh my phone refused to stop making on receipt of certain emails. I wasn’t sure what the pattern was, if it was something that certain senders were doing from their end, and I could only surmount the matter by turning the volume all the way down, which I rarely did. So instead: there was the swoosh. A reply from Garrett had finally come—the entirety of which was a single exclamation point above the photograph of my swatches. No reply had yet come to my sketches.
Rather than wonder about Garrett’s curious response, the precise dimensions of his interest and how fleeting it may prove to be; rather than reply to him right now (after all, what is the appropriate response to a mark of punctuation?); rather than speculate any further about meanings embedded in these two characters and these two drinks—the whiskey and the nootropic—the various lines of force between consumption, mystique, perspective, and Geist, all of which kept spreading out before me, beneath me, like a thriving system of roots, even after two naps, I thought instead, as evening deepened, to turn to the whiskey I’d enjoyed the night before. Not for comparative purposes—I could undertake that later—but to put a definitive end to reflection for the night, which sleep alone apparently could not. It was as if these two drinks had opposite properties, the one promoting clarity and light, and the other, murkiness and confusion. But even these latter states of mind had their uses, I supposed, especially the way they kept their counterparts in check. Unknowing, obscurity, even outright error, it was easy to sell them all short. Yet weren’t they also the allure of art, and perhaps even art’s central aim, if Levinas, or Blanchot, or Artaud, or Nietzsche were to be believed: art as a fantastical consolation for the emptiness of human life? (Flaubert’s great question: why must man’s heart be so big, and life so small?) Didn’t art, like alcohol, undermine our sense of having cognitively brought the world to heel, reinstating a sense of the incomprehensible, even the sublime? But to what end, exactly? Simply to whet our appetites to understand it better, that is, to overcome our epistemic complacency? Or could it be to help us see that ignorance—mystery—could have some positive, primordial value, not so much as a key to the universe as a brick through the window?
Mystery couldn’t simply be written off, I knew, even if it couldn’t be wholly embraced or understood in a manner that didn’t leave you trapped in a subjective hall of mirrors. It was a matter of holding both together, light and dark, in just the way I wanted now to volley between the effects of these drinks: whiskey pushing me toward that state of oblivion Blanchot would have approved of, and Garrett’s synthetic concoction speeding me in the opposite direction—though I wasn’t at all sure I could call this the direction of truth, not without more time.
At that moment, I needed less clarity, not more. For there is a point where sustained cogitation, which generally fills me with pleasure and pride, becomes decidedly inapposite, indeed menacing in its implications. Light brings its own form of terror: isn’t that Dumont’s point in The Sort? Theria, or even just the oddity of the two people I’d been introduced to today, leave alone Garrett’s own illegibility—both his motives for such an unusual advertising campaign, the details of which he’d still not revealed to me, and the question of whether he would balk at my images and my swatches and take a different tack, which was perfectly consistent with his noncommittal response so far—had brought a violent searchingness out of me. For most of the day it had been exhilarating. Now, though, as the day finished, and even after a pair of naps in which I’d hoped to sleep off its effects, it continued to linger, but as an affliction, a burden, a threat. To carry on in this direction was self-sabotage.
It was time, then, to slow my terrible progress, and it was my good fortune that whiskey excelled at this, at bringing the mind to a standstill. The repetitive utterings of the drunk are no accident; these are the sounds of the mind spinning its wheels, mired in the animal aspect of experience. And so, for the rest of the night, I called off the search for answers. This is what the first two fingers of whiskey did for me. Soon the bottle was going fast and my insouciance came into full flower. Whatever else happened, whatever Garrett wanted from me, whatever I might have to contribute or not, hadn’t I at least gotten this beautiful bottle out of knowing him?