Carnal Knowledge (1971)
The experience of making Catch-22 and having it fail to resonate with the mass audience to which he’d long since grown accustomed in three separate entertainment careers shook Mike Nichols, who took on, as his fourth feature-film project, a narrative that feels worlds away from his pacifist war movie. The enormous, vaudevillian cast of Catch-22 is replaced in Carnal Knowledge by a chamber ensemble of seven (one of whom, Carol Kane as Jennifer, has only one scene and no lines, and another, Rita Moreno as Louise, appears only in the film’s final scene). Carnal Knowledge is a simpler film with more complex characters. It is more like the films Nichols himself says are his instinctive subject.1 While Carnal Knowledge has an epic sweep of time from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, it unfolds as an intimate drama, a character study of the sexual evolution of two men against the broad context of the sexual revolution within the culture. Unlike Catch-22, for which the large-cast, big-production assumptions of a mass-audience appeal (as in The Graduate) had to be re-scaled for the niche, art-film audience it actually served, Carnal Knowledge never presumes to be a film for everyone. Like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge continues pressing at the edges of what is depictable in the realities of human relationship (both films notoriously also helped to shatter the assumed limits entrenched by the old production code in Hollywood).2 The frankness of adult language and situation make these early films Nichols’ most “European,” by the standard assumptions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. John Calley, the Hollywood film executive and long-time friend and collaborator of Nichols, says, “‘It changed my life and the lives of many friends. It wasn’t this runaway hit that seemed to catch a generation in the palm of its hand like The Graduate, but as a […] work of art, it was very, very important.”3 Perhaps the time-capsule quality of its depiction of the growing pains inherent in the sexual revolution of the 1960s will leave some to conclude that the film has not aged gracefully, but thinking about the film in relation to a remarkably similar narrative from relatively late in Nichols’ career—the 2004 adaptation of Patrick Marber’s 1997 stage play Closer—reveals that Nichols’ 1971 film still offers insights not bound by its time and place. In Marber’s play, Larry (the Clive Owen character in Nichols’ adaptation) says, “Everyone learns, nobody changes,”4 the very essence of reified despair. In returning to variations on Carnal Knowledge’s objectified sexuality in Closer, Nichols models his tempered optimism as a film artist, acknowledging our reticence to change but also the perpetual redemption available in reified awareness. Ernest Callenbach writes that Carnal Knowledge is “about the sexual chauvinism which is America’s machismo, and which is very far from dead now even though the fifties may have been its heyday”; Callenbach concludes, “It is a cold and merciless film, but then artists are not required to stand in for the Red Cross. They document disasters, and it is we the viewers who must clean them up, in our own lives.”5
Of Catch-22, Nichols has said, “[T]hat’s not my kind of movie, because it’s not about interpersonal things at all. […] There is no subtext, […] there is no underneath, when the underneath is what draws me; it’s why I make movies. The things people don’t say.”6 In this sense, Carnal Knowledge is a therapeutic return for Nichols from a self-imposed exile in the chilly surrealism of Heller’s world. He had chafed while in the isolation of the Mexican desert, and he had similarly found himself restricted by the broad picaresque nature of Heller’s vision, in which character development is oxymoronic. For all the notorious frankness of Carnal Knowledge’s screenplay by Jules Feiffer, much of the interest of the two main characters is located in Sandy’s, Susan’s, and Bobbie’s utter subjugation to Jonathan, disparities of power that ultimately make it impossible for any of them to be fully frank and honest with one another. Sandy’s is the only potentially dynamic character in the film, but all the characters are given abundant opportunities for insight, change, and growth that they squander. Their failure is indicative of the tone intended by Feiffer, the satirical New York cartoonist who originally created the narrative as a stage play for Nichols to direct. Of Nichols’ first three films, all of which unfold in tonal darkness, The Graduate’s tone is deceptive, because the film is agleam with sparkly Southern California light and situational comedy (as well as with the color-saturated dreaminess of the romantic genre fantasies of the film’s second half). Carnal Knowledge’s tonal darkness is as chilly as its settings (filmed on location mostly back on Smith College’s campus in the late autumn leaves and snow, and in wintry British Columbia): cold overcast days at college; at the Wollman Ice Skating Rink on Fifth Avenue in New York; on a gray, chilly day for tennis.7 Referring to it as “perhaps Nichols’ greatest film,” Peter Biskind writes, “Carnal Knowledge was easily as original and savage as Virginia Woolf, but it lacked even the whisper of affirmation that saved Virginia Woolf from total bleakness.”8 Nichols calls it “the darkest movie I ever made.”9
Art Garfunkel, who made his Hollywood debut in Catch-22 in a supporting role as the angelic and well-meaning naïf Nately, assumes an entirely different level of acting responsibility in Carnal Knowledge. He begins in the same sort of wide-eyed innocence as in portraying Nately, and the lightness and gendered ambiguity of his character’s name, Sandy, suggest a similar relationship to the wider world. While not as close to the center of the narrative as his best friend, Jonathan (Jack Nicholson, in the first of four roles for Nichols), Sandy is ultimately the most interesting character in the film. Like George and Martha in Virginia Woolf, Benjamin (and to a lesser degree Elaine) in The Graduate, and Yossarian in Catch-22, Sandy has a reified recognition about himself and his relationship to larger forces in the world and must either act or fail to act on what he has learned. Sandy’s journey is from Nately-like innocence; in the film’s first half, his ingenuousness is rarely shaken, and Jonathan and even Susan (Candice Bergen) can startle him with what appears to be the forthrightness of their spoken desire. Jonathan in particular uses his misogynistic distrust and air of phallic entitlement to provoke titillated giggles or opened-mouth awe from Sandy. The only phenomenon that can jar Sandy’s default optimism about romantic experience is his marriage to Susan, and this is when he deliberately allows Jonathan to become for a brief time his teacher, with disastrous effects on both his marriage and the affair with Cindy (Cynthia O’Neal) that Jonathan abets for him. The final scenes of the film suggest that, despite his steadfast efforts at maintaining companionship with Jonathan, Sandy may have left his old mentor behind. Yet he hasn’t quite become his own man; instead, he has subjugated himself to a girl young enough to be his daughter and adopted her vocabulary and vision: Jennifer is his “love teacher.” It’s an indication of the darkness of the film that, at the moment Sandy makes this pronouncement, we are less apt to celebrate his enlightenment than to sneer at him along with Jonathan (Sandy’s “hate” teacher), a character from whom we’ve been profoundly distanced during the course of the narrative because of his cruelty and duplicity.
What is less ambiguous in the film’s conclusions is that the roots of unhappiness in Carnal Knowledge are militantly patriarchal, seated in the minds of men who, as Nichols characterizes them, “think of [women] as mere sex objects.”10 Jonathan, the film’s center, is unapologetic in his refusal to adapt to the changing cultural landscape, in which the assertion of feminist identity and sexuality is the pervasive subtextual catalyst. The film’s point of view, largely via Jonathan’s aggressive misogyny, reflects this: while the two lead women in the film, Susan and Bobbie (Ann-Margret), are substantial roles (earning Ann-Margret an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress), each woman unceremoniously disappears from the film well before the end, precisely because Jonathan’s disgust has willed her expunging. Even Sandy, clearly Jonathan’s longest-standing and perhaps only friend, vanishes before the end, with the implication that, were the film to continue further into the future (with Jonathan as a corporate take-over specialist of the 1980s, perhaps), it would do so without Sandy either. Increasingly, Jonathan must retreat into a world of fantasy performance, given his painful inadequacies in asserting traditional dominance. The indelible vignette Cynthia O’Neal creates in her brief appearance as Cindy suggests that there’s no exit from patriarchy if women’s liberation simply entails their becoming duplicitous men. But the near invisibility of Jennifer, who watches Jonathan’s misogynist slide show in stunned silence, leaves us to try and glimpse her exclusively in what transformations she may have wrought in Sandy, who gushes about her masterful personality. Carnal Knowledge isn’t ultimately about feminism; it’s about the endangerment of patriarchal hegemony, in which women and men alike are “struggling in the strait jacket of a morality that divides women into madonnas and whores and men into make-out artists and losers.”11 Responding to the myopic charge that Nichols and Feiffer have created a misogynist film, Vincent Canby observes, “If anything, “Carnal Knowledge” is exploitative of men, not, heaven knows, as sex objects, but as exploiters.”12 The film, especially in the ironic depiction of flaccid phallocracy in the final scene, would seem to be announcing the endangered species of the phallocrat, but it is far from unambiguously optimistic about patriarchy’s extinction.
The film was the second of Nichols’ three productions with Joseph E. Levine and AVCO-Embassy, for which the prurience of subject and the prospect of Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret in bedroom scenes were reason enough for crusty Levine’s eye-winking patronage. For the fourth consecutive film, Nichols worked with a different Director of Photography (the legendary Guiseppe Rotunno, who shot The Leopard for Visconti and who had just begun a long working partnership with Fellini), many other contributors were familiar faces to Nichols’ productions, editor Sam O’Steen and production designer Richard Sylbert chief among them. Nichols typically asked cast and crew to capture long takes, with the logistical demands on blocking, lighting, acting, and camera movement. For all the phenomenal instances of montage transition in The Graduate and Catch-22, many of the essential thematic ideas are encapsulated via long take. The final moment on the bus in The Graduate is a profoundly revealing image wrought by leaving the camera running, as were the “conversation” between Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin and the closing debate Yossarian has with Danby and Tappman in the base hospital. This affinity for the long take may quite naturally be attributed to Nichols’ instinct for the power of live theater—people exploring conflict by talking to each other as they maneuver around each other. And while Nichols became more comfortable with cutting for desired effect, his work has continued to demonstrate an affection for the cinematic potential of judiciously used long takes: “I still love a long [take], if enough is happening, because it has a certain mesmerizing quality.”13
In Carnal Knowledge, the long take has particular emphasis as a part of Jonathan’s religion of surface appearance and “glamour.” Susan, Bobbie, and finally Louise all have their long-take close-ups in Carnal Knowledge, and in each case, there is an irony in the world seen at length through Jonathan’s eyes. Gavin Smith observes that the famous long take of Benjamin and Elaine on the bus, consigned to scrutiny by the rest of the bus patrons but also by the audience, suggests “the point of departure for the style of Carnal Knowledge.”14 Having already assigned himself an objectified role as a traditional male, Jonathan can only see these women in their status as objects of his fickle desire (which trumps what he perceives as their own inevitably fickle nature). He’s a mess, and so he makes sure to leave greater messes wherever he goes. As in The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge ends in role-playing and pretense rather than in any wholesome solidification of identity, but Nichols, burned by the mass-audience’s tone-deafness to the ironies of generic fantasy in The Graduate, makes the performative commodification as overt as possible in Carnal Knowledge. “The keynote of these relationships,” writes John Lindsay Brown, “is exploitation.”15 The “games” of social performance (clawing at power in marriage and career in Virginia Woolf, conspicuous consumption as social brinksmanship in The Graduate, and the bartering of human lives in Catch-22) continue unabated in Carnal Knowledge.
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The white-hot spotlight of The Graduate radiates not only within the first phase of Mike Nichols’ film career but within the larger context of all the films he’s released, none of which has approached the cultural resonance and ubiquity of his second film. One way of re-contextualizing Carnal Knowledge is that, in the progress of the generation, Sandy and Jonathan are east-coast contemporaries not of The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock, but of Benjamin’s parents, and the Robinsons. Jennifer, the young woman Sandy brings with him in the scene in which Jonathan presents his misogynistic slide show, is only a few years younger than Elaine Robinson. The film is not in any sense within the point of view of Elaine or Jennifer’s generation, though Jennifer certainly serves as mute, horrified witness to the ruins of the preceding generation. The Graduate is a kid’s self-serving fantasy as a way of negotiating the problems posed for him by his parents’ generation, in which the satirical eye of the film turns increasingly ironic, particularly in the film’s second half, revealing the failures of counter-culture kids unable to imagine alternatives to the cultural defaults they’re set to inherit. We get only brief glimpses of the older generation’s sensibility, most acutely during the “conversation” Benjamin insists upon with Mrs. Robinson before one of their frequent assignations at the Taft Hotel, when Mrs. Robinson lets slip some revealing vignettes of her brief youth in college. Carnal Knowledge backtracks to those salad days, to reveal that Mrs. Robinson’s unplanned pregnancy was only one variant of social determinism for those who came of age immediately after the war.
Jonathan is the dark mind of Carnal Knowledge, demonstrated as his voice rises out of the dark screen (the title’s sex euphemism printed in red lettering), amidst the nostalgic strains of Glenn Miller, to ask a question of seemingly naked vulnerability: “Would you rather love a girl or have her love you?” The film thus introduces a potential distinction between its title (sex) and the apparent, stated preoccupation of its characters (love), but as Jacob Brackman observes, “Continually looking for fulfillment from mere fornication, never understanding the erotic as a metaphor for one’s deeply felt connectedness, [the characters are] doomed to fall short of satisfaction forever.”16 Sandy immediately, instinctively puts Jonathan’s hypothetical question about love into dispute, balking at the artificiality of Jonathan’s either-or absolutism, but his challenge is in the spirit of sophomoric dorm-room debate rather than genuine seeking for mature wisdom. Their snickering, prurient conjecturing reveals them to be as blank as the screen in terms of experience. The intimacy of the darkness seems at first to include us, their voices as close as the person in the next theater seat, but we soon learn that each is disingenuous in his own way, undercutting the illusion of intimacy. They veer inconsistently between valuing interior qualities of romantic love (wanting someone to talk to and who will understand one’s inner life) and superficial qualities of lampooned sexual attraction (a girl who’s “built”). Their debate conveys a friendship based in mutual exploration of social formation: they try ideas out on each other in the seemingly safe social vacuum of their nighttime dorm room, prior to venturing out into the social gambit of dating. Even in this brief three-minute exchange, the two young men betray their sensibilities: Sandy, an essentially timid, nice person, is looking for someone “nice.” Jonathan, an essentially manipulative, cold person, confesses, “Every time I start being in love, the girl does something that turns me cold.” Each feels dread and anticipation in embarking upon his sexual and sentimental education, and Sandy, the more forthright if less frank of the two, gets the last word on this anxiety they’re articulating in the dark: “I feel the same way about getting laid as I feel about going to college. I’m being pressured into it.”
Nichols has rendered cinematic conversation against a dark screen before, of course, in the epic conversation Benjamin Braddock tries to have with Mrs. Robinson as a desperate way of re-humanizing their dehumanized affair. In Catch-22, Nichols again presents key conversations in a metaphorically revealing darkness. Orr tries slyly to hint to Yossarian in their barracks that there may be a genuine method in the apparent madness of his continuing to fly despite his serial crashes, and later, Yossarian receives a tutorial in “Catch-22” logic from the old woman left behind at the whorehouse after it has been cleaned out by Milo’s MPs in M&M’s hostile takeover of the business. These conversations in the dark confound cinematic expectation; not only do they emphasize the revelation of spoken word but also ironize those revelations that emerge in the darkness and fail to illuminate. In the case of Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson, the conversation serves both to confirm Benjamin’s instinct that dialogue humanizes, promoting understanding, and to undercut the potential for meaningful connection in a relationship when neither partner is willing to sustain honesty and understanding. Orr, lit by the single bulb shining on a gasket from his plane engine, half-trusts Yossarian with his secret, but in the paranoia of the military environment, he cannot risk a full declaration; it’s every man for himself. The old woman’s implacable explanation of all injustice and suffering as the self-evident product of the mysteriously pervasive “Catcha–22” has Yossarian yearning for insight from a stranger with little English, so accustomed is he to the difficulties and obfuscations of human discourse. Coming as the first scene in Carnal Knowledge, and more boldly obliterating any pictorial representation from the screen than in the least-lit “darkness” scenes of The Graduate or Catch-22, Nichols presents an overture on alienation: the presumed intimacy and underlying deception that encapsulate the uneasy contradictions whenever two people talk. The admixture of fear and need is as likely to compel people into playing roles as to be themselves.
As the titles end, our first image is of Susan, her fair beauty emerging from a darkness as if Sandy and Jonathan’s dialogue during the titles has conjured her, and in a sense, it has—the dialogue is an anticipation of the social “mixing” that awaits them as part of the proscribed ritual of courting and mating. Susan is in this sense a construction of their imaginations, and their imaginations are a construction of their reifiying culture. Sandy and Susan’s conversation is rich in meta-analysis of the social “act.” Nichols has her enter the room where the mixer is being held as if from the darkened wing of a brightly lit stage, and Sandy and Jonathan become her obvious audience. They are all on display for one another at the mixer, including the two men in relation to one another. Before either of them talks to Susan, they play with the prerogatives of male proprietorship; Jonathan magnanimously announces to Sandy, “I give her to you.” Yet his gift masks a more malicious intention, using Sandy as his advance man, a way to manipulate both Sandy and Susan. Jonathan, as usual, says what everyone is thinking—except for his hidden subtext. Having given Sandy suggested ice-breakers, including the “unhappy childhood” routine he later trots out himself, Jonathan warns Sandy, “But don’t make it like an act.” This is not quite the same thing as admonishing Sandy to “Just act natural.” It’s an acknowledgement of the rules of social commerce and an observation that triumph comes in the most artful “act.”
Sandy has already failed to perform his first time in Susan’s presence, and it takes Susan breaking the ice for them to begin a conversation. They instantly gravitate to their shared self-conscious antipathy for the ritual of performed socialization, and an intrinsically romantic quality the two young men have already conjured as their ideal in the darkened dorm room (“She should be very understanding,” Jonathan has specified. “We’d start the same sentences together”) here comes to sudden life, as Susan’s observation, “Everybody puts on an act,” becomes the opening of a sentence Sandy is dying to conclude: “So, even if you meet somebody, you don’t know who you’re meeting.” Susan even provides a coda to the thought: “Because you’re meeting the act.” The inherent wisdom of this opening exchange fails to protect Sandy and Susan from what will become a heavily reified courtship and decades-long marriage of disillusionment and reduced expectation, in which every move is codified within a preexistent set of assumptions for what constitutes “success” and “satisfaction.”
Susan argues a line of logic that consigns all relationships to reified performance (“If they think it’s an act they feel better because they think they can always change it”). Instead of accepting her warning, he patronizingly refers to her as “a lady lawyer,” and when she asks if he likes Amherst, he muses, “My parents worked very hard to send me. I’d better like it.” Sandy thus renders a version of himself as dutiful—sensitive to the proscribed behavior of son and, soon enough, lover. His proscribed role as a man becomes the subject of several campus dialogues with Jonathan, intercut with scenes of Sandy attempting to perform this assumed role with Susan. Almost all of these early moments of turf conflict are waged on the playing field of Susan’s body, as Sandy makes his halting way around the sexual bases. Jonathan embodies Sandy’s perceived sense of expected performance, with his talk of having “won” the “big fight” over kissing. With Susan on their dates, Sandy talks not in terms of desire but performed expectation: “If I could kiss you once last week, I should be able to kiss you at least twice tonight,” and “Because the way we’re going, by this time I should be feeling you up.” Genuine desire is nowhere in evidence; indeed, when Susan challenges him to explain what “fun” is available to him in her coerced performance, he immediately retorts, “I didn’t say it was fun.” The entire experience of intimacy becomes a rote negotiation of reciprocal responses, of quid pro quo. Later in the same date Susan learns that Sandy is not an experienced young wolf on the prowl, and she modulates her performance based on this new information: a sexual advance commences, initiated by her. This new development, dutifully carried back to campus where Sandy can at last take pleasure not in the experience itself but in the status it confers, is the event for which Jonathan has been waiting. Knowing from Sandy that Susan is both sensitive and sexually yielding, he gives her a call. Nichols underscores the performed quality of the entire sequence by having Sandy and Jonathan celebrate—at high volume—Sandy’s breakthrough, then cutting abruptly to a one-shot of Jonathan’s call, from a phone booth in the highly presumptive location of the Smith campus. His story that, “taking a drive,” he was “practically on” her campus, is not overly far-fetched, since the two colleges are only about eight miles apart. Jonathan is not above poaching on his best friend’s girl, and Susan, we’re even more surprised to learn, is not above being poached.
As they begin to warm to the task in a campus bar, their talk returns the script to meta-analysis, the same reified self-consciousness that characterized Sandy and Susan’s initial conversation at the mixer. Jonathan holds forth on the hidden agendas that serve as the default parlance of most relationships: “Most girls I talk to, it’s like we’re both spies from foreign countries and we’re speaking in code. Everything means something else.” As with Sandy, Susan intuitively understands and can contribute further insights, to which Jonathan’s “You’re very sharp. I like that,” elicits her “And that means something else.” The irony of the entire exchange is that their self-conscious awareness of their complicity in the games people play is a kind of license for the awkward transgression of betraying Sandy, throwing subsequent debriefings between Jonathan and Sandy into ironized complexity, as when Sandy says to Jonathan, “I can say things to her I wouldn’t dare say to you.” While this enthusiastically reported intimacy becomes the bone of contention between Jonathan and Susan, it is an entirely accurate representation of Jonathan’s own position. Jonathan has introduced their preferred mantra of “Bullshit artist” as a response to all significant romantic and sexual conquests, and the phrase is in fact an apt descriptive of each member of the triangle. Jonathan may be the impresario, but he eggs on Susan to commence and continue their affair, and he eggs on Sandy with victorious tales of his conquest of “Myrtle.” Sandy never gets suspicious that his best friend won’t produce this generous girl, only redoubles the inherited pressure for competitive performance, appealing to Susan to relieve him of his virginity as if of a disreputable social stain. For her part, observes Brackman, Susan is complicit in her commodification, willing “to put out strategically” in order “[t]o parlay the competition for her favors into a home in the suburbs.”17
Feiffer originally thought of Carnal Knowledge as a stage play, but Nichols knew a play could not deliver the alienated intimacies of Carnal Knowledge’s close-ups and two-shots. After the wide-open spaces of Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge’s landscapes are dorm rooms and living rooms, car interiors and hushed clinches. Catch-22 was not Nichols’ “kind of movie,” he says, “because it’s not about interpersonal things at all.”18 In this sense, Carnal Knowledge is a watershed in Nichols’ career. The Graduate was about intimate failures of communication, but his audience misinterpreted it. Catch-22 was about politics and grand systems of human deception, and the audience tuned out. Carnal Knowledge re-centered Nichols in character study as a means to the ideas he desired to explore.
The conspiracy Susan and Jonathan strike up continues unrevealed for years, though the affair itself is doomed from its inception, like all relationships predicated in falsified performance. Feiffer and Nichols assert this falseness by returning again to another motif introduced in Sandy and Susan’s initial conversation, when Jonathan recommends Sandy talk about his “unhappy childhood” without making it “like an act.” In fact it’s Jonathan who trots out the “very messed-up childhood” story for Susan: “I’m another person with her,” he tells Sandy, though in fact he’s always what Susan initially described to Sandy at the Smith mixer (“I think people only like to think they’re putting on an act, but […] they’re the act. The act is them”). He’s a “bullshit artist” who wants to crow about his conquests and doesn’t want to hear about Susan’s sexual relenting with Sandy. Nichols and O’Steen use a dancing scene to access the toxins that have permeated the triangle: Jonathan and Susan dance together with animated pleasure; Sandy and Susan dance together in an awkward choreography of obligation. The cuts are hidden by other dancers crossing in front of the camera, producing the vertiginous sensation for the viewer that we are uncertain who will be with whom next. But it’s the long next shot, the three friends seated together at a bar table, that illustrates how manic their performance has become. In a long-take close-up, Susan screams with laughter at some unheard punchline about a chronically mispronounced word. The unease we saw on the dance floor is masked by an inflated performance of “fun,” completely out of scale to the modest payoffs of other mispronounced words. Jonathan’s and Sandy’s voices derive from off-screen during the entire take. They aren’t the focus, nor can they see her as we see her. They can only see her from where they sit. She’s the piece of meat between two hungry carnivores. Sandy can grasp the concept of socially proscribed performance without ever grasping its applicability; Jonathan cynically grasps at the concept as an arch justification of his manipulative actions. Susan, who has articulated a clear-headed vision of how reified performance works, here dances as fast as she can to keep both her lovers happy. It won’t work, and the rest of Carnal Knowledge’s first section, featuring Susan, devolves into a protracted breakup.
Feiffer’s script keeps pouring on the ironies: Susan is the only one who “gets” the escape hatch in reification, but isn’t the one who escapes. Instead it’s Jonathan who exits the affair, having found the basis of his objection to a girl who gives him regular sexual access: she can tell Sandy his thoughts, but she can’t reciprocate with Jonathan. There’s real anguish as Susan acknowledges this, and convincing despair in Jonathan’s demand. What goes unsaid between them is why Jonathan’s mind remains opaque to her: he’s too much within the fortified walls of his invulnerability to ever allow a genuine thought to project. Nor can she do the other task Jonathan requires of her: to tell Sandy that they have fallen in love with each other. “He looks at me with such trust,” she says. Jonathan, recoiling, asks, “How do I look at you?” Told he conveys “bitterness,” he replies, bitterly, “At least you know my thoughts.” But bitterness and mistrust have always been Jonathan’s response to the other sex, from the opening dialogue in the dark where Gloria’s sexual provocation and Gwen’s sexual fastidiousness—the two sides of intimate performance—both prove to be turn-offs for Jonathan. His anxiety about performing becomes more acute with accrued performances.
Although Susan’s name continues to pop up in the story (as Sandy’s off-screen wife), Susan disappears from the plot after Jonathan breaks up with her. The breakup conversation comes via telephone call, accentuating the distance they’ve always had to negotiate as a couple. The ultimatums Jonathan has given her—to read his thoughts, to tell Sandy the truth about their relationship—all end in Susan’s failures to deliver (at least from Jonathan’s point of view), and in the next scene, the film’s point of view is refined to identify Jonathan as its source. Susan’s last on-screen line is the breakup cliché, “I’ll always be your friend,” to which Jonathan responds, “I hope not,” reducing her first to tears, and then, in her last scene, to a purely off-screen presence. The point of view is ironic, however—Jonathan’s is an increasingly unsympathetic perspective. In essence, Nichols invites us into the mind of a monster; too encyclopedic in his distastes to be called merely misogynistic, Jonathan is misanthropic, his contempt for his best friend Sandy palpable from the earliest moments in the film, having “given” Susan to Sandy only as a means to keep his thumb on them both. Jonathan’s obsession with power and control are organic byproducts of his learned masculinity, invulnerable defenses against vulnerability. Because she is “sharp,” Susan is dangerous—she has angles that can cut. She is capable of holding up her end of their conspiracy, perhaps more capable in her own way even than Jonathan, given her comparatively greater intimacy with Sandy. Candice Bergen’s slender angularity makes her an ideal physical type for the “sharp” role, a pronounced contrast to the zaftig curves and softly rounded passivity of Ann-Margret as Bobbie, Susan’s replacement as the occupied center of Jonathan’s point of view.
In Susan’s last scene in the film, we can still hear her but can’t see her, because Jonathan’s autocratic point of view forbids it. Sandy and Susan are packing for a camping trip that pointedly does not include Jonathan. The take, a single close-up of Jonathan, is initially reminiscent of the close-up of Susan in the bar after dancing, screaming in exaggerated laughter. But in that scene, performance is the preoccupation: everyone is watching Susan—the audience, Sandy (in adoration), Jonathan (with suspicion). In fact, the long-take close-up of Jonathan in this scene, while it demonstrates in Susan’s bright tones her having launched herself entirely into the role of Sandy’s lover, is less a reminder of Susan performing than a harbinger of Jonathan’s shrinking worldview; it’s a shot that shares a greater affinity with the final shot of the film, another close-up of Jonathan, who, by narrative’s end, is not quite post-woman but is adamantly post-relationship. In the dorm-room close-up, Jonathan’s gloom seems to goose Susan’s off-screen demeanor. She’s a parodic performance of chipper affability, although her direct addresses to Jonathan have zero effect: “Isn’t he being silly, Jonathan?” and “Isn’t he a nut, Jonathan?” do not stir Jonathan from his brown study. It’s the last trace of Susan in the film’s diegesis. He obliterates her from his consciousness (though not from his slide show, which retains all, harboring every grudge and slight of his lifelong turf war with the female sex). Nichols and O’Steen fade this final scene of the collegiate triangle.
There are comparisons to be made here to the narrative transitions in The Graduate, although in The Graduate the transitions typically are punctuated by black, the “darkness” of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence.” The essential similarity is that these transitions—Benjamin’s slamming the bathroom door at the Taft Hotel to plunge himself into the empty affair with Mrs. Robinson; the fade to black after Elaine discovers the truth of the affair and Benjamin is banished by two generations of Robinson women—demarcate an intensifying alienation in the protagonist, as they do, in white blankness, in Carnal Knowledge. The darkness of Jonathan’s character is in little doubt; the whiteness on screen is thus an analogue not to his sensibility but rather to his willed indifference, a deliberate wiping of his emotional slate. After this first occurrence, 38 minutes into the film (within a minute or so of the first blackout transition of The Graduate), there will be two recurrences: at the end of the film’s second section, Jonathan’s life with Bobbie up through her suicide attempt; and at the conclusion of the film’s much briefer third section, the last image of the film. While the blackout transitions of The Graduate are accompanied by silence (interrupted only by Simon and Garfunkel’s non-diegetic song), an ice-skating rink organ burbles maddeningly to each of the three whiteout transitions in Carnal Knowledge. It is music that compels gaiety and that has no cultural meaning outside performance. The ice dancer, her long exposed limbs a public provocation in the wintry scene, performs.
There is no certainty of identification of the skater, and thus she is emblematic of all the narrative’s various performers aware of their desirability and consumable status. The initial sensation of the skater’s appearance is, for the audience, disorientation: how did we get from the Amherst dorm room to this bright, open, sun-splashed place? Who is this woman? Through whose eyes do we see her? Having wiped clean his emotional slate of nagging vulnerabilities, Jonathan has emerged fifteen years after college19 as a successful New Yorker (his firm did the taxes of a minor celebrity with whom, he boasts to Sandy, he has slept). Yet in another sense, little has changed: he is still ogling women from afar in the company of his old college roommate Sandy. While we (and they) watch the skater, Feiffer’s largely off-screen dialogue fills us in on what we’ve missed: Jonathan has yet to settle down into marriage and family, while Sandy and Susan have married and Sandy has a successful medical practice. Jonathan needs little encouragement to launch into a paranoid, misogynist screed about emasculation, terrified and enraged by feminine power—in the early sixties, before the full cultural assertion of feminist autonomy.
As Sandy takes cues from Jonathan’s miserable attitude to suggest monogamy as a potential solution, Jonathan directs his most frontal assault on Sandy’s reified life. “You’re so well off?” he challenges, and Nichols and Feiffer cut to a new scene in which, we imagine, the dialogue has continued from visit to visit. This is Garfunkel’s momentous close-up (Bergen and Nicholson have already, as noted, been scrutinized in close-up, and Ann-Margret will have her memorable, post-coital moment of creeping devastation propped against the wall behind her bed). Sandy is talking to Jonathan, who is the camera. He is selling himself one or another of the oft-sold Manhattan bridges, an apologia for a marriage that, if Susan were in the room with them, would be humiliating. Gone is the bravado of his earlier claim, “Susan’s plenty enough woman for one man”; in its place is resignation to a proscribed life of passionless material partnership. A reverse shot of Jonathan listening reminds us that Sandy’s speech reinforces in Jonathan’s mind a sense of how easily he can triumph in his life’s competition with Sandy. Sandy confesses his life is “not glamorous or anything,” and tries desperately to believe “There are other things besides glamour.” Of course there are, but whether Sandy finally comes to embrace rather than resignedly accept this truth is left in doubt.
The immediate cut by Nichols and O’Steen after Sandy’s claim, to a screenful of Ann-Margret at her most bountifully glamorous, makes Jonathan’s position on the claim abundantly clear: his restless pursuit of accumulation and display never ends. Julian Jebb writes, “She is the Playmate personified: huge-breasted, submissive, smiling, co-operative”20; Paul D. Zimmerman adds, “she is everyone’s adolescent dream but her own.”21 For Jonathan, there is only “glamour,” and when he can’t help but see through that illusion, it intensifies the inauthentic, culminating in the film’s haunting final scene with Louise the prostitute, rehearsing potency. Carnal Knowledge’s small ensemble is perfectly cast, but there is no greater coup for Nichols in the casting of his fourth film than his having risked an important part on Ann-Margret, Scandinavian bombshell of notoriously superficial cinematic glamour, as Bobbie, majestically carnal, spiritually in need. Nichols believed in Ann-Margret’s rightness as Bobbie as he’d once believed in Elizabeth Taylor as Martha or Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock or Alan Arkin as Yossarian, in spite of the registered doubts of producers and industry experts. The easy part for Nichols in casting Ann-Margret was in seeing the physical type. The cut to Ann-Margret hunkered with Jonathan at a tablecloth restaurant, bursting from her black cocktail dress, is cinema in full command of comic irony: her hair and features and mannerisms and voice are all much, much larger than life, Jonathan’s answer to Sandy’s attempted devaluation of glamour. If Jonathan is going to embrace the consolations of material “success,” he’s going to be as performative as possible, a Manhattan power broken out on the town with his trophy, and then to bed. Casting Ann-Margret as Jonathan’s object of desire was surely no stretch; finding within the bimboid persona of the screen’s female Elvis a genuinely soulful existential presence is the astonishment at the heart of Carnal Knowledge: the human soul requires other things besides being—or having—Ann-Margret.
In Manhattan’s Rainbow Room, Bobbie and Jonathan are on their flirtatious first date, seated over dinner. This and the next three scenes—in the cab, entering the apartment, and at climax—constitute an encyclopedia of knowing, reified clichés of the proscribed courtship ritual. In the restaurant, they wrangle over her age before arriving at an agreement on “twenty-nine,” one of the perpetual markers of female vanity, after which Jonathan, who is also in his thirties, zings her with his crack about preferring “older women.” Nuzzling in the cab, their conversation becomes increasingly intimate; strikingly, it mirrors the subject of Susan and Sandy’s first conversation: an awareness of the familiar roles they are assuming. While Susan and Sandy’s dialogue was a series of meta-analytical insights whose wit was cool and distant, Bobbie and Jonathan pursue a franker, farther-reaching improvisation on the course not only of courtship but its deterministic endgame: marriage, domesticity, and divorce (“I’ll take you for every cent you’ve got”). Bobbie is joking, and yet we know enough about Jonathan’s misogyny to recognize Bobbie’s lampoon of the gold digger as part of Jonathan’s paranoid vision of gendered performance—this is no joke. The scene is playfully sexy and as full of doom as Yossarian’s surrealist vision of drowning just beyond carnal salvation with the beauty on the floating dock in Catch-22. Yet while Yossarian dedicates himself to attempting to reverse his reified life, Jonathan is powerless in the grip of glamour to extract himself from a misery he understands awaits him. His fault in this misery will be a failure to recognize he has always played his role too well: in possessing his trophy, he all but obliterates her.
Nichols accesses the movie cliché of passion with his slow track across the discarded clothing strewn in the moment’s heat in a trail to the bedroom, where the inarticulate ejaculations of the lovers move toward a temporary, annihilating satisfaction. The scene is not quite believable, precisely because it is so self-referentially cinematic: it’s what the conventions of film genre compel us to want. In this film whose courting lovers are so hyper-aware of their performed roles, a long take like the one that trails across a room, down a corridor, through a door, and up to the bed of unwitting characters is a reminder of film’s manipulative medium. We’re being asked to play our proscribed role as moviegoers, yet we’re also asked to stand at a meta-critical remove to examine this proscription. In other words, we as a movie-going audience are in precisely the same predicament as Susan and Sandy and, later, Bobbie and Jonathan are as courting lovers: aware of and in thrall to our manipulation. This is the nature of reification, which carries within it meta-cognitive recognition. Nichols, who learned his lesson in projecting narrative irony in the wake of The Graduate’s juggernaut of non-reflective adoration, leaves no room for misapprehension here. If that slow track to veritable intercourse of the gods does not alert us to a sense of our complicity in fetishizing the performance of glamour, we are as much to blame as Jonathan.
The seeming idyll of ecstatic sensuality and satisfaction depicted in the first four scenes of the relationship between Bobbie and Jonathan receives a coda in a brief morning-after scene, reading the Sunday paper with breakfast in bed, an easy, Edenic nudity suggestive of all masks discarded, roles renounced in favor of genuine contact. They play a game in which they take on acknowledged, cliché roles of nurse and patient, secure for the moment in who they are when they are together. Yet in the following scene, which in time reveals to us that several equally idyllic weeks must have passed since their first night together, Bobbie challenges Jonathan’s primacy (and autonomy) by suggesting they “shack up.” His ease evaporates instantly, and his evasive response devolves into a halting, cautionary legalism that she eventually euthanizes with a sharp insult. The moment just before her suggestion is their last moment of happiness in the film; he leaps up for one of the many showers we see him take during this section of the narrative (a physical manifestation of that psychological fastidiousness to wipe clean the emotional slate), and Bobbie is caught by the camera in a long and pensive close-up against a wall dominated by blankness, “the finest shot in the film.”22 (Eventually, we see more of the apartment’s interior, whose central decorative element is a stunningly glamorous headshot of Bobbie caught in mid-spin in the model’s studio; in contrast, Nichols and Rotunno’s gorgeous close-up of the woman herself, in the grip of equal and opposed forces of desire and anxious caution, is more beautiful for being alive, not posed, captured.) Ann-Margret convinces us of the difficulty of this moment, listening to her lover’s cheerfully tin-eared voice in the shower and afraid that the feelings she’s about to reveal will bring them both only heartache. She knows she ought to hastily dress and walk away. Zimmerman praises Ann-Margret’s “quiet, soft, moving performance that catches the pathos of so many women who never develop their inner resources because men seem so satisfied with their exteriors.”23 Yet she is complicit as well in the prophecy she and Jonathan have teasingly enacted in the cab their first night, since she has entrapped someone she instinctively knows better than to love, because she knows (or knows soon enough) that he has no love to return, only possessive worship. When she makes her proposition, she’s as emotionally naked as she is physically naked; Jonathan adroitly wraps himself in a towel and in convenient clauses of caution, ultimately analogizes her proposition to “business deals I’ve seen come to grief.” Feiffer’s word choice here reveals the default assumption Jonathan carries into all human transactions, whether personal or professional: everything is always about negotiation and acquisition. If Bobbie persists (as she does), it will be with the understanding that she is a commodity she has bartered at the price of her own self-worth. She becomes Jonathan’s prisoner, but she has slipped on her own chains.
In the apartment Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) comes to share with Bobbie (Ann-Margret) at the heart of Carnal Knowledge, the most prominent decoration is a glamorous, larger-than-life photograph of Bobbie from her days as a fashion model. It is a harrowing evocation of the objectifying perspective from which Jonathan regards her, and the brooding prospect captured in this image indicates how little satisfaction he actually derives from the conquest and possession of a socially constructed “trophy.” As Nichols had first argued inThe Graduate, a life predicated upon restless acquisition can never be at peace.
The careful structure Nichols and Feiffer impose on Carnal Knowledge demonstrates that, despite varieties of type and temperament, cultural conformity homogenizes experience. Susan and Sandy’s first conversation pessimistically summarizes their decades-long relationship; Bobbie and Jonathan’s does the same. Competition (and thus, power) motivates action. Sandy makes his first sexual power moves based on the “success” Jonathan has reported with “Myrtle,” not because of an inner urge to express sexual passion (which isn’t the predicating motivation for Jonathan, either). Later, the editing sequence implies that Jonathan bedding Bobbie is predicated upon Sandy’s defensive assertion that glamour is not the zenith of human achievement; indeed, Jonathan’s sense of aggressive, superficial possessiveness and desire to win points are what cause him to possess whomever and whatever he possesses. (When in the brief last section of the film, as Sandy and his new, young girlfriend Jennifer visit Jonathan and endure his slide show, Jonathan explains the circumstances under which a venereal 16-year-old to whom he paid $20 in the Village has found her way into the show, Jonathan suggests that Jennifer might know her and thus sets up the implication that, in different circumstances, he’d have been as likely to proposition her.) Sandy’s speech “de-glamorizing” glamour is delivered in close-up to the camera; after Bobbie’s proposition, Jonathan addresses the camera, sitting across from Sandy at dinner. It is remarkable as one of the few, albeit brief, moments of Jonathan’s vulnerability left exposed. He confesses to occasional impotency, no doubt confident that Sandy in his role as physician is more accustomed than the average man to such disclosures and much more inclined to confidential respect for the information (as opposed to the opportunistic exploitation Jonathan would likely pursue). Yet the closest he can come to vulnerability with Bobbie is to mask it with excessively obvious displays of traditional masculinity, demanding food, demanding that Bobbie desist from pursuing her independent life and career. Terrified of dependence, he moves to instead make her entirely dependent on him, and his utter success consumes him with loathing for them both, displayed in brow-beating her for not having beer in the refrigerator. Yet when she offers to go to the store, then asks if he’ll accompany her, he concludes in disgust, a forecast of Jonathan’s alienated life as the film ends, “I may as well go myself.” It’s a painful acknowledgement to them both of the illusion of intimacy—the illusion is by this point all they share.
The last of the close-up monologues in this second section of the film belongs again to Sandy, who, perhaps inspired by Jonathan’s own admission of vulnerability, confesses to the physical deadness of his marriage to Susan. The ironic weight of these close-ups has begun to accrue by this point: close-ups are a cinematic trope of self-revelation, but as these characters get further and further from genuine intimacy with one another, the close-ups mock true revelation. Jonathan uses this opportunity—patiently awaited for decades—to suggest Sandy have an affair, which will afford Jonathan new turf to invade and conquer. He’s nursed his grudge against Susan and Sandy since college; now he’ll destroy their marriage bond and, having found Sandy a lover, once again claim her as his own. The contextualization of all Jonathan’s action within competition and winning can hardly be in doubt in the site of Sandy’s first date with Cindy, on a late-autumn Manhattan tennis court. Initially, the men strut and preen for the women; Cindy watches with appetite, while Bobbie quickly loses interest. Cindy is invited to “take on” Jonathan, despite Bobbie feebly protesting it’s her “turn.” She has been usurped by a deglamorized, masculinized woman. If she is aware that Jonathan has procured Cindy for Sandy, she doesn’t let on her position about this premeditated infidelity. Rather, she appears to be meditating on how low Jonathan can go, as if she has glimpsed all the future chess moves required to bring them all to “mate”—on Jonathan’s terms.
The next sequence is the last to feature Bobbie (who, like Susan, becomes a spectral presence after marriage, a foregone possession). It is the scene that confirms Jonathan’s bad intentions in having brought Cindy into the picture—he means to betray both Bobbie and Sandy, ironically by pushing them into each other’s arms. The sequence unfolds in three scenes, the first of which is a culminating argument between Bobbie and Jonathan before Cindy and Sandy drop in on their way to a party, followed by Jonathan’s bait and switch proposal to Sandy to trade partners for the evening, and capped by the very different behaviors of the two women to Jonathan’s condescending manipulations: Bobbie begs for marriage, only to have Jonathan frankly compare it to a death sentence; Cindy chides him for plotting without her consent and promises a future assignation only if negotiated on her terms. In Cindy, Jonathan has met his match: her cold detachment in deflecting his play for her is cruelly contemptuous of everyone but herself: “You want to come around sometime by yourself, that’s one thing. I’ve been expecting that. But you tell Sandy if he lays one hand on that tub of lard in there not to come home.” She leaves without bothering to tell Sandy herself.
Cindy’s man-eating frankness of desire is a distortion worthy of inclusion in Jonathan’s slide show; Bobbie and Cindy are bookends in the sequence that represent Jonathan’s spectrum of disgust, from the women like Bobbie who emasculate by smothering a man, to the women like Cindy who forget that they are “the weaker sex” and, in emergent liberation, assert the prerogatives of primacy that transcend gender. The entire sequence plays as an elaborate variation on “Catch-22” logic. Bobbie understands her dissolution as a perpetuating cycle: “The reason I sleep all day is I can’t stand my life,” she says, but it is clear she could just as easily invert the two clauses. She doesn’t want anything except for Jonathan to love her, but he replies, in a narcissistic caricature of self-disclosure, “I’m taken—by me!” He commands her to “get out of the house” and “do something useful,” though of course he’s previously commanded her to quit her job and stay at home. In a line that could have fit in Catch-22, Jonathan asserts in exasperation, “I’d almost marry you if you’d leave me.” Her suicide attempt makes his statement prophetic. Though defiantly screaming his resolve not to be manipulated over her prone body, his resistance is futile. He is, by his own confession, impotent.
The skater’s waltz and whiteout screen return; we understand that, in the internal logic of the film, more time will have passed, and with it, another illusory attempt by Jonathan at redeeming the time via wiping the emotional slate. Predictably, his carapace continues to harden around him with the passing years. Feiffer’s screenplay identifies Jonathan, when we finally see him at the conclusion of his slide show, as “in his forties.”24 The urban minimalism of his furniture, Sandy’s groovy facial hair: the diegesis has finally found the present, the film’s 1971 release date.25 The slide show itself is baroque in its misogyny. Sandy seems too shell-shocked by what he has witnessed to confront Jonathan when Susan’s image appears, though he must be exploring the possibility that this could be the mysterious “Myrtle” he’d heard so much about.
Sandy has shown his old friend contempt while rescuing Bobbie from her overdose; now his disapproval seems to have moved beyond words. But as their final conversation reveals, it’s Jonathan who can barely contain his contempt for his perennially naïve friend, while Sandy can afford to be magnanimous about Jonathan’s many malevolencies because of Jennifer’s nubile body and mature wisdom. It seems reasonable for Sandy to conclude that he, not Jonathan, has won. “I found out who I am,” Sandy claims, and he laments “[a]ll those games” they have allowed themselves to play. The sermonette on overcoming the culture of “games” can’t help but echo the socio-terrorism of the game playing in Virginia Woolf. The ferocity with which George and Martha perform their “exorcism” from the reified cycle of “success” games they’ve been waging for years on domestic and academic playing fields is more convincing as a transformation than Sandy’s cliché-strewn testament to his own evolving sense of identity. Jonathan, for his part, does not believe a word he’s hearing, and heaps scorn on Sandy for the clichés and the naivety. He will never permit someone he’s so easily fooled to be his advisor. After hearing one too many of Sandy’s hippie appropriations, he says, “‘Bad vibrations.’ Sandy, I love you, but you’re a schmuck. Well, you were always young, Sandy. Open. You were schmucky a lot of the time but maybe schmuckiness is what you need to stay young and open.” In this line of logic, Jonathan has never been “schmucky,” because he could never be “young and open.” That way lies vulnerability and weakness. In another throwaway line that could easily have been one of the linguistic knots in the Catch-22 script, he says, “Listen, don’t listen to me.”
He concludes, “You’re doing great and I’m making money.” It’s as nice as Jonathan gets: there’s enough success to go around, as long as Jonathan gets a bigger share. Sandy will not relent: “You can find what I’ve found, Jonathan.” Sandy, it turns out, will not agree to let Jonathan win, and it prompts the last words Jonathan says to Sandy in the film, words that could easily spell the end of the illusion of their “friendship”: “Don’t make me insult you.” What has kept these two together all these years is Sandy’s “schmuckiness” and Jonathan’s easy avenue to feel superior. There may be only one true friendship among all the relationships represented in Mike Nichols’ first four films, and it’s the notorious donnybrook of a marriage between George and Martha in Virginia Woolf. (In his next film, Nichols would work with Buck Henry to explore another genuine marriage-based friendship, the life’s work of Jake and Maggie Terrell in The Day of the Dolphin.) There is never an opportunity for such a friendship between Benjamin and Elaine, because they never allow themselves to think beyond a codified future in which marriage is a means of social manipulation. There is never an opportunity for such a friendship between Yossarian and any of the various isolates and misfits on his base in Catch-22, or with Luciana, who couldn’t marry anybody crazy enough to want to marry her. Certainly there has never been enough genuine honesty between Sandy and Jonathan to sustain such a friendship—Jonathan simply is not capable of it. He’s too good at winning. In the logic of “Catch-22,” Jonathan’s compulsive winning dooms him to a lifetime as a loser.
Sandy has referred to Jennifer as his “love teacher,” but we get no opportunity to verify the claim, only the faintly ridiculous sound of these hippie phrases in his mouth. But the film has never been about Sandy anyway. The film’s perspective begins, literally, in darkness; it ends in a different kind of darkness, in the warmly lit apartment of a prostitute, with money exchanged, lines of potency rehearsed, and a final wipe of the slate via the return of the skater and the maddening organ music. Jennifer clearly has principles and a vocabulary she’s imparting to her avid disciple Sandy, who seems always ready for the next revision of his philosophy; in Jonathan’s world, on the other hand, there can be only one teacher, one philosophy. He’s “taken.” His phallocentric commitment is made nauseatingly overt in the script he has written for Louise. The performance he teaches her is corrupt at so many levels: predicated in money, not love; instigated from the autoerotic rather than the erotic impulse; and ultimately a controlled pretense in which the smallest, off-script improvisation can literally deflate the project. The film ends with one final monologue in close-up, the only one given to someone other than one of the main quartet: Louise pep-talks Jonathan through a meditation on phallic power, the oldest lesson in patriarchy, and the only one Jonathan has managed to retain. But this is not Louise talking: this is Jonathan pep-talking himself in the script he has created for her to perform, to “summon an inner power so strong that every act, no matter what, is more proof of that power.” Following his rave for Catch-22 with two separately published raves for Carnal Knowledge, Vincent Canby in the New York Times lamented that the film had to end as soon as it did,26 but the film has to end where it ends—Jonathan can devolve no further without opting out of life’s project altogether. He is the purely misanthropic man. Of all the darkness of Mike Nichols’ first four extraordinary films, there is no darker moment than this.