Closer (2004)
Maintaining his torrid production pace from the release of Wolf (1994), a decade in which he directed five theatrical features, a cable feature, and a six-episode cable mini-series, Mike Nichols worked with British playwright Patrick Marber to adapt his intense chamber drama, Closer, which debuted at London’s National Theatre in 1997 and ran for well over a year in a series of venues culminating in transfer to the West End and then Broadway, where Nichols invited Marber to breakfast in 1999 and asserted his claim on the play.1 Both play and film span the four years that Dan (Jude Law) and Alice (Natalie Portman), who meet quite literally by accident, when she is struck by a London cab while making eye contact with him, know each other before parting company forever. Although he cut “about 35 per cent”2 of the play, excising entirely one of the stage play’s original twelve scenes (Scene Nine) and substantially revising the final scene, Marber maintained the essential integrity of the original. “For a ninety-minute Hollywood film made in 2004 to contain only a dozen scenes/sequences, all lasting between five and eleven minutes, is extremely rare—and shows how determined Marber and Nichols were to avoid the traditional approach to filming plays [… by] break[ing] them up into sequences of shorter scenes set in several locations.”3 Upon the film’s release, many critics instantly connected Closer back to two early, chamber-ensemble casts from Nichols’ first phase as a filmmaker: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Carnal Knowledge. In significant formal and thematic ways, Closer is a revisiting of these earlier Nichols films; however, while Marber knew the Albee play and Nichols’ famous adaptation, he was introduced to Carnal Knowledge during discussions with Nichols before they collaborated on the adaptation; “‘I subsequently saw the film and could understand why Mike thought I had. It’s a very tough four-hander about misogyny.’”4 Both Carnal Knowledge and Closer are chamber ensembles limited to four main characters; indeed, the earlier film introduces three minor but important characters (Cindy, Jennifer, and Louise) relatively late in the film, while Closer is even more insular: only the four main characters matter. “[T]here are virtually no other speaking parts [beyond the four principals in Closer], which is fitting given the quartet’s seamless absorption in themselves and one another.”5 Both narratives unfold over years (in Carnal Knowledge, decades). Unlike most of Nichols’ films beginning with 1990’s Postcards from the Edge, which typically offer at least one character (and sometimes more) moving in reified wisdom from social proscription towards self-actualization, neither Carnal Knowledge nor Closer offers optimism about progress in the gender wars or in its characters’ evolutionary capabilities.
Almost all interactions between the four principals in both these Nichols films may more appropriately be termed transactions—commodifed gambits in which the objectives are possession and evasion, manipulative deception and aggressive domination, all fueled by terminal self-interest. The four principals in Carnal Knowledge are all in their own ways among the socially entitled: Sandy (Art Garfunkel), Jonathan (Jack Nicholson), and Susan (Candice Bergen) as students at exclusive, tradition-bound Northeastern colleges, and Bobbie (Ann-Margret) as a cover-girl model. Marber introduces a complicating dimension of class struggle to the gender wars: while Dan and Anna (Julia Roberts) have the luxury to indulge their artistic temperaments (Dan as an obituary writer moonlighting as a novelist, Anna as a successful photographer), Larry (Clive Owen) and Alice are self-conscious about their status; Larry refers to his “working-class guilt” about the au courant furnishing of his and Anna’s bathroom, and Alice theorizes that she has lost Dan to Anna “because she’s successful.” While Larry has enough disposable cash as a dermatologist with his own surgery to carry (and unload) hundreds of pounds of currency on one private dance by Alice, Alice has made enough money as a stripper (from obsessed men like Larry) to splurge on an anniversary vacation trip with Dan to New York. Ultimately, class conflict does not fuel the machinations of the four characters in Closer; as in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the 1792 epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, money may provide the assumption of entitlement, but the motivations run deeper, to gendered resentments, fears, and aggression. Carnal Knowledge and Closer, films at opposite ends of Mike Nichols’ long and productive Hollywood career, each argue that our innate instincts in mating are commodifying territorial predation. Sam Davies writes, “The title is a piece of mordant authorial irony. The characters seek intimacy, but the denouement, and the Jacobean sexual treachery that leads to it, argue such intimacy is, if not impossible, probably illusory.”6 Anthony Lane observes that the title of Closer “could stand for [Nichols’] whole career” as “an intimist director who is far happier finding dirty laughs in a closed room” than on a broad, exteriorized canvas.7
In practical terms for Nichols, Carnal Knowledge and Closer serve as logical next projects after quixotic directorial ambitions. Nichols’ long, self-imposed exile in the Mexican desert making the sprawling, complex, surreal Catch-22 required commitments of time and energy he needed to conserve in his next project if he was to regain the industrial capital in Hollywood that he’d earned in the extraordinary popular success of his first two films, particularly The Graduate. And in taking on a cultural behemoth like Angels in America, Nichols once again risked his reputation (as he had with Catch-22) in adapting a bellwether ideological work of immense formal proportions about which everyone had strong feelings. Closer, like Carnal Knowledge, was a move from an enormous cast to a chamber ensemble, from a picaresque series of dreamscapes to a realistic slice of the way we love now, with a bleak outlook on the possibilities of “transformation”8 via reified wisdom.
In Carnal Knowledge, the characters are aware from the earliest moments of the film of their performative roles in society (as evidenced by Sandy and Susan’s flirtatious deconstruction of the mixer at which they meet and begin to perform their roles, or Jonathan and Bobbie’s flirtatious deconstruction of romance on their first date, playfully moving from first passion through marriage to acrimonious divorce). Yet this knowledge fails to prepare them adequately to act outside of these roles, and Sandy’s apparent liberation late in the film from his patriarchal defaults is likely another phase of an essentially weak and easily manipulated person, now under the sway of a hippie teenager, his “love teacher.” Jonathan is in thrall from beginning to end to the most literal interpretation of gender-based hegemony (he literally scripts phallocratic performance at film’s end); he lives in terror of female sexual autonomy and thus commits himself to dissection of women via erotic synechdoche (his big-breast fetish), since he believes women are sexual terrorists bent on doing the same to him (his “ball-buster” paranoia). Despite their intelligence and privilege, the people in Carnal Knowledge remain ignorant of the “knowledge” they can articulate, retreating into rote performance of the very roles they’d once playfully critiqued.
Likewise, in Closer, “Alice” and Dan predicate their relationship in a fantasy construction of one another so total that “Alice” isn’t even Alice’s name; Alice’s fiction is that Jane Jones can truly love a man “forever” under a name she has assumed while looking at a memorial plaque on a London garden wall. Could they ever have been married, or even passed through customs inspection together? (Is this in fact why Alice invents a controversy they cannot overcome on the night before flying overseas?) Dan’s fiction is that Alice is his possession (“mine,” he tells the cabbie) from the first moment he sees her and takes his confessed liberties by kissing her while she is unconscious beside him (if indeed she is) on the ride to the hospital. In their mythological nostalgia for meet-cute inevitability, they inadvertently betray commentary on the poorly concealed truth of their feelings, beyond the romanticized constructions they overlay on their reality: they have a rehearsed litany of trivia (“What was in my sandwiches?” “What color was my apple?”), and when Alice correctly answers the question, “What were your first words to me?” with “Hello, Stranger,” Dan playfully comments, “What a slut.” This is, in fact, precisely what each has feared about the other from their first meeting: she has known she would lose him because she can’t share in his inner life as a cultured woman like Anna can; he has known he can not trust her because of her unsettling combination of immediately assumed intimacy and unapologetic revelation of her stripper past. And when Dan, in their nostalgic trivia trips, tells his story of kissing her in the cab to the hospital, which he presumably is recounting as another part of this mythologizing litany, she playfully interjects, “You brute,” precisely the conclusion she draws—in dead seriousness—as their relationship ends several minutes later, when he acquiesces to her taunting demand to hit her, since “that’s what you want.”
Anna also sees clearly but in her complicity refuses to see that she has been objectified as a desirable pawn in the territorial battles of Dan and Larry. Larry does the same to Alice, and Alice is even more active in her complicity than Anna to abet Larry’s objectification of her. Nichols has said “the film is about how powerful people deal with ‘being in the power of someone else.’”9 In such to-the-death competitions, there must be a victor, and in Larry, Closer’s “most obnoxious and least deluded character,”10 Marber has created a misanthropic equal to Carnal Knowledge’s Jonathan, a terrorist of the emotions with a “caveman” point of view on sexual politics. “Even Closer’s self-styled caveman might blanch” at some of Jonathan’s concluding self-pronouncements on phallocracy, “yet Jonathan’s plight can be viewed as a salutary warning of where Larry’s relentless objectification of women […] might lead him ten years down the line.”11 Like Jonathan, Larry remains resolutely unreconstructed. Larry delivers an important, terse summation of reified despair in the last scene of Marber’s stage play, lost to the adaptive revision but still present in the spirit of the screenplay: “Everyone learns, nobody changes.”12 There can be no bleaker understanding of human existence in the cinematic world Nichols has created over the past half-century: that a man (or woman) can understand the need for change and the means of his transformation, yet retreat into the systemic defaults of objectified control, settling for “victory” in exchange for his soul.
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A familiar Nichols touch—the circular soundtrack—brings us into Closer even before the titles begin. The mournful tempo of Damien Rice’s spare, plaintive “The Blower’s Daughter” accents well the slow-motion photography introduced in the opening montage, a variation of the old cinematic cliché of lovers moving towards each other from opposed angles. Centered in cross-cut shots of crowds on London’s pavement are Alice, instantly striking with her dyed hair, tacky faux-fur coat, and mini-skirt, and Dan, far less noticeable save that his place on screen and in his respective sidewalk crowd is a form-cut replacement of the spot where we’ve just been watching Alice. The variation on the standard Hollywood visual trope of reunion is that these two have never met: they look at the camera, and what they see, as each approaches the curb to the traffic street that separates them, is each other. Indeed, as Rice’s chorus, the five-times repeated “I can’t take my eyes off of you,” ends in a sixth repetition cut short to begin the second verse, Natalie Portman as Alice and Jude Law as Dan have moved into close-up range of the camera and, with proximity, into the forthright and smiling gaze of what appears to be recognition. Rice’s second verse begins in a statement of self-fulfilled prophecy that never finishes—Alice, the young American new to London, has stepped out into the street after looking the wrong way, and our first shot at normal speed interjects the unconventional: a crane shot from several stories directly above where Alice lies prone on the street. The new angle asserts a disassociating, clinical distance on what we thought we were watching unfold, a radical rupture of narrative rhetoric that alerts us, for the first of many times, to deceptive practice: our assumptions about what we see ought not to be trusted.
The sequence, which does not appear in Marber’s stage play except as immediate backstory to how these two strangers end up waiting together in the hospital for her treatment of a minor leg abrasion, is a valuable addition to the narrative’s examination of the corrosive dangers of wishful thinking aided by willful ignorance of the real. The formalist accenting of the opening shots—slow-motion cross-cuts followed by the God’s eye view—invites an ironic distance on what we’re watching. There is a romanticized nostalgia in the audience as two recognizable Hollywood faces approach one another; further complicating the effect is our learning eventually that both these characters, Dan and Alice, like to indulge themselves (and each other) in romanticized nostalgia—though of the two, Dan is the more susceptible, as his return to haunt Postman’s Park in the film’s epilogue suggests. As in The Graduate, which opens and closes with Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) enveloped in Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence,” passively conveyed into a future he hasn’t chosen, Closer begins and ends with “The Blower’s Daughter,” its refrain repeated enough times to connote helpless psychological obsession. The Graduate presents the illusion of movement in the freneticism of Benjamin the Track Star’s mad dash throughout the southern half of California, yet, upon reflection, one is left to conclude that Benjamin is merely running away, without any positive objective in mind. In Closer, the narrative’s full-circle return leads us to Alice on Broadway, again the beautiful face in the crowd as the lyric’s obsessiveness repeats. Once she is off screen, the narrative ends, and the credits begin scrolling on a black screen; the song reaches its final chorus, where “eyes” is replaced by “mind”: a fair assessment of Dan’s state at film’s end, since he will never see Alice again except in the haunting of his mind’s eye. If Alice’s sidewalk stroll in slow-motion is the clearest visual repetition of the film’s opening, Dan’s psychological repetition as he haunts and is haunted by Postman’s Park is the film’s adamant statement of Larry’s idea, in the play, that “everyone learns, nobody changes.” It is a pessimistic artistic rendering of reified stasis, the flip side of the free flow of reified wisdom in many of the films in the second half of Nichols’ career. Closer serves as additional, cautionary tempering of the optimism of films like Regarding Henry and The Birdcage. In his previous film, the epic Angels in America, Nichols conveyed the full, career-long complexity of his vision, the tempered optimism that reification can, beyond its social imprisonments, also bring the insights necessary to liberation. While Prior Walter (Justin Kirk) and Hannah and Harper Pitt (Meryl Streep and Mary-Louise Parker) experience an enlightening revision of identity in relation to the objectifying world around them, Roy Cohn (Al Pacino) and Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson) are held fast by their reified bonds. In Closer, no one escapes the iron grip of reified entrapment.
Despite his shape-shifting predilections as a novelist (and in online chatter assuming promiscuously libertine female identities), Dan may have more opportunity to learn and change than anyone in the film; at the very least, his moments of recognition are most formally underscored by Nichols, using mirrors as Lacanian signifiers of arrested self-formation, invitations to see himself and failing to see. “Nichols, Goldblatt, and the production designer Tim Hatley find visual equivalents for Closer’s examination of the slippery nature of identity: the reflections of faces in mirrors in Dan’s flat, the strip club, the airport hotel, in Anna’s camera lenses, computer screens or in the glass walls of the Aquarium tanks; the translucent walls of the private room in the strip club.”13 When Dan waits for Anna to arrive at the opera, he is aware of the errand she’s been on that day, trying to extract Larry’s signature for the divorce that will leave Anna free to be with Dan. He has little sense as yet of Larry’s capabilities as an artist of revenge; when Anna comes running up the stairs with her one-word explanation of her lateness (“Traffic”), and when she is vaguely evasive in accepting his toast on her success in securing the signature, his imagination turns to what she is capable of, rather than what Larry is capable of: she has repeatedly deceived Larry with Dan. In the men’s room, he regards himself in the mirror. He is looking at a treacherous person, who is in love with a treacherous person who has been married to a treacherous person. And he bursts with accurate accusations when he returns to the table and, in so doing, drives her away. In “a superb addition to the play, giving us a preparatory, and slightly ominous, glimpse of the couple’s domestic life,”14 mirrors are prominently framed features of mise-en-scène in Alice and Dan’s preparations to attend Anna’s show, “Strangers”: in a complicated visual composition, both Dan and Alice appear in his bathroom mirror, Alice self-conscious about his potential for treachery with Anna because she herself has been deceiving him all along, pretending to be a foundling. A mirror, yet to be mounted in Larry’s surgery, dominates mise-en-scène in the shot after Anna has slept with Larry and finally gains his signature on the divorce papers, per the Machiavellian deal he has struck with her. Intercut as a flashback to her confrontation with Dan after his own moment of conviction in the opera bathroom mirror, the immersive presence of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, a sonic mirror of their infidelity, merges their similarly corrosive insights about themselves and, inevitably, each other. Late in the film, on the eve of his trip with Alice to New York in celebration of their four years (mostly) together, Dan again confronts himself in a mirror—this time in a hotel elevator, having just pushed Alice further with possessive accusations than he had any right to do. He’s been wearing contacts, but he has just taken his “eyes out,” the euphemism for switching to glasses but the accented metaphor for default blindness to the consequences of the objectifying impulse. His relation to the elevator mirror is identical to the camera’s capture of his moment before the lavatory mirror at the opera while he was still with Anna. Regarding himself again, he now has learned what his hypocritical possessiveness has done to one relationship, though as he was hectoring Alice with his “eyes out,” he couldn’t see it, blind to all but his presumption of ownership. Chastened by giving himself a good look, he returns with his ill-gotten prop of a rose as peace-offering, only to find that he has done it again, driving Alice away as he’d driven Anna away.
As Dan had said to Anna during their confrontation, Larry is the only one who “understands” him; Dan acknowledges how “clever” Larry is: “I almost admire him.” To get “truth,” he will have to go to Larry, who describes himself as “a clinical observer of the human carnival.” The “truth” that Larry understands and Dan learns (without either of them changing) is that of the “caveman,” as Larry calls himself. The caveman is, above all, territorial. Survival, let alone profit, may be measured in whether one has gained or lost turf, property, goods. Larry is ambitious, having raised his status from working-class origins (still abundantly evident in his broad accent) to life as a physician—a dermatologist, an expert on skin, on surfaces. Yet when we see him at work the first time, what occupies his consciousness is not his patients (a distraction he attempts to deflect as quickly as possible) but fantasies of sexual mastery and conquest. For Larry, women are objects. Certainly this is displayed in his behavior in the online chat room with Dan, and in the private room with Alice at the club, where women are reduced to fetishized anatomy to be revealed in slow, ritualized tease. Ultimately, it is his use of the two women in the film that most clearly displays his objectifying, commodifying instincts. The night he returns from his conference in New York, he has a confession to make: he has had sex with a working girl at the Paramount Hotel. Although he understands Anna may attach consequences to this behavior, it has not prevented him from acting on his desire; he claims to be telling her the truth now because he loves her. The obvious objection would be to wonder why his love could not stop him from pursuing this unfaithful course, but this becomes a minor consideration when weighed against his appalling hypocrisy when Anna makes her own confession. He knows that she struggles with self-image and depression (she’s even been subject in past relationships to physical abuse); he briefly attempts a pep talk: “Anna, you’re making the mistake of your life. You’re leaving me because you think you don’t deserve happiness, but you do.” Then he stops himself, and as Dan is compelled to accuse both Anna and Alice, so Larry now accuses Anna, having finally understood the mystery of her redressing after her bath. He is as relentless as a detective with his detailed (and eventually comparative) questioning, and Anna finally asks, “Why is the sex so important?” Larry’s subsequent “caveman” explanation stands as much for Dan as himself (because he “understands” them both): Anna is contested territory between the men. And so Larry goads Anna into ever more humiliating revelations, until she has been reduced to attack, which in turn reduces Larry to adversarial, marauding caveman. For Larry, attack is truth, because life is predation. He spits at both Alice and Anna at the height of hostility with each, “Thank you. Thank you for your honesty.” The context both times is his having goaded them to reductive insults, justifying his own atavistic reversion. After Larry confesses to Dan that he’s slept with Alice, Dan asks what he and Larry always ask when confronted with evidence of having been cuckolded: did she enjoy it? Larry assures him that his objective was not “to give her a ‘nice time’” but to injure Dan: “A good fight is never clean.” Larry thinks of Anna and Alice as property to be vandalized.
Dan, who knows that Larry “understands” him, has a similar response to women (beneath the appearance of a sensibility of greater tenderness). When he first meets Alice, he takes the “waif” under his wing, assuming a proprietary paternalism that allows him instantly to claim her as “mine” to the cab driver, whose question about Alice reflects his own possessive understanding of love. “Is she yours?” may be an innocently Anglicized shorthand to ascertain relationship status, but it nonetheless yields troubling linguistic assumptions about power. In exploiting Alice’s life for his art, Dan aestheticizes Alice’s troubling past—it is likely easier for him to think of her hyper-sexualized experience as his fiction rather than her fact. What’s more, during his conversation in Anna’s loft while having his jacket photo taken, he translates this literary co-opting of Alice’s experience into erotic capital he can then use in betraying her by seducing Anna. (As it turns out, he’s not even a very good novelist; he’s only managed to find good “material.”) Dan grows tired of his possession of Alice, not on any enlightened political ground but in the way that materialism always breeds exhaustion and restless desire for something new, as a person might tire of furniture, or seek to trade in an old car on a newer model. He enters into an affair with Anna and, later, into fantasies online; he parts ways with Alice, drives Anna away, and eventually drives Alice away again. A life predicated upon acquisition, ownership, and accumulation is a life of craving for the next unpossessed object; the clearest evidence of this is that Dan understands best what a woman has meant to him only after he has “lost” her (sometimes more than once).
In that first, immediately flirtatious conversation with Anna at her studio, each is quick to accuse the other of “stealing” as a means of artistic creation. Having learned that the heroine of Dan’s book, The Aquarium, is based on a woman named “Alice,” Anna asks, “How does she feel about you stealing her life?” Dan corrects her: “Borrowing her life”—then he looks for his opportunity to deflect the accusation with an equivalence of Anna’s stealing people’s likenesses in her photographs; she parrots his own correction (“Borrowing”) to their mutual amusement. Yet in what sense (other than perhaps a royalty) is it possible to talk about a reciprocal exchange on “borrowing” a past or a likeness? In fact, Dan and Anna recognize in each other (as Dan and Larry recognize their shared “caveman” identities) the shared instinct for commodification of individuals in their art. The creative distance necessary to abstract the real into a formalized artifice makes, when done well, its own truth. Yet Dan and Anna exemplify the danger of exploration inherent in commodifying reality: while bonding over their artistic instinct, they fail truly to feel the gravity of the real woman they betray. After Alice arrives and shoos Dan away so she can confront Anna about the seduction she senses has taken place between Dan and Anna, Alice renders herself for Anna as object to be aestheticized. She is complicit in her own objecthood when, shedding tears by the window, she insists Anna photograph her. The moment seems genuinely to move and inspire Anna—but doesn’t keep her from sleeping with Dan. Later, at the opening to Anna’s exhibition, “Strangers,” long before she learns he is the artist’s boyfriend, Alice deconstructs Anna’s show for Larry. Those “who appreciate ‘art,’” she says, “say it’s beautiful because that’s what they want to see. […T]he people in the photos are sad and alone, but the pictures make the world seem beautiful. So the exhibition is ‘reassuring,’ which makes it a lie, and everyone loves a big, fat lie.”
Alice would know, of course. Her identity from first to last in Closer is a construction, a “big, fat lie” for people to love. In nearly every episode of the film, she has “made herself over”—especially her hair, but also clothes, make-up, even body language. Wearing a ridiculous platinum wig in the scene with Larry at the strip club does not prevent her from wearing a longer, blonder wig at the club when Dan subsequently tracks her down. These “makeovers” are a part of her re-creative “armor,” as Larry calls it when referring to the aliases the girls at the strip club adopt. All these surface efforts of re-creation are intended to guard against genuine commitment and avoid “shame” about self-commodification. The characters in Closer lie with such frequency and alacrity that, as observers, we begin to suspect that anything they say is as likely to be a lie for unknown, ulterior motives as it is to be the truth. Which of the sparse “facts” Alice tells Dan at their first meeting is true? Is it really Anna’s “birthday” the afternoon she and Larry accidentally meet at the Aquarium? Does anyone ever really love anyone, just because they claim to do so? This is Alice’s condemnation of Dan, just before erasing him from her life: “Where is this ‘love?’ I can’t see it, I can’t touch it, I can’t feel it. I can hear it; I can hear some words, but I can’t do anything with your easy words.” Who is “Alice,” however, to be making such a self-righteous claim? There is no bigger, fatter liar in Closer than “Alice Ayres,” with her continual, four-year deception.
At the opening of a portrait exhibition entitled “Strangers” (which could have been the title of Nichols’ film, instead of the ironic Closer), two masters of manipulative autonomy meet. Larry (Clive Owen) and Alice (Natalie Portman) see the objectifying nature of the world better than their romantic partners, affording them control of their relationships. This remains their consolation in the inevitable collapse of the illusion of love, which cannot coexist with manipulation. The ambiguously exploitative image of Alice on the wall recalls a similarly displayed image of Bobbie (Ann-Margret) in Carnal Knowledge, the film from early in Nichols’ career to which Closer so closely corresponds.
In The Graduate, Buck Henry and Nichols set up as the centerpiece of their film an extraordinary ten-minute scene at the Taft Hotel in which, after half a summer of joyless erotic congress, Benjamin insists to Mrs. Robinson that they legitimize their relationship via “conversation.” Implicit is the assumption that the shared self-revelation of dialogue begets meaning, and this is borne out (although hardly as Benjamin in his naivety had intended) in their ensuing exchange. The conversation at the heart of The Graduate is the most traditionally dramatic episode of the film: two characters alone together, revealing themselves to each other (and us) via their words, until they can no longer stand it. “Let’s not talk at all” is Benjamin’s profoundly disillusioned summary of what the conversation has taught him; he longs to retreat back into illusion, and thus the second half of the film is the result, with its pretty, fantasy images of boy-girl romance and rescue. Closer, originally a stage play, is necessarily stocked with such dysfunctional conversations, yet one in particular, which Lane calls “the core of the picture,”15 creates an interesting study in contrasts between two masters of manipulative objectification: the strip-club conversation between Larry and Alice, during which, outraged by Alice’s ironical, performed lines, Larry fumes, “I’m trying to have a conversation here!” The ironies of this scene are as thick with murk as the lighting and sound systems of the club. Two people speak the truth past each other, revealing nothing. In Closer’s “examination of the way modern people talk their way through and around treachery—simultaneously seeking and sabotaging intimacy,”16 the club scene verbalizes all the desires and defenses of these brutal, brutalized people. Not even Anna and Larry’s sordid, blue confessions of infidelity to one another upon his return from his conference in New York have the same multi-dimensional effect: their break-up scene is designed for maximum injury; the club scene’s injuries somehow manage to reveal (to us, though not to each other) the yearning beneath the savagery. “The characters in “Closer” don’t wound each other with deceit, like most couples do,” writes Sean Smith. “They brutalize their lovers with truth.”17 Yet, as Dennis Lim points out, “Brute honesty is simply the purest form of emotional deceit.”18 It’s only much, much later, as she returns to her native country, that we know “Alice” has stripped herself bare before Larry at the club—offering him that most totemic of her possessions, her true identity, confident that he can’t possibly believe her.
There are layers within layers of deception in their situation in the “Paradise Suite,” one of eight such identical private performance rooms in the club. Underlying all, of course, is Alice’s identity as “Alice,” eventually revealed by the film’s denouement to be a construction. There is also, on her side, the performed fiction of her identity as a “private dancer,” an even more blatant complicity in self-commodification than her yielding herself as “slut” to Dan’s pen or as “sad” to Anna’s camera. She strikes a series of poses for Larry in the “Paradise Suite,” some at his direction, others her exceedingly rote, professional contortions. A further layering of deception has its source within Larry: it is never clear whether, in pursuing her within and beyond the “Paradise Suite,” he feels any genuine attraction to her at all, or whether he has only pursued her, as he claims to Dan, as a means to further vengeance (“It’s not a war,” Alice claims at one point during their conversation, and Larry laughs). All Larry’s protestations of love and of desire to see her may only be attempts to establish feigned intimacy; ironically, the usual reason a man performs emotional connection as a deceptive act is as a means to the end of sexual gratification, an abstracting of the woman as sex-object. Larry’s deception, however, may be even more abstract: the sex act itself may not be the point, either, but rather merely an act of aggression against another person (Dan) not even present. This is why Alice seems so hurt when Dan reveals at the end that Larry has used her not as a sex object (which, after all, she herself has fostered as a stripper and which thus affords her the illusion of power) but instead as a revenge object, denying her even the illusion of control. “Why did he tell you?” she asks. “How could he?” Given that she is in the midst of leaving Dan, there should be more than enough emotional upheaval for her to process. That she lingers over this bombshell suggests how deeply Larry has deceived her and she has deceived herself about the “power” she possesses. Her only trump card is to rely upon the power she holds over them all concerning her identity: she is inviolable because she is unknowable.
Larry begins the Paradise Suite conversation with a ridiculously glib utterance: “I love you,” to which Alice responds precisely as she would to an erotic compliment, or to cash: with a crisp, professional “Thank you.” She collects his money, words, and gaze as tokens of her assumed control over her objecthood; she understands herself to be in charge, and she maintains the further “security” of the cameras that watch and restrain client behavior. Larry becomes more heated—or at least performs the role of the overheated male—when attempting to approach the “reality” of Alice rather than the “performance” of the private dancer. At one point, she asks him his profession (though she in fact reveals later that she already knows he’s a dermatologist), and he seizes on this as evidence of a non-professional curiosity about him: “It’s a chink in your armor,” he says, referring to the dancers’ inevitable desire to remain anonymous to fend off unwanted suitors beyond work. “I’m not wearing armor,” she protests, twisting it towards a provocation she can control, considering how little she actually is wearing. “Yes you are,” he insists, and he focuses upon her stage name, “Jane,” as evidence to support his supposition. When she avows that Jane is her real name, the brokenness of the commodified environment in which they encounter each other is so profound that he can parry, with confidence, “We both know it isn’t.” Neither knows a thing, in actuality, about the other, because the “relationship” has been forged in the corrosive mutual mistrust of power.
The enormous outlay of cash that changes hands cannot buy him any other name, though we understand by film’s end that he has paid repeatedly for a truth he cannot or will not believe (or perhaps has only pretended to care about to begin with). Later, he amends his initial protestation of love to something that, even in hindsight and at face value, we can believe: “I love everything about you that hurts.” What he intends here is an equation of their powerlessness, the two jilted lovers of Anna and Dan. Larry can appreciate when people hurt. However, since Alice refuses to be jilted (“I’m the one who leaves,” she tells Dan, and does so the instant his back is turned), she is constitutionally incapable of thanking Larry for this particular compliment. But just as she hides in plain sight behind her real name, this may be the closest Larry comes to revealing himself: he responds to the suffering of others; it is how he gets what he wants. The important differences between Benjamin’s conversation with Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate and the conversation Larry claims he is “trying” to have with Alice is that Benjamin actually wants—however misguided—to establish a justifying intimacy with Mrs. Robinson, and the conversation in the Taft Hotel room literally reveals all about what they have been doing together all summer. Neither Larry nor Alice genuinely seeks contact in Closer, and so it is no surprise that all remains concealed between them. The most important parallel between these two great set-piece conversations at opposite ends of Nichols’ long Hollywood career is that both establish clearly that when the conditions for intimacy are absent, replaced by commodifying barter and manipulative grasping for control, all that can result from such a conversation is frustration and silence. “Let’s not talk at all,” a wounded Benjamin mutters as postscript, and in Closer, Larry commands Alice to perform a silent striptease, his money having bought him the illusion of control.
Marber’s title has obvious ironies, given the chilly atmosphere of the narrative’s failed relationships and emotional frigidity (“You’re cold,” Larry pronounces upon Alice in the Paradise Suite; “You’re all cold at heart”—but it is a diagnosis that as easily fits the caveman’s mentality of love as war). The comparative form of the word “closer,” however, is left ambiguously vague: closer than what, or to what? Marber attributes the title to an intended allusion: the British band Joy Division’s 1980 album, awash in morbid assumptions of doomed love.19 Within the context of the film, the title projects the paradox of wearing metaphorical “armor” while at the same time seeking contact. Alice is thus the perfect embodiment of the title’s ironies. At once, she projects an image of total fidelity (“I would have loved you forever”) and utter alienation (she has never revealed her name, most basic tenet of identity). Even her “forever” declaration comes freighted by the conditional tense—hardly an uncompromised commitment. Her commitment is always and only to the inviolability of herself, maintained through concealment of herself, even at her most naked (in the strip club, stating her real name). Perhaps this commitment to self-concealment and re-packaging of identity is why she moves from stripper to food service and back again: each is a job she is more likely to be able to negotiate off the books, avoiding issues of identity, than if she’d dedicated herself to a job with the promise of future advancement. Alice does not believe in future advancement, only knee-jerk rebooting of identity.
It is possible to understand all the relationships in Closer as invitations to self-reflection. Dan has acknowledged this when he says that Larry “understands” him, but he has also demonstrated it when, in looking himself in the eye while in the lavatory at the opera house, what he sees reflected there are Anna’s infidelities. It’s why Nichols has saturated the film with Mozart’s Così fan tutte: inconstancy is in the air these people breathe, and in the hermeticism of their shared chamber drama, the air is simply recirculated among them until it has poisoned them all. Dan and Alice in particular are attracted to Mozart’s opera buffo: it’s as likely to enter a scene diegetically, because the characters have actively sought to listen to it, as non-diegetically, because Nichols has selected it for its choric commentary on the characters from beyond the world of the film. Like “The Blower’s Daughter,” used non-diegetically to bookend the film, Così fan tutte is employed to pervasive, compulsive effect, like the lovers’ treachery and fear of treachery. Alice takes one look at Dan after his shoot with Anna and knows she had better listen carefully to what they say to each other; her own foundational lie, perpetuated for four years, fine-tunes her ear to detect false notes in others’ voices. Anna and Dan instantly see the exploitative impulse of the artist in one another; Anna and Larry intuitively detect the strangeness in each other’s choice to bathe late at night and then dress again. With all the powerful insight each of them brings to the subjects of deception and infidelity, it’s a wonder that they are so often vulnerable. Ultimately, the two more traditionally privileged individuals, Dan and Anna, are least resilient. Their deceptions are of the heart, deceiving others to be together, and their greatest deception is of themselves: that they can be at peace together, each knowing what they were capable of once. Larry and Alice are more accomplished at this game of emotional survival than either Dan or Anna; in the Paradise Suite, with an admiration for Alice he doesn’t even attempt to conceal, Larry says, “You’re strong.” What more admirable quality for a caveman to contemplate? Strength is Larry’s chief characteristic as well, though others might more likely perceive it as ruthlessness or savagery. “Without forgiveness, we’re savages,” Larry tells Dan when they talk about their women at Larry’s surgery, but after he “prescribes” Alice for Dan, he poisons Dan with the revelation of having slept with Alice, too. Undercutting his earlier claim about forgiveness and his own civility, Larry says, “I’m just not big enough to forgive you.” Strength is his weakness: he has to win. Larry lays claim compulsively to his inner caveman. He sleeps peacefully at film’s end because he has come to terms with the limitations of love, settling instead for manipulative possession. He owns them all: Anna, despite his abuse, continues to share his marriage bed; he stuns Alice with his ability to manipulate her into the revenge sex she’s already announced to him, in the Paradise Suite, will never happen; and Dan is ruined for love, having lost both women he thought he could have and hold. With each of the three, Larry assumes a very personal, possessive control, and the compulsion to do so is, ironically, most acute in relation to Dan. Responding to what he’s read in the body language between Anna and Dan the night of her exhibit opening, he allows the learned refinement of his educated accent to slip back to its most antagonistic blue-collar roots: “I could ‘ave ‘im. […] If it came to it, in a scrap, I could ‘ave ‘im.” As in the cabbie’s inquiring of Dan, “Is she yours?” when driving Alice to the hospital, Marber finds embedded within the idiomatic absurdity of Larry’s non sequitur claim the etymological truth: a bald statement of possessive dominion, predicated in atavistic strength, power, caveman savagery.
It isn’t surprising that Nichols and Marber, having found the victor in the “war” these four participants have waged, do not linger long on Larry’s peaceful slumber at the end: there is no need to because Larry is everywhere: he “has” them all. He coerces Anna to become his “whore,” and though she has the signed divorce papers to show for it, she can see Dan’s love “draining out” of him as if from a wound. Disgusted by her, he says, “All I can see is him all over you.” After he has lost Alice, Dan again can see only Larry: “he wanted this to happen.” Nichols and Marber do not need Larry to be active in the epilogue, because his caveman strength has set in motion the self-inflicted ruin of all the other participants. This is an instinct Marber carries over from the stage play: Larry is on stage just long enough in the final scene so that he can make a very obvious exit. Larry is not so unambiguously the “victor” in the play as he is in the film, however: he and Anna are not together, his surgery and subsequent romantic relationship have failed, and he expects not to have long-term love in his future. While he and Anna share a marriage bed in the concluding montage of Nichols’ version, the doom is palpable. Acknowledging Closer’s irony, A. O. Scott observes, “in the end, its plot conforms to the basic rules of comedy without offering much in the way of consolation.”20 The biggest change in the ending involves Alice, who in the play has died in another street-crossing accident, this time back in the U.S.; Dan has been notified (and thus learns her real name) because his address remains among her effects. This creates a more sentimentalized vision of Alice/Jane in the play version, providing evidence of her retained flame for Dan; it also recasts the opening “accident” in the new light of a second, identical accident, suggesting that what appeared to be a careless act may have been premeditation—if not the first time, then perhaps the second. Returning via Nichols’ film to a renewed exploration of the characters, Marber uncovers a second interpretation of their fates. Of these, clearly the most radically transformed from the play’s conclusion is Alice, who is buoyantly, defiantly alive in the film’s last shot, and with no implied residue of sentimental attachment to Dan. Although hurt by men before London, and hurt by at least two men in London, she remains sovereign in the hoarded truth of herself, a vision in slow motion of youthful strength and beauty. What lingers, however, is the wistfulness (and, perhaps, sincerity) of her question, when Dan announces he’s breaking up with her to be with Anna, “Why isn’t love enough?”
Her question reveals Alice in all her ambiguous and ambivalent complexity: a passionate, strong woman willing to commit years of her life to a relationship without ever, in her vulnerable terror of weakness, taking off the “armor” of an instinctively improvised name. In a narrative in which everyone sees the duplicity in others by having lived so long and contemplated so intimately one’s own duplicity, her question haunts her. Dan’s infidelity condemns her own deceptions. She may not know the answer to the question, but she knows the truth of what has provoked it. Her tragedy, whether she lives (as in the film) or dies (as in the play) is most profoundly located in the self-knowledge that either way, she is emotionally dead: her absolute need to control all contact makes contact impossible. She is “Alice” because she has known all along “love” was not enough, and therefore she can never be Jane with someone else.
Dan claims a different premise for what civilizes us than Larry’s claim of “forgiveness.” In his final, fatal missteps of a self-fulfilling doomed relationship with Alice, Dan claims that without the truth, “we’re animals.” Truth is the redeeming possibility within reification—one’s awareness of complicit surrender to systems of destructive objecthood. In his magnum opus, Angels in America, Nichols offered us characters stuck in reified stasis like Roy and Joe and others (Prior, Harper, Hannah, Belize) capable of transformation because they encounter not one or the other but both of these civilizing influences Larry and Dan articulate. Belize is the film’s most profound example of this civility—able to express forgiveness even as he continues to nurse grudges—and Prior manifests this same civility in his willingness to reclaim Louis as a friend despite the enormity of the wrong Louis has done him. What Angels prophesies is emergent kindness, an expanded definition of “citizens.” As in Carnal Knowledge, Nichols’ earlier chamber drama on the alienating destruction wrought by objectification, reified truths are everywhere in evidence in Closer, but the principals are too fragile or threatened to act in anything but savage, isolating self-defense. The truth, co-opted for possessive manipulation, is at best half-truth, and nowhere near love. Larry’s manipulative power comes in using the truth to destroy. Anna, Alice, and Dan all prove capable of breathtaking cruelty and manipulative abuse, even if it is not quite as close to the surface in any of them as it is in caveman Larry. Dan and Alice may appear, in their rekindled romance, to have combined the civilizing agents of truth and forgiveness, but in their final hour together, what they have used to mend their brokenness is illusion: their long-nurtured desire to mythologize (and thus distort out of recognizable correspondence to the realities they fear) their romance of the “Waif” and the “Knight” (words Alice uses in the opening scene of the play21 and film). The story they tell each other in their oft-rehearsed, meet-cute catechism seeks to cover the badly concealed brittleness of their connection, in which he has shut her out of his past (the burial of his father) almost as completely as he’s been shut out of hers. They have found each other to shelter together a while from the storm, full of the knowledge that love is not enough. They only have fantasy to impose as an alternative to facing their fears—the fantasy of the fated collision of strangers. (And when the fantasy of “Alice” ends, it’s “Welcome back, Miss Jones.”) Like Larry, Alice understands another, equally bankrupt alternative: autonomous control. If Larry can “‘ave” Dan, so can she; the reprise of “The Blower’s Daughter” at film’s end assures us that she does. Her image as she strides through Times Square bespeaks self-possession. She has made herself over yet again. It will have to do.