18

Figuratively Speaking

FAVORITE STUDENT QUESTION: is that a symbol?

Favorite instructor answer: what do you think?

It might not be a symbol, though. Consider metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, or any of a dozen other figures of speech and action. Plenty of options that are not precisely symbols. Like any literary form, film makes abundant use of our capacity for figurative thinking. We don’t so much understand symbols and metaphors as apprehend them, and in a medium where they’re gone in a heartbeat, apprehension is plenty. So what do we make of those figurative things as they go whizzing across our retinas?

We talked about images some little time ago and concluded, among other things, that movies are, give or take, a hundred and twenty minutes of images. Thousands of images, not that all of them implant themselves in our memories. Our question here, though, is different: how do those images become something more, begin to stand for something larger than themselves? To understand that process, we should begin with an example or three.

In The Lion in Winter, we might just notice a candle or two. Big whoop, right? It’s 1183 and Edison is a few years away; the only light source is fire in one form or another—fireplace, torch, sun, candle. True enough, but there are candles and then there are candles. The ones I’m talking about get loving attention from the camera. For instance, in the fireplace scene between Henry and Eleanor that we examined earlier, there is a table in the foreground with three items. The two that matter to us at the moment are a very large candle and an hourglass. In the scene that immediately precedes it, Alais is lighting candles in a holder, and the one that gets our attention has numbered rings on it, clearly a way of marking off time. The candles Alais tends to, like the candle and hourglass, remind us of the importance of time even in societies before it rested on wrists or resided on phones. That is the image portion of the program. Since this is a movie about the movement of time toward death, the candles are about a good deal more than shedding light. Time is running out; their time is limited; Eleanor’s time of freedom is nearly over; Alais’s time as Henry’s favorite paramour may be running out. For those who know their history, so is Henry’s own time, destined as he is to fall in battle with those very sons he abuses in the film. So many possibilities. What we make of those possibilities, which of them we choose or ignore, is largely up to us. The film’s creators have brought the images into being and, without a doubt, given hints about what we might understand them to mean, but viewers become the final arbiters as to their significance.

Sometimes, the images are so evident that we might almost wish to ignore them, their suggested meanings a little too suggestive. But we can’t. In Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s sexually obsessed Alvy has a pronounced tendency to run into Diane Keaton’s Annie with lengthy objects—the handle of a tennis racquet on their first meeting, a boat oar when they’re trying to corral lobsters in the seaside cottage—that can only be described as phallic. This in a movie where almost the first substantive scene invokes Freud. Well, what do you make of that trope? And try not to blush.

While we’re on the subject of blush-worthy moments, let me take you back through the ages, far back in film history, to the Time Before Sex. Okay, so there never was a time before sex. Romance and sex were of considerable interest almost from the moment the Lumière brothers filmed the workers leaving the factory. And for a little while in the late silent and early talkie era, things got rather, shall we say, heated on movie screens. And a number of off-screen sex scandals gave Hollywood an even worse reputation than it already had in much of this country. But then voices for decency and oppression got loud, and a censor’s office was formed with President Harding’s postmaster general, Will H. Hays, as its head. In truth, Hays gets a lot of unfair blame. He was in charge for only a few years before giving way to the much more inflexible Joseph Breen, but the Motion Picture Production Code was forever known as the Hays Code and the enforcement arm the Hays Office.

And why do we care? Because that office, and the a priori censorship of film it represented, was responsible for more figurative invention than any other single factor in the history of American film. In The Maltese Falcon, it is clear at one point that something is about to happen between Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy. We see her seated before a window at night and him bending over to kiss her. The next thing we see is daylight streaming through the same window and the curtains blowing in. I distinctly recall teaching this movie in the 1980s and having to explain to students what the curtains meant. Having come of film-watching age after 1966, their idea of what sex looked like in the movies was, predictably, sex. But for roughly thirty years prior to that date, it had not looked like that. The Production Code forbade depictions of nudity and sex, among other things deemed offensive such as getting away with crime or bleeding after being shot, so filmmakers found workarounds. Some realities couldn’t be worked around, of course. Like double beds. Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man, who are recently married, by the way, sleep in separate twin beds. Endless heavy drinking and smoking and massive hangovers were no problem for the censors, but married persons sharing a bed, even for purposes of mere sleeping, no way. Unsurprisingly, both the folks making the movies and the ones watching them knew better, just as they knew that, as long as there are men and women in the world (it took a little longer for other pairings to be accepted), there was going to be both hanky and panky from time to time. It just couldn’t be shown. So lots of other things were shown that, not sex in themselves, nevertheless encoded the act of coitus. Those curtains were not the only ones that ever fluttered in the breeze. The cliché we all know, even if we’re not sure where we saw it, is waves breaking on the beach. That one occurs most famously in From Here to Eternity (1953), where Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr) and Sergeant Milton Warden (Burt Lancaster) roll on the beach, kissing, with a wave breaking over them; they run up the beach, go horizontal and clinching again, we see another wave, and she says, “Nobody ever kissed me the way you do.” That’s some kiss, even without the postcoital dreamy eyes and tone. But it has those, too. For sheer variety, Tony Richardson employed the sexiest meal ever eaten in Tom Jones (1964) between Tom (Albert Finney) and Mrs. Waters (Joyce Redman), as they leer and slurp and slaver over their tavern meal and each other. For utter lack of subtlety, however, the champion has to be fireworks, employed by Hitchcock in To Catch a Thief (1955) when he wants to suggest what has gone on between John Robie (Cary Grant) and Frances Stevens (Grace Kelly). That’s suggestive, all right. My absolute favorite comes at the very end of North by Northwest. In one of the great miracles, Hitchcock (again) gets Roger Thornhill (Grant, again) and Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) down from the face of Mount Rushmore, where they are clinging for dear life. We cut seamlessly from Roger telling Eve to hang on and come up to him on the mountain to his same face saying, “Come along, Mrs. Thornhill,” as he pulls her up into a sleeping berth on the Twentieth Century Limited, and then cut again to the train roaring into the tunnel. Now that’s subtle. Of course, this was at the end of the Production Code era, and Hitch is pushing the envelope.

That same year, 1959, saw Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder deal with rape and murder, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer, whose plot turns on paying for homosexual encounters. Curiously, those films received their certificates of approval after demanded cuts, but it was the one that didn’t that hit the system hardest. The Production Code was dealt a hard blow in that very year by, of all things, Some Like It Hot, a saucy but hardly debauched comedy about two musicians who cross-dress to hide from the mob after witnessing a massacre. The Hays Office denied it a certificate of approval and crowds turned out in massive numbers anyway. Come on! Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe? Morality, shmorality. The death knell finally came in 1966 with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which dealt frankly with sexual matters and featured an extended scene of Vanessa Redgrave topless. It, too, found a large and ready audience. That it also featured youth culture and Carnaby Street fashion and the Yardbirds didn’t hurt, unless you were the morality police. In any case, by the time my students got to me in 1986 or so, all that censorship noise was ancient history, and they had no idea how to decode old movies.

It needs to be said that not all figuration was about sex and gender topics. Film uses metaphor and symbol and all the rest about as much as any other literary art. Rain, for instance, often tells us something more than that it is wet outside. That poster of George Valentin that has found its way into the gutter in The Artist, for instance, would carry a different meaning were it not lying in a puddle with rain falling. The desolation is greater as filmed. Group dining scenes in My Dinner with Andre or Babette’s Feast or The Dead carry the same implication of communion either observed or violated that they do in literary works; indeed, John Huston’s film exquisitely captures James Joyce’s original meaning in that last example. And how do movies achieve figurative meaning? By and large, much the same way as other artistic media. We begin with images, actions, conditions. A poster on the street in the rain. A group of old friends and acquaintances around a dining table. From there, it’s largely a matter of what viewers make of the images presented—and how the director and cinematographer present them. Does the camera linger on the image? Zoom in to the exclusion of all else? Touch passingly? How does the lighting affect the image? The music behind it? Some elements are common to novels and poems and plays, but others are specific to cinema; you can duplicate them nowhere else.

Here’s one such. It’s a violin. Floating in a river. Not something you see every day, to be sure. On the other hand, if you are watching Roland Joffé’s masterful The Mission (1986), there it is, plucked out of the water by a small brown hand, which in turn is attached to a naked Guaraní girl. She carries it over to a waiting dugout canoe, which is full of other naked Guaraní children, and they begin paddling upriver, farther back into the rain forest. Sounds almost paradisal, doesn’t it? Except that this is no Eden. It’s a burned-out mission, the site of a recent massacre of Indians and priests by the combined forces of the Church and moneyed, slave-holding interests during the heyday of Spanish and Portuguese exploitation of the Amazonian borderlands, circa 1758. The movie is a wonder—screenplay by playwright Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons, Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia), possibly the best score Ennio Morricone ever composed, terrific performances by Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro—and it may be the best movie no one has ever seen. Despite winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Oscar for cinematography, the film barely made back its costs. The details above will inform you that it is tough sledding, yet that should not keep away anyone with a genuine interest in the art of the movies. But back to our fiddle. The image of the floating violin and its rescue is just that, an image. We bring the knowledge necessary to give it meaning, as Bolt and Joffé know we will. We know, for instance, that the movie opens with the previous priest, who had tried and failed to convert the Guaraní, floating over Iguazu Falls tied to a cross, that Father Gabriel (Irons) risked terrible dangers getting to the mission and converting the natives; that he was accepted, loved, worshipped, even; and that the violin is a talisman of this murdered priest that the children are taking upstream, not down over the falls, and into their world. Watched in isolation, the scene tells us very little except that something very bad happened in this place. In context, it is incredibly rich in meaning.

There is a special category of figuration in film that has to do with characters and the objects associated with them. Example? Sure, try this one on for size—here are four items, from which you will name the character: tight coat, baggy pants, derby hat, and cane. What’s that? You can’t come up with a name? Of course you can’t, because there isn’t one. But if you’re over a certain age (I’m guessing about eleven), even if you have never seen a film in black and white, much less without sound, you can identify those objects as belonging to—and defining—Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. We could have added a couple more talismans to his makeup, chiefly the outsize shoes and the little mustache, but those would make it too easy. He sprang, in a sense, fully formed onto the silver screen in Mack Sennett’s 1914 Keystone comedy, Kid Auto Races at Venice, and remained intact, and silent, through dozens of short films and brilliant features up through the 1936 partial talkie, Modern Times. He stole audiences’ hearts and, more often than not, won the girl, in such immortal features as The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928), and City Lights (1931), although notably in the film that names the character, 1915’s The Tramp, he repeatedly saves the girl only to lose out to her fiancé. Part of his beauty as a character has always been that he does not invariably win.

Figure 13. City Lights—the Tramp discovers that the Flower Girl is blind. City Lights © Roy Exports S.A.S. Scan Courtesy Cineteca di Bologna.

Of course, those four elements do more than act to identify the character; they define him.

Q: Here’s a question that may seem stupid, but we need to ask it: how do you know if someone’s a cowboy?

A: It’s not the cow. He has a horse.

Q: (hopefully slightly less stupid) How do you know what sort of cowboy he is?

A: What he’s wearing?

Yes, that second answer may be in the form of a question, but it is an answer. Perhaps no movie genre is more shot through with codes than the Western. Good guys wear white hats, bad guys wear black hats, and so on. Or at least they did when Tom Mix was the good guy. Things got a little muddled later on, but the basic principles allowed and even caused that muddling.

I’m more interested in specific cowboys in specific movies. And one cowboy in particular. Shane. Alan Ladd’s title character in the 1953 classic Western is defined by his accoutrements—and he is splendidly accoutered. Shane is a gunslinging dandy: fringed buckskin jacket and holster with silver rosettes on the belt, silver-plated, pearl-handled revolver. Only his hat, which is almost white, shows any appreciable wear.

Jack Wilson, his main adversary, wears a black hat. Seem accidental to you? Me neither.

The first of the truly great gangster films is Mervyn LeRoy’s 1931 Little Caesar, the vehicle that not only made a star of Edward G. Robinson but saddled him with the mannerisms that impressionists would take to the bank for decades. Robinson’s Rico sneers for much of the film and speaks in a sort of slide, where “Yeah” is spoken as “Myyeah,” usually followed by a rising “see.” You didn’t have to be Rich Little to do a takeoff of Robinson as hoodlum, although Little did him very well. So did seventh graders in every schoolyard in North America. LeRoy has a tough job in the movie, trying to depict Rico as truly dangerous not in a way that would be worthy of our respect. He’s violent, all right, but there’s something slightly effete about him. Maybe more than slightly. He gets upset by the prospect of his best pal leaving the gang the way most people do at losing a lover; the feeling is entirely one-way. And then there’s his grooming habits. He is identified by two items in particular. The first, his pistol, makes sense; the guy’s a gangster, after all. The other one? A comb. It gets worse: he uses the comb far more than the gun. He’s a dandy all around—snappy dresser, very concerned with appearance, good grooming—as befits someone hoping to rise in station, even if that station is as a lowlife. But the combing is a reflex in moments of stress and suggests an unmasculine (for circa 1931) obsession. The film overtly references the comb in its intertitles (those title cards with text that show up in the midst of old films), so it appears that LeRoy was attempting to lessen the peril or to ridicule the mob. That’s mostly speculation, although the homoerotic subtext seems pretty clear. What is abundantly clear is that W. R. Burnett, who wrote the book on which the movie is based, was very unhappy with the change. He had written Rico as resolutely interested in girls and very masculine. To the extent that the celluloid character is less than that, Burnett felt his intentions were violated. The writer may have been annoyed, but audiences were thrilled. Even fifty years on, my students laughed at Rico’s mannerisms even as they agreed that the movie is pretty taut otherwise. He’s dangerous, but he’s also a little foolish and conceited, not quite Al Capone material.

Now then, for the truly dangerous. How about a flat-topped Stetson that looks like it’s been through the wars? Nothing? Well, it doesn’t add much. How about heavy stubble or a small beard? Still not enough. A well-chewed cigarillo that looks as bad as the hat? That narrows the field, but it remains pretty wide. Okay, what about a poncho? Now we’re talking. That ensemble describes one character. Or three, since he’s in that many films. He has no name, but he might respond to a fistful of dollars. In fact, that’s where we met him, this Man with No Name, in the first of Sergio Leone’s so-called Dollars Trilogy. He’s a pretty ragged character—nothing like the traditional cowboy hero, as far as you can get from Alan Ladd’s Shane as it is possible to be. In fact, I would describe him as the anti-Shane. They’re both, in the peculiar subgenre of the Western, avenging angels, although our guy is hard to recognize as an angel. No fringed buckskin for him. No well-scrubbed look. His Colt Peacemaker and holster look like they’ve been used. A lot. Alan Ladd’s look brand-new. As a point of information, Eastwood brought his boots, gun, and hat from his Rawhide days, when he had been a lot more well-scrubbed himself. He rides into town not on a sparkling steed but on a mule (okay, it’s really a horse, but it’s supposed to be a mule; casting issues, one supposes). And the poncho and shearling vest underneath look, um, lived in. Lived in, in fact, by the man who’s wearing them.

Figure 14. Not the Little Tramp. Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. Courtesy of Getty Images/MGM.

Now, none of those items is merely a stage property or an emblem. They’re not just window dressing. Rather, they are called into action. The revolver, obviously, plays a starring role in numerous action scenes. It is rarely fired just once. The poncho hides a multitude of sins. Our guy is not above shooting someone from inside it, the gun never showing. In A Few Dollars More, it will conceal a heavy metal breastplate that stops the villain’s rifle bullets and provides the Man with No Name with the advantage he always seeks. But that advantage is never overwhelming power. It’s surprise, anxiety, doubt, laughter, things that come out of hiding, out of the poncho. The little cigar offers any number of uses. The MwNN conducts lots of screen business with it, taking it out of his mouth and sometimes spitting an invisible fleck of tobacco from his tongue while letting a point sink in or waiting for an opponent to get nervous. It can suggest the passage of time, for it is almost always half-smoked. It lights a fuse or two when explosions are called for. It can attract or distract attention, as needed. It is perhaps the deadliest cigar in movie history. The hat, too, serves a host of cinematic functions, from keeping the sun off to taking a bullet aimed at its owner (this does not make said owner happy). The hat, moreover, tells a story of its wearer and the rough living behind its look. Taken together, this is one of the great ensembles, almost a character in its own right. We have only to see it from behind to know the man inside. What Leone comes up with launches the look of a thousand unorthodox “heroes.” Think Popeye Doyle. Think Rambo. Different looks, same concept.

In fact, we only have to make a few changes to wind up somewhere else entirely. Lose the cigarillo. Swap hat styles for a fedora. Drop the poncho in favor of a much-worn leather jacket and some equally abused lace-up work boots. Most important, make the sidearm less explosive, something like, oh, maybe a bullwhip. You knew we were going there, didn’t you? The world had already discovered in 1977 that cowboys transfer from horse operas to their space cousins and that Harrison Ford makes a more than passable space cowboy when the original Star Wars took us to that galaxy far, far away—and took ours by storm. Seriously, how many spaceship captains wear their gun that low on their leg, gunslinger-style? What no one could have guessed is how well they would transfer to the world of archaeology just four years later when Indiana Jones made his debut.

Images are everything, as we said earlier. They also tell us things. But what if the image is not one the character actually possesses? What if it is a desert or a mountain or a river? Or maybe the sun? After all, can anyone own the sun? Didn’t think so. During one rural interlude in Mr. Turner, we watch Turner climb a ridge overlooking the sea. In the distance a lonely, abandoned structure occupies a promontory, but he never looks up at it. As he moves beyond the camera and begins his downhill walk, a line of wild horses climbs up toward the ridgeline from behind him, but he shows no awareness. His attention is all on the sea. Even if we haven’t come to the film knowing Turner as a painter almost exclusively of seascapes, the action and the testimony (sometimes uncomplimentary) of other characters tells us so. But here is concrete evidence. Neither the building nor the horses—perfect subjects for paintings in other hands—hold any magic for the sea-obsessed Turner. Instead, it is the sea and the sun that fascinate. At the beginning of the scene, the low sun is shining through clouds to form an indistinct white glow familiar to anyone who has ever seen one of his works. He crosses the sun in a sort of top-of-the-world silhouette: this is his space, his setting. The scene’s big payoff is that same white sun, now reflected off the water, forming a brilliant white line in the center of the screen in exactly the way the young John Ruskin (Joshua McGuire) comments on in another scene as being a defining feature of the paintings. As the camera travels the length of the light from its beginning to its end at the shore, it leads us to Turner, positioned directly in line with it and drawing it in his sketchbook. The scene then ends with Turner, again on top of the ridge, surveying the last light of evening, the sun now sunk behind the watery horizon. Throughout, the scene plays off a lone woodwind—oboe or alto sax—in a sad, slightly atonal melody against the prevailing strings, adding to the sense of aloneness and even movement against the general flow that characterizes Turner’s life and work. The image of the solitary Turner silhouetted against a low sun appears in the very first scene and recurs periodically throughout the movie. Each time it appears, as here, we are reminded of Turner’s status as a permanent outsider; this scene also emphasizes both his genius and its dazzling origin. You could make a case that Turner’s talisman is his easel or his brush, but he is the artist who almost always places the sun or some equivalent at the very center of his paintings, no matter how dark and turbulent otherwise. No, our great artist here is a creature of the sun.

As every fashionista knows, accessories make all the difference. And sometimes not only the objects but how they are employed. Let us consider two drives to town. From the same story. Nothing really much going on, just a couple of guys making their way from Long Island to Manhattan. Could be anyone. Except that it’s Jay Gatsby driving Nick Carraway in a fabulous yellow car. Those two scenes are from the Jack Clayton 1974 adaptation of The Great Gatsby, with Robert Redford and Sam Waterston playing driver and passenger, and Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 version starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. On one level, the two drives are largely identical—semirural roads becoming more urban, the medal from “little Montenegro,” Gatsby’s too-well-rehearsed story of his life. Except that it’s all different.

Redford’s Gatsby takes a sedate, even stately, approach; the magnificence of the car, not the brilliance of the ride, is the point. You can think of it this way: he’s dressed to impress. He’s trying to soften up Nick so that later on, Jordan, as someone of Nick’s social caste, can try to persuade him to invite Daisy, his married cousin, to a very private tea. The sequence is also very static. Gatsby shows Nick the car while it’s parked in a bay of his garage, asks his question about what Nick thinks of him while they’re standing on either side of the car. The driving scenes are minimal; we see landscape streaming past the talking heads. DiCaprio’s Gatsby, by contrast, arrives with a roaring engine as he circles Nick’s cottage again and again. Once en route, he drives like a teenage boy showing off for a pal, darting in and out of traffic, taking crazy risks, barely watching the road as he seeks to make eye contact with his quarry. His background “story” is all nervous energy and obvious lies, unlike the more studied Redford version, as his eyes dart to Nick for signs of disbelief or gullibility. Even the scenery is more jittery in the later movie. The party of young black men and women having a party “on a car” crossing the Queensboro Bridge is raucous and vibrant. Gatsby hands his get-out-of-jail card from the police commissioner to the motorcycle cop while both vehicles are still whizzing along the city’s streets. The Clayton-Redford version is a slow waltz; this is full-tilt boogie.

Even the destinations bespeak the differences in characterization. The restaurant where Redford’s Gatsby and Waterston’s Nick meet Meyer Wolfsheim for lunch is quiet and approximately refined—soft music in the background, dignified waiters. The only uncouth thing there is Wolfsheim himself. In the Luhrmann version, the place is obviously a speakeasy—entered through a door with a sliding window—and the atmosphere lies somewhere between a jazz club and a stag party. The music is rowdy, the girls’ costumes inspired by Josephine Baker, the action busy and a little jerky, the nerves a little jangly. Here’s Wolfsheim (Amitabh Bachchan), garish and overstated but with none of the earlier Howard Da Silva’s seediness, ruling like a pasha from his prime table. There is the commissioner, carousing with what seems an entire chorus line. And the music! As with the rest of the score, it’s just like the original period, assuming Jay Z and Beyoncé had been alive then. On the one hand, the scene displays every sort of Luhrmann excess; on the other, it’s exactly how we always hoped the twenties roared.

Really, though, can these two road trips, even with their destinations, really tell us what the main characters are like? Naturally, these competing sequences cannot fully reveal their respective Gatsbys in all their pied glory. At the same time, they can tell us a great deal. Remember, at this point in the films, we have barely met the title character. How he conducts himself around Nick, from whom he is about to request (through a third party) an enormous favor, speaks volumes. And that conduct includes showing off his fabulous car. Redford’s portrayal is cautious, measured, quite calculated. He can almost pull off this imitation of the aristocracy. Not quite, maybe, but nearly. We can almost believe that his restraint means that he really can be trusted with a wife’s friend, as Wolfsheim says, although we also know that Tom Buchanan is no friend.

DiCaprio’s Gatsby is vastly more dangerous. His mask of gentility keeps slipping, as if male power or animal instinct keeps overwhelming his less than fine-honed image. We can believe that he really did kill a man, that he is capable of ruthlessness, a quality we have to take on faith in the earlier adaptation. It’s as if he learned how to play the millionaire but perhaps the final lesson was not provided. His driving is very nearly demonic; he can’t quite contain himself; there are sudden outbursts of his inner gangster. Indeed, he can’t stop himself offering Nick the chance to make a little money on the side, although he quickly recognizes that as a violation of the code in Nick’s world, if not in his.

And we see all this in parallel trips in an automobile. The car is the same—thematically, anyway, although the first is a Rolls-Royce and the second a Duesenberg—but it’s the driving that makes all the difference.