Cinema bulimia: Peter Greenaway's corpus of excess

PDF

Download

Open document

Flip pages

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Request accessible transcript

Transcript (if available)

Content CINEMA BULIMIA:
PETER GREENAWAY'S CORPUS OF EXCESS
by
Tracy Ellen Biga
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Cinema-Television/Critical Studies)
May 1994
Copyright 1994 Tracy Ellen Biga
UMI Number: DP22280
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, th ese will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
Dissertation Publishing
UMI DP22280
Published by ProQ uest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
Microform Edition © ProQ uest LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code
ProQ uest LLC.
789 E ast Eisenhower Parkway
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 -1 3 4 6
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, w ritten by
Tfac^ E I ^
under the direction of h.*~S. Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
p h . P ,
Civa
3222CJ.07
D O C TO R OF PH ILO SOPH Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date FEBRUARY 28th, 1994
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
i i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Marsha Kinder, David James, Leo Braudy, Jon
Wagner, Chris Lippard, Jan Biga, Kay Biga and Ricardo
Echevarria for all their assistance and encouragement.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
i i i
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION...............................1
CHAPTER TWO: HOW DO YOU FORGE A FILM?: CRIMINAL
CONSPIRACY IN A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS.....24
CHAPTER THREE: EXCESS.................................... 46
CHAPTER FOUR: FILM AS BODY..............................61
CHAPTER FIVE: CONSUMING SUBJECTS AND CONSUMABLE
OBJECTS..................................102
CHAPTER SIX: THE LOST CHILD OF THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S
CONTRACT................................ 126
CHAPTER SEVEN: A MAP, A BOOK, A CEMETERY
CHAPTER EIGHT: RESURRECTION TELEVISION..
CHAPTER NINE: CONCLUSION................
147
170
186;
1
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
During the final scene of Peter Greenaway's The Cook,
the Thief. His Wife and Her Lover, the wife, Georgina,
urges her husband, the thief Spica, to eat her lover,
grandiosely roasted at her direction by the cook. The
patrons and employees of Le Hollandais restaurant, where
the film is set, led by those characters most abused by the
boorish and cruel Spica, watch in fascination as a fork
moves hesitantly toward the lover's baked penis. Georgina,
the most tormented character, revenges herself by
threatening to gun Spica down if he refuses to eat. When
he succumbs and consumes, she calls him a cannibal and
shoots him dead.
The scene is remarkable in several respects.
Visually, its elements are stunning and excessive.
Georgina's cage-like black gown with its long train—
designed, like all the costumes, by Jean-Paul Gaultier—
parodies a wedding dress; she stalks the dining room like a
haute couture Miss Havisham, her bereavement inspiring
unusual behavior. The other characters sport less
elaborate, but no less peculiar, color-coded fashions and
are arranged to invoke the compositions of Dutch paintings.
Their elegant clothes and coiffures contrast with the
medical equipment— bandages, crutches, a wheelchair— which
2
are the marks of Spica's physical abuse. Astonishing, in a
mainstream film, is the extended male frontal nudity of the
lover. The fact that this character is dead and baked may
or may not make this nudity more surprising.
The true disruption of the scene resides not in the
exposure of the actor, but in the transgressive moment of
cannibalism— perhaps the ultimate crisis of consumption.
This scene is the paradigmatic moment in a film obsessed
with appropriate and inappropriate consumption. What
should be put into the body, the film asks, and what should
not? Punishment takes the form of forced consumption— of
dog shit, buttons, books, kitchen utensils, and human
flesh. Pleasure, on the other hand, does not necessarily
correlate with appropriate consumption. Despite the fact
that the film is set in a fancy restaurant, no one has a
satisfying meal; characters sneak off to the kitchen and
the bathroom to enjoy themselves. Only the production of a
meal or its expulsion can satisfy.
While these concerns with production and expulsion—
with a corollary anxiety about the act of consumption
itself— are features of what has come to be called
postmodernism, they suggest another contemporary crisis of
consumption: the eating disorders anorexia nervosa (self-
starvation) and bulimia (bingeing and purging). The
victims of these disorders ask the same questions: what
should be put into the body and what should not? Like the
characters in The Cook, the Thief, anorectics and bulimics
are described as having "an intense preoccupation with
food, which may result in bizarre patterns of behavior
related to food preparation and consumption" (Kennedy,
Garfinkel 76). Although anorexia nervosa was first named
by Sir William Gull in 1874, and has been retrospectively
deduced back to the Middle Ages, its incidence, or its
recognition, has more than doubled in the past 2 0 years
(Kennedy, Garfinkel 75). The contemporary prevalence of
this psychiatric illness along with the specific female
gendering of its victims— approximately 95 percent (Walker,
Brown 17)— make it a frustrating and provocative object of
study. These factors invite an analysis which would place
the syndrome in an historical, cultural perspective.
Aside from its actual clinical picture, anorexia
nervosa and bulimia provide a metaphor for a society
obsessed with consumption. Hilde Bruch begins Eating
Disorders: Obesity. Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within
by noting: "There is no human society that deals
rationally with food in its environment, that eats
according to the availability, edibility, and nutritional
value alone" (3). The word hunger is used "as a symbolic
expression of a state of need in general, or a simile for
want in other areas" (47). One of those areas, the one
4
with which this study will deal, is the cultural. We can
speak of the production, consumption and even expulsion of
art. This analysis argues that the metaphors arising out
of the central fact of eating can be extended; the function
of eating disorders and distortions can usefully discuss a
crisis of artistic production.
With the term bulimic cinema, I refer not to the very
real afflictions of anorexia and bulimia, but to a set of
interrelated factors associated with the characteristics of
eating disorders. The bulimic text is: taxonomic rather
than unified; without borders or limits rather than
discrete; created by conspiracy rather than the Author/God;
resistant to judgment rather than interpretable; excessive
rather than moderate; a destruction rather than an
immortalization; a murder without a solution. These
qualities can be used as a framework to discuss a wide
range of cultural production: avant-garde, experimental or
alternative texts; more conventional, widely distributed
art cinema; texts which don't address issues of consumption
explicitly, but which use consumption metaphorically; and
texts which directly consider eating, food or digestion.
To varying degrees, Greenaway's work has operated in
each of these categories. Cinema and video, in which
Greenaway has produced his most compelling work, are the
sites of the bulimic text. His work reiterates a familiar
5
observation: that cinema is capable of consuming the other
arts. Other media— such as painting, the medium in which
Greenaway first worked— are vulnerable to cinema's
incorporation. Because of its history of production and
distribution, cinema, whatever its current manifestations,
is associated with mass consumption by a mass audience.
Cinema and video, in their reliance on the image (above the
word, logos), foreground the material nature of the
artwork.
Greenaway's films are also an apt field for an
analysis based on eating disorders because of his thematic
and formal concerns. His films frequently raise questions
associated with the consumable nature of the medium: What
happens to the artist when the art work becomes a
consumable object? What should go in the film and what
should be rejected? Who controls the work of art? What is
the significance of the filmic organization? What is the
nature of the filmic body?
Greenaway's concern with consumption is frequently
implicit, but just as frequently right on the surface. The
Cook. the Thief takes place almost solely in a restaurant;
the only detour takes the viewer to a biblioteque— a
location presented as superior to the restaurant, a place
where the mind can feed. These settings announce a concern
with consumption on the part of the film's characters which
6
can be seen in many Greenaway films: The Draughtsman's
Contract begins at a meal and ends when a character bites
into a pineapple; in A Zed and Two Noughts a character is
forced to eat a rotted prawn and ultimately the two main
characters will be left dead in a field experiment to be
eaten by maggots, worms and snails; Bellv of an Architect
has a long scene of restaurant feasting at the beginning
and a long scene of the same restaurant's destruction at
the end; Drowning by Numbers shows a woman being sexually
aroused by a popsicle. While this thematic concern with
consumption exists on a character and plot level, it is not
the characters who are anorectic or bulimic. Rather I
would argue that the features of anorexia nervosa and
bulimia help us to understand how Greenaway's texts
themselves— which fluctuate between starvation (minimalism,
structuralism) and gluttony (excess plot, visuals)—
operate. These films, like so many postmodern art objects,
are stuffed with references and allusions which they cannot
digest. In Greenaway's work, the female body, the most
common site of anorexia nervosa and bulimia, is replaced by
the body of an artist's work.
In Illness As Metaphor Susan Sontag analyzes the
metaphoric employment of tuberculosis and cancer and
suggests that it may not be "morally permissible" to use a
fatal illness in a metaphoric sense.
Since the interest of the metaphor is
precisely that it refers to a disease
[cancer] so overlaid with mystification, so
charged with the fantasy of inescapable
fatality. Since our views about cancer,
and the metaphors we have imposed on it,
are so much a vehicle for the large
insufficiencies of this culture, for our
shallow attitude toward death, for our
anxieties about feeling, for our reckless
improvident responses to our real "problems
of growth," for our inability to construct
an advanced industrial society which
properly regulates consumption, and for our
justified fears of the increasingly violent
course of history. (84)
Sontag implies that metaphor is connected to fantasy
or frivolity and somehow removed from everyday life, that
metaphoric intervention fosters "a shallow attitude" which
keeps us from knowing things as they are. For Sontag,
metaphor may lead to anxiety, recklessness and the
inability to think clearly. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
challenge this view of metaphoric thought by arguing that
"metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in
language but in thought and action" (Metaphors We Live Bv
3). Orientational metaphors, ontological metaphors, and
structural metaphors form coherent conceptual systems and
arise physiologically as well as culturally. In this view,
metaphoric concepts "structure what we perceive" and "play
a central role in defining our everyday realities." We can
identify the systemic coherence of the illness as
consumption metaphor in Sontag's account; she observes that
cancer was, without medical basis, thought of as consuming.
8
The metaphorically perceived function of disease extends
beyond what is actually known about a particular illness to
structure thought about all illness.
In this application, consuming is read negatively as
an action contained within but uncontrolled by the body.
This reading is consistent with the structural metaphor of
consuming as it applies to activities from eating to
buying. The food and eating basis of the "consumer" in
consumer culture structures our perception of the concept.
The expressions "I can swallow that" and "I'11 buy that"
both imply acceptance or acquiescence. Discomfort and
anxiety about eating translates into similar attitudes
towards material accumulation and, as we have seen, is
assigned to other phenomena, such as disease, which are
associated with the compromise of the body, lack of
personal control and mortality. In The Denial of Death.
Ernest Becker makes this connection in a discussion of
anality. Of the product of consumption, Becker says:
"Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it
shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely
unreality of his hopes and dreams" (33). Human knowledge
is always ultimately a knowledge of mortality— a knowledge
which at its limit becomes associated with another kind of
eating: "What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal?
The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to
9
know that one is food for worms" (Becker 87). The final
disposition of bodies— drowned in rivers, buried in
cemeteries, thrown in moats, eaten by worms, of course, and
even by human characters— is a prevalent theme in
Greenaway's work. This thematic obsession is inseparable
from the way in which the consumer in "consumer society"
functions metaphorically.
The metaphoric function of their disease is fully
recognized by many anorectic and bulimic patients, often in
their reaction to treatment. The therapist can propose an
interpretation which the patient may "swallow":
The contents would be good; they would be
expected to convey pleasure and interest.
But there would be a fury, too. The
contents were not to be refused. The
pleasure would be inflicted. Imposed
pleasure!. . . Then I imagined this all
turning upside down and backside front.
Now Ms. F. would switch her identification
from the projector of food-cum-truth-
pleasure into a fellow feeling with the
recipient of this infliction. How awful to
be forcefed— how helpless, how humiliating,
like the victim of a rape. (Boris 105)
In this case, the patient reduces the interpretation
metaphorically to the food which she has persistently
refused; she must refuse the interpretation as well. R.D.
Laing recognizes this anxiety and refusal in other cases of
psychotherapy and uses a variation of the same metaphor:
"To be understood correctly is to be engulfed, to be
enclosed, swallowed up, drowned, eaten up, smothered,
10
stifled in or by another person's all-embracing
comprehension” (Laing 45) . The strange resoluteness of
anorexia nervosa and bulimia patients which obscures
diagnosis and frustrates treatment is an often noted
feature of the disease. Although the anorectic may
outwardly agree with her therapist— may even appear to
comply with the diagnosis and treatment plan— with
intractable deception and resolution, she will persistently
not eat. In their symbolic refusal, these patients are
frequently described as "recalcitrant” (Boris 89).
The metaphoric function of eating disorders can be
compared to another malady primarily ascribed to women:
hysteria, which has been particularly resonant in
theorizing melodrama. The application of this psychiatric
category to film is based on Freud's description of
conversion hysteria "in which the psychical conflict is
expressed symbolically in somatic symptoms of the most
varied kinds" (Laplanche, Pontalis 194). Laplanche and
Pontalis' description stresses the economic and symbolic
aspects of this process: "through bodily symptoms,
repressed ideas 'join in the conversation,' although they
are distorted by the mechanisms of condensation and
displacement" (Laplanche, Pontalis 90). The excess
libidinal energy which cannot be expressed verbally is
11
translated into the body. The body "join[s] in the
conversation," speaking what the mouth cannot utter.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith locates this process in the body
of the melodramatic film text. As these films strive for
realism and a happy resolution, they generate an excess
which "cannot be accommodated within the action" (73).
Music and mise-en-scene substitute for the emotionality
that the plot cannot convey. "It is not just that the
characters are often prone to hysteria, but that the film
itself somatizes its own unaccommodated excess ..." (74).
The film speaks indirectly, with its body so-to-speak, what
cannot be said directly through the plot or characters.
In a chapter that deals principally with characters
within films that feature a medical discourse, Mary Ann
Doane also argues that "the logic of the symptom might be
used to read the film texts differently" (44). Doane,
however, presents a more critical perspective on the
"association, within patriarchal configurations, of
femininity with the pathological" (38). Despite the fact
that men can suffer from hysteria, the syndrome, beginning
with its name, is read as feminine and links femininity
and aberrance. Doane locates the site of this association
in the woman's body. "Represented as possessing a body
which is overpresent, unavoidable, in constant sympathy
with the emotional and mental faculties, the woman resides
12
just: outside the boundaries of the problematic wherein
Western culture operates a mind/body dualism" (39). The
effect of the ensuing hysteria is a doubled relationship to
narrativity, "in its relation to its cause (excessive
daydreaming) and its treatment (the 'talking cure')" (66).
The solution to the body's participation in the
conversation lies in the discourse of confession. In
Doane's conception, the female spectator must give up
identification with the ill body (female) and take up
identification with the knowledgeable doctor (male).
This crucial moment of treatment is one of the points
at which eating disorders differ greatly from hysteria.
The hysterical patient allies herself with the doctor to
speak her cure; the "recalcitrant" anorectic patient
refuses to swallow food, advice or interpretation and
thereby refuses to be swallowed/understood.
In my theoretical application of anorexia and bulimia,
I will argue that eating disorders provide a better model
for contemporary film than hysteria. The shift from
hysteria to bulimia is compatible with what Brian MacHale
has mapped as the shift from the epistemology of modernism
to the ontology of postmodernism. MacHale argues for the
detective genre as the genre par excellence of modernism.
Freud, in his persistent analysis of clues and obdurate
determination to solve the case, acts as a detective. In
her discussion of medical discourse films, Doane notes:
"most of these films situate the psychoanalyst as a kind of
epistemological hero, as the guarantor of the final
emergence of truth. . ." (47). The description,
treatment, indeed the possibility of hysteria depends on a
truth about the symptoms which can be known. When the
patient knows what the doctor has discovered— when they
know together— the cure has been affected, the case has
been solved. This strategy, as noted above, has been
singularly ineffective in treating eating disorders. The
doctor can not simply persuade the patient to adopt his or
her knowledge. Bruch critiques what she calls "outmoded
concepts of psychoanalytic treatment" which are applied to
anorexia and bulimia:
Many [therapists] stress the symbolic
meaning of the non-eating and the
underlying unconscious problems, fantasies,
and dreams, and interpret their unconscious
meaning to the patient. When the
traditional psychoanalytic setting is
examined in transactional terms, one can
recognize that for these patients it may
signify the reenactment of some damaging
experience in their past ....
[Anorexics] experience 'interpretations' as
indicating that someone else knows what
they truly mean and feel, that they
themselves do not understand their own
thoughts. (The Golden Cage 123)
Not understanding her own thoughts is linked, for the
anorexic, with ontological confusion: "They act and talk
14
as if they and their body were separate entities" (Eating
Disorders 91).
This refusal of knowing with a focus on being can be
linked to MacHale's argument that "the dominant of
postmodernist fiction is ontological" (10). Here, the key
genre is science fiction, which features the creation and
intersection of alternative worlds. The postmodern
ontological fiction doesn't require a solution even if it
posits a mystery: Who killed Mr. Herbert? Was Caspasian
a criminal or a compassionate friend? Did the Colpitts
women drown their husbands and why? Greenaway's films
either offer no solutions or mutually-plausible solutions.
Unlike the ambiguity of modernism, here this lack of a
conclusive answer implies that an explanation is
unimportant.
The postmodern fiction accepts alternative worlds and
alternative states of consciousness existing
simultaneously. In The Cook, the Thief. Georgina's dress
changes color— from green to red to white— as she passes
from one room to another. The film never suggests a real
world; the dress has no one true color. The promise of
solution and cure through knowledge that hysteria presents
no longer has validity. The character of Georgina can't be
known or diagnosed. She has no psychological consistency—
no one true color.
15
The question of basic ontological insecurity raises an
issue crucial to a conception of bulimic cinema: control.
Whatever other explanations are presented to account for
the existence of eating disorders, one persists— from
Raymond Bell's description of anorexic medieval female
saints to Susie Orbach's investigation of contemporary
women: the issue of control. When asked by her doctor
whether she considered herself crazy, one patient answered,
"Am I what? Normal? No. Crazy? I don't know. Out of
control? Yes. Out of control so I'm not crazy? Maybe"
(Boris 96). Out of control feelings related to eating are
part of the condition's official description: "The DSM-
III—R criteria require the presence of recurrent binge-
eating episodes, a feeling of lack of control during eating
binges, and persistent overconcern with body shape and
weight" (Mitchell 94). Inability to maintain control over
what she eats and how her body appears leads paradoxically
to rigid and ritualized feeding. Anorectics will often
insist on eating the same items at the same times each day.
A stick of gum or a single grape may be divided into many
small pieces and doled out according to an inflexible
schedule. "In the early stages, this state of self-imposed
starvation seems to produce a sense of personal control not
previously experienced" (Kennedy 76).
16
The paradox of out-of-control feelings conquered
through excessive and ultimately uncontrollable control can
be seen on several levels of Greenaway's work. A Film
Quarterly review of The Draughtsman's Contract, sees
assertions of power in the film's absurdism, its structure
and its resolution:
The Draughtsman's Contract, by preventing
both protagonist and audience from, in the
broadest sense, 'understanding,' affirms
the power of the film-maker and, within the
text, the power of the socially dominant
class, which controls the 'true meanings'
behind the presented reality of the film.
(Malcomson 39)
Excessive control is also apparent in visual design, when
the work of other painters is faithfully recreated, and
through cinematic conceits: not moving the camera in The
Draughtsman's Contract. withholding close-ups in A Zed and
Two Noughts.
Rather than "affirm[ing] the power" of the filmmaker,
however, I would argue that this extremely realized formal
control demonstrates just the opposite. Artists and artist
figures in Greenaway's films almost inevitably come to an
unfortunate end. A sense of abundant autonomy is gradually
replaced by powerlessness; this powerlessness operates in
the realm of the self, the created art object and even
children. The artist's confidence in his artistry,
sexuality and paternity inevitably erodes. The tension
17
between control and powerlessness here functions in a way
similar to that in eating disorders.
We can see this loss of control, which is really an
abasement, in the shift from the creative role of the
artist to that of the father. The Deuce brothers, Storley
Kracklite and Mr. Neville begin by asserting creative
authority over a documentary, an architectural
retrospective and a series of drawings, respectively; they
end by grasping for the paternity of their children before
they die. Ernest Becker defines the causa-sui of the
creative personality as: "the narcissistic self-inflation
that denies dependency on the female body and on one's
species given role and the control and harboring of the
power and meaning of one's individuality" (119). To
succumb to the species imperative of biological
reproduction is a lesser feat than the god-like project of
creating the self. Beginning in aspiration, the artists in
Greenaway's films find themselves battling to maintain a
debased role. The metaphor of bulimic cinema— which
invokes a wild fluctuation between regulation and abandon—
provides a model to analyze this crucial issue of artistic
control.
Bulimic cinema also illuminates Greenaway's response
to a crisis of consumption in consumer society connected to
what has come to be called postmodernism, especially the
18
postmodern tendency to collapse oppositions. In this
context, the most prominent opposition is that between high
art and mass culture which, as Andreas Huyssen argues, is a
crucial feature of modernism:
Only by fortifying its boundaries, by
maintaining its purity and autonomy, and by
avoiding any contamination with mass
culture and with the signifying systems of
everyday life can the art work maintain its
adversary stance: adversary to the
bourgeois culture of everyday life as well
as adversary to mass culture and
entertainment which are seen as the primary
[focus] of bourgeois cultural articulation.
(Huyssen 73)
For a modernist sensibility, a collapse of high art into
mass culture can only mean indiscrimination. The ability
to identify valuable— transgressive, adversary— art and
distinguish it from pointless trash is compromised. Jurgen
Habermas— who seeks to continue the project of modernity—
interprets the collapse of high art into mass culture as
leading to political reactionism because of the inability
of the work to be transgressive and oppositional.
However the collapse of the high/low split is
interpreted in its effects, its basis can be identified in
a mind/body dualism from which an array of oppositions
flows including masculine/feminine, word/image. This is
one of the areas where a metaphor of anorexia and bulimia
can be useful in understanding art in a period of mass
consumerism. Consumerism is itself not a concept fully
19
understood because its basis is obscured. Eating confounds
the barriers between subject and object, perpetually
undermining a mind/body dualism. If you are what you eat,
and what you eat is invariably dead, inert matter, what is
the human subject? The function of eating in many art
works is simply displaced onto the problems of sexuality or
class, a movement which displaces the truly disturbing
aspects of eating. An examination of aberrant eating can
help us to understand the threat that all eating poses. As
Greenaway's films consistently illustrate, no act of
digestion is innocent whether the object consumed is an
apple, the seed of a pomegranate, or a portion of human
flesh.
Before I continue, I would like to clarify two points
about my use of a metaphor of eating disorders and my use
of textual material.
In Feminism Without Women. Tania Modleski raises a
warning concerning the increased use of anorexia in
cultural writing. She critiques some theorists for
"finding in anorexia a laudable feminine rejection of the
body" (110). Instead, she urges feminists to "refuse the
romantic impulse to celebrate a disease that only reflects
patriarchy's paradoxical image of woman ("transcendence in
immanence") back to itself. . ." (110). Modleski's refusal
to celebrate as liberating for women what is in fact a
20
painful, debilitating, often lethal illness is a position I
share. It may be satisfying to think of anorexia as
positive resistance, but it is less so when we consider why
women's struggle should take such a self-abusive turn.
Anorexia and bulimia as personal strategy lack a crucial
aspect of effective political resistance: autonomy. The
person in the grip of disease, even a disease about
control, is surely not in control. Instead of valorizing
mental illness as a technique, we need to analyze a culture
that foments this kind of response— that offers many women
a sense of control only in the form of the most profound
disturbance and denial.
But if the real historical incidence of eating
disorders in real historical subjects cannot be seen as
resisting or liberating, the conceptual use of these
problems poses a number of questions and suggests some
possible ways to consider them. What is the relationship
of eating and sexuality? What is the basis of our
discomfort with consumption? How can we understand
cultural cycles of incorporation? And why has the topic of
eating become so prevalent in contemporary art?
Although my discussion of bulimic cinema will be
primarily confined to film and video projects written
and/or directed by British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, I
will argue that what I identify as a quality of bulimia can
21
be found in a wide range of cultural products. No artist
works in a vacuum, and Greenaway has been particularly
forward in stuffing his work with references both explicit
and obscure to art, science and philosophy. Among the most
obvious influences are Jorge Luis Borges' essays and short
stories, and I have included some mention of these. I also
make use of other prose texts and films for which I do not
make a case of direct influence either on Greenaway or from
him. I include them because, I will argue, they share
qualities of what I will call bulimic cinema. By "bulimic”
I refer to the whole continuum of eating disorders which
includes anorexia, and by "cinema" I recognize the medium
most susceptible to these characteristics. It is the art
form which has eaten the traditional arts, and is now in
the process of being eaten itself, by television.
Finally, I would like to note the particular
challenges that Greenaway's texts offer to the critic and
how I have responded to them in my use of his texts. To
take just the example of the scene with which I began this
discussion: the cannibalism scene of The Cook, the Thief.
We could identify, we could even become entrapped in
identifying, how certain details of the scene reproduce
themes of Greenaway's work. The scene includes references
to: literature (John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's A Whore.
Dickens); pictorial art (17th century Dutch painting); the
22
French Revolution (the downtrodden rise up to slay their
oppressors); consumption (Spica, the man who can buy
anything and understand nothing, forced to eat his victim);
revenge; as well as interconnectedness to other Greenaway
films (Spica is the name of a star in Drowning By Numbers,
etc.).
Greenaway's references create a ceaselessly repeated
pattern. The whole is contained in a fragment; the same
tropes reappear on different scales. This quality
discourages horizontal analysis, just as a crystal would,
and instead spawns a series of endlessly spiraling lists.
A discussion of Greenaway's work can quickly devolve into a
pointless recitation of vertical categories. The issues I
discuss— forgery, excess, eating and nakedness, gender,
parent/child relationships, television, and interpretation-
-can be applied to all of Greenaway's films and videos.
Although I concentrate on one or two films in each chapter,
the same features perpetually re-occur across a corpus
which, in many ways, can't be clearly delimited into
separate art objects.
Within "cannibal," the final word in The Cook, the
Thief. is contained a range of associations that permeate
Greenaway's work. It also invokes one of the most crucial
ideas in that corpus: the problem of classification. How
do we classify cannibalism? As aberration? As punishable
23
crime? Or is it simply an extreme example of the fact that
all eating is highly ritualized, used for a variety of
social purposes, and never simply nutritive? With the
consumption of human flesh the problems of eating and
classification come together in a broad and impossible
question: What is the nature of humankind? Of what is it
made and how can it be classified? More specifically, but
just as impossibly, what is the nature of the artistic mind
that must eat and be eaten?
24
CHAPTER TWO
How do you forge a film?:
Criminal Conspiracy in A Zed and Two Noughts
Borges' short story Pierre Menard. Author of the Don
Quixote describes its hero, a 20th-century Frenchman, as
wanting to write the Don Quixote.
It is unnecessary to add that his aim was
never to produce a mechanical transcription
of the original; he did not propose to copy
it. His admirable ambition was to produce
pages which would coincide— word for word
and line for line— with those of Miguel de
Cervantes. (48)
The narrator offers this analysis of passages from
t
Cervantes' version and from Menard's— passages which are,
needless to say, identical:
Equally vivid is the contrast in styles.
The archaic style of Menard— in the last
analysis a foreigner— suffers from a
certain affectation. Not so that of his
precursor, who handles easily the ordinary
Spanish of his time. (53)
One way in which the story amuses is in the attempt to
wrest away the ownership of Don Quixote from Cervantes, but
a Don Quixote which is then no longer what it was because
it is no longer written by Cervantes. The work may be
richer or more impressive, but it is also less valuable.
In this strange case of plagiarism, as in the cases of
forgery and appropriation, a vital area of discussion is
the relationship between the artist and the work. Borges
here imperils that relationship to the extent that he makes
it a joke. Cervantes becomes a grouping system, a category
of analysis.
According to Michel Foucault:
An author's name is not simply an element
in a discourse (capable of being either
subject or object, of being replaced by a
pronoun, and the like); it performs a
certain role with regard to narrative
discourse, assuring a classificatory
function. Such a name permits one to group
together a certain number of texts, define
them, differentiate them from and contrast
them to others. (107)
This author function also acts to reduce the danger of
discourse:
The question then becomes: How can one
reduce the great peril, the great danger
with which fiction threatens our world?
The answer is: one can reduce it with the
author. (118)
By attributing the discourse to a single individual—
fallible and vulnerable as well as limited— it becomes less
powerful and less prolific. While Foucault recognizes the
"'ideological' status of the author" and how it disarms
discourse, he also suggests that the discourse might
endanger the author. The author "assumes the role of the
dead man in the game of writing" (Foucault 103). It is the
danger to the artist in the artist-*work relationship which
I would like to discuss, particularly how it is
conceptualized differently in forgery and appropriation.
Is it even possible to speak of forgery without the
presence of an original creative persona? In Umberto Eco's
The Limits of Interpretation, the "Fakes and Forgeries"
chapter minutely categorizes the forging of paintings,
documents, essays, the Parthenon, but not films. Cinematic
borrowings are described in another essay, "Interpreting
Serials." In this chapter, Eco points out that the
insistence on originality is a romantic— modernist idea;
that postmodern imitation realized in film and television
is entirely in the spirit of Aristotle's Poetics; and that
really one can't avoid correlations between Balzac and
Dallas. although, Eco implies, Balzac is more interesting.
But Eco's appreciation of postmodern appropriation is not
unambiguous. For Eco, the divide between high art/low art
has shifted from the art object to the reader. The reader
of aesthetic objects which imitate or borrow is either
naive— someone who doesn't understand from what sources the
work borrows— or critical— someone who does understand. Of
the first category, there is an "unhappy many," who fail
to understand that there is an original author much less
who he or she may be. Of the latter, a "happy few," who
enjoy "a neobaroque pleasure" by knowing the ancestry of
the aesthetic object (Eco 99).
It becomes clear why Eco discusses cinema and
television in terms of seriality rather than forgery, why
he opposes the name of the object, Dallas. to the name of
27
the creator "Balzac," why, in fact, if there is no Homer,
one must be invented.
Eco's organization implicitly recognizes the creator's
obliteration, or at least disconnection, from the body of
the film text, a disconnection established early in cinema
history. Directors, as well as actors, were not commonly
credited for their contributions to silent films until the
mid-teens. D.W. Griffith, for example, made more than 400
films for the Biograph Company without director credit.
When he left Biograph for Mutual in 1913, Griffith took out
trade ads to assert creative ownership over his work.
Although currently the director's name occupies a place of
honor closest to the body of the text, the extensive array
of names which accompany it in the credits emphasizes
cinema's traditionally collaborative nature, its multiple
authorship.
While Eco distinguishes the forging of paintings from
the appropriations of cinema— with the division of chapters
substituting for a clear rationale— Greenaway has collapsed
the two issues in several of his films and videos. In
particular, Greenaway's second feature, A Zed and Two
Noughts, deals explicitly with the forging of paintings and
the production of cinema and is, itself, an assemblage of
appropriated parts. Although the varieties of artistic
actions in the film are characterized by intent and
28
accomplishment, all artistic operations are carried out
under a dark cloud of criminal conspiracy. The
obliteration of the artistic personality appearing
simultaneously with the depiction and perpetration of
conspiracies may itself not be a coincidence.
Examples of forgery and appropriation with
conspiratorial intent appear in A Zed and Two Noughts so
frequently and variously that it is difficult to catalog
them. Most obviously, the presence of the seventeenth-
century Dutch painter Vermeer, an historical figure
associated with spurious reproductions, permeates the film.
The historical Vermeer had a maternal grandfather who
counterfeited Dutch coins in the Hague (Montias 17). Three
hundred years later Vermeer's paintings were involved in
the most notorious art history scandal of the twentieth
century. A Dutch art dealer named Hans van Meegeren forged
several Vermeers, some of which he then sold to the Nazis.
Later, fearing war crimes charges, he confessed his
forgeries to outraged critics who had accepted the
paintings as genuine. Some of these canvasses are still in
dispute (Bianconi 87). One character in Greenaway's film
is named for this famous forger. The film's Van Meegeren
is an evil surgeon and hobbyist painter who wants to paint
like Vermeer. Greenaway's "homage" to Vermeer, as he puts
it, also has a formal aspect: lighting and composition
29
mimic that found in Vermeer paintings, and Greenaway's
mise-en-scene includes objects— maps, trumpets, letters—
commonly depicted by Vermeer.
While Van Meegeren works at forgery, the heroes of the
film are just as obsessed with appropriation. Oliver and
Oswald Deuce— separated Siamese twins— lose their wives in
a freak car accident. To assuage their grief, they embark
on a project to discover— through cinema— what happens to
people after they die. Their "documentary” is based on the
influential BBC documentary by David Attenborough, "Life on
Earth" (1979), snippets of which.are shown, unnamed and
uncredited, but presumably recognizable. Attenborough
describes the process of evolution with segments showing
increasingly more complex forms of life. The Deuce
brothers appropriate the same organization, but show the
disintegration of increasingly more complex forms—
beginning with an apple and ending with themselves. The
act of creation leads, in their case, to the personal
annihilation of the artists.
The Deuce brothers' creative act of film production is
echoed by their creative act of fatherhood. One or both of
them impregnates Alba Bewick, and their struggle to produce
the film runs concurrently with their struggle to assert
paternal control over the prenatal twins.
30
The association of the art object with a child,
apparent in this concurrent struggle, is also implicit in
Greenaway's depiction of the character Van Meegeren, who
enters the story as a surgeon and appears, frequently,
attempting to paint the other characters, forcibly costumed
in seventeenth-century garb and arranged like the figures
in Vermeer paintings. The surgeon, in this way, lays claim
to Vermeer's posterity. He also conspires to adopt the
unborn children of Oliver and Oswald Deuce. With this
attempted usurpation, Van Meegeren lays claim to the
posterity of Oliver and Oswald.
Van Meegeren's mistress in the film shares a name with
Vermeer's wife, Catherina Bolnes, but unlike her
seventeenth-century model, who bore Vermeer fourteen
children, the film's Bolnes is barren. Their other common
mistress— painting— was also fertile for Vermeer, but
barren for his imitator. Van Meegeren can't create—
biologically or artistically. He must steal babies as well
as inspiration.
In A Zed and Two Noughts. Greenaway depicts the figure
of the forger as particularly destructive; when he is not
painting or bullying the Deuce brothers, Van Meegeren
performs unnecessary leg amputations. Forgery is aberrant
and criminal because it attempts to steal the posterity of
the artist and defile it. The undiscovered forgery
31
implies the potential to taint the artist's reputation— to
infect it with spurious meanings. As a category of
analysis, however, undiscovered forgeries don't really
exist. The revealed forgery, the only forgery we can ever
know, serves only to bolster the reputation and importance
of the originating artist. By striving for maximum
fidelity to the original, the forger reinforces the unity
and integrity of the art object and simultaneously the
unity and integrity of the artist. Pursuit of the greatest
"authenticity" leads inevitably back to the "author." The
artist's relationship with the work is therefore
reaffirmed.
In his analysis of the historical Van Meegeren's most
famous forgery, Alfred Lessing asserts: "Paradoxically, The
Disciples at Emmaus is as much a monument to the artistic
genius of Vermeer as are Vermeer's own paintings. Even
though it was painted by van Meegeren in the twentieth
century, it embodies and bears witness to the greatness of
the seventeenth-century art of Vermeer" (Lessing 76). This
conception of the artist-work relationship posits the
artist as the model for the work— as the parent is the
model for the child and the teacher is the model for the
pupil. A forgery recreates the artist, perpetuating the
original self-creation of artistic production. This
original causa-sui of the creative personality is, as
32
Ernest Becker points out, "independent of the female body
and on one's species given role" (Becker 119).
The possibility of non-biological reproduction is also
raised in Greenaway's presentation of appropriation,
particularly through the figures of twins Oswald and
Oliver. Otto Rank links the twin with the artist through
precisely this self-reproductive quality: "As the twins
appear to have created themselves independently of natural
procreation, so they were believed to be able to create
things which formerly did not exist in nature— that is,
what is called culture" (The Double 92).
Oliver and Oswald's artistic enterprise— a film about
decay— is presented as the recovery of loss, initially the
loss of their pregnant wives. Ultimately, their loss is
presented as an earlier separation; the plot reveals that
Oliver and Oswald were originally Siamese twins, separated
in babyhood. This separation replaces the more usual
trauma of the separation of mother and child, a loss that
also leads to the creation of culture. Like Becker's
artistic causa-sui. this substitution gives the brothers an
illusion of being "independent of the female body."
As in all of Greenaway's films, however, this illusion
of independence, as well as the illusion of artistic
control and autonomy is revealed to be a sham. A stable
attitude toward the art object becomes impossible. For
33
Oliver and Oswald, the art object is not associated with a
child or son; it is not an unambiguous object capable of
perpetuating the artist, instead, art is associated with
femininity. The art object is both venerated as an ideal—
madonna— and debased as a commodity— whore. The two major
female characters in A Zed and Two Noughts provide an
example of each of these roles. Alba Bewick functions as a
mother in her relationship with her daughter Beta and also
in her maternal attitude towards the Deuce brothers; she
also becomes the mother of Oliver and Oswald's children.
Alba consistently submits, although reluctantly at times,
to male authority when she poses for paintings and, at the
urging of her doctor, allows her second leg to be removed.
Where Alba represents a madonna, useful only for admiration
and reproduction, another female character— Venus de Milo—
is an industrious, capitalist career woman with several
professions. Milo's name suggests that she too is
limbless, but she is, instead, well-armed as a seamstress,
a prostitute, and a writer zealously pursuing publication.
Despite, or perhaps because of, her industry and
resourcefulness, she is treated throughout the film with
contempt.
In forgery, the extremes of admiration and contempt
come together when the economic value of art, the venial
motive, comes to the aid of veneration. The forgery "is as
34
much a monument to the artistic genius of Vermeer, as are
Vermeer's own paintings." It is only in the process of
cutting the imitated object off from its author that we
discover appropriation and, for this reason, appropriation
is far more damaging to the conception of the artist. The
simulacrum is not interested in "authenticity."
In a Zed and Two Noughts, the Deuce brothers— each the
simulacrum of the other— make no claims to authenticity,
because they do not recognize or admit that they have
sources, artistic or biological. Their film, which depicts
an apple, prawns, an alligator, a swan and a zebra
disintegrating in time-lapse photography, mimics in reverse
Attenborough's Life on Earth— but Attenborough is never
acknowledged or even mentioned. Oliver and Oswald are
appropriators in yet another sense: they obtain the animal
corpses needed for their film from a group of shady
characters. Not only do they refuse to do their own
killing, they refuse to acknowledge that the animals have
been slaughtered on their behalf.
Despite their differences, the singular forger and the
plural filmmakers have common interests and points of
contact. Although they express mutual animosity, Van
Meegeren and the Deuce Brothers come close to an uneasy and
impossible deal. When Oliver and Oswald are wounded by a
tiger they visit Van Meegeren for treatment. While trading
35
insults, the brothers and the doctor negotiate for what
they want and what they feel the other party could provide.
Oliver and Oswald want to be re-attached as Siamese twins.
Van Meegeren, more accustomed to amputating limbs, says he
will oblige if, in recompense, he could be allowed to adopt
Alba's unborn twins.
In this scene, as in the rest of the film, Greenaway's
visual references to Vermeer are obvious: two Vermeer
paintings hang on the wall; the floor is checkered; a low
light source emanates from the left side of the frame; the
human body is shown at a "full-shot" distance; figures hold
objects. Van Meegeren— "no Vermeer" as the brothers point
out— no longer strives for his own artistic or patriarchal
success. Oliver and Oswald are no better off. Their
desire to be re-attached— to annul their traumatic
separation— may indicate a need to abdicate the artist's
role. Greenaway's depiction of Oliver and Oswald makes his
own position extremely complex. Even as he destroys his
heroes, he has put himself in their place. The Deuce
brothers use another artist, Attenborough, for inspiration,
as does Greenaway with Vermeer. The Deuce brothers use
cinema to mourn their losses; Greenaway does as well. But
unlike his fictional characters, the director seems willing
to take responsibility for the dead bodies his acts of
creation generate.
36
In Greenaway's work, film and video become the media
through which the traditional arts become known—
architecture and sculpture in The Belly of the Architect;
drafting, painting and landscaping in The Draughtsman's
Contract: literature in A TV Dante. Cinema repositions
these other art forms and, in doing so, cuts them off from
their original authorization. Like the character Bolnes,
the mistress of the film's Van Meegeren, painting is now
barren. It can no longer lead to the re-creation of the
artist— the art object as child. Cinema has infected
painting's reputation, rendering it sterile. If we look at
it in an evolutionary sense, which A Zed and Two Noughts
seems to invite, cinema accomplishes the murders of both
painter and painting.
In "Introjection— Incorporation, Mourning or
Melancholia." Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok consider two
responses to grief. Their distinction can be interestingly
applied to how cycles of appropriation create and destroy
art objects. Abraham and Torok consider the condition of
mourning by distinguishing between introjection— a process-
-and incorporation— a fantasy. Introjection allows a
topographical alteration in the psychic system, an
acknowledgement of loss. Incorporation uses fantasy to
conserve a secretly maintained topography. The difference
between the two corresponds to the difference between
37
"learning a language and buying a dictionary" (Abraham 5).
Or to put it in terms pertinent to Greenaway, the
difference between eating with digestion and without it.
Oswald avoids "swallowing" his loss by swallowing instead
shattered glass from his wife's fatal accident. Oswald and
Oliver fail to resolve their grief; but, I would argue,
Greenaway successfully introjects Vermeer— acknowledging
the loss of painting.
The introjection of Greenaway's film is perhaps
clearer when contrasted to Jon Jost's recent All the
Vermeer's in New York and the way it incorporates Vermeer.
The characters in Jost's film visit the Metropolitan Museum
and gaze reverently at the original framed Vermeer
paintings on the wall. These paintings are swallowed
whole. The admired canvasses represent an idealized
alternative to the venality which characterizes all the
other human relationships in the film.
The connection of swallowing and grief reaches its
apotheosis in Greenaway's feature The Cook, the Thief. His
Wife and Her Lover, where the cook explains that he charges
more for black food because patrons can then say, "Death, I
eat you." That film culminates in murder, mourning and,
inevitably it seems, cannibalism. Cinema, paradoxical in
so many ways, murders and mourns in the same instance.
38
Debates about forgery seem to devolve into one
question: if two objects are identical, how can one— the
original— be more valuable, in an aesthetic sense, than
another— the forgery? When film imitates, however, there
is no possibility of perfect identity, no point in striving
for authenticity and no need to remain loyal to the author.
By its nature, film rules out fidelity. The very
possibility of faithfulness has been obscured.
What are the implications of this impossibility?
Forgery, which perpetuates and validates the aspirations of
the creative persona, is, in fact, an activity necessary to
the conception of an artist. The loss of forgery is, for
the artist, the loss of one testimony to mastery, and this
is only one of many contemporary encroachments on the
artist's position.
Foucault has argued that the concept "author" is used
by readers to control the danger of the discourse.
Greenaway's films ask, and attempt to answer, Foucault's
other point. How do authors— authors not only of film but
of other arts such as painting— authors who are there, but
not there— how do these authors control their mortal danger
from the cinema discourse?
There is yet another related question lurking for the
readers of texts: do any repercussions or dangers— to the
reader— attend the annihilation of the author? Roland
39
Barthes— a prime suspect in, but hardly the sole
perpetrator of, the artist's annihilation— addresses this
issue in his influential essay, "Death of the Author?"
Barthes observes the father/artist, child/art object
metaphor at work:
The Author is thought to nourish the book,
which is to say that he exists before it,
thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the
same relation of antecedence to his work as
a father to his child. (145)
The implications of this relationship extend beyond the
realm of either fathers and children or the production of
the work of art. The father/author becomes aligned with
the idea of God through his creative function. The death
of the Author then is also the death of God:
In precisely this way literature (it would
be better from now on to say writing), by
refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate
meaning, to the text (and to the world as
text), liberates what may be called an
anti-theological activity, an activity that
is truly revolutionary since to refuse to
fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God
and his hypostases— reason, science, law.
(147)
But if the author didn't do it, who did? If God
doesn't exist, what consciousness orders the universe?
Barthes concludes that "a text's unity lies not in its
origin but in its destination" ("Death of the Author" 148).
This is, of course, the same shift to the reader that Eco
describes in his discussion of how high art and low art
have been replaced by the high or low skills of the reader.
40
Meaning resides in the reader, and "the birth of the reader
must be at the cost of the Author" (148). If we extend
Barthes' metaphor, is the birth of the human being at the
cost of the death of God? Certainly the birth of the child
is at the cost of the death of the father, but the prior
existence of the father seems to be a presupposition of the
operation. If the analogy holds, the Author does not
simply not exist, he must first exist so as to be killed as
a sacrifice to the reader's birth.
The same may be said of the notion of God who must
also, it seems, be dispatched with malicious intent. This
particular murder pervades contemporary society, as, for
instance, in the Death of God theology movement of the
1960s which:
claimed that meaningful talk about God is
impossible for two reasons: modern people
require empirical evidence and the idea of
a benevolent ruler of the world is morally
repugnant in light of such events as the
Holocaust. (Carse 212)
The specter of murder is crucial to this thinking which is,
after all, not the Non-existence of God movement.
Nietzsche's madman had much earlier announced this
important crime, the perpetrator and the resulting
emotions:
Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of
the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do
we not smell anything yet of God's
decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is
dead. God remains dead, and we have
41
killed him. How shall we, the murderers of
all murderers, comfort ourselves?
(Nietzsche 105)
Attempting to solve such a murder touches off an endless
chain of speculation which, perhaps, can never end, but
only get more convoluted. If God is dead, first, who
killed Him and, second, what entity can arise to fill the
vacuum of functions and qualities traditionally assigned to
a creative power?
In Greenaway's films, the controlling sensibility—
which can never belong to a single artist— belongs, not to
the reader, but to a conspiracy. Readers don't kill the
artist, although they may, perhaps, collude. Mysterious,
conspiratorial forces always perpetrate the worst crimes.
They trample the concept of a creative God through the
destruction of the artist, His structural equivalent. They
then usurp the controlling and ordering functions of a
deity.
In A Zed and Two Noughts, van Meegeren in league with
his mistress Bolnes creates his forgeries, but this is not
the only criminal conspiracy in the film. A band of zoo
workers run a black market operation in animal corpses.
While pulling a dripping crocodile corpse out of his
raincoat, Joshua Plate notes how easy such an operation can
be: "In a zoo community of seven thousand animals there
are deaths every day. Crocodiles are not immortal." The
42
conspiracy simply usurps the life and death powers of God;
the crime is easily concealed.
An etymological connection exists between the concept
of a deity and that of a conspiracy. To conspire means to
breathe with someone; the conspirators form a connection by
breathing together in their plots. The deity also forms
relationships through a breath, the spirit that enters the
believer (con spirito sanctus). This penetrating breath
might carry the inspiration to which the artist aspires.
The concept of conspiracy contains many of the same
functions and qualities that we ascribe to the concept of a
deity. Both create order and meaning. Possessing an
infectious quality, for good or ill, both have the ability
to inspire or provoke action. Although their presence may
be sensed indirectly, both remain secret and
incomprehensible. Unknowability is essential to the very
nature of God and serves to distinguish Him from His human
creation. Conspiracies hide their existence out of
criminal necessity, but this very disguise becomes an
important activity of the conspiracy and sometimes its main
rationale. The concepts of both God and conspiracy imply
an entity without known borders or limits.
The existence of a pervasive conspiracy figures in
almost every Greenaway film. A conspiracy is implied in
every atypical ordering pattern, and Greenaway's films are
43
designed around atypical ordering patterns. By shifting
the emphasis from one ordering pattern to another, the
meaning and interpretation of the narrative can shift
radically.
In the example with which we began, "Pierre Menard,"
Borges plays with the ordering pattern of authorship. In
"Three Versions of Judas," Borges provides another example
of an alternative ordering pattern, one that evokes
questions of authority, criminality and conspiracy. The
story purports to describe the New Testament research of
the "deeply religious" 20th century scholar Nils Runeberg.
Noting, as had others, that Judas' act was superfluous, but
that an act in such a crucial drama could not be haphazard,
Runeberg concluded that "the treachery of Judas was not
accidental; it was a predestined deed which has its
mysterious place in the economy of the Redemption" (152).
Runeberg assigns to Judas the ultimate heroic role, that of
the Word made flesh Itself, God made man Himself. Judas is
the character who ultimately sacrifices the most. "The
ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and
mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit.
He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as
others, less heroically, renounced pleasure" (154). Borges
transforms the great Easter drama from a simple, open
triumph of the Word over the flesh to a conspiracy, a
subterranean mystery the power of which depends on its
never being solved. The co-conspirators God, Judas, and,
perhaps, Jesus— are never found out; the conspiracy
theorist Runeberg is consigned to oblivion and dies of an
aneurysm.
A Zed and Two Noughts is not the only Greenaway film
rife with layers of secret, paranoiac, criminal patterns; a
catalogue of conspiracies would include examples from every
Greenaway film. In Dear Phone, mysterious forces cause the
text of the printed narration to break down into profound
sloppiness. In Vertical Features Remake, a conspiracy led
by Gang Lion impedes the reconstruction of Tulse Luper's
structuralist film. The Falls suggests an extraterrestrial
event which mysteriously, but definitively degrades the
lives of its uncomprehending victims. Mr. Neville, in The
Draughtsman's Contract. is murdered by members of the
nobility and every other character in the film, except
perhaps the murdered Mr. Herbert, is implicated. Storley
Kracklite, in Bellv of an Architect, is driven to suicide
by a variety of factors which includes a group of money-
laundering fascists and, perhaps, his own wife. The water-
tower conspiracy of Drowning Bv Numbers. although motivated
by a sincere desire to investigate the deaths of friends
and relatives, is presented as a betraying and malevolent
group, at odds with the film's heroines, the three cissie
45
Colpitts. In The Cook, the Thief, the downtrodden rise up
to trap their victim, and their leader, the wife Georgina,
literally wears a web of conspiracy.
Greenaway's films suggest that all film is a criminal
conspiracy. Cinema announces the impossibility of forgery
which is also the impossibility of fidelity to a creative
figure— artist or God. The creative persona is not single,
unified, inscrutable, all-powerful and omnipresent, but
rather multiple, conflicted, and without motive, having
variable and undetermined powers and borders. The
ontological status of the out-of-control figure of the
artist is in continual flux. This lack of control, this
uninsurability of being, is at the core of bulimic cinema.
46
CHAPTER THREE
Excess
An important feature of hysteria, both as a clinical
disorder and in the way it has been used to theorize film,
is excess. This concept is also crucial to the metaphor of
eating disorders that I propose. Nevertheless, as Kristen
Thompson has noted, "the critic is also faced with the fact
that excess tends to elude analysis" (Thompson 133).
Typically the concept of excess implies not a sufficiency,
but a superfluity. The opposite of excess is not absence,
or even paucity, but moderation, a concept that has proven
difficult to quantify in terms of cinema. Although the
concept of "excess" is used often in film theory, no one
has ever established how much "filmness" is normal, against
which standard, filmic superabundance can be read. In
practice, "excess" frequently denotes not-enough-ness as
well as too-much-ness.
In the theory of excess posited by bulimic cinema, the
insufficiency of anorexia exists at the opposite end of a
continuum to the excess of bulimia, but both can be
identified with the issue of control. In the clinical
afflictions of anorexia (not enough) and bulimia (too
much)— frequently exhibited sequentially— the woman's body
becomes the site of extreme fluctuations motivated by a
perceived lack of control. The central anxiety: who
47
controls the woman's body? In the films of Peter
Greenaway, there exist extremities of not-enough-ness and
too-much-ness on several filmic levels such as narration,
visual design, acting and the incorporation of other arts;
the issue is: who controls the body of the film?
In the analysis that follows, I will argue that we can
perceive Greenaway's films as excessive and that this
excess is related to other aspects of bulimic cinema— the
lack of artistic control, confusion over the boundaries of
the art object, rejection of interpretation; consumption of
other arts and anxiety about that consumption, the female
gendering of the art object, and the use of structuring
patterns which reject narrative. I will also examine how
this conception differs from other theories of excess, and
speculate on the reasons for this shift.
Due to the nature of film, definitions of excess are
particularly difficult to articulate. There exists such a
multitude of qualities to compare, with so many variables
to consider, in such a variety of contexts, that it becomes
impossible to define absolutely whether any single element
is excessive or not. Because of these difficulties, I
propose to start with two examples— from two of Greenaway's
films— that are clearly excessive and arrive at some
conclusions from their description. In The Bellv of an
Architect, the architect, Storley Kracklite, fears that his
48
wife has been poisoning him with tainted figs. In fact, he
suffers from terminal stomach cancer. He suffers as well
from an over-identification with both the architect
Boullee, whom he seeks to commemorate, and the Emperor
Augustus, whom he is about to follow into death.
Kracklite's fear of dying manifests itself in ceaseless
wandering through Rome, postcard writing, and a belligerent
attitude towards all the other characters. Most
obsessively, he repeatedly photocopies representations of
stomachs— his own, that of the statue of Augustus, that of
a putative drawing of Boullee. A museum display of
postcards— of Augustus and a building— shown early in the
film, foreshadows this reproduction. In this common
display, there is no longer simply a statue of Augustus,
but limitless multiples of a photograph of a statue of
Augustus, reduced in size, sold for a pittance, effectively
diminished. Kracklite steals one.
Later in the film, after he has begun to feel the pain
in his stomach, Kracklite photocopies and enlarges this
postcard until it is life-sized and holds it up to his own
stomach. He projects his discomfort onto the photocopy; he
uses it as a map, upon which he draws the guilty figs,
marks his pain, and guides the doctor's diagnosis. This
enlarged, stolen, reproduced stomach of Augustus becomes
Kracklite's main object of contemplation while
49
simultaneously collapsing many of the film's themes. These
include: the debased nature of the artwork as a result of
reproduction, and— reinforcing the link of debasement and
reproduction— the ambiguous nature of the engorged cavity.
This cavity may be a pregnancy or a cancerous stomach; it
may be Boullee's buildings or Augustus' tomb, birth or
death, artistic inspiration or annihilation. The postcard
of Augustus also demonstrates the tenuous control which can
be exerted over the artwork's circulation. In this case,
the postcard has been stolen. The original statue of
Augustus has already been reproduced as a postcard in a way
unanticipated and unsanctioned by its carver; now,
Kracklite manipulates the postcard in a way similarly
unanticipated and unsanctioned by the postcard's printer.
The excessive scene— representations of a belly
spewing out of a photocopying machine— is repeated
throughout the film. While Kracklite's reproductive act
serves a narrative function— it demonstrates that he is
worried about his stomach pain and is becoming increasingly
upset— its visual impact and repetition clearly transcend
this rationale. Both in their individual manifestations
and in their cumulative impact, the shots of the
photocopied bellies operate as excess.
This example of excess includes components of both
form and content. An example of excess from The Cook. the
50
Thief. His Wife and Her Lover relies more heavily on a
single formal element: a long, lateral tracking movement.
Early in the film, the camera tracks from a parking lot,
through the kitchen of Le Hollandais restaurant, past the
entry and cloakroom, and into the restaurant's dining room.
The rooms and hallways, in their vast scale and artful
decoration, themselves provide examples of excess which
contribute to the pleasure of the camera movement. What
visual delight will the camera reveal next? Where will
this journey end?
The extended tracking shot operates inter- and intra-
textually. It will be repeated several times throughout
the film, and it visually quotes from previous Greenaway
films— for instance, The Draughtsman's Contract— and
anticipates others— Prosoero's Books. The nature of the
shot signals a break with traditional cinema— Hollywood
cinema— which typically avoids such an extended camera
movement. But, despite the immensity of space revealed in
the shot, the one-dimensionality of the movement evokes the
two-dimensionality of painting rather than a space
constructed to suggest realism. The shot, in its duration,
its rejection of Hollywood three-dimensional space and its
repetition within and without the film, functions as
excess.
51
Where the example from Belly of an Architect is
reductive and isolating, the tracking shot from The Cook.
the Thief is comprehensive and all-encompassing. Kracklite
acts out a metaphor of self-absorption and inward, single,
focus: contemplating his own navel. Conversely, the mobile
camera of The Cook, the Thief, by investigating every
corner of the restaurant regardless of narrative action,
demonstrates all-inclusiveness. In their extremity, they
both operate as excess. How can we account for them?
Definitions of excess inevitably tend to be defined
against a standard of filmness set by pre-WWII classical
Hollywood Cinema, whether this standard is consciously
invoked or not. A Fritz Lang film noir can be read as
excessive by virtue of its stylized sets or exaggerated
lighting which exceed in some measure the classical
standard (too-much-ness). An Andrei Tarkowski drama, on
the other hand, may be excessive for the use of long takes
or restrained acting styles (not-enough-ness) in comparison
to the classical standard. At all times, this classical
standard is guided by a steady devotion to the development
of the story. This devotion is often repeated in
theoretical accounts of excess.
In "The Concept of Cinematic Excess" Kristin Thompson,
synthesizing the approaches of Stephan Heath and Roland
Barthes, connects excess to the materiality of film:
52
Style is the use of repeated techniques
which become characteristic of the work;
these techniques are foregrounded so that
the spectator will notice them and create
connections between their individual uses.
Excess does not equal style, but the two
are closely linked because they both
involve the material aspects of the film.
Excess forms no specific patterns which we
could say are characteristic of the work.
But the formal organization provided by
style does not exhaust the material of the
filmic techniques, and a spectator's
attention to style might well lead to a
noticing of excess as well. (132)
In this conception, "material aspects of the film" are seen
in opposition to narrative or plot elements— the word of
the father— pater— pattern— plot. What is not the father's
word, what is image, is the mater— material (Goux). All
imagery is therefore implicated in the struggle against
narrative pattern. Since the materiality of the image
always exceeds that of the written word, all film— in its
materiality— is excess.
A tension develops between narratively-motivated
elements which unify— words— and excessive elements which
lie outside and struggle against the narrative. Thompson
further implies that images function differently than words
in that there is less control over their deployment:
[N]arrative function may justify the
presence of a device, but it doesn't always
motivate the specific form that individual
element will take. Quite often, the device
could vary considerably in form and still
serve its function adequately. . . .The
actual choices are relatively
arbitrary. ..." (135)
53
Although Thompson approaches the question of excess
from a neo-formalist perspective, her discussion is
compatible with a psychoanalytic framework. Thompson's
conception of how the material functions accords with how
the clinical disorder of hysteria has been used to
conceptualize film. The hysterical symptom is not stable
in its manifestations, and it doesn't fall within the
patient's control. The hysterical symptom signifies
through representation rather than through the word. It
lacks, therefore, the unity, the linearity, and, most of
all, the fixity of words. The inability to communicate
with words/plot characterizes those films— melodramas,
women's films— most associated with hysterical expression
in visual design and acting. The inability to communicate
with words also appears within these films; muteness is a
particularly favored hysterical symptom in the hysterical
woman's film of disease (Doane 166).
Hysteria is excess, which "forms no specific
patterns," rather than style, because style "is the use of
repeated techniques which become characteristic of the
work." Through organized repetition, material aspects of
the film can express unity, wholeness, pattern. Lyotard
puts this idea into economic terms:
No movement, arising from any field, is
given to the eye-ear of the spectator for
what it is: a simple sterile difference in
an audio-visual field. Instead, every
54
movement put forward sends back to
something else, is inscribed as a plus or
minus on the ledger book which is the film,
is valuable because it returns to something
else, because it is thus potential return
and profit. (53)
This analysis leaves open the nature of the pattern, the
structure of return which is signaled by repetition. Some
elements, for example, displaying only narrative
significance when presented singly, can be repeated to the
point of excess. Thompson suggests a pattern based on
narrative motivation "by which the work makes its own
devices seem reasonable. At that point where motivation
fails, excess begins" (135).
In the case of Greenaway, the primacy of narration as
an organizing principle is frequently called into question.
It isn't that the films lack narrative elements— often
there is too much plot. However, organizing patterns,
other than narration, typically exert more control over the
films' development. Such patterns include: the numbers
from one to an hundred; the alphabet; the seven hills of
Rome; the twelve drawings of Mr. Neville; the first four
letters of a last name.
In Anatomy of Criticism. Northrup Frye posits a
category of fiction which, like a Greenaway film,
privileges taxonomy as an organizing principle. P. Adams
Sitney calls Greenaway's The Falls (1979) "an instance of
this rare genre in its purest and most extravagant form"
55
(45). Like Thompson, Frye analyzes the relationship of the
work's materiality to narrative drive as a way of drawing
distinctions between forms of prose. Frye doesn't describe
a perpetual tension between the narrative— unified and
stable— and the material manifestation— diffuse and
changeable. Instead, he uses the quality of foregrounded
materiality as a way of defining a category.
Separating and dividing critical categories, Frye
argues, makes it possible to properly appreciate a work in
a way not possible with a monolithic category of fiction in
which all works come to be judged by the standards of the
most dominant category (novel). In addition to novels,
romances, and confessions, Frye identifies what he at first
calls Menippean satire: extroverted and intellectual;
"deal[ing] less with people as such than with mental
attitudes" (309); most likely to be critically
misunderstood; and least likely to conform to narrative
expectations.
At its most concentrated the Menippean
satire presents us with a vision of the
world in terms of a single intellectual
pattern. The intellectual structure built
up from the story makes for violent
dislocations in the customary logic of
narrative. . . . (310)
Frye suggests Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy as the
paradigmatic example of this category and adopts the word
"anatomy"— defined as a dissection or analysis— to replace
56
"Menippean satire." The significance that Frye gives this
form, and a telling example, is provided by the title of
his own critical work: Anatomy of Criticism. By choosing
"anatomy" to designate the form, Frye connects the body to
the tendency to "expand into an encyclopedic farrago"
(311), a connection on which Greenaway obsesses.
The Falls is such a collection: encyclopedic in
length— 185 minutes— and a farrago of references—
i
Hitchcock's The Birds, avant-garde animation, documentary
cinema, the French Revolution, Genesis, Greenaway's other
films past and future, etc. The imaginary project which
The Falls pretends to depict is both isolating and
comprehensive. The film consists of ninety-two, almost
completely discrete, segments which provide a capsule
sketch of 92 "victims" of the VUE (Violent Unknown Event).
The subjects of the film's study, a portentous narrator
informs us, have been chosen because the first four letters
of their last names are F-A-L-L. A conceit of the film is
that the chosen letters are purely arbitrary, although of
course the word they form clearly evokes Adam and Eve's
fall from grace. The film studies the effects of the VUE
through changes traced on the bodies and speech of their
victims. They assume some physical characteristics of
birds and begin to speak in idiosyncratic languages. In
57
contradistinction to Adam and Eve, they realize that they
have been rendered immortal.
Greenaway provides another catalogue of bodies in his
short film Death in the Seine. Twenty-six corpses
represent all the bodies pulled from the Seine during the
French Revolution. Like the victims of the VUE, these
victims are isolated through a peculiarity: the discovery
of the corpse. But the video also demonstrates
inclusiveness. While the camera examines each naked and
inert character, a voice-over narration lists every thing
that is known about the person and how they came to be
found dead in a river.
The Falls and Death in the Seine synthesize isolation
and comprehensiveness, attributes that we have identified
separately in the two examples with which we began. These
opposing qualities are basic to the anatomy which strives
to be both discrete and all-encompassing.
Certainly, Greenaway could be that Menippean satirist,
who,
dealing with intellectual themes and
attitudes, shows his exuberance in
intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous
mass of erudition about his theme or in
overwhelming his pedantic targets with an
avalanche of their own jargon. (Frye 311)
The anatomy, through its very name, implies a taxonomy.
Aside from "overwhelming his pedantic targets," to what
58
purpose does the Menippean satirist put this "vision of the
world in terms of a single intellectual pattern"?
Taxonomy, in Greenaway's films, is associated with the
appearance of excess and motored by a demonstration of
control. One of the most powerful examples of taxonomy and
control can be seen in the story of Adam and Eve, a story
to which Greenaway, in films such as The Falls and The
Cook, the Thief, makes frequent and explicit reference. It
is interesting to note Adam's first chore:
So out of the ground the Lord God formed
every beast of the field and every bird of
the air, and brought them to the man to see
what he would call them; and whatever the
man called every living creature, that was
its name. (Genesis 2:19)
Having been granted dominion over "every creeping thing
that creeps upon the earth" (Genesis 1:26), Adam constructs
a taxonomy. As Lacan points out, this operation of naming
assumes a dual function:
Thus the symbol manifests itself first of
all as the murder of the thing, and this
death constitutes in the subject the
eternalization of his desire. (104)
Adam names to control all other entities, to fix them
(although they might be dead, decayed, or debased in the
process). This action is at once limiting— it reduces the
objects in the world to a single intellectual idea— and
infinite— it is capable of including everything and
anything.
59
Bulimic cinema disconnects what Adam's taxonomy
collapses. Anorexia reduces life to a single intellectual
idea: avoiding fat. Bulimia, on the other hand, can
encompass anything and everything, although all substances
must eventually be expelled.
In this conception of bulimic cinema and in Frye's
anatomy, the taxonomy is traced on a body, the symbolic
body of the work of art. Who names this body? Who
controls what can enter and what must be expelled, where
it begins and leaves off, who has access and who is denied?
In Bellv of an Architect and The Cook, the Thief, the
figure of the artist has been undermined to the point
where he can assert himself on none of these questions.
The architect Kracklite loses his exhibition and his baby
to the fascist moneyman Caspasian. The cook Richard can
make mischief in the kitchen, but the loquacious moneyman
Spica rules the dining room. Good intentions and good
taste don't accomplish much. In bulimic cinema, control
can only be achieved in extremity and outside the realms of
logic and capital.
What are the organizing patterns of Bellv and The
Cook, the Thief? We might say, a love triangle and a
revenge drama, but the material in the films which lie
outside these plots can't productively be classified as
stylistic excess. Systems other than plot, taxonomies and
60
lists, create their own single-minded meaning. With these
systems in mind, we can more interestingly consider some
features which occur in Greenaway's films as well as many
other contemporary films. These include: characters
lacking psychological plausibility; non-resolution of story
complications; a deficiency of plot motivation for formal
elements; a breakdown of borders between the film and other
artworks; and, finally, a general resistance of the film to
interpretation. These are all components of what I would
call bulimic cinema.
The paucity of the organizing pattern may seem opposed
to the exorbitance of the images, but both function as
excess and, like the problems of eating disorders, together
they lead us to the issue of control. These films react to
the barriers to achieving control without the benefit of
words, and without the appeal to reason and meaning,
fixedness and finitude, that a reliance on words implies.
61
CHAPTER FOUR
Film as Body
The body, as a symbol of organization, is crucial not
only to Greenaway's films, but to the concept of
postmodernity. Frye has suggested that the literary form
"anatomy" links the body metaphorically to a literary
organizational system. George Lakoff, a cognitive
linguist, argues that the body functions not only as a
metaphor but as the basis of metaphors. These metaphors of
the body are often realized more vividly and
straightforwardly than human bodies themselves whose
depiction and significance is often masked. Body
metaphors, according to Lakoff, also structure how we
organize and think about other objects in the world— all
other objects— but frequently in an unconscious or obscured
manner.
The significance of the body is central to Greenaway's
films, and he presents issues of the body on different
levels. Greenaway depicts the body as metaphor: as a
system of organization and as an analogy to art objects.
In this chapter I will consider how the postmodern body
operates as the basis of expanding conceptual metaphors.
But Greenaway also depicts actual human bodies; this
depiction emphasizes the materiality of bodies through the
revelation of nakedness and through an emphasis on physical
62
processes— particularly eating (with its digestive
corollary excreting). These concepts— eating and
nakedness— are both shown to intersect with sexuality, but
unlike their existence within a psychoanalytic account,
they are not subsumed within or explained by sexuality. In
Greenaway's films, eating and nakedness suggest a nexus of
meanings including knowledge, mortality and exclusion. The
second and third sections of this chapter will consider
these meanings through the concepts of eating and nakedness
in more detail.
Using Lakoff's discussion of metaphoric thought, we
can better understand the implications of naming an
artist's output his or her "corpus," body of work" or
"oeuvre." A body or bodies are always implicated when this
metaphor is applied to objects. What is of interest in
postmodernity is how explicit the embodiment of the work
has become. The corporality of the postmodern art object
contrasts with the disembodied nature of the modern art
object. Although it is often distinguished by a
foregrounding of the materials of production, the modern
art object transfigures those attributes associated with
materiality: mortality, transience, mutability,
contingency. The brush stroke, the flatness, the color of
painting; the tone, the tempo, the repetition of music; the
63
zoom, the grain, the sprocket of cinema: these qualities
are isolated and abstracted, propelled into transcendence.
I will argue, conversely, that the body of
postmodernity is not only explicitly mortal and mutable,
but has assumed the characteristics of the only body that
there ever has been in Western representation— the woman's
body: plural, conflicted, inconsistent, threatening, naked
and eating.
EXPANDING METAPHORS
In Women. Fire and Dangerous Things. Lakoff
contrasts a traditional view, which he terms objectivist,
with a cognitive approach, which he calls experiential
realism. Lakoff tries to deny a totalizing relativism,
which might be suggested by his rejection of objectivism,
by noting some shared characteristics between the two
views:
(a) a commitment to the existence of the
real world, (b) a recognition that reality
places constraints on concepts, (c) a
conception of truth that goes beyond mere
internal coherence, and (d) a commitment to
the existence of stable knowledge of the
world. (Women. Fire xv)
Despite these similarities, Lakoff argues that the
difference between the two approaches articulates a
substantial philosophical rift. One of the main
64
distinguishing characteristics between the two views is the
system of category formation:
On the objectivist view, things are in the
same category if and only if they have
certain properties in common. Those
properties are necessary and sufficient
conditions for defining a category. (xiv)
Alternatively, Lakoff's experiential realism, or
experientialism, depends on the idea that "thought
fundamentally grows out of embodiment. . . . reason is made
possible by the body. . . " (xv).
The capacity to reason is usually taken as
defining what human beings are and as
distinguishing us from other things that
are alive. If we understand reason as
being disembodied, then our bodies are only
incidental to what we are. (xvi)
Lakoff rejects this disembodiment, viewing the human body
as a central determinant of our conception of the world.
Along with the body, Lakoff would add imagination—
metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery— as elements which
are vital to categorization, but which are often left out
of the process of reason.
As Lakoff makes clear, this argument has profound
implications for the project of categorization, a project
which is inseparable from reason. "To change the concept
of category itself is to change our understanding of the
world" (9). What also changes is the possibility of
expressing control over things in the world. An
objectivist approach to the problem of categories allows
65
some validity to Adam's project of domination through
naming and categorizing. However, in Lakoff's cognitive
view, no category exists absolutely, even within so-called
objective scientific language. What is a zebra? Lakoff
wonders. In an argument based on the conflicting standards
of biologists, Lakoff concludes that "There is no true
biological category that consists of all and only the
zebras" (119).
Like Lakoff, Greenaway sees the problem of
categorization as basic. The characters in Greenaway's A
Zed and Two Noughts are also stymied in their attempts to
categorize zebras. What is a zebra? A black animal with
white stripes, a white animal with black stripes, a black
and white animal for a special zoo, a type of horse, an
object of scientific study, a sexual partner, a suicide
machine? How is it possible to control the animals in this
category, or lack of a category, of zebras? In A Zed and
Two Noughts, animals persistently find their way out of
their assigned enclosures— through rescue, theft, and
death— and humans find their way in. Each character
eventually forms a personal menagerie based on some
personal idea: stolen black and white animals; animals in
pornographic stories; animals in children's songs; dead and
decomposing animals. Your zoo is a reflection of your
self. Oliver says of the child Beta's "brand new
66
taxonomy": "Only an innocent would put a spider and a fly
in the same cage because they were both brown." Categories
for Lakoff and for Greenaway— like zoo cages— are variable
and permeable, if not completely unstable; they are absurd,
not universally accepted, artificial.
If categories can't be fixed through an objectivist
view, how are they formed? Lakoff's model remains
fundamentally based on the human body. He argues that all
cultures refer to basic-level categories which are "human
sized" (51) and which have "no objective status external to
human beings" (38). Abstraction arises out of body
experience in two ways: "By metaphorical projection from
the domain of the physical to abstract domains" and "By the
projection from basic-level categories to superordinate and
subordinate categories" (268). The body becomes the
ordering element of human reason: "It must be assumed that
our bodily experience itself has structure, that it is not
an unstructured mush" (267).
There are two apparent problems with this conception:
not only does it seem obvious to the point of
meaninglessness, there seems to be a dangerous appeal to
biologism. If we assign terms to concepts and objects
based on how our bodies are oriented in space— upright
while healthy and vital, prone in sickness and death— what
room is there for cultural determination or artistic
67
manipulation? The interest of the concept arises when we
consider how these metaphors extend beyond the body and
form connections which are not physically determined— the
"metaphorical projection from the domain of the physical to
abstract domains." Extended bodily experiences, for
instance "up" and "down," can create new categories of
perhaps strange conceptual bedfellows. Many of these
extensions are not obvious, but are embedded in a system
characterized by obviousness. Connections between
concepts— categories— are naturalized through the body as a
system of organization.
The problem of categories is one that also pervades
Greenaway's work. I have already mentioned the zoo cages
in flux of A Zed and Two Noughts. This film continually
evokes evolution, the theory of which seriously confounds
previous systems of categorization. Organisms in an
evolutionary scheme are all part of a vast continuum from
which one might distinguish branches, but never true
isolated character. "The very nature of the evolutionary
process ensures that the limits we set on each group of
related species are arbitrary" (Futuyma 59). In this
respect, the possibility of a creative, omniscient God—
whose categories could be, theoretically, clearly
determined— -is challenged on yet another front.
Greenaway demonstrates that even as it is impossible
to categorize all objects in the material world, it is as
impossible to assign stable categorization to subsets of
objects. The categories of individuals, for instance,
would seem to be obvious, but Greenaway consistently blurs
their boundaries. In Drowning Bv Numbers, three women bear
the same name— Cissie Colpitts— and use the same modus
operandi— drowning a husband. The character of Ariel, in
Prospero's Books, is played simultaneously by four actors—
identically dressed in red diapers and curly blond wigs,
but varying in age from a small boy to an adult man. In
The Falls, characters who have lost their identities are
advised to choose a new one from a group of ten which
includes David's Marat in the bathtub, Tippi Hendren in The
Birds and Greenaway's own recurring orthinologist character
Tulse Luper.
Another problematic category of categories is the set
of works of art. In Greenaway's films, a single
character's consciousness never determines every aspect of
any art object depicted. The category of a particular art
object is permeable, variable and subjective. Mr. Neville
of The Draughtsman's Contract includes in his drawings
objects which are not part of his design and which
eventually betray him by their presence. These
incriminating objects have invaded the limits of his
69
drawings. The death of the artist Neville at the end of
the film reflects the lack of power to which this incursion
attests. In Prosperous Books. Greenaway's primary
divergence from Shakespeare's Tempest provides another
example of how art works can exist with indeterminate
borders. The books Prospero treasures are re-created as
books of infinitude: the book of colors, of mirrors, of
movement, of minerals. These books include all the
infinite possibilities of the category they represent.
Within the finitude of a book, of course, this is an
impossibility. All books imply a selection and separation
performed by a reasoning consciousness. Prospero's books
could not have been written by any artist other than an
infinite God.
Greenaway's obsession with taxonomy intersects with an
obsession with bodily processes through what Lakoff has
suggested as the determining element of organization: the
human body. Greenaway explicitly invokes the same concepts
of bodily experience which Lakoff has identified as a
structural constant. However, Greenaway's use of the body
as system of organization is never absolute and is always
filtered through a tradition of Western culture. It is
through the body that Greenaway perpetually re-plays the
confusion of categories which are arbitrary, absurd,
variable and, ultimately, disintegrating.
70
The metaphor of up and down and the metaphor of the
body as container, are, according to Lakoff, two principal
structuring concepts that extend, or chain, through human
conceptual systems forming their own fluctuating categories
of meaning. Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe a cluster of
implications that attend the concepts of up and down:
happy is up, sad is down; conscious is up, unconscious is
down; health and life are up, sickness and death are down;
having control or force is up, being subject to control or
force is down, good is up, bad is down; virtue is up,
depravity is down; rational is up, emotional is down
(Metaphors We Live By 15).
Greenaway acknowledges the Western significance of the
up and down orientational metaphor through his use of a
specific image: Mantegna's painting of the Dead Christ.
Greenaway consciously invokes the painting: briefly in
Drowning By Numbers: as the main visual structuring element
in Death in the Seine: and again in Prospero's Books.
Mantegna's Christ lies on his back with his feet
prominently in the foreground. Because of the artist's
celebrated foreshortening technique, the feet appear large
and in the foreground, more prominent than the head. This
Christ, represented during the period after death, but
before resurrection, expresses the human, earthly aspect of
His dual nature— the capability to suffer and die— through
his foot. To assume this capability Christ had to descend
from heaven to earth. He will descend further, into hell,
and will eventually re-ascend. A chain of associations are
set in motion by these holy feet, a chain that ends in
death.
In his 1929 essay on "The Big Toe" Georges Bataille
comments similarly on the significance of the lower body
parts:
Although within the body blood flows in
equal quantities from high to low and from
low to high, there is a bias in favor of
that which elevates itself, and human life
is erroneously seen as an elevation. The
division of the universe into subterranean
hell and perfectly pure heaven is an
indelible conception, mud and darkness
being the principles of evil as light and
celestial space are the principles of good:
with their feet in mud but their heads more
or less in light, men obstinately imagine a
tide that will permanently elevate them,
never to return, into pure space. Human
life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing
oneself as a back and forth movement from
refuse to the ideal, and directed against
an organ as base as the foot. (20)
In Death in the Seine (1989) this back and forth movement
is articulated through a camera movement. This short film,
like The Falls, is segmented into capsule sketches of
individuals connected by a single criteria. The conceit in
this case is that the 26 characters profiled, or rather
their corpses, were pulled from the Seine during the French
Revolution. The camera tracks up their naked bodies from
the foot to the head— from refuse to the ideal— as the
72
video recounts what little is known about their lives and
the manner in which they died. These individuals
themselves demonstrate the oscillation from refuse to the
ideal. Found floating, discarded, unnamed and unmourned,
as refuse in the river, they are reconstructed as the
ideal, the human individual which is named, unique, and
socially connected. The video functions as memorial, a
remembrance of the dead. This in itself is an
immortalization or, in terms of up and down, an elevation.
Death in the Seine suggests those memorial photographs of
dead bodies which sought to arrest the body at the cusp of
decay. The agency of that arrest: representation and
remembrance.
The French Revolution, a prevalent theme in
Greenaway's work, here, as the film's setting, provides
another example of the movement between refuse and the
ideal. The Revolution begins with high ideals of liberty
and egalitarianism and results in irrational carnage, the
disintegration and decapitation of the social body in the
person of the king.
Death in the Seine provides 26 examples of the corpse
displayed, 2 6 examples of a visual motif that can be found
in several Greenaway films. In Drowning Bv Numbers. Cissie
Colpitts 2 mourns her husband on the veranda of their beach
house. Hardy, a poor swimmer, drowned by Cissie 2, has
73
been pulled from the sea and now lies on his back with his
feet in the foreground. Greenaway explains that he was
directly quoting Mantegna and that the original was
considered "almost a blasphemy— when Christ's feet are
given a greater sense of place than his head or his body—
yet bringing into concentration the wounds of the nails on
the soles of his feet" (Fear of Drowning Bv Numbers 111).
The wounds, of course, serve the same purpose as the feet
on which they are displayed; the suffering they represent
again refers to Christ's human, earthly nature.
The murdered Hardy has no stigmata, but his body
clearly demonstrates his earthly nature through a different
kind of imperfection: his fat. Hardy is not the only
Greenaway character whose personality is defined through
his weight. The ineffectual, pudgy Madgett, in the same
film, stuffs himself with chocolate pudding, and, like
Hardy, is drowned by the slender Cissies. Kracklite (Belly
of an Architect) is betrayed by his body, first by its bulk
and then by its internal rot. In these examples, the body
is used as another structuring metaphor to which Lakoff
refers: the body as container. In these examples, it is a
container attacked from within.
Where the concepts of high and low imply a series of
value judgments, the body as container is a more ambiguous
and problematic metaphor for the individual. The skin is
74
the container for the body, just as the ego is the
container for the personality. This conception of the ego
and the unconscious as receptacles for psychic material
persists despite Freud's attempts to conceptualize them as
agencies. The subject's relationship to the rest of the
world is formulated as the relationship of inside to
outside.
In Belly of an Architect, the human body is a
vulnerable and suffering container for the artist.
Although the human mind is capable of erecting the
magnificent buildings and statues of Rome, the shell which
holds it is suspect to degrading impulses and ills: poison,
jealously, greed, gluttony, cancer, vanity, death and
oblivion.
A scene from Belly of an Architect, which draws on
both the metaphor of up and down and the body as container,
depicts the stomach as a fragile and mundane container
explicitly contrasted with the head, the uniqueness of
which is demonstrated through the mind and the individual
features. Only the mind, located in the head, can present
the possibility of immortality.
Kracklite's compassionate doctor tells him that he
will soon die of cancer— stomach cancer— but he conveys his
diagnosis in a manner calculated to emphasize the eternal
potential of the individual. Doctor Amansa leads Kracklite
75
past the busts of famous Romans— Galba, Titus, Hadrian,
Nero— and describes their common fate: all dead. At an
unnamed bust, the doctor pauses:
Unknown. . .no name. . .he looks serene
enough, let's suppose he was you. . .same
fleshly face. . .what happened to him? How
did he die?
As Kracklite begins to understand the significance of this
speculation, the doctor adds:
There is some comfort to be had in
contemplating the folly of so many dead
. . . don't you think? . . . and more
comfort still in contemplating the
continuity. . . ?
The doctor urges Kracklite to find consolation by inserting
himself in the great chain of immortality on view.
Kracklite can imagine himself as the unnamed bust, in a
line with emperors whose fame has lasted 2,000 years.
These emperors are depicted only by their heads which bear
their individuated facial features— "same fleshly face"—
and which thereby represent their long-remembered
personalities. They are not remembered by their bodies—
long gone— which are not represented in these statues.
The body as container extends metaphorically to
characterize objects other than the body— for example, the
setting of The Cook, the Thief. This setting, the
restaurant Le Hollandais, is excessively overdetermined.
It is at once a cathedral, a gallery, a museum, and a
literal restaurant. Its color-coded parts also suggest the
76
distinctions between earthly paradise in the form of a
green kitchen (complete with a pastry cook named Eden),
hell as a red dining room, and heaven as a white bathroom.
Heaven, hell and the earthly paradise are likely realms for
a film so interested in depicting absolute evil, as
Greenaway in a BBC interview has said he intended to do
through the character of Spica. These ontological
categories also invoke Greenaway's everpresent themes of
transgression, a fall and (generally foiled) redemption.
The restaurant as a whole, as container,
isomorphically represents the human body. The three realms
can also be seen as the head, the heart and the digestive
system. Like a person, the restaurant has a name. And,
like a person, the restaurant is subject to a struggle for
control. In this case, the struggle which persists
throughout the film is waged between the artist and the
capitalist, between silence and speech, between
discrimination and philistinism— a struggle which the film
figures as a struggle between the forces of good and evil.
Like the conflict of eating disorders, this struggle
involves the question of what is allowed to go in the body
and what is rejected to be kept outside. Spica steals two
food vans full of fish and meat for the restaurant which
the cook Borst, who is dedicated to "quality," refuses to
use. Spica's henchmen arrive with tawdry, pilfered
77
utensils which are quickly rejected. The trucks full of
stolen food stay in the parking lot, outside the mouth of
the restaurant. Eventually, the food in them decays into
uselessness.
For Greenaway, as for Lakoff, the body is the most
ubiquitous ordering system. Greenaway's films acknowledge
the body as the basis of cultural categories and as a basic
component of art, particularly within a tradition of
Western culture. Nevertheless, this basis is no more
stable than other, more rational, orders. Not even the
human body can provide the universal structure that Lakoff
would ascribe to it. The body is always already a corpse,
and always from the moment of birth has its own
decomposition inscribed in it. The exquisite order which
the life of a vital being represents invariably gives way
to total dispersal and disorder. Greenaway's films are
littered with decomposition— tombs, human corpses,
roadkill— and its agents— worms, insects, maggots. Like
the food in the vans outside Le Hollandais, the human body,
as ordering system, will decay into uselessness. The human
body will disintegrate just as the social body— which
supports the metaphors— will also disintegrate. The
structure of the body and the experience of the body will
indeed be digested into "unstructured mush." In
Greenaway's films, eating and digestion represent the main
78
agency of decay, the greatest threat to the body's
integrity, the principle destroyer of the body as basis of
category and reason.
EATING
But the sight of salami sometimes almost
made them faint, because it was all
immediately and entirely edible. (55)
In George Perec's Things (1968), the central couple, Jerome
and Sylvie, spend all of their time consuming. Much of the
novel devolves into lists of things they want to buy and
consume. As semi-prosperous Parisians, they have some
means and unlimited opportunity to indulge themselves in
cocktails, cigarettes, books, newspapers, furniture,
clothes and, above all other things, food. While they
never get enough of what they want, there are some moments
of excess which are like pleasure,
an almost visceral pleasure, a pleasure so
intense as to verge on numbness: an
impression, almost exactly identical to the
experience of speed, of a tremendous
stability, of tremendous plenitude. (Perec
59)
They "indulge in distractions" of food and drink, and then
binge on a cure: "The couples would stay at home, dieting,
feeling queasy, overindulging in black coffee and soluble
aspirin." Perec uses metaphors of drowning or paralysis to
convey the horror, not of loss, but of surfeit. The sight
of the salami, the phallic object, makes an observer faint,
79
not because you can't have it, but because you can. In
Things. the characters love the cinema, but they recognize
in it a lack not associated with their other habits of
consumption:
It was not the film they had dreamt of. It
was not the total film each of them had
inside himself, the perfect film they would
have liked to make. Or, more secretly, no
doubt, the film they would have liked to
live. (Perec 57)
To live, to have, to apprehend the object as "immediately
and entirely edible"— for Jerome and Sylvie, these eclipse
the possibility of vision, of sexual desire, of lack;
clearly, they must deny a cinema which has embodied these
concepts. Consumption (having), rather than libido
(lacking), is the primary motivator in their lives, and in
this way they must also deny the movement of which that
cinema is a part: modernism.
Consumption as a motivating force is a possibility
consistently denied by psychoanalysis which, with Marxism,
operates as modernism's dominant narrative. Psychoanalysis
considers eating only in its relationship to sexuality.
This relationship puts eating underneath, outside the
realms of pleasure and culture except as it is brought in
and mediated by sexuality.
In Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Jean Laplance
provides an overview of the psychoanalytic approach to
eating, the function of which serves as a "prop" to the
80
function of sexuality. While the "libido" of sexuality is
a term analogous to "hunger," sexuality operates on a
different level: as a drive, that which is already a
delegation or representation of an unknown biological
stimulus ("a kind of biological x"). As a drive, sexuality
is not only already a representation, a substitution, a
"metaphorico-metonymical 'derivative' (125) and therefore
wholly cultural, it is also single, possessing unity.
Although Freud, at times, suggests that the sexual drive is
only one of some others, Laplanche offers the thesis that:
"it is sexuality which represents the model of every drive
and orobablv constitutes the only drive in the strict sense
of the term" (Laplanche's emphasis, 8). With this
assertion, Laplanche subsumes all possible motivations
within the sexual. The "lack" of sexual desire eclipses
the "have" which characterizes consumption.
The notion of drive is compared to and contrasted with
a concept with which it is sometimes confused: the
instinct. The function of the instinct is that on which
the drive, the sexual drive, is "propped."
The phenomenon Freud describes is a leaning
of the drive, the fact that emergent
sexuality attaches itself to and is propped
upon another process which is both similar
and profoundly divergent: the sexual drive
is propped upon a nonsexual, vital function
or, as Freud formulates it in terms which
defy all additional commentary, upon a
'bodily function essential to life.' It
will thus be admitted that our divergence
81
from Freud's thought is minimal, that we
are in fact only rendering it more precise
when we say that what is described as
propping is a leaning originally of
infantile sexuality on the instincts, if by
instinct is meant that which orients the
'bodily function essential to life': in the
particular case first analyzed by Freud,
the instinct is hunger and the function
feeding." (16)
We may infer that the sense in which eating is a "bodily
function essential to life" is a sense more immediate and
direct than that of sexuality which is also ultimately a
"bodily function essential to life." Still, to concede
this point doesn't suggest how these terms "defy all
additional commentary." Why does nothing more need to be
said about eating?
With this idea of "propping," the sexual drive and the
hunger instinct fit into what I have discussed as the
orientational metaphor of up and down. The central image
of "propping" suggests this metaphor, as does the
association of sexuality with the higher conceptual
functions of representation and abstraction. Another
concept categorized with "up" is indivisibility. There is
only one drive, but many instincts. In this way, sexuality
is placed in a transcendent position of unity and
singleness, while eating is of the multitude. There is
only one God in heaven, but swarms and legion in hell.
Still, even though there are presumed to be many instincts,
82
examples are only drawn from this "particular case [in
which] the instinct is hunger and the function feeding."
Laplanche's reading of Freud, which on this point
remains consistent with a general psychoanalytic
consideration— or lack of consideration— of eating,
eclipses eating, completely subsuming or swallowing it as a
process within another process— sexuality— which is
demonstrated to be on a different, higher level than the
animalistic, naturalistic level of the instinct.
If hunger were an instinct by Laplance's definition,
it would be uninflected by culture or "historical
evolution," fixed in its aim and object, and unsusceptible
to aberrations. This is, in fact, how the argument
develops. Unlike the sexual drive for which the object is
unimportant ("it remains relatively indifferent and
contingent" [12]), the object of hunger is presented as
nourishment, which in Laplanche's discussion is simplified
as "milk" (17). This simplicity contrasts with the
description of the sexual drive which is figured as subject
to every kind of distortion. Laplanche argues that the
taxonomy of perversions that Freud provides in Three Essays
on Sexuality is specifically calculated "to destroy
received notions of a specific aim and specific
object. . . ." (15):
Sexuality . . . gives the appearance, in a
so-called normal adult, of an instinct, but
that is only the precarious result of a
historical evolution which at every stage
of its development may bifurcate
differently, resulting in the strangest
aberrations. (15)
Because it is the drive, sexuality is not a clear-cut
operation. Yet, eating too is subject to manifold
aberrations, of which anorexia and bulimia are examples, as
well as complex habits and rituals. Clearly, disordered
eating and ritualistic eating is not done merely in the
service of an animalistic self-preservation uninflected by
"historical evolution." To account for perversions of
eating, psychoanalysis is forced to re-prop them back onto
the sexual drive. Hence the psychoanalytical conclusion
that anorexia and bulimia are the fear of or desire for
pregnancy.
When aberrations of eating must be transferred to the
sexual realm, so must the pleasure of eating:
No one who has seen a baby sinking back
satiated from the breast and falling asleep
with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile
can escape the reflection that this picture
persists as a prototype of the expression
of sexual satisfaction in later life.
(Freud quoted in Laplanche, 18)
By the end of its first meal, the baby's physical
sensations of eating have leapt from a nutritive
satisfaction (which is presumably always there on an
instinctual basis with a source in the digestive system) to
a completely sexualized feeling. This leads to the
question: is any eating which is not "self-preservation"
84
automatically sexual in Freudian terms? Are the pleasures
of eating the same as the pleasures of sexuality? Despite
the fact that the sexual usage towards orgasm culminates in
a loss of control which seems at variance with the
pleasures of eating, the psychoanalytic response to both
questions is always "yes."
The slippage from eating to sexuality which Laplanche
effects is not unique to Freudian thought. Freud doesn't
invent this slippage so much as re-contextualize it. For
Freud, this shift takes place in the realm of the psyche,
preceding and malcing possible the formation of the
personality. Elaine Pagels identifies the same slippage in
early Christian interpretations of Genesis. In this case,
the ground of the shift is the basis of original sin.
Although the act itself was to eat, the rationale of the
act as original sin must exceed consumption itself. The
claim that Adam and Eve's sin was really to engage in
sexual intercourse was "a view common among such Christian
teachers as Tatian the Syrian, who taught that the fruit of
the tree of knowledge conveyed carnal knowledge" (Pagels
27). Adam's choice of scratchy fig leaves to cover the
genitals was intended to punish the offending organs
(Pagels 28). In these interpretations, sexual disobedience
is "propped" on the consumption of the apple.
85
While eating is often self-preservative, disordered
eating demonstrates that eating is not simply self
preservative in an animalistic, instinctual, outside of
culture sense. Eating is not the simple part upon which
the complexities of representation, culture, and sexuality
are propped.
In Denial of Death. Ernest Becker attempts, among
other things, to explain Freud's dogged devotion to the
primacy of the sexual drive. For Becker, Freud's analysis
is valid to great extent, but falls short in that it
represses rather than recognizes the basic animal condition
of humankind. The major task for all subjects according to
Becker is the flight from helplessness and obliteration.
Relative to this goal, "sexual matters are secondary and
derivative" (36).
Becker's analysis converts Freud's sexual drive into
an especially successful technique of control through
repression. The displacement of anxiety onto sexuality is
necessary in the face of helplessness and obliteration
which are inevitable, in fact, and which are perpetually
recalled by the need to sustain the body through constant
eating. To Becker, Freud's emphasis on the repression of
sexual matters itself functions as a repression because
sexual activity is not the truly disturbing element. That
element is the vulnerability of the body. For Becker,
86
gender differences are threatening not through their sexual
implications, but because "gender reveals that the nature
of the body is arbitrary" (41). The subject could just as
easily be female as male, just as easily animal as human.
I have argued that, within many discourses such as the
Freudian, eating is subsumed by sexuality. In a move which
is not mutually exclusive, the significance of eating is
also commonly displaced onto the question of class. What,
where, how much, and in what manner one eats indicates
economic power and social position. Again, eating no
longer simply sustains the body. In this case, it
metyonmically represents the personality.
The displacement of eating onto sexuality and class is
an operation continually attempted by the characters of
Bellv of an Architect, for the most part successfully.
Yet, for Stourley Kracklite, the architect of the title, no
such displacements are possible. As he dies of stomach
cancer over the course of the film, each meal becomes a
painful ordeal. By eating, Kracklite is always reminded of
his station in life and his inevitable death.
Bellv of an Architect opens with sex followed by a
brief and oblique discussion of food and class. The
American Kracklite, accompanied by his wife Louisa, are
traveling by train to Rome, where Kracklite plans to
organize an exhibit of the work of the architect Etienne-
87
Louis Boullee. The contented, sexually-satiated Kracklite,
who has just impregnated his wife, anticipates his project
with optimism. For him, Italy is "Land of fertility . . .
fine women . . . inimitable history . . . home of the dome
and the arch . . . and good food . . . and high ideals.'1
Louisa responds with a contradiction. Her Italian father
wasn't fat, as Kracklite is, "he was thin." He emigrated
to Chicago, "city of blood, meat and money," and became a
sausage exporter. "Home of the best carnivorous
architecture in the Western World," Kracklite says of
Chicago. "That is, of course, outside of Rome. ..."
Kracklite laughs, not realizing that he is about to become
the meat which will be eaten.
When the couple arrives at their apartment, Louisa
announces that she is hungry and thirsty. Kracklite
mistakes this for a physical need and suggests room
service. Louisa, however, is interested in the social
aspects of dining. She "want[s] to eat in public. . . .You
can't eat alone in Rome." As expected, the supper party at
the Pantheon Restaurant, depicted in the next scene, will
be much more than an opportunity to satisfy hunger and
thirst. In terms of the film's narrative, this supper
party is also an opportunity to introduce the film's major
characters: Io Speckler, Kracklite's Italian host, and his
88
stylish children, the architect Caspasian and the
photographer Flavia.
As the restaurant scene begins, the main course has
ended and the guests are about to enjoy their desert of
fruit and cake. The desert course is, arguably, the most
superfluous and symbolic part of any meal. Certainly the
items consumed in this scene carry a heavier burden of
significance than of nutrition.
The spectacular white desert cake is formed as a model
of a building by Boullee. Like a new building, it even has
a ribbon to cut. Through these references, the cake
celebrates the exhibit which Kracklite will organize. The
building depicted was designed in honor of Sir Issac
Newton; its model therefore celebrates the recognition of
gravity as well. The cake also sports fifty-four candles
which commemorate Kracklite's fifty-fourth birthday,
another celebration. As the dialogue makes clear, the
rounded shape of the cake suggests Kracklite's bulging
stomach or a pregnant belly. Eating the cake invokes more
symbolism. Caspasian tells his friend Frederico that
Louisa is "Obviously looking for a 'Romantic Experience.'"
He can tell by "The way she eats cake!"
The supper party concludes, then, with the mass
consumption of an object which evokes celebration, purity,
science, infidelity, reproduction, aging, fascism and
89
class. By the end of the scene the cake lies in ruins,
half-eaten and squashed together with guttering candles.
Kracklite's good-luck, one-pound note, which bears the
likeness of Sir Issac Newton, has been crumpled into the
remains. By simply eating their cake, the party-goers have
created a metaphor of loss, destruction and bad fortune.
The figs which Kracklite eagerly eats also presage
problems. For the rest of the film, Kracklite will invest
these figs with a mythico-historical meaning. He
interprets them as the figs with which the Emperor Augustus
was poisoned by his wife. Eventually, Kracklite will begin
to suspect his own wife of poisoning him. When the couple
returns to their apartment, Kracklite's love-making is
interrupted by a pain in his stomach that he at first
ascribes to indigestion and will later decide was the
result of the poisoned figs. He ends his first night in
Italy throwing up.
The ritualized meal characterized by good food and
sociability will be repeated in the film at a luncheon
buffet and at a country picnic. Each time, the social
atmosphere will appear more poisonous to Kracklite, and his
physical pain will be greater.
At the Vittoriano lunch, the characters debate the
possibility that Boullee's designs are essentially fascist.
Caspasian, who will play the role of Kracklite's rival,
90
recounts the story of Augustus' death by elaborately play
acting death by poison. As at the Pantheon Restaurant,
Kracklite is disturbed by the conversation and the food.
He quickly rushes to the toilet and vomits his lunch. In
the toilet, Kracklite witnesses a suspicious exchange of
cash. This is the first intimation that his exhibit will
be used to launder money. On another occasion, Kracklite,
Louisa, the Specklers and hangers-on also travel to Roman
ruins for a picnic. Although he has ignored his wife,
Kracklite resents Caspasian's attentions to her. Again,
Kracklite is rattled by the events which occur at the
sociable meal, and he is unable to keep his food down. His
illness becomes more unpleasant and desperate. This time
he retreats to a ruin, where a stray dog eats his vomit.
The slim and elegant Italians have little sympathy for
such suffering. They spend their meal-times wondering out
loud how the 54-year-old, overweight Kracklite can satisfy
his beautiful, young wife. They refuse to take seriously
an American architect from the bloody slaughterhouse yards
of Chicago. They will eat meat, but they won't kill it.
They use Kracklite's beloved exhibit as an opportunity to
make money and dine on good food. Louisa, herself of
Italian heritage, quickly adapts. Despite her pregnancy,
she has no trouble keeping her food down. Only Kracklite
is unable to enjoy the lush meal times.
91
The night before the Boullee exhibition is scheduled
to open, Kracklite— now fully aware of his terminal
condition— returns to the Pantheon Restaurant, the scene of
his earlier triumphant celebration. Now he wears white,
not black, and he is as drained of power as of color.
Staggering drunkenly into the restaurant, Kracklite makes a
token effort at linking food with sex and social standards.
He approaches two heavy, middle-aged women and cautions, "I
shouldn't eat those figs, lady, they're an aphrodisiac and
I don't think you'd be up to it." Ignoring their protests,
Kracklite tries to join them. "Can I join you? . . . My
wife always wanted to eat in company."
Quickly, he returns to his obsession with the belly.
"Do you have a belly?" he asks, lifting his shirt to expose
his own. He tries to get a woman to touch his stomach.
"Don't be frightened . . . it won't bite you . . . It's
only biting me. . . ." Unlike the other characters in the
film, Kracklite can never ignore his own belly, and he can
never disconnect eating from the disease which will kill
him and which, while it may take the form of stomach
cancer, is simply the nature of the human body. Kracklite
is always a belly, always a body— acted on from within by
cancer, acted on from outside by gravity. In the end,
gravity and his body kill him. As the Boullee exhibition
opens, he leaps to his death. In its final shot, the film
92
offers a metaphor of a human life in the form of a
gyroscope.
The gyroscope in close-up spins round and
round, its axis becoming more and more
diagonal— until— this machine that can
temporarily withstand gravity— collapses.
(Published script 114)
To eat, an apple, a fig, or anything else, is to
acknowledge the ultimate destruction of the self— the
body's inevitable capitulation to gravity. Eating must be
converted into something else— religious salvation, a
sexual ploy, ritualized sociability, assertions of class.
Food becomes a meal, nourishment becomes dinner, self-
preservation is masked by the trappings of the banquet hall
and its contemporary equivalent, the restaurant.
NAKEDNESS
Before leaving the question of the body and its
metaphoric extensions, let us consider the body in its most
revealing state: naked. Artworks can depict nakedness in
various ways: as a specific conventional category, as a
sexualized image, or simply as a person who for some reason
is without clothes.
The nude, as a canonized category of art production
and of analysis, has been critiqued, and it is interesting
to note the nature of this critique. In the nude, the
93
naked person is depicted as being a body, and this
embodiment subjects him or her, but usually her, to being
in the viewer's control. Although there are categories of
male nudes (for instance, Jesus), most nudes are female and
their discussion must recognize the issue of gender.
John Berger provides a critigue of the nude in Wavs of
Seeing:
Men act and women appear. Men look at
women. Women watch themselves being looked
at. This determines not only most
relations between men and women but also
the relation of women to themselves. The
surveyor of woman in herself is male: the
surveyed female. Thus she turns herself
into an object— and most particularly an
object of vision: a sight. (47)
Here, Berger argues a version of the ubiquitous point that
women possess a non-unitary nature; she is male while
looking and female while being observed. This passage also
reiterates how vision has been expanded into a concept of
distance from, and ability to see, difference— the other
which is also woman. Berger goes on to develop Kenneth
Clark's distinction within representation between being
naked, which simply means to be in a state without clothing
or covering, and being nude, which implies an awareness of
being looked at in a state without clothing or covering.
"Woman" is more susceptible to the latter condition because
"woman" "is not naked as she is. She is naked as the
spectator sees her" (50). She is not in her own control,
94
but in the control of whomever enjoys the picture, a
"surveyor" who is inevitably read as masculine even if the
"surveyor" is a woman.
Nudity enhances objectification through its revelation
of the body, because objectification can reduce a person— a
subject— to only a body, just a body, simply a body. This
critical stance carries its own assumptions and is infused
with its own denial; is it possible for the individual
depicted or for the critic, him or herself, to be anything
other than a body? Does John Berger avoid objectification,
is he not a body, because we don't see him in the book
version of Wavs of Seeing? Is he not susceptible to being
seen as only a body when we do see him in the BBC video
version?
Greenaway is certainly aware of and responds to not
only the European art tradition of the nude, but to its
critique. Many shots in his films clearly evoke particular
paintings or particular genres of paintings, including
nudes. However, this canonized, codified nudity is not the
kind of nakedness that best characterizes Greenaway's
interests. Although he doesn't ignore the power
relationships and possibilities of oppression and sexual
possession suggested by nakedness and nudity, he refuses to
limit the concept to these qualities.
95
To understand the full range of associations evoked by
Greenaway's use of nakedness, we must turn to Genesis. The
embodiment of human kind is a crucial factor in Adam and
Eve's fall. A group of associations revolve around this
moment. Although the fall is a punishment for
disobedience, the particular details of the story link the
concepts of: eating, sexuality, exclusion, knowledge, and
mortality. These meanings cohere around one aspect of the
story which is given great emphasis and occurs immediately
after the fateful bite:
Then the eyes of both were opened, and they
knew that they were naked; and they sewed
fig leaves together and made themselves
aprons. (Genesis, 3:7)
The first knowledge afforded by the tree of knowledge of
good and evil is the knowledge that they are naked. This
knowledge is also the tip-off of their sin. Adam and Eve
hide because they are naked, and God asks suspiciously:
"Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the
tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" (Genesis, 3:11).
Obviously, the state of nakedness means more here than
simply to be in a state without clothing. It marks
knowledge, the first new thing Adam and Eve know. It marks
mortality, their new condition. It marks the act of
consumption, the prerequisite of their transformation. It
marks exclusion, suffering, and guilt, the secondary
repercussions of the crime of knowledge. As we have seen,
96
it also, through a strange interpretive slippage, indicates
sexuality. These are the same associations we discover in
Greenaway's use of the naked human body— not repressed or
forgotten, but emphasized.
In The Draughtsman's Contract, a naked statue roams
the grounds of Anstley, never speaking. While he observes
his "betters” as they move through the gardens, they
clearly don't see him for what he is, a human being, but as
a statue. By this misperception, or perhaps refusal of
perception, they demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding
of art. The class-climbing characters perpetuate a
civilization dependant on a studied ignorance of human
bodily processes: the eating, stretching, scratching and
urination of the statue that they refuse to acknowledge.
The statue's final act is an example of these processes as
well as an ironic commentary on the film. The visiting
draughtsman has just been murdered by his hosts when the
statue takes an ironic bite out of a pineapple, symbol of
hospitality. The juice dribbles down his chin, washing
away the paint of his disguise. In addition to this
statue, the film also shows semi-naked characters more
conventionally in sexualized situations.
In contrast to the limited use of nakedness in The
Draughtsman's Contract. and indeed in most films,
Prosoero's Books depicts the naked human form almost
97
universally. At one point, even the aged Gielgud as
Prospero appears dishabille. Only Miranda keeps her
clothes on— in opposition to the expectations of filmgoers
accustomed to the nudity of young, female love objects. As
the film foils expectations about which characters will
appear without clothes, it foils expectations about what
that nakedness signifies. In Prospero's Books, to be naked
is never a simple thing.
As the film begins, Prospero steps out of his pool and
dons a spectacular cloak. (Gielgud found the cloak so
large and heavy that he cited wearing it as the most
difficult aspect of making the film.) In his bid to re
establish himself as ruler, Prospero uses magical powers to
manipulate people and events. His gorgeous cloak becomes a
symbol of the superhuman abilities that allow his control.
On the other hand, Prospero's manipulees— the Dukes of
Milan and Naples and their retinue— must give up their
clothes as the symbols of their own authority and power
before they can enter the fantasy world of the island. In
a scene not depicted in Shakespeare's play, the shipwrecked
nobles are shown naked, unconscious and submerged during
the tempest. This naked submersion suggests baptism, a
rite that marks the movement from one ontological realm to
another.
98
As in the play, the castaways discover that upon their
arrival on shore, their clothing has undergone a fantastic
modification. Gonzalo notes "that our garments, being, as
they were, drenched in the sea, hold, notwithstanding,
their freshness and gloss, being rather new-dyed than
stained with salt water." The amazed Gonzalo raises the
point three more times, each time in the context of how the
clothes now seem as fresh as they had at Claribel's
marriage to the King of Tunis. Marriage signals a major
shift in being and therefore requires a new set of clothes.
So, too, does falling in love. During his first
conversation with Miranda, as Ferdinand becomes more
infatuated, he is gradually disrobed by a swarm of spirits.
Unlike Ferdinand who appears in an extended shot of
full frontal nudity, his sexual rival Caliban never appears
completely naked. Throughout the film, Caliban wears the
same outfit of a girdle and a sort-of form-fitting codpiece
which serve to cover, while drawing attention to, the
genitals. Unlike Ferdinand who is encouraged to become
romantically attached to Miranda and does, Caliban's sexual
threat lacks sentiment. His rationale for wanting Miranda,
like Claribel's marriage to the King of Tunis, is
reproductive and strategic. In his relationship to
Prospero, Caliban is an Adam to the God-figure. Prospero
will give anything to Caliban except the one thing he
99
wants— which is to be Prospero. This Adam never figures
out that he is naked, mortal, vulnerable. When the
buffoons Trinculo and Stephano hesitate in the murder of
Prospero to steal clothes off the laundry line, Caliban
urges them onward: "What do you mean / To dote thus on
such luggage? Let't alone, / And do the murder first."
Caliban doesn't realize the powerlessness of his own,
almost total nakedness, and he doesn't know enough to cover
himself up with the right symbols. Perhaps to be Prospero
is as easy as putting on his clothes. At the conclusion of
the film, when Prospero gives up his supernatural power, he
gives up his special cloak as well, in favor of the social
uniform— black suit, ruffled collar— worn by the other
noblemen.
Nakedness has meaning for these human and semi-human
characters, but only for humans, and only because humans
exist within the context of the body and its processes—
whether sexual, digestive or mortal. For the many nymphs
and spirits of the island, to be naked has little meaning.
Their clothing is purely decorative, and their bodies
completely unreal. At the beginning of the film, the
littlest version of Ariel urinates into Prospero's pool for
an outrageously unnatural length of time. Ariel's pee
operates as an abstract shape. It's flow describes an arc
just as the swing on which he is perched describes an arc
10 0
through movement. Having waste excreted into his pool
doesn't appear to bother Prospero at all even though he is
partially submerged in it. The prodigious and amusing pee
is meaningless in the same way as the statue's urine is
meaningless to the other characters in The Draughtsman's
Contract. characters for whom the statue doesn't exist as a
person. Why is he peeing so long, one wonders of the
little sprite, Ariel? and then, why is he peeing at all?
We have already observed a pervasive slippage of
eating and sexuality. Now we see the concepts of eating
and nakedness, which is clearly not always sexualized,
intersect. They meet at the continuum of eating disorders
where the manipulation and organization of the appearance
of the body is reduced to the manipulation and organization
of eating. These manipulations, ostensibly intended to
improve appearance, serve instead to degrade it.
Simultaneously, the anorectic and the bulimic lose the
ability to know how they appear. The devoted attempts to
manipulate the body's image through eating results in an
inability to see the body, to apprehend one's own
nakedness. The popular notion of eating disorders is that
the woman is trying to fulfill society's expectations of
skinniness, and yet, having attained a state beyond the
ideal, she frequently layers herself in concealing
clothing. She, in fact, doesn't Mturn[] herself into an
1 0 1
object— and most particularly an object of vision: a sight"
(Berger 47). Not seeing the body either metaphorically or
literally is the desired condition. Why try to see the
disturbing self when even the healthy body has its own
corruption inscribed in it? The appeal of the disordered
eater is to non-reason, non-knowledge.
Clearly, knowledge is not power, particularly when it
is knowledge of the body, a self-knowledge which reminds
the individual of his or her oppression, ephemeral nature,
or vulnerability and, in all cases, inevitable doom. As
hard as the anorectic or bulimic may try to overcome the
body's corruption, it is the most salient fact. This
reluctance to see the self, to be an object to one's own
subjectivity, has implications for how art objects are
depicted and will be considered in the next chapter.
102
CHAPTER FIVE
Consuming subjects and consumable objects
"Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you
will betray me* . . . It is he to whom I
shall give this morsel when I have dipped
it." So when [Jesus] had dipped the
morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of
Simon Iscariot. Then after the morsel,
Satan entered into him. (John 14, verses
21, 26-27, The New Oxford Annotated Bible)
And as they were eating, he took bread, and
blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them,
and said, "Take; this is my body." And he
took a cup, and when he had given thanks he
gave it to them, and they all drank of it.
And he said to them, "This is my blood of
the covenant, which is poured out for many.
(Mark 14, verses 22-24)
-The argument that conceptions about the human body
extend metaphorically to include other objects,
particularly art objects, suggests a series of questions:
What is the nature of that body? Whose body is it? Can we
identify any concepts— specifically linked to bodies— that
act to determine our understanding of objects? Finally,
what are the repercussions of a confusion among or an
identity between subjects and objects: a confusion or
identity produced through metaphors of the body?
Bulimic cinema arises when the body of a film, j
I
analogized to the human body, assumes a dual nature, when j
the filmic body is both subject and object. Greenaway's j
films, like a wide variety of contemporary art, depend on
I
the incorporation of material from diverse sources.
Cinema's cannibalization from other sources is itself
repeated in the cannibalization of cinema by other media,
particularly television. The subject of incorporation
becomes the object of the same process. Incorporation
selects and deconstructs. It confuses the assessment of
art between useful and unartistic objects and objects which
exist only for their own aesthetic sakes. It blurs the
distinction between subject and object, so that neither
subject nor object can any longer maintain an identity with
unity, integrity and limits.
Any single element from any complete work can be
isolated and re-integrated in any other work. Eisenstein's
baby carriage has shown up in novels (Lampedusa's The
Leopard), albums (Paul Simon's Graceland), and feature
films (Brian de Palma's The Untouchables), symbolizing
exquisite timing, revolutionary struggle, and cinematic
technique— all or none of which may have been intended by
Eisenstein. In Zbitniew Rybcznski's avant-garde video
Steps. the loaded baby carriage has rolled to its
inevitable destination as a tourist attraction. Using
sophisticated computer animation, Rybcznski integrates
footage of the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin
with live-action footage of a group of camera-wielding,
Bermuda short-wearing tourists who are visiting the film.
Even as Eisenstein's film has become a consumable object,
10 4
some other agent of consumption, Rybcznski's video, has
ingested it. Battleship Potemkin, as we had known it,
disintegrates, even as Steps memorializes it as a
celebrated film that everyone should experience— a must-
see. It commemorates while replacing. Steps itself
becomes an object now available for some other film's
incorporation.
Earlier, I discussed how this process of
incorporation, as it destroys the possibility of forgery,
attacks the concept of authorship and the existence of
authors. In this chapter, I would like to discuss a
related phenomenon: how, in bulimic cinema, the consuming
subject and the consumable object coalesce. This collapse
has implications for how art objects are thought about,
certainly in how they are situated within gender, but also
for the assignation of meaning to objects and the ability
of subjects to form judgments.
Theorists of eating disorders such as Hilde Bruch have
argued that, in anorexia, one of the subject's goals,
towards which she works desperately, is to avoid the
powerlessness of objectification. A pre-schizophrenic
(Eating Disorders. Bruch 280), rigorously imposed
separation of mind and body is used to ward off any
confusion between the unruly body and the insecure self.
1 05
The body, which will starve, is offered up as a sacrifice
to mental control and power.
With their concrete, childish style of
thinking, anorexics blame the body for
their discomfort and try to solve all their
problems by changing the body through
starvation and exhausting activities.
(Cage, Bruch 70)
At the opposite extreme of this control crisis, bulimics
abandon themselves to bodily impulses to binge and purge.
In this case, the bulimic wantonly submits to the body, a
submission which leads to overwhelming feelings of guilt
and shame.
The basic mind/body dualism that structures these
extreme and fluctuating responses anchors a variety of
familiar oppositions: male/female, spirit/world,
heaven/earth, logic/irrationality, word/image, idealism/
materialism, abstraction/concreteness, light/dark,
high/low. These oppositions, in conflict or imbalance,
result in problems of dual, doubled and split natures, one
of Greenaway's frequent themes. Male and female gendering
provide two distinct and irreconcilable models for the
i
i |
resolution of dual natures. The male figure as original, J
!
i
single, totalizing author/god creates coherence through a j
jheroic synthesis. In contrast to this male model of
i
junification, the bulimic text splinters into unresolvable
i
t
oppositions of conservation and usage, purity and filth, j
i
restraint and incontinence, preservation and dissipation. j
106
Or, as these extremes are most frequently realized, madonna
and whore. I
Quoting from "The Dead Christ" in Drowning. Death in
the Seine, and Prosperous Books. Greenaway invokes a figure
who represents duality on a cosmic scale. Jesus offers the
ultimate example of the male heroic synthesis of opposing
qualities. Most fundamentally, he is both man and god.
The very nature of Jesus' role as sacrificial victim
requires this duality. As Rene Girard argues, sacrifice
depends on a play of similarities and differences:
The proper functioning of the sacrificial
process requires not only the complete
separation of the sacrificial victim from
those beings for whom the victim is a
substitute but also a similarity between
both parties. (39)
The relationship of sacrificer and victim is echoed by
another relationship embodied by the Christ figure: father
and child. In cannibalism systems which memorialize the
consumed victim, a scenario which the Last Supper clearly
suggests, these two relationships explicitly merge:
When the warrior took a prisoner, he
declared: "He is as my beloved son." The
captive replied: "He is as my beloved
father." Thus, the victim offered up by
the Aztec sacrifier was his own child. j
(19) I
This ritual fulfills Girard's requirement for sacrifice.
It demonstrates a relationship— father and son— which |
maintains some connection and similarity, while
107
simultaneously requiring and maintaining an inviolate
separation.
The dual requirements of connection and separation
characterize another relationship embodied by Jesus Christ:
that of creator and created. As an aspect of the Holy
Trinity, Christ has created the universe. As man, he is
the created. As Christ does, the artist figure must
perpetuate a heroic synthesis of both these roles. In his
analysis of the artistic personality, Otto Rank analyzes
the impetus for resemblance between creator and created:
This impulse [to create] is at bottom
directed to the creator's own rebirth in
the closest possible likeness, which is
naturally more readily found in his own
sex; the other sex is felt to be
biologically a disturbing element except
where it can be idealized as a Muse. (Art
and Artist 56)
The artist creates a self-as-creator through the production
of a created other which is not identical with the artist
(difference), but which is based on a likeness (similarity)
which cannot be allowed to become too diffuse in the form
of the other sex. Here, artistic creation is, in fact, a
Inon-biological self-creation, "concerned only with the
struggle to develop a personality and the impulse to create
which arises from it" (56). The created object becomes
i
subsumed within the artist's need to become a personality. I
I
Not even "a disturbing element" such as gender can
remain outside the totalizing synthesis that Jesus
1 08
represents. His character includes feminine qualities of
kindness and gentleness. At times, the depiction of
Christ's feminine nature becomes explicit; Caroline Walker
Bynum notes, "the body of Christ was sometimes depicted as
female in medieval devotional texts" (176) particularly
when Christ is shown nailed to the cross. Femininity must,
like the created object, be fully subsumed within its
opposition. Each of these examples demonstrates that the
figure of the male hero creates synthesis only through
hierarchy: the man contained within and beneath the god;
the created existing in the service of the creator's
personality; the female manifested at the low point of
suffering and death.
Significantly, the linked, but clearly differentiated
dual characteristics that figure in the Passion (man and
god, sacrifice and sacrificer, body and spirit, created and
creator, son and father) are articulated through the act of
consumption, a consumption which is ritualized and
specified. In the above scenes from the gospels of Mark
and John, both set at the Last Supper, we can see two
distinct examples of consumption— one evil, one good. In
the first incident, from Mark, Judas provides a clue to his
betrayal— his duplicity— by eating the bread which Jesus
has encouraged him to eat. Eating the bread in its regular
function of food provides entry to a metaphorical incursion
109
of Satan. Only when that same bread has first acquired an
abstract function distinct from sustenance can it save
rather than destroy. This is a common theme. That same
Saint Theresa of Avila who— via the Bernini statue— is used
by Jacques Lacan to define jouissance, would make herself
throw up with an olive branch. In this way, she would
evacuate the food as food to make room for the food as a
representation of Christ's body.
In the second, more popularly recounted incident,
Jesus proposes that He be eaten as symbolic food. Here,
transmutation literalizes the incorporation of Jesus' body
into that of the believer, but the process itself is
metaphysical. Consumption is acceptable only when it is no
longer material. Real food actually ingested for
sustenance must be absolutely displaced by symbolic food
used to advance the spiritual goal of becoming one with
God. Through the act of becoming bread and wine, Jesus'
earthly body is clearly distinguished from other human
bodies. As the immortal Son of God, the death of His body
is reversible and, furthermore, has no effect on His
spirit. This body literally doesn't require bread and
wine; other human bodies can only, and must, reject bread
and wine through symbolism. Manifested as spiritual food
i
and drink, Jesus' body has become that symbolism
absolutely.
1 10
A negative version of the Christ figure appears in The
Cook. the Thief in the form of the gangster Spica. Rather
than bringing oppositions together, this character is the
embodiment of extremity, an agent of fluctuating excess.
Spica isn't pure good; he is pure, unexplained evil. He
doesn't turn the other cheek; he jabs a fork into it. He
doesn't succor the infirm; he torments them. He doesn't
possess a loving father; he is unable to have a son. He
isn't eaten as the sacrificial body; he eats the
sacrificial body. Through the criminal Spica, Greenaway
rejects the possibility of the heroic male synthesis as
well as the potential for coherent creation such a figure
implies.
In a distopic version of the Last Supper which occurs
early in the film, Spica gives his henchman Mitchel some
bread dipped in water. As Jesus does, he assigns the bread
a new and unexpected identity: "Now, pretend this is a
prairie oyster, Mitchel." After telling his dupe how the
"prairie oyster" tastes, Spica reveals that a prairie
i
ioyster is really "a sheep's bollock." Although he has onlyJ
eaten dry bread dipped in water, Mitchel "splutters and j
rasps" (script for The Cook, the Thief 43) at the imposed, |
i
purely symbolic, meaning of what he has eaten. j
i i
The act of eating the genitals which is played out in j
i
this scene foreshadows the film's final scene of I
I l l
cannibalism. Just as Spica forces Mitchel to eat a
(symbolic) generative organ, so he will himself be coerced
to eat the (literal) generative organ of his own murder
victim. To be compelled to commit an act recognized as
transgression— Girard begins his discussion of sacrifice
with this duality:
In many rituals the sacrificial act assumes
two opposing aspects, appearing at times as
a sacred obligation to be neglected at
grave peril, at other times as a sort of
criminal activity entailing perils of equal
gravity. (1)
The revenging wife Georgina threatens Spica with death to
compel him to eat the body. When he eats, she executes him
as a "cannibal.” Spica, between two perils, chooses and
pays his penalty.
Georgina has offered up her lover, Michael, as the
body to be eaten, as the sacrifice. She demands not only
that Spica eat, but that he eat a specific body part: "Try
the cock Albert. It's a delicacy. And you know where it's
been." Spica vomits, presumably out of revulsion, but by
vomiting he emulates Saint Theresa, purging himself of real
i
food and making way for symbolic food. Although his fork j
veers away from the genitals, Georgina's order reinforces
the impression constructed by Mitchel's consumption of the j
putative prairie oyster: the only objects to be eaten in j
this film are (symbolic) genitals. Michael, identified in
the title as "her Lover," nakedly displayed with his penis
1 1 2
offered up and available to be eaten, has, metonymically,
become a penis. The play of differences ("complete
separation") and similarities ("similarity between both
parties") that Girard finds in sacrifice, here ends at the
phallus. Spica reluctantly lifts the baked flesh to his
lips and is immediately shot. The abuser is abused, the
murderer, murdered,
The play of similarities and differences offered by
this scene suggests another theoretical play, one that also
ends in a phallus.
In any case, man cannot aim at being whole
. . . while ever the play of displacement
and condensation to which he is doomed in
the exercise of his functions marks his
relation as a subject to the signifier.
The phallus is the privileged signifier of
that mark in which the role of the logos is
joined with the advent of desire. (Lacan,
287)
For Lacan, the chain of similarities and differences which
is the basis of all signification, stops only at the
anchoring point which is the phallus, an object chosen:
because it is the most tangible element in
the real of sexual copulation, and also the
most symbolic in the literal (typo
graphical) sense of the term, since it is
equivalent there to the (logical) copula.
It might also be said that, by virtue of
its turgidity, it is the image of the vital
flow as it is transmitted in generation.
(287)
Lacan selects the phallus because it is two things at once.
It is the most tangible and also the most symbolic. It can
1 1 3
perform an equivalence, a copula, between terms which can
never be equivalent. It may be "the image of the vital
flow" as far as biological reproduction, but it is also the
antithesis of the vital flow as far as language because it
is the stop, an end to "the play of displacement and
condensation to which [man] is doomed." Georgina makes a
reference to this function as she prepares her lover to
become the sacrificial food. She assures him, "Today
Michael— this all must end."
Lacan's phallus is perpetually turgid never flaccid,
or— to borrow Lakoff's terminology— never "unstructured
mush." The phallus offered by The Cook, the Thief,
represented by the baked lover, Michael, differs from
Lacan's phallus in that it is available to be eaten, indeed
must and will be eaten. The power to function as anchoring
point disintegrates with a consumption which renders the
phallus just another indistinguishable element in the
never-ceasing movement of cycles of incorporation, a
movement which is based on the concept of use. Spica lifts
human flesh to his lips and, in so doing, confronts us with]
I
as with a picture of use. Georgina "uses" her lover as a |
component of her revenge scheme, and eating itself is a j
metaphor of use. As Jean-Jacques Goux argues, it is the I
concept of use which marks the end of the phallus (symbol
1 1 4
of transcendental power) and the beginning of the penis
(body part).
In Symbolic Economies After Marx and Freud. Goux
analyzes the development of the general equivalent, the
"systematic institutionalized configuration of monovalent
measure" (5). Goux basis his discussion on Marx's four-
stage development of the money form which elevates one
substance, for instance gold, to the universal standard of
value— from which all other examples are kept separate and
against which all other examples are defined. For Goux,
this configuration orders the relationships of Western
reason establishing a series of hierarchical oppositions
where: the father represents the general equivalent of all
subjects; the phallus, all part objects; logic, all
signification; and money, all commodities.
Maintenance of these relationships is based on the
principles of non-use and separation. Use and
undifferentiation, for both of which eating is the dominant
metaphor, would recycle the privileged general equivalent
back to the realm of all subjects, objects, signification,
iand commodities. Eating has the ability to destroy
stability and the sacred, to provide an end to the end
point.
On one side of Goux's opposition, money represents the
ideal, the sacred, capital. One commodity, gold, may
1 1 5
become the general equivalent, but it attains this status
only because of a certain characteristic— its use is never
necessary. Money only sustains itself through a non-use
based on excess. There must be a too-much-ness of money
for it to function as general equivalent:
In the election of gold as in that of the
phallus, the surplus is charged with
measuring the deficit in transactions
involving value— whether in a positive form
(as surplus of wealth in gold or surplus of
vitality in the phallus) or in a negative,
archaic form (as excrement, matter that is
excluded and expelled). (Goux, 31)
On the other side of the opposition, commodities are
capital which have been bought, had, used or used up.
Commodities are objects which have been consumed, and which
have become, therefore, un-idealized.
According to Goux, the same distinction which Marx
establishes for money between use and non-use operates in
the realm of subjects. The father functions as a general
equivalent of subjects based on the same requirement that:
"Indeed, only the objects of a need that can be deferred
may become the object of desire" (3 6). For the father to
truly function, he must be already absent or dead,
propelled into transcendence. From a supernatural position
(for instance, heaven), the father can never be used up.
j Similarly, as we have seen, the phallus must remain
"turgid," i.e. unused. To this end, Lacan emphasizes the j
non-real qualities of the phallus: "It is even less the
1 1 6
organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes. . . . For the
phallus is a signifier. ..." (285). As the non-real, the
phallus is unavailable for use. Goux's conception of
symbolic economies is clearly based on a hierarchy which
privileges non-use over use. To maintain the system, then,
requires a principle of differentiation, rigorously
imposed.
The inability to differentiate between separate
entities is the key point of connection between The Cook,
the Thief and John Ford's baroque English tragedy 'Tis Pitv
She's a Whore. a play which Greenaway frequently cites as
an inspiration for his film. The Cook, the Thief opens and
closes with red theater curtains suggesting the artifice of
a play. 'Tis Pitv functions as tragedy; the hero,
Giovanni, is a likable nobleman whose only weakness is his
sister, Annabella. Brother and sister begin an affair
which frustrates Annabella's suitors and uncovers
infidelities amongst the other characters. By the end of
the play, violent revenge has ensued; the nurse Putana
blinded, the scorned wife Hippoletta poisoned, the oaf j
Bergetto stabbed. Violence and vengeance reach their !
i
pinnacle in the final scene when Giovanni enters a crowded i
i
banquet hall carrying his sister's heart, newly cut out of |
her pregnant body, aloft on a dagger. Almost immediately, |
he stabs himself.
1 1 7
A lack of clear differentiation characterizes every
aspect of the play. Putana is cruelly punished, even
though she isn't guilty of anything except knowing too
much. Hippoletta inadvertently poisons herself when she
attempts to poison her faithless lover. Bergetto is
mistakenly stabbed by an assailant intent on a different
victim. Most obviously, the play's theme of incest
suggests improper differentiation between sister and
brother. Like cannibalism, incest is an activity usually
strongly prohibited. It is officially allowed only in
highly specialized and ritualized cases.
In 'Tis Pitv. the lack of proper differentiation,
symbolized by the incestuous union of brother and sister,
leads to disaster. Not only are many characters dead at
the end, they have perpetrated that most horrible of social
faux pas— a bad family scene at a dinner party. But,
improper differentiation is not the only cause of the
horrifying outcome. Giovanni's use of his sister, revealed
in the very first speech of the play, is the act which sets
the chain of events in motion. At the play's conclusion, j
two minor characters, Richardetto and the Cardinal, discuss J
the preceding events and determine that even though
Annabella is "One so young, so rich in nature's store, who
could not say, 'tis pity she's a whore?" Ultimately,
having been used by her brother, and irrespective of her
1 1 8
other merits, Annabella can only be one unfortunate thing,
a thing announced in the play's title and reiterated at the
end— a whore.
With the figure of the whore, and its counterpart, the
madonna, we arrive at the female resolution or rather lack
of resolution of dual natures. The male heroic synthesis
provides a model of unity and stability which is based on
hierarchical order and maintained through separation. The
depiction of women gives us instead a model of plurality
and fluctuation based on a collapse between subject and
object, and characterized by non-differentiation and use.
In her famous essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema," Laura Mulvey recognizes an economic aspect to how
women are represented. Re-enactment of the original
castration trauma— voyeurism— leads to "devaluation."
Fetishization— fetishistic scopophilia— leads to "over
valuation." Mulvey's psychoanalytic description identifies
woman as a threat within an economy of desire because "her
lack of a penis[] impl[ies] a threat of castration and
hence unpleasure" (811). In both the cases of voyeurism
and fetishistic scopophilia, Mulvey posits a relationship
between a spectator (male) and a spectacle (female). It is
i
| a relationship based entirely on vision, distance and
i
: separation rather than on consumption. If we consider
Mulvey's argument in terms of Goux's symbolic economies,
1 1 9
the woman-as-phallus/fetish operates as the structural
equivalent of capital. Capital accumulates as long as it
is not economically spent. The definition of capital— to
reproduce without being touched— is also the definition of
the madonna. The Virgin Mother reproduces the savior
man/god without being used. No sperm is sexually spent.
If the madonna functions structurally as capital, the
whore can be seen as equivalent to the commodity form, an
object destroyed through use. Women are always madonna
(total denial, anorectic) and whore (total abandonment,
bulimic). The great myth of the Virgin Mother presents
women with an impossibility; to be one, means to be the
other. Women are always capital and commodity, always
subject and object. A metaphor of vision cannot accomplish
this coalescence, consumption, frequently designated as
feminine, provides a model of undifferentiated sameness, a
model of the use of commodity.
Ernest Becker suggests that all consumption is
disturbing because all consumption reminds us of our animal
nature. Eating must therefore be displaced onto other
activities and must, like incest and cannibalism, be
ritualized. Human societies rigidly codify what and in
what manner we eat. For Becker, this ritualization is
inevitable; human distress over an animal nature,
1 2 0
continually revealed through digestion and excretion, will
always lead to distress at consumption.
While consumption may always be suspect, it is
particularly problematic within a system dedicated to
maintaining a surplus that can't be touched. We find,
then, that the most extreme critique of consumption can
only be perpetrated within a capitalist system. In The
Cook, the Thief, this is exactly what happens. Its
examination of consumption takes place in a gourmet
restaurant. While many characters dine at Le Hollandais,
only one is singled out for his inappropriate consumption:
Albert Spica. His problem is located in the mouth.
Louis Marin, in Food for Thought, a psychoanalytic
study of French folktales, describes orality as "an
ambivalent matter because of its locus" (37). The mouth is
the fulcrum of two vital functions. The mouth eats, an
activity which creates a doubled connection between the
human and the animal. We eat the animal and can be eaten
as an animal. Yet the mouth is also the organ of speech, a
singularly human activity. As Marin makes clear, these two
I
functions must be kept separate, and in this way
consumption can be contained. The human can supersede the
animal.
The character Spica fits Marin's definition of "The
Fabulous Animal."
1 2 1
The animal figuring in fables is properly
animal in that it is presented as a body
that both eats and is eaten. Yet this
animal also speaks. (44)
At the beginning of The Cook, the Thief. Spica's animal
nature is established. He and his henchmen, surrounded by
a pack of dogs, terrorize a man by forcing him to eat dog
shit. Like a dog marking its territory, Spica urinates on
his victim. He is certainly the body that eats, and later,
by eating Michael, a body like his own, he suggests that he
is potentially the body that is eaten.
While he is brutal and animal in his behavior, Spica
is also the most incessant speaker in the film. His name
plays on "speaker" (as well as "spic"), and he continually
abuses his wife, employees and customers with verbal
ranting. In contrast, other characters know when to keep
quiet. The non-verbal connection between Georgina and
Michael is emphasized during their first sexual encounter
when their wordlessness helps them avoid detection.
It has been suggested, by Greenaway among other
critics, that through Spica the film critiques the rampant
and destructive consumerism associated with Margaret
Thatcher's economic policies. Yet, unless we are to
believe that bad taste is a moral crime, the film's
critique of Thatcherism in the person of Spica is
|thoroughly incoherent. It in no way builds a case against
consumption. The food at Le Hollandais tastes good. The
1 2 2
customers would get great pleasure from eating it in the
highly ritualized manner by which its creator intends it to
be eaten, if only Spica didn't interrupt them. At Le
Hollandais, the sauce is not too sweet, and the diners know
to eat their asparagus with the fingers. Dishes are artful
and glorious constructions prepared with the utmost
attention to taste, color, shape and symbolism.
The main action of the film, including the revenge
murder of Spica, takes place in the restaurant because it
must. Outside the context of capitalism and consumption,
Spica's greatest crime— indiscriminate consumption— has no
meaning. It could be argued that in addition to being
upwardly mobile, Spica is also a wife-beater, sexual
deviant, child-abuser, murderer and bad boss. Still, the
film offers no psychology behind these qualities other than
Spica's position as moneyman. If capitalism has a casual
relationship to brutality, violence and bad taste, then all
the characters share in its sins even though they are acted
out through only one figure. The wondrous restaurant—
which everyone would enjoy if only Spica weren't there—
exists only because he is there. Spica provides the
capital that finances the restaurant. That capital is
I
iamassed only through Spica's crimes, evidence of which— the
I stolen silverware, his own boorish behavior— he insists on
i w
bringing to the dinner table.
1 2 3
Ultimately, the animal Spica must be brought back to
human society through an act of ritual cannibalism. His
wife and all the abused patrons and employees of Le
Hollandais force him to commit a crime which even he
recognizes as such. Eating Michael is Spica's forced
confession before being burned at the stake. Here,
Greenaway undercuts the critique of Spica as the tasteless
consumer by making his punishment as uncivilized and brutal
as the acts for which he is being punished. Like Judas,
Spica is compelled by the good (Jesus, Georgina) to eat the
evil food, or rather, food on which an evil symbolic
meaning has been imposed. He eats, "then after the morsel,
Satan entered into him." Evil enters Spica, the repository
of all evil, and the redemptive process is begun.
If the film's critique of consumption doesn't make
sense, its critique of the male heroic synthesis does.
Spica embodies contradictions without resolving them. He
is a figure that can't create at all; his wife is barren
and his restaurant is artistically successful despite him
rather than because of him. At the same time, his female
counterpart, Georgina, doesn't fit expectations of madonna
or whore. She is both and she is neither.
When the male heroic synthesis fails, so too does a
!certain relationship to art. Art no longer functions as a j
| t
symbol of the creator's personality. The so-called j
1 2 4
commodification of art, which is so much a part of the
contemporary critique of culture, is built on the problems
of use and differentiation which have always characterized
the depiction of women. Art assumes their conflicted
qualities. The art object is at once madonna and whore,
anorectic and bulimic, capital and commodity, used and
unused, separate and undifferentiated.
Kafka's 1924 short story "The Hunger Artist"
demonstrates the problematic position of art when the
consuming subject and the consumable object become
indistinguishable. The story describes the career of a
professional faster from his heyday to oblivion. The
Hunger Artist is both the subject of artistry— he refuses
to eat— and the object— it is on his body that the
starvation works and it is his body which is on display.
The coincidence of the consuming subject (the artist) and
the consumable object (his body) is intolerable. At the
end of the story, the hunger artist has been forgotten by
his public. More importantly, he has lost faith in his own
artistry.
I always wanted you to admire my
fasting. . . . But you shouldn't admire
it. . . . Because I have to fast, I can't
help it. . . . Because I couldn't find the
food I liked. If I had found it, believe
me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed
myself like you or anyone else. (255)
1 2 5
For the male heroic synthesis to function, the creator and
the created must be alike, but never equivalent. In
Kafka's story, creator and created are indistinguishable.
If only the artist had found the right food, the good food
not the evil, he would have eaten it with "no fuss."
Bulimic cinema doesn't solve the problem of
instability culturally imposed on female gendering. It
imposes the problem on the work of art. Art assumes a dual
nature as capital— which must not enter the economy and be
commercialized— and as commodity— which must be cycled and
recycled. Art in Greenaway's films is based on a schism.
Art objects within the films are depicted as
uncontrollable, changeable, unfaithful. The films
themselves are stuffed, filled, and yet still voracious.
i
I
i
1 2 6
CHAPTER SIX
The Lost Child of The Draughtsman/s Contract
I have argued how, in Greenaway's films and in other
contemporary artworks, a shift has occurred; the art object
can no longer be described by the metaphor of the child.
The artwork, as depicted by Greenaway, fluctuates between
being an artwork in the traditional sense— with its
attendant implications of the artist/father and the non
commodification which accompanies the filial relationship—
and being an artwork as a commodity which can be consumed
and controlled in ways beyond the control of the artist and
antithetical to the filial relationship. The use, intent,
audience and even the form and dissemination of the artwork
are frequently determined by forces outside the influence
of the "original" creator— a concept that is itself under
siege. This fluctuating status leads to a fluctuating and
crisis-ridden representation. The artwork as artwork is
foregrounded, but— unlike the self-reflexivity of high
modernism— this emphasis on the artwork serves to highlight
a metaphoric connection to other concepts.
A fluctuating status— between transcendental object
and commodity— is akin to the way the woman's body has been
represented in Western culture. The shift to the woman's j
i j
1 body is also consistent with the greater threat from the i
woman, as well as the greater palatability of her
1 2 7
destruction. The woman's body can be destroyed and
reconstituted at will; it can be replaced by another
object— like all interchangeable commodities— or
dehumanized by veneration. The cycles of incorporation
which characterize art in an age of mass reproduction
inevitably threatens art: the work can be dispersed,
disintegrated, used-up, re-used, de-contextualized and
consumed. The susceptibility to these destructive
processes necessitates a metaphorical movement to the
woman's body as art object from the child as art object.
The destruction of the child suggests acts too ghastly to
contemplate, particularly when we consider the prime
suspect of the child's annihilation: the father.
The potential destruction of the child by the parent
is a familiar mythological theme. The stories of William
Tell and Abraham and Issac present a father forced by a
higher authority to put his son at risk. In these
examples, the actual death of the child at the father's
hand is repressed; but in other examples, this death is
often realized, and it is often accomplished through
cannibalism. The pre-Greek god Kronos swallowed all his
children by his sister/wife Rhea as they were born. Zeus,
who would later destroy his father, only survived through
trickery. In another myth in which cannibalism and incest
combine, Procne revenges her sister's rape by her husband,
1 2 8
Tereus, by cooking her infant son and serving him to his
father. Christ's Passion manages to bring together the
themes of repression and cannibalism. God the Father
orchestrates Christ's consumption and death, but
participates from a distance and soon provides a
resurrection. Repression is accomplished through the
idealization and disembodiment of the father figure and the
ultimate idealization and immortalization of the son.
The marker of these archetypal myths is the violent
threat which the father represents to the son. For Rene
Girard, the Oedipal configuration rises out of this
possibility: "The incest wish, the patricide wish, do not
belong to the child but spring from the mind of the adult,
the model" (175) . The son learns to be in violent rivalry
with the father through imitation. That the father may, at
any time, destroy the child is a possibility so horrible
that it must be perpetually warded off. One way in which
this is accomplished is by making the father transcendent.
In Aberrations of Mourning. Laurence Rickels applies a
psychoanalytic approach to crypts— the disposition of
bodies and the nature and expression of grief. Rickels
J distinguishes between the death of the father which is
!
|necessary and mournable and the unmournable death of the j
i 1
!child:
j i
The death of the child and sibling is the j
rehearsal and, then, repetition of the I
1 2 9
death of the father, the guarantor of
proper mourning. We mourn only for the one
we have murdered: in turn, we mourn by
killing off the deceased. (20)
The father is mournable and murderable because, in fact, to
function he must already be dead.
What do we observe in the paternal register
but that the mediation of the father is
possible only to the extent that what
functions as father is excluded from the
world of other individuals, that is to say,
is killed, functions only as the "dead
Father," who rules only provided that he is
separated from the group of people, that
is, expelled into transcendence? (Goux 17)
The psychoanalytical necessity for the death of the father
*
possesses the same requirement of murder that characterizes
the death of God and the death of the Author discussed
above. It is through the figure of the father that we see
the same paradoxical linkage of murder, successful
mourning, and entry into culture which finds hyperbolic
expression in cinema. Despite his murder, the father
remains in modernism as a transcendental fact. In
Greenaway's cinema, however, the artist/father cannot
maintain this abstract position. He cannot paint, draw,
design buildings, write or cook. At the same time, the art
object is burnt, botched, stolen, exiled or lost in the
mail. These two losses— the artist/father and the art
I
object/child— serve to destroy the traditional arts even as
they are memorialized, a simultaneous acknowledgement and
avoidance. As Greenaway's cinema works towards this
1 3 0
destruction, it does so while grieving— acknowledging—
their loss. Nevertheless, the true loss is not invested so
much in the figure of either the father or child, but in
their disconnection— a shift, an avoidance— which renders
their terms meaningless. If Greenaway's films can be seen
as a mapping of this shift from the art-object-as-child
metaphor to the art-object-as-woman's-body metaphor, we
need to ask: what happens to the child?
In fact, Greenaway's films typically provide two types
of children: a weird orphan and a disputed fetus. The
weird orphan is an older, intelligent child with a strange-
-sometimes gruesome— hobby or affinity. These children— in
the world, already individuated— are clearly not as
desirable as a baby in the womb, not as likely to function
as an imaginary extension of the father's ego. The weird
orphans are the age of children, but they lack a key
attribute of children: a particular relationship to the
parent which implies authority and ownership as much as
affection. The unowned, uncontrolled child is always an
orphan, possessing a difficult and unprotected status.
Greenaway's older orphans manifest the problems of their
unparented state through a variety of peculiar behaviors:
in The Draughtsman's Contract. Augustus lives a solitary
life, dressed up like a doll, surrounded by servants; Beta
(Zed and Two Noughts) makes her own zoo and wants to know
1 3 1
what kind of underpants other people wear; and the little
boy in Belly of An Architect wanders around in a sheet.
Probably the weirdest children in Greenaway's oeuvre are
Smut and the Skipping Girl in Drowning and Pup in The Cook,
the Thief. Smut counts and labels roadkill as a hobby. He
eventually commits suicide. The Skipping Girl counts the
stars and lives a fantasy life in rejection of her
prostitute mother. She is struck down and killed by a
speeding car. Pup, the kitchen boy of The Cook, the Thief,
entertains the other characters with choral works sung in a
disconcerting boy soprano. Pup's orphan status— his
disconnection from his birth parents— is signaled in a
particularly spectacular manner; after being forced to eat
the buttons of his overalls, he is tortured by an attack on
his belly button.
Against the father's actual separation from the older
child, the bond to the fetus— which is purely spiritual—
can be anything desired. As Rickels notes, "All fatherhood
is adoption." The unborn baby represents a potential blank
slate over which the parent may write. The fetus is so
unindividuated, it doesn't possess even the basic
differentiation of gender. A Greenaway film is over when a
baby emerges into a world which will immediately begin to
corrupt it, even as the film has been born into that
corrupting world. The adult characters in Greenaway films
1 3 2
appear fond of the weird orphan, but their passion,
plotting, and rhetoric are saved for the disputed fetus.
This configuration first appears and is codified in
Greenaway's first narrative feature, The Draughtsman's
Contract, which features both a weird orphan and a disputed
fetus, both of whom are significant despite their seeming
lack of prominence in the complex narrative. The weird
orphan is the little German, Augustus, who, like other
orphan children in Greenaway films, appears to wander
around outside the main movements of the plot.
Augustus first appears carried by one of the servants
at the English country house dinner party that opens the
film. The lady of the house, Mrs. Herbert, bends to kiss
his hand as he is trundled past, but she appears distracted
by other thoughts. Mrs. Herbert has no family relationship
to, and hence little control over, the boy, but— the
audience discovers much later in the film— he is positioned
to inherit the property to which, arguably, she has the
greatest claim. The dinner party marks the beginning of a
plot (the plot of the movie; a murder plot) calculated to
produce a more satisfactory heir to Anstley, a country
house with gardens. If Mrs. Herbert's daughter, Mrs.
J Talmann, could only produce a child, the problems of
succession would be resolved to a general satisfaction
which would exclude Augustus; however, Mrs. Talmann is
133
married to an ineffectual German who seems incapable of
impregnating her. Mrs. Herbert needs to find an
alternative. She kisses Augustus as she plots to
dispossess him, a kiss that recalls other kisses of
betrayal in other gardens and other mothers plotting to
jrescue daughters.
After a series of jokes which play on the film's
themes of sex, ownership, scatology, and art, Mrs. Talmann
begins the convoluted plot with an act that gives little
hint of her intentions. She contracts with a visiting
draughtsman, Mr. Neville, to trade her sexual favors for
his drawings of her husband's property.
Augustus next appears walking with his nanny. His
appearance here seems to serve no narrative purpose; he and
his nanny are simply part of the garden landscape. The
alphabet jingle in which he is being tutored (A is for
Apricot. . .) is familiar to viewers of Greenaway films
(and perhaps is intended to emphasize the arbitrary nature
of the signifier). Augustus speaks only German so that, in
a film where almost all the characters speak excessively,
he is almost completely silent. This is one of the ways
his outsider status and lack of personal power is signaled.
In the next scene, accompanied by his nanny, Augustus
sits at the draughtsman's table scratching at a blackboard.
When Mr. Neville arrives on his rigorously announced
1 3 4
schedule, the child is hustled out of the picture. Since
Augustus represents the inability of Mr. and Mrs. Talmann
to produce an heir to the property, he does not get
represented in Mr. Neville's drawings of the property.
Again, Augustus is presented outside the line of the
family.
Up until this point, the identity and status of
Augustus has not been explained either to Mr. Neville or to
his companions in misassessments, the audience. When Mr.
I
Neville observes Augustus on a swing, "attract[ing]
servants like a little midget king," he asks Mrs. Talmann:
"What is his patrimony, Madam?" She explains that the boy
is her husband's nephew, that his father was killed and
that his mother became a catholic. Because "he was an
orphan . . . and needed to be looked after," Mr. Talmann
brought the child to England. Her answer disavows the
child's true role in the household which we learn in the
next scene; Mr. Neville learns from Mrs. Herbert that—
because Mr. Herbert doesn't believe in women owning
I
property— in the event of the Talmanns' failure to produce
!an heir, Augustus will inherit the property.
i
Mr. Neville scoffs at the notion that Mrs. Talmann
considers the child an orphan: "An orphan, Madam, because
l
his mother became a catholic?" Here, as in much of the j
early part of the film, Mr. Neville appears to have the
1 3 5
upper hand; he passes judgment on the child-rearing
decisions of his hostess and demonstrates his own religious
tolerance as well as a sophisticated cynicism about
protestant morality. As the film will reveal, however, Mr.
Neville's interpretation is based on the illusion that the
child's interests are of concern. Mr. Neville has no
understanding of what it means to be an orphan to the
people by whom he is employed. Augustus' mother hasn't the
ability to assert maternal control over the child against
the propertied interests which have their own use for him
as putative heir. Mr. Neville's mocking superiority is
further undermined by his own hypocrisy. His original
question— "What is his patrimony, Madam?"— also omits the
mother.
Augustus not only attracts servants; he is like them
in his lack of control over property. The film links
Augustus to the servants by having him see what they see.
When Augustus next appears, he is walking with his uncle,
Mr. Talmann, who lectures the child— in English— on the
importance of maintaining a German sensibility. As they
pass a vine-covered wall, Augustus spies a mysterious new
character: a naked man painted to resemble a statue and,
i
like a statue, posing. In interviews, Greenaway has
mentioned that this figure is based on an actual historical
practice. In 1688, the year in which the film is set,
136
people could be hired to pose as statues and decorate the
landscape more cheaply than it would cost to buy a real
statue. The presence of this character, then, could be
taken as a critical commentary on the worth of human beings
relative to statues of more traditional materials like
stone or bronze. Is this statue better— more valued—
because he is a person? Or less valuable? At least a real
statue wouldn't be scratching, peeing, shifting,
evesdropping and eating all over the property. This
animated statue could also be interpreted as a fantastical
figure, available only to certain sensibilities. He is an
inanimate object that comes to life guided by particular
imaginations— the imaginations of children or servants
rather than the imaginations of the landed classes whose
discernment of an object extends only as far as seeing it
as a part of the property or not. Augustus clearly
observes this animated statue first posing and then making
a comical face in the direction of the oblivious Mr.
Talmann. He observes that the statue is not a statue, but
a man, thereby destroying the illusion of artifice and j
property. Immediately, he is once again hustled away. j
This is the last appearance of Augustus. A few scenesj
later, Mrs. Talmann forms her own contract with the j
draughtsman. Ostensibly, he will continue to draw and ;
receive her protections which consist of making benevolent j
1 3 7
interpretations of his drawings; and, in return, she will
take her sexual pleasure with him. In fact, she has
plotted to be impregnated with a child who will clearly not
be, but will be taken for, an heir. After all, "all
fatherhood is adoption." With this contract is realized
the real possibility of a proper property heir of Anstley,
one with whom all the characters, with the notable
exception of Mr. Neville, are able to live. At this point,
Augustus disappears from the film. |
Despite his perpetual status as outsider and this
eventual eclipse, the film associates Augustus with a
ruler. "Who is this little midget king?" asks Mr. Neville.
The child also shares a name with the Roman Emperor
Augustus (a historical figure to whom there are frequent
allusions in Greenaway's A Belly of an Architect).
Augustus is dressed ornately, even by the excessive
standard set by the film's other characters, and is never
seen without an attendant— an interesting likeness between
children and kings. A king is an ultimate and absolute
symbol, but the significance of this symbolism is not that
Augustus is a locus of power, but, as the heir, that he is
a locus of property. That he is nothing else is made clear
when, by losing his place in the succession, he loses his
place in the film. What Augustus recognizes in the statue-
-that it is a person, not simply an art work or an object j
1 3 8
of the property— is never recognized in him. As part of
the property, the statue is represented in one of Mr.
Neville's drawings. Augustus, however, has assumed a
transcendental status and stands outside the economy of the
property. This economy is the true subject matter of the
I
drawings. Mrs. Herbert protests that she desires drawings
of the property because she intends them to bring about a
happy reconciliation between her and her husband.
Notwithstanding, her stated rationale is so thin and
unconvincing it serves only to highlight other instances of
affection used to disavow economy. Augustus' role as the
symbol of property is similarly elided by his caretakers:
"He was an orphan. . . and needed to be looked after."
Greenaway's depiction of Augustus and the drawings
demonstrates how conveniently the art-object-as-child
metaphor serves to disavow the art object as property.
Although the weird orphan in this and in other
Greenaway films are not naturalistically represented as
children— few close-ups, no psychological shadings— they
are still tangible as children. They can't quite escape
into perfect transcendence and, in this sense, they remain
the unmournable, although as orphans there is no parent
available to mourn them. The great difficulties they
encounter in Greenaway's films— death, torture, perversion-
-can't fail to evoke a certain pathos. This is less true
1 3 9
of the ephemeral fetuses. Their status as symbolic
property, as the locus of property, as the symbol of
property itself, is absolute. Like property, they are in
perpetual dispute.
As a result of the sexual liaison suggested by Mrs.
Talmann and formalized in a contract, Mr. Neville may have
unwittingly impregnated her. The women will eventually
explain that that was their intention. Perhaps the
negotiated contract might have been a tip-off that Mrs.
Talmann had serious intentions. This pregnant end can be
construed as one of the main objects of her and her
mother's plotting to the extent that anything can be known
about the characters' motivations. Mrs. Talmann asks the
baffled Mr. Neville, "Do you think I would risk so much for
pleasure?" Apparently not, but Mr. Neville risked as much
or more for a sexual (reproductive) pleasure which by this
time in the film has become definitively linked with the
pleasures of art (also reproductive). His bid for
immortality through art becomes biological, he is thrown
out of the game and replaced by another player.
By the time he learns of the baby's possible
existence, Mr. Neville lacks the authority with which he
might have asserted his paternity, an authority which,
despite his confidence, he probably never possessed in the
first place. At the conclusion of the film, several other
1 4 0
characters gather eagerly to explain to him his folly and
to kill him. Although Mrs. Talmann's baby's father will be
murdered, her child will not be an orphan. His adoption as
true heir of Anstley destroys the structure of succession
which is the fiction of the transfer of property and the
fiction of the artist's relationship to the work. This
structure holds up as long as the father— even as a ghost
or spirit, even as a corpse— stands in the paternal
relation to the child. If a child is adopted, and if "all
fatherhood is adoption," all children are adopted, this
relation is severed and the father's death, his murder, his
sacrifice is for nothing; his position is annihilated. The
dead father no longer hovers as a guarantee of psychic
success because he is forgotten, unacknowledged and
decomposing in the moat.
As he does for most of his films, Greenaway wrote as
well as directed The Draughtsman's Contract, a condition of
production which suggests the greatest thematic control.
However, the two-child configuration can also be seen in
Greenaway's sixth feature, Prosoero's Books, which is an j
adaptation from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Greenaway's
version of Shakespeare's play remains faithful to the
i
original text; there are only minor omissions, principally j
in some scenes between Miranda and Ferdinand and in some of j
the comedic exchanges of Stephano, Trinculo and Caliban. j
. i
1 4 1
The name change from The Tempest: to Prosoero's Books
reflects the main addition Greenaway makes to the play; he
invents names, descriptions and partial representations of
the books which Prospero takes with him into exile. These
are, of course, the same books which got Prospero into
trouble in the first place. Greenaway makes a mantra of
Prospero's devotion to this library: "Knowing I loved my
books, he furnished me / From mine own library with volumes
that / I prize above my dukedom."
Greenaway's other significant conceit is to collapse
the figure of Shakespeare— and we might also say Sir John
Gielgud, who plays Prospero, and Greenaway himself— onto
the figure of Prospero, an interpretation that meshes the
roles of artist, ruler and father. At the beginning of the
film, Prospero, ousted Duke of Milan, father of Miranda, is
shown writing and repeating "Boatswain!" the opening word
of the play. Frequently, he returns to his writing desk
and dips his pen in ink, presumably writing the story as it
is acted out. For much of the film, Gielgud also speaks
the parts of all the other characters either singly or in
unison with the actor playing the part. This multiple
voicedness ends only when Prospero gives up his magical,
total control of the island ("But this rough magic I here
abjure") to return to being merely a ruler of men rather
than a magical puppetmaster. These formal choices create a
1 4 2
strong sense of authorial mastery consistent with the
stable paternal control which eventually will be exerted on
the potential fetus of the play, the unborn child of
Miranda and Ferdinand.
In addition to this ephemeral child, Prosperous Books
has its own weird orphan, Caliban, who, like Augustus, is
an heir deposed. Caliban, as the son of Sycorax, lays
original claim to the island which Prospero by the time of
the story rules. As Prospero attests, at first they shared
a father/son relationship of affection: "I have used thee
/ (Filth as thou art) with humane care. ..." This idyll
ends when Caliban asserts himself sexually in a way which
would also reinforce his claim on the island. Prospero:
"I have lodged thee / In my own cell till thou didst seek
to violate / The honor of my child." Greenaway emphasizes
this sexual threat through Caliban's costume which consists
solely of a corset and an attention-drawing, decorated,
skintight pouch for the genitals.
Shakespeare's play contains the possibility that
Caliban through his desired union with Miranda will insert
himself into the line of descent. Significantly, the
monstrousness of Caliban is not in the moment of sexual
i
union with the tender virgin. Caliban's threat is to the
I
distribution of property not to the sensibilities of young
girls. Greenaway emphasizes this point by giving us a
1 4 3
Caliban which is beautiful and graceful rather than
physically gruesome. He also visually provides, by
contrast, the scene of Claribel's paternally-sanctioned
wedding night. The shot features a gigantic King of Tunis
wearing an unsympathetic expression and glowering over a
cringing and bleeding bride who clutches her groin.
Prospero has another husband in mind for Miranda— one
who will help to restore his position as Duke. Through a
series of plots and manipulations that begin with the
tempest, Prospero conspires: to marry Miranda to Ferdinand;
to ensure the compliance of Ferdinand's father, Alonso; to
put down any opposition from Caliban or Ariel; to give up
his enforced exile. By the end of the play, he has
accomplished all of his goals.
If the film ended here, as Shakespeare's play did, it
would seem to suggest a meaning at odds with the familial
metaphor traced in The Draughtsman's Contract. The Tempest
concludes with Prospero's mastery of the situation. His
paternal control of Miranda, and by extension her future
child which will consolidate two kingdoms, is assured. He
is so confident that he can even play at losing her:
Prospero tells the distraught Alonso that he has lost his
daughter when he has only artfully contrived her marriage
to Ferdinand. Caliban, the unsuccessful rebel, becomes a
1 4 4
more compliant servant, and Ariel is released. Prospero
speaks the epilogue.
Greenaway now adds a coda to the film that doesn't
exist in the play. His ending questions Shakespeare's
containment of the weird orphan, the monster, the other
thing that threatens succession. Gielgud's Prospero makes
good on the threat to drown his books by throwing them in
the swimming pool. Greenaway has claimed to be horrified
by the idea of destroying books and he makes them "auto-
combustible" to evoke the specter of burning books. We
might also note that burning and drowning both suggest
metaphors of engulfment and consumption; perhaps they are
being read, another kind of consumption. Burning and
drowning also suggest containment and a physicality which
must be finite. Prospero's books have been transformed,
perhaps by his abandonment of them, from the infinite to
the limited.
Only one book survives and only through the agency of
Caliban. This is Shakespeare's own book of plays that
Gielgud's Prospero has been writing throughout the film.
! The Prospero at the end of the film is oblivious to its
continued existence, and it is now in the care of the weird
orphan. This ending clearly plays on the disputed
authorship of Shakespeare's plays, indeed Shakespeare
himself.
1 4 5
By placing the art object in Caliban's hands,
Greenaway disorders succession in a significant way. Mr.
Neville and Prospero may appear different in that Mr.
Neville is a victim of conspiracies and Prospero
orchestrates them. Nevertheless, Prospero's power doesn't
engulf all other consciousnesses. By giving up control of
one other mind, he loses control of the great corpus of
plays. Caliban may not get Miranda, but he gets something
better: the play that contains Miranda.
Western culture's logic of the father— as in Goux's
conception of the Father as the general equivalent for all
subjects— argues for the father's disappearance, absence,
death. The father's power consists of remaining idealized,
in not being used, of maintaining a completely symbolic
relationship with the child. Prospero throws away his
books of infinite taxonomies which suggests that he may be
giving up the power and mastery implied in his position as
father. But, as Greenaway's films perpetually re-play the
relationship of father/artist and child/art, the mastery
that Prospero abdicates here is one that perhaps he never
really had. Once the art object has been realized in a
tangible form, it is already beyond the control of its
parent creator.
Furthermore, art objects can exist only in that
tangible form. At the end of The Draughtsman's Contract.
1 4 6
Mrs. Herbert and Mrs. Talmud coldly inform Mr. Neville that
their sexual interest in him was confined to his pro-
creative potential. Yet, it is never clear whether Mrs.
Talmud has become pregnant or not. Mr. Neville cannot
maintain a spiritual bond with something that may or may
not exist. In the same way, the art object as idea may or
may not exist, and from the moment of its material
manifestation, it is lost.
Here, the conception of the art work which presents
the father as artist is no longer tenable or relevant. By
disengaging this relationship, these films dislodge the
idea that it is only the father who can create because only
the idealized male figure exists in a relationship of
control based on ownership and benevolence sustained
through repression. But this father figure is not simply
replaced by the artist as mother. Although Greenaway's
films often feature suspicious female plotters, their
effectualness is always in question. Instead, the art
object arises out of an uncertainty which is neither mother
or father— an uncertainty which, in its fluctuations, can j
never maintain the stability of a similarity in difference.
1 4 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
A MAP, A BOOK, A CEMETERY
While the artist/father's death is spectacularly
revealed in his graphic extinction within the world of the
film, Greenaway consistently perpetuates his existence on
another terrain— that of interpretation. For the
postmodern artist this may be the only terrain left.
Greenaway provides an excess of extra-textual auto
commentary— in press kits, interviews, published material
and related other-media projects. Despite this
supplementary profusion, his films resist explication— his
own as well as that of other critics. The same issues that
I have identified with bulimic cinema can be discovered in
this bulimic criticism: confusion over control of the
body; the imposition of artificial and arbitrary patterns;
mourning of loss; and excess. Ultimately, Greenaway's
presentation of interpretation, both inside and outside the
films, challenges the very idea of analysis.
The bulimic film is as recalcitrant as the bulimic
patient, outwardly complying with any and all analysis, but
internally resistant. I would argue that this is a
characteristic of many contemporary films, with Greenaway's
films being among the most notoriously immune to a unitary
interpretation. Although rich in symbolism and allusions,
1 4 8
the references don't cohere. Explications quickly devolve
into lists.
All analysis implies an analyst, and the
impermeability of the postmodern art object also affects
the relationship of critic and work, the relationship of
transference, "the terrain on which all the basic problems
of a given analysis play themselves out" (Laplance and
Pontalis, 455). In his study of grief, Laurence Rickels
also defines transference as a place:
the intermediary realm between illness and
life which is also a 'playground' where the
patient is permitted to act everything out
just so long as everything is kept in the
analyst's view. Transference requires,
then, a map, a book, a cemetery— an at once
visible and legible terrain. (24)
These are the same terrains— a map, a book, a cemetery—
that perpetually re-appear in Greenaway's films. A non-
comprehensive list would include: the maps of A Walk
Through H and Bellv of an Architect: the books of Dear
Phone, Vertical Features Remake and Prosoero's Books: and
the cemeteries of Death in the Seine. A TV Dante and A Zed
and Two Noughts.
As Rickels emphasizes, these are terrains of
explication and judgment. Objects can be labeled,
categorized, fixed, and made intelligible, although they
must be rendered representational (as symbol) and inanimate
(as corpse). The answers to all questions are possible and
1 4 9
everything is permitted, "just so long as everything is
kept in the analyst's view." But for the postmodern work,
everything is not in view to just any analyst. Although
the artist may retain little power, it is only the artist
who is his or her own best critic, the only consciousness
which fully understands the work of art and the work— the
sacrifice— for the art.
What are the dynamics of a transference that has
become a self-transference? What place is left for the
reader whose interpretations are systematically blocked?
What are the intertextual and metatextual possibilities for
an interpretation of Greenaway's films and to what extent
does the resistance of Greenaway's films reflect a general
contemporary implausibility of interpretation?
Greenaway's film career, beginning with the
experimental Train and Tree (1966), is contemporaneous
with a structuralist denial of the artist, most
dramatically articulated in Roland Barthes' essay "Death of
the Author" (1968). Barthes disconnects the temporal
relation of the writing subject and the created object. I
have already discussed how Barthes links the artist with
the father (and, ultimately, the god), and the work with
the child. In his critique of this filial relationship,
Barthes imposes a function usually unconnected to fathers
onto this conception of the artist. "The Author is thought
1 5 0
to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before
it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation
of antecedence to his work as a father to his child"
(Barthes, 145). To say that "The Author is thought to
nourish the book," though, is actually not to say that they
exist "in the same relation. . . as a father to his child."
It is the other, elided, parental figure which supplies the
nourishment, and the father who maintains a spiritual
connection. The presentation of a nourishing father loads
the entire creative function onto one figure. The father
becomes everything and assumes every function only to be
definitively rejected.
Is it possible that the only figure left after this
comprehensive expulsion— the reader, the critic— then
becomes dangerously transcendent? Also, is it possible to
keep this reader separate from the totalized father-figure
of the artist? Who, after all, is the reader of the
readerly? In Greenaway's works, as in other works of
postmodernity, it is the artist who is presented as the
only possible figure to perform an interpretation. The
artist proposes a meaning and in so doing reverses Barthes'
metaphor, eating rather than nourishing his or her own
words or work. This operation resembles the mythical
scenario of a father eating his own children and must be as
firmly repressed. The author who "exists before [the
1 5 1
work]" in a relation of creation— antecedence— may also
exist after the work in a relation of interpretation—
succession. For artists who are consequent to their works,
the functions of artist and critic collapse.
In Kafka's The Hunger Artist, in which the consuming
subject and the consumable object are the same, this
coincidence of artist and critic is the inevitable
conclusion of art:
No one could possibly watch the hunger
artist continuously, day and night, and so
no one could produce first-hand evidence
that the fast had really been rigorous and
continuous; only the artist himself could
know that, he is therefore bound to be the
sole completely satisfied spectator of his
own fast. (Kafka, 246)
Here, Kafka provides a permutation of the collapse of
subject and object which operates on the terrain of
interpretation. His own body is the object of the fast on
which the hunger artist acts. He is also the controlling
subject of the work. Finally, the artist assumes a
critical function which might be thought to be separate, to
belong to a different subject, a separate entity. The
hunger artist is now the only critic, the single analyst,
the "sole completely satisfied spectator." The collapse of
the distinction between artist and critic functions is
echoed through the crucial materials of the artistic act—
the human body and food. The art of the hunger artist
doesn't rely on vision, the sense with which distance and
15 2
the recognition of difference is maintained. Vision is
revealed as a sense inadequate to the task of judgment.
("No one could possibly watch the hunger artist
continuously. . . .") His art is about food— the other
which is incorporated— and whether or not the artist can
keep its difference from encroaching on the same— the
artist's body. The artist's body has become the totality:
artist, material, critic. Or, to stretch Barthes'
terminology: nourisher, nourishment, and nourished— the
confluence of cannibalism.
The impossibility of final outside judgment takes
Eco's informed reader perhaps to its logical conclusion, to
its most extreme form, to the point where the reader meets
the creator. Only the artist is truly informed and can
truly understand. Ultimately, there is no interpretive
position outside the economy of the artist and the artist's
body in absolute identity.
Just as Kafka's story and Eco's criticism dismiss the
assessments of most observers as fundamentally inadequate,
Greenaway's films continually hint at the impossibility of
interpretation by any spectator. The 45-minute
experimental film Vertical Features Remake (1978) is at
once a parody of structuralist film and a reminder of the
argument prominent in structuralist theory that the search
for the artist's intention is pointless and ridiculous.
1 5 3
Like The Falls. Vertical Features Remake purports to
document the labors of an official organization which is
itself documenting the history of a project or event. The
anonymous representatives of the Institute of Restoration
and Reclamation attempt to re-create a lost film of the
orthinologist Tulse Luper— a ubiquitous character in
Greenaway's corpus. The Institute's efforts are stymied by
a critical group of academic hangers-on. The most
outspoken member of this faction, Gang Lion, in a parody of
structuralist criticism, ultimately claims all credit for
the film. The critic, the reader, has usurped the creative
function. Other members of the Institute maintain that
Tulse Luper never existed as a person/artist and that his
supposed photograph is merely that of the film editor's
father-in-law. Although the film is restored and reclaimed
four times, it is impossible to know which version is
closest to the artist's intention. This path to an
analysis— a reader or readers reconstructing what they want
to believe the artist intended— can only lead to a false
identity, a conspiracy, or a void.
Greenaway avoids the annihilation— which Barthes
announces and which Vertical Features Remake, in a
i
extravagant game of fort-da, acts out— by himself taking on
the additional role of critic. His own extra-textual j
commentary creates a system of comprehension by at least
1 5 4
one analyst whose appreciation is, like that of Kafka's
hero, "continuous[], day and night" and may be credible:
the artist himself.
Greenaway provides a singularly comprehensive gesture
of interpretation in Fear of Drowning bv Numbers Reales du
Jeu (1988), a commentary in one hundred parts of Drowning
bv Numbers (1988). The centenary division of the book
echoes that of the film and, in fact, the book is an
explanation on and around the film. Is this book— this
terrain of transference— an interpretation, a self-
annihilation or simply another version of a myth?
"We define the myth as consisting of all its
versions," said Claude Levi-Strauss in "The Structural
Study of Myth." "Or to put it otherwise, a myth remains
the same as long as it is felt as such" (Levi-Strauss,
217). Freud's interpretation, as much as Sophocles'
dramatization, is a valid version of the Oedipal myth, and
Freud becomes another author of Oedipus. Greenaway becomes
doubled as he shifts from teller of the film to analyst of
the film through the book, but what is less clear about
Greenaway's versions of Drowning By Numbers than the
Sophoclean and Freudian re-tellings of Oedipus is: what is
the underlying repeated myth?
Drowning Bv Numbers is the story of three women who
murder their husbands. Cissie Colpitts 1 (Joan Plowright)
1 5 5
drowns her philandering husband in a tin bathtub. With the
complicity of the local coroner Madgett (Bernard Hill), to
whom she promises sexual favors, she explains the death as
an accident. Cissie 2 (Juliet Stevenson) soon drowns her
own husband with the same accomplice backing up an
identical explanation. Inevitably, Cissie 3 (Joely
Richardson) imitates the technique of her grandmother and
aunt, drowning her newly-wed husband Bellamy. Along the
way, the characters play a variety of games. Some are
actual— skipping, paper chase, tug-of-war. Others are both
fanciful and prophetic— Dawn Card Castles, Deadman's Catch,
Hangman's Cricket. At the film's conclusion, the three
women conspire to drown Madgett, an act that will serve as
his only reward for the assistance he has rendered.
Meanwhile, Madgett's young son Smut has inadvertently lured
his friend the Skipping-girl to her death; he hangs
himself, perhaps out of remorse, with the dead girl's jump-
rope. The film, which had begun with a murder, ends with a
murder and a suicide.
Greenaway's book on the film, Fear of Drowning Bv
Numbers, addresses itself to a variety of artistic issues:
structure— the number 100, the number 3, etc.; themes—
water, games, etc.; visual influences— Gainsborough, Van
Dyck, Holman Hunt, etc.; inspiration— the story of Billy
Goat Gruff, Renoir's Reales du Jeu. etc.; etc., etc.
1 5 6
Although it is only occasionally presented in list form,
the book is in fact a series of co-existing, but not
interconnecting, lists.
Despite the profusion of information the book
supplies— in English and French!— Fear of never fully
addresses the central enigma of the film: why do the women
kill their husbands? The women are clearly responsible for
the deaths and interested in covering them up. At the same
time, the Cissies attend the funerals of and appear to
grieve for their dead spouses. Their behavior makes little
sense based on a traditional character psychology, in which
Greenaway seldom seems interested. How does Fear of
Drowning address this mystery?
The magic of the women— why do they come in
threes? To mock the patriarchal
theological trinity? Three sirens, three
graces, three muses and three witches in
Macbeth? (Greenaway, 59)
Greenaway's rhetorical question doesn't approach the issue
of motive, but rather the basis of his own formal choice:
why three? Even that answer is suggested without much
conviction. Still, these comments offer hints we can
consider in more depth, in addition to other solutions
indicated by the text.
1) They are witches or pagan goddesses.
1 5 7
If Cissie 1 is Ceres, as Greenaway suggests (49) she
is Demeter, the mother of Persephone. The mother and
daughter of The Draughtsman's Contract invoke this same
myth about a woman, who, like Eve, can't resist eating
something she shouldn't, who can't control her appetite.
These impulsive nibbles lead to trouble for all of Mankind:
winter, toil, death. As objects, as property, as
materiality, women point to suffering and mortality. As
witches, they transcend this link. By gaining power and
exerting it as they do in Drowning Bv Numbers. the Cissies
can no longer remain human women; they must become witches
capable of metaphysical stunts: conjuring up storms as
Cissie 2 does or materializing suddenly in a room as Cissie
l does. As witches or pagan goddesses, their impulses are
as likely to be destructive as beneficent. They kill their
husbands through the convergence of power improperly
aligned with irresponsible whim (femininity): the recipe
for witches.
i
2) They are the holy trinity.
In addition to Macbethian witches, the Cissies evoke
another superhuman female trilogy: the Virgin Mary, St. |
i
Lucy and Beatrice of Dante's Divine Comedy. Their
appearance is only one of a series of allusions to Dante's i
epic which is itself centrally concerned with
1 5 8
interpretation and judgment. The structure of Drowning Bv
Numbers is based on the same structure of one hundred as is
The Divine Comedv. Within each work, the organization of
three in one also dominates.
Mary, Lucy and Beatrice reside in Paradise, a realm
that can't be entered through logic or reason, but only
through faith and love. Their power— the power to save
Dante the Pilgrim, to save men— functions like that of
witches, through the denial of the human body which they no
longer possess (the feminine) but not through reason (the
masculine). This trio saves Dante from himself by
compelling him to pass through death. "All initiation
rites [are] a rehearsal of the ultimate initiation, the
cross-over into the realm of the dead" (Rickels, 36).
Dante is one of innumerable heroes, beginning with
Odysseus, who takes a literalized version of this passage.
He travels to the other side and embraces the feminine
(mother, Beatrice) so that he can be born again, more
heroically, in the world.
Dante experiences two levels of initiation— the
complete journey to death and back and the ritual of
baptism. To be baptized is to be submerged, swallowed, to
submit to an other, to give up life to be born anew. Women
act as the agents of Dante's submersion. In Drowning By
Numbers. women also act as the agents of a submersion which
1 5 9
could be a baptism— an atonement for sins— or a killing— a
punishment for sins. Jake, Hardy and Bellamy, the drowned
husbands, may seem to be guilty of nothing but
unpleasantness. In fact, they are guilty of being too weak
in the flesh. They can't control their weight or their
women. Madgett, Jake, Hardy and Bellamy are fat and/or
sexually unsatisfying. As the holy trinity, the Cissies
kill their husbands to redeem them.
3) They are exacting feminist revenge.
By murdering their husbands, the Cissies may simply be
acting out a crude form of feminist revenge. Cissie 1
links the abovementioned problems of weight and sexuality
when she asks her daughter: "Do all fat men have small
penises?" This remark, and the general portrayal of the
husbands, suggests that somehow they are inadequate,
boorish, unsatisfying. Madgett's poignant inability to
take advantage of the sexual promises made him is hinted at
even before the promises are made when, at the beginning of
the film, he nervously spoons up a bowl of pudding, a
favorite dish of childhood. In the opening scene, Jake is
so drunk that he appears incapable of consummating his
adultery. He and his mistress Nancy only manage some
awkward naked frolic before passing out. Food as an
inadequate substitute for sex is presented most explicitly
1 6 0
when Hardy refuses to satisfy his wife with anything more
substantial than a popsicle. These husbands aren't
portrayed as evil, but they are insensitive, clumsy and
unappealing.
Still, this may be a feminist revenge of greater
subtlety. The very fact that the women's actions so
palpably don't make sense may itself be an elaborate
feminist parody of the manner in which women have been
portrayed in literature. The amazing figure of Helen
provides a model of female heroes to come. Did she go with
Paris willingly or was she abducted against her will? The
crucial point remains: it just doesn't matter. Woman,
with her material, changeable nature, can never be relied
on; therefore, her fidelity is irrelevant. Some versions
of the Trojan War even posit two Helens— one loyal, one
false— providing further examples of the multiplicity and
duplicity of women. To be faithful, the woman must become
the transcendent object, the dead virgin, a category for
which Beatrice provides a variation. The unfaithful Cissie
Colpitts may be Helens exaggerated to mock the tradition.
The problem is not that the male characters can't satisfy
them sexually, but that the male artist can't represent
them artistically.
d) To fulfill the logic of the game.
1 6 1
If we choose to say that the film is about games, then
the three murders that follow Jake's funeral can simply be
seen as a fulfillment of the game of Deadman's Catch which
is played near the beginning of the film. As Smut
explains: "If a player in the game of Deadman's Catch
drops a skittle, he is obliged to suffer a succession of
handicaps. . . .If a player finally drops a catch with both
eyes closed, then he is out and must take his place in the
winding-sheet" (Drowning. 31). Not surprisingly, the order
in which the characters lose the game and take their places
in the winding-sheet is the order in which they will be
murdered. These characters are not characters, but pieces
of a game that may be moved about. Their death is as
meaningless as the death of a carved chessman taken out of
its game. In Drowning By Numbers every human activity is a
game: literature is an encyclopedia of cricket injuries;
justice is a tug-of-war; and death is a matter of flags and
colored paint.
The above explanations are multiple, conflicting and
irrelevant. Why do the women kill their husbands? For all
the commentary in Fear of Drowning, this question is never
j
resolved and isn't even presented as being very important, j
One theory may be inconsistent with another, but none are !
I
inconsistent with the film, which invites all or none of
1 6 2
its interpretations. The film submits to analysis, but
never succumbs.
If the central theme of the film is elusive, the same
may be said of the meaning of individual details. Apples,
for instance, particularly green apples, are featured in
most Greenaway films: being eaten and tossed in The
Draughtsman/s Contract: as decoration and as experimental
object in A Zed and Two Noughts: piled on a table in Belly
of an Architect: as ingredient and display in The Cook. the
Thief; and proffered towards the camera by Francesca in A
TV Dante.
A profusion of apples also appears in an early scene
of Drowning. Drunken Jake and his mistress Nancy cavort
amongst dozens of apples before they pass out in a pair of
bathtubs. When the betrayed wife, Cissie 1, arrives, she
drowns Jake in the bathtub. The significance of the strewn
apples in this scene far exceeds the narrative rationale of
the scene, and, I would argue, it exceeds even what would
be considered in a traditional sense the meaning of the
film as a whole.
Most obviously, all these apples refer to Eve and
original sin, a character and moment to which Greenaway
continually returns. The fruit is unidentified in
scriptures, but is retrospectively named; the Latin word
for evil and for apple is the same: malum (Ferguson, 28).
16 3
The apple is an appropriate symbolic detail for Greenaway;
its value is unstable— in the hand of Adam it is sin; in
the hand of Christ it is salvation (Ferguson, 28)— its
meanings are multiple, and it is always subject to decay.
As I have argued above, the transgression of eating
and the terrifying knowledge of human mortality are linked.
Apples become a symbol of this linkage as a food symbol of
knowledge, the preferred gift to teachers. Apples also
figure prominently in the legend of William Tell. The
theme of this story, the parent's potential sacrifice of a
child, can also be found in Drowning Bv Numbers through the
Skipping-Girl with her neglectful, prostitute mother and
through Smut with his negligent father, Madgett.
The color of these apples, green, suggests additional
meanings. Green is the color of greed and envy, but it is
also the color of spring and re-birth. Greenaway
frequently depicts a symbolic object or event in a manner
directly opposed to its familiar meaning. He does this
with the fecund green apple, symbol of new life, by showing
it fallen from the tree, rotting on the ground, symbol of
decay.
The name of Jake's paramour makes yet another
allusion. As Cissie 1 points out, her name is "Nancy Gill,i
I
she calls herself Nell, but everyone. . ." knew her as
Nancy. Greenaway borrows the line from "Rocky Raccoon," a
1 6 4
song on the Beaties' White Albumf recorded, not
surprisingly, on the Apple label.
At this point the analysis appears to have lapsed into
minutiae. The eager critic looking for clues could study
the White Album, or English landscape, or the films of
Renoir. The book Fear of Drowning encourages this activity
by providing commentary on the same level of detail. It is
detail which is irrelevant to understanding the film as a
totality: what does it mean? why did the characters
behave as they did? The film points in a limitless number
of directions all away from these familiar questions.
My own commentary has now furnished two lists: the
possible significance of the three Cissie Colpitts within
Drowning By Numbers and a more general survey of the
significance of apples, particularly green apples, which
may be invoked in Greenaway's repeated use of this object.
However, my interpretation of particular elements in the
film doesn't add up to an interpretation of the film.
Instead, these lists indicate a failure to form judgments.
This failure is repeated through some aspects of the film's
content.
To appreciate this failure we must return to the topic
of conspiracy. In this respect the contrast with Dante's
Divine Comedy. to which Drowning continually refers, is
again instructive. In The Divine Comedy a powerful God
1 6 5
makes the definitive interpretation of all individuals.
Even the worst sinners recognize this powerful and
determining God, and acquiesce to His judgments. Drowning,
like all Greenaway films, contains a conspiracy which
usurps the powers of God. In conspiracy, judgments are
formed in secret, praise and punishment are inconsistently
administered, and general acceptance can never be ensured.
Unlike God's incontrovertible judgments, conspiracy
demonstrates the inability to form and convey fixed
judgment.
While returning from Hardy's funeral, the Cissies spy
a knot of people gathered under a water tower— Jake's
mistress, Nancy; Hardy's mother; Jake's cousins; suspicious
joggers; even Splash Bellamy, Cissie 3's newly-wed husband.
"What are they planning now?" asks Cissie 3. "It's one
conspiracy against another," Madgett explains. "Yours
against theirs. Yours to drown, theirs to prosecute." The
water-tower conspirators question the accidental nature of
the drownings. They are correct in their suppositions— the
Cissies have drowned their husbands. Yet the film presents *
i
this group as being incapable of forming judgments. They j
meet in the dark, in secret. Their connections are |
nebulous, their position unclear, their resolutions
t
ineffective. The members of the conspiracy refuse to i
I
accept the interpretation of accidental death put forward
1 6 6
by the Cissies. Only the Cissies are authorized to
interpret their own actions, even when their assessments
are obviously false. "There are three official
explanations for an unnatural death— accident, suicide or
murder. 'Drowning' can satisfy all three" (9). Madgett as
the coroner, the official representative of judgment,
should determine which of the three explanations applies,
but his authority is seduced away from him by the guilty
perpetrators, the true authors of the acts in question.
The film presents the Cissies as attractive women.
They are beautiful, good-natured, nicely-dressed,
desirable. Actual justification for their actions may be
missing, but they are so pleasant that the murders of ugly,
unsympathetic husbands seems tolerable. By the end of the
film, the tolerance into which the reader is wooed has
become problematic. The Cissies' final murder victim is
the lovelorn Madgett. Madgett's death orphans the genial
young boy Smut who simultaneously commits suicide. Smut is
strange and morbid, occupied with collecting insects,
jumping out of windows, and cataloging animal corpses.
Still, he is a genial child. The destruction of the
father/child relationship, here perpetrated through murder
and suicide, is a familiar Greenaway theme and always
signals a destruction of the art object. In this case, the
art object is a catalogue of cricket injuries. Madgett and
1 6 7
Smut's father/son project to photograph the injuries on
Smut's body is tainted by a child abuse investigation. By
the end of the film, it has been definitively ended. The
father and son are separated, and dies oblivious to the
fate of the other. The simple murders of husbands has
become indiscriminately destructive. Maybe the Cissies
intended their conspiracy to be so far-reaching or maybe
they couldn't control it.
In its relationship to other texts, the bulimic text
always presents the specter of a conspiracy. It is an
entity without center, without borders or limits. Any
interpretation must recognize this borderless quality. It
isn't possible to isolate a single text in the Greenaway
oeuvre. The apples in Drowning refer as much to their
appearance in other Greenaway films as they do to any other
external meaning. The Cissie Colpitts of Drowning may not
be the same as the Cissie Colpitts of The Falls or Vertical
Features Remake, but she cannot be clearly distinguished
from them. As I have noted, the category "Cissie Colpitts"
is not entirely discrete.
If the analyzed text exists without borders, so too
does the analysis. Drowning accepts all interpretations,
and, through an internal illogic, fulfills none. The
analysis is never anchored, never completed, never fully
known or definitive. It can slide to another pattern of
1 6 8
organization or shift to another film. In this way, the
film avoids its own submersion, its own Hstifl[ing] in or
by another person's all-embracing comprehension" (Laing,
Divided Self. 45). The interpretation is suffocating and
must be resisted. Comprehension leads to obliteration. An
analysis, like a drowning, can be perpetrated as an
accident, a murder or a suicide, and it will surely
culminate in a funeral— a memorial to the dead text— a map,
a book, a cemetery. Greenaway's texts struggle to keep
afloat against those forces which would submerge them.
The recalcitrance of the bulimic text provides a
variation on the resistance of modernism. But where the
high art object of modernism provides a point of stability
against which the rest of culture can be defined, the
bulimic text complicates its relationship to other texts
through its outward compliance. It agrees to everything—
plot, character, linearity, formal beauty, suspense,
fashion— but its agreement is so flamboyant that it
confounds. Is this commercialism? Irony? Critique? Like
the resistance of the modern art object, the bulimic
i
rejection of interpretation does not simply lead to ;
meaninglessness. Meaning resides in the fragment, in the
pattern of the detail rather than in a totality. The
bulimic text encourages the vertical examination of detail
1 6 9
rather than a horizontal analysis of a totality because the
bounds of that totality are always in flux.
1 7 0
CHAPTER EIGHT
Resurrection Television
Now the whole earth had one language and
few words. . . Then they said, "Come, let
us build ourselves a city, and a tower with
its top in the heavens, and let us make a
name for ourselves, lest we be scattered
abroad upon the face of the whole earth."
And the Lord came down to see the city and
the tower, which the sons of men had built.
And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one
people, and they have all one language; and
this is only the beginning of what they
will do; and nothing that they propose to
do will now be impossible for them. Come,
let us go down, and there confuse their
language, that they may not understand one
another's speech." So the Lord scattered
them abroad from there over the face of all
the earth, and they left off building the
city. Therefore its name was called
Ba'bel, because there the Lord confused the
language of all the earth; and from there
the Lord scattered them abroad over the
face of all the earth. (Genesis, 11)
Genesis 11 describes the proliferation of languages as
an act of divine intervention. The Lord curtails human
accomplishments— the ability to erect monuments, to "make a
name for ourselves" and to live in unity and harmony— by
scattering the people "over the face of all the earth."
The Lord's goal, confusion and misunderstanding among
people, is represented through the inability to speak j
together. For the citizens of Ba'bel, scattering is the !
i
i
inevitable result of a confusion of languages because there ,
I
I
is no substitute for a common tongue.
i
Greenaway's The Falls (1980), like the story of
Ba'bel, attributes a confusion of languages to an extra-
171
terrestrial power which strikes the inhabitants of earth.
I
The Violent Unknown Event (VUE) occurs, affecting the
bodies and speech of approximately 19 million citizens. To
varying degrees, victims of the VUE assume the physical
characteristics of birds. They also begin to speak one or
more of 92 new languages which develop after the event.
Some of these languages are shared by many victims, others
by only a few. One language has only a single speaker,
obviously raising the question: to whom does he speak it?
The Falls. 185-minutes in length, doesn't operate as a
traditional narrative. It purports to be a documentary, or
rather a filmed catalogue, of victims of the VUE—
specifically, those 92 victims whose surnames begin with F-
A-L-L. Some of these victims refuse to be filmed, but
among those subjects interviewed on camera, most speak one
of the new VUE languages. They are forced to communicate,
or— in some cases— they choose to communicate, only with
the benefit of translation.
The Falls addresses translation between languages, but
|we might consider other types of translation. A TV Dante
and Prospero's Books. Greenaway's two major video projects, ;
are both adaptations from other sources and present the
problem of translations between media. In the case of
adaptation, the re-working of other material is explicit, j
but, in fact, all art works form a relationship of
1 7 2
translation to art works which have preceded them. Tom
Phillips— co-director of A TV Dante and translator of the
cantos— announces at the very beginning of that program:
"A good old text is a blank for new things."
In "The Task of the Translator," Walter Benjamin
begins by considering a distinction between creating an
original and creating a translation (Illuminations 76).
For Benjamin, the nature of the translation— faithful,
loose— is irrelevant to the translatability of the
original. That translatability resides not in the
translation, but in the original: "Does its nature lend
itself to translation and, therefore, in view of the
significance of the mode, call for it?" (70). In this
sense, translation, like forgery, becomes a testament to
the nature of the original, to its power and mastery.
Benjamin calls the connection between the translation
and the original "vital" and the purpose of the translation
basically theological. "A translation issues from the
original— not so much from its life as from its afterlife"
(71). It marks a "continued life" which is "far easier to
recognize" than the "less conclusive factors of animality,
such as sensation" (71). Translation gives to the original
a new life, one which is "potentially eternal" (71).
The translated language itself is transformed by the
effort of translation. In this way languages form a
173
relationship of kinship which "it stands to reason. . .does
not necessarily involve likeness" (74). This relationship
results in "linguistic flux," a situation which depends on
a play of similarities (of meaning, the "object of
intention") and differences (of form, the "mode of
intention"). For Benjamin, an anchor point for this
linguistic flux exists only in that state before Babel, a
state of "pure language" (74): "There is, however, a stop.
It is vouchsafed to Holy Writ alone, in which meaning has
ceased to be the watershed for the flow of language and the
flow of revelation" (82). While any individual translation
may be irrelevant to its original, the process of
translation is hardly secondary or irrelevant, but is
indispensable to the process of language. At some point,
the art of any language will require a translation.
The distinction between the art of the original and
that of translation that Benjamin draws for translations
between languages can also be drawn between translations
between media. Edward Buscombe's account of "la politique
des auteurs" notes that the concept of the auteur plays
precisely on a designated difference between the original
and the derivative:
All the articles by Truffaut, Bazin and
Rivette from which I have quoted share this
absolute distinction between auteur and
metteur en scene . . .; and characterize it
in terms of the difference between the
auteur's ability to make a film truly his
1 7 4
own, i.e. a kind of original, and the
metteur en scene's inability to disguise
the fact that the origin of his film lies
somewhere else. (Buscombe 24)
Buscombe's argument suggests that all cinema is potentially
a translation, but also potentially an original, and
therefore itself susceptible to translation.
The possibility that cinema can function as an
"original" in Benjamin's sense of that-which-can-be-
translated seems inconsistent with Benjamin's ambivalent
discussion of cinema in another essay, "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In "The Work of Art,"
film, because of its limitless reproducibility, is the
"powerful agent" of processes which lead to "a tremendous
shattering of tradition" (678), to "a far-reaching
liquidation" (679). Ultimately, "that which withers in the
age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of
art" (678) by which Benjamin means the "unique existence"
and "authority" of the object.
Benjamin's discussion of art operates along a
continuum of legitimacy which considers the nature,
technology, and reproducibility of an art form. To
maintain their aura, both the written word and the image
must be connected to a tradition by a fastening to the
history of a particular object. Yet, the image has a
greater requirement to make this connection. Benjamin's
argument that the image is more inherently fascistic
depends on the assumption that the creation, selection and
arrangement of images cannot be meaningful in and of
themselves, but must establish this meaning by maintaining
a historical chain of existence to the physical object.
If we assume instead that images, their construction
and juxtaposition, can carry meaning independent of the
history of their existence, we can ask a series of
questions about cinema and its relationship to video based
on Benjamin's discussion of translation. If one language
can't leave another language alone, is it possible that one
medium doesn't leave another alone? Does cinema, at a
certain point in its development, require television? Is
the nature of cinema modified by a relationship of kinship
to television? Can we speak of television as a language?
These are, in fact, the questions that A TV Dante
addresses:
A TV Dante tries to answer the question, Is
there such a thing as television? Is
television a medium in its own right with
an individual grammar that would make it an
art form as independent of cinema as opera
is of drama? (Greenaway, "Postscript,"
Publicity materials for A TV Dante)
This program presents us simultaneously with a translation,
an adaptation, and television.
Greenaway and Tom Phillips, an artist, composer and
translator of Dante, first collaborated in 1985 on Canto V,
Inferno. The project, commissioned by Michael Kustow for
1 7 6
Britain's Channel 4, marked the television debut of both
Greenaway and Phillips. A shorter and revised version of
Canto V appears in the 1989 version which includes Cantos
I-VIII. Plans for the project stipulate that Phillips will
continue as overall director of the remaining Cantos of
Inferno in collaboration with other directors. Greenaway
is tentatively scheduled to return for some of the final
cantos ("How a TV Dante Came About" Kustow).
The title of this project connects two concepts which
are often seen as incompatible. First, it announces "TV,"
a vast technical system which is singularly authorless.
The term "television" implies video as the technical
designation of a particular medium and a term often applied
to avant-garde or alternative programs. "Television" also
includes broadcast television as a particular system of
exhibition. Many works are both— A TV Dante has been
broadcast on Channel Four in Britain as well as exhibited
in alternative, avant-garde venues in the United States.
The use of the term "TV" for a high cultural event such as
an adaptation of Dante raises a point similar to that of
!David Antin in his discussion of television. Antin argues
that whether avant-garde video projects or commercial
programs for national (or international) broadcast are
implied, the specter of broadcast television affects all
video production.
1 7 7
It would be so much more convenient to
develop the refined discussion of the
possible differences between film and
video, if we could only forget the Other
Thing— television. . .[But] it is with
television that we have to begin to
consider video, because if anything has
defined the formal and technical properties
of the video medium, it is the television
industry. (Antin 307)
A discussion of Greenaway's videos and their relationship
to Greenaway's films, must take into account both the
formal properties of video as they have been employed by
video artists outside the system of television distribution
and also the existence of that system of TV.
The second part of the title, "Dante," is the proper
name of the poet whose work is being translated and adapted
to the television screen. This name implies the authorship
of a distinct individual whose personal genius has created
a fantastic and coherent universe. His name replaces The
Divine Comedy. the title of Dante's great work, a work
indisputably enshrined in the Western literature canon and
the basis of Greenaway and Phillips' video project. The
proper name of the artist displaces the name of the work.
With their title, Greenaway and Phillips suggest that
the proper name of the artist is not incompatible with the
existence of television. With the article "a," they
i
further imply that this is not the definitive
televisualization of Dante's poem. It is only one of a
possible many television versions. "Dante" is endlessly
1 7 8
translatable and interpretable. In fact, it requires
continuous translation and interpretation. In his poem,
Dante ascribes redemptive powers to art, but the goal of
salvation can only be achieved through the agency of the
reader. His poem is famous for its multiple layers of
meaning and for Dante's specific instructions that it be
read on different levels.
In their design of A TV Dante. Greenaway and Phillips
use the videomatic aspects of their medium to translate the
themes of Dante's poem. Like Dante, they choose to create
in the vernacular. Television is not the official language
of literary adaptation, but the language of the masses. To
choose Italian instead of Latin, television instead of
cinema, is to choose a different possibility of speaking
and a different audience at which to speak.
One of television's ways of speaking is excess. It is
as excess, in its negative senses, that television has
frequently been described. What Meaghan Morris calls
"negative aspects of media" all imply too-much-ness:
"overrepresentation, excessive visibility, information
overload, an obscene plenitude of images, a gross
platitudinousness of the all-pervasive present" (19).
These characteristics are negative only in the sense that
they are excess. The quantity which would propel these
qualities beyond the threshold of artistic acceptability
1 7 9
may be unclear, but it is a threshold beyond which video is
popularly thought to have gone. Video is as much critiqued
from the opposite possibility of excess: not-enough-ness.
It is a cultural desert without innovation, perspective,
autonomy. It is all the same; there is nothing there.
The possibilities of excess are exploited throughout A
TV Dante. The multiple layers of Dante's poem find a
visual analogy in the project's multiple visual layers,
made possible with video technology. A TV Dante is
designed so that it cannot be comprehended at a single
viewing. As many as sixteen images appear simultaneously
on the screen. Like a poem, it must be read over and over.
The video's animated footnotes are some of the more
innovative uses of this layering. Boxes appear in and
interrupt the main image or images. The style of these
interpellations resembles most closely the style used to
present commentary in news and sports programs on broadcast
television. They contain experts from the fields of
literature, horticulture, astronomy, etc., who comment on
the action and its symbolism from a variety of
perspectives. Certainly the presence of these experts
parodies the tradition of modern Dante translation which
relies on extensive commentary. A TV Dante suggests that
jthis commentary may not all be necessary. At one point, an
analysis runs without sound; a mouth moves wordlessly, but
1 8 0
it isn't clear what is being missed, if anything. The
sixth canto, which depicts the glutton Ciacco, is
interrupted three times by an expert who concedes, "We know
nothing whatever about Ciacco." Yet, while mocking the
possibility of expert commentary, the existence of the
footnotes also suggests that it isn't possible to
understand Dante's poem without such an intervention,
without a critical translation. The expert footage runs
with visible edits; the portions included in the video are
only a small part of a series of larger discourses spawned
by this single poem.
Greenaway and Phillips also draw on the incorporative
aspects of video. The constant shift between ontological
realms is one of the qualities which characterizes
television. The broadcast schedule operates as a taxonomy
of programs. The viewer can choose which channel or,
within a genre, which example of a cop show, variety hour
or situation comedy, to watch. The worlds created by
various programs are not consistent, but they are
connected. The universes of a soft drink commercial, an
evening soap opera, and a politically-focused talk or
"chat" show may be incompatible, but they co-exist on the
most immediate terms.
Ontological shifts are evident in A TV Dante in its
use of varied material: footage shot specifically for the
1 8 1
video, stock footage produced for entirely unrelated
intentions, reproductions of artistic or everyday images.
In the act of incorporation, the images are transformed to
form new meanings.
For instance, the video borrows from groups of still
photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, and reproduces them in
series. Their basic nature has shifted from a related
group of photographs to a single moving image.
Furthermore, their modification through color and context
also modifies their significance. A dog, reproduced in a
repeating loop, becomes a wolf which represents the animal
appetites. A figure descending a staircase is manipulated
to become Christ descending after death for the harrowing
of Hell.
A crucial ontological separation is articulated
through the video's depiction of the poem's central human
relationship. Dante and Virgil represent the relationship
of an artist to a predecessor. With few exceptions—
Virgil's face superimposed in a book, Dante with a
background of Arabic script— both figures are depicted as
completely separate from the created world of the poem.
The adaptation plays on the poem's distinction between the
poet and the pilgrim, depicting Dante as the poet. In this
way, A TV Dante exaggerates a separateness barely hinted at
in the poem. In The Divine Comedy. the character Dante
1 8 2
sleeps, dreams, casts a shadow and is described as having a
palpable, weighted form, but he neither eats nor drinks
during his three days in hell, four days in purgatory and
three days in paradise.
Both Dante and Virgil are shown at the same close-up
shot distance, centered in the frame, facing forward and
against a black background. With this equivalence, the
video emphasizes the connection between them, the
continuity of poets. Another figure who appears— in the
first shot of the video— in close-up, centered in the
frame, facing forward and against a black background is co
director Tom Phillips. The only variation in Phillips'
depiction is that he is seen framed within the frame of the
television screen. Phillips appears at other times in the
eight cantos as one of the commenting experts. The
successor to the poets Virgil and Dante is the adapting
television director who is also a translator. Like Dante,
he appears in his own work— not as a pilgrim seeking God,
but as a critic.
Greenaway's second major video project is his only
!
other literary adaptation— of Shakespeare's The Tempest. j
i
Unlike A TV Dante. Prospero's Books was intended for [
j
theatrical distribution rather than broadcast television, j
1 |
iand much of it was filmed in 35mm. Yet this film is also a|
video. In Prospero's Books. Greenaway used HDTV technology
18 3
so advanced post-production had to be done in a special
laboratory in Tokyo. (Because of the film's extensive
nudity which violated Japan's censorship laws, workers
required special badges to enter the area.) In addition to
HDTV, the film makes extensive use of the digital,
electronic Quantel Paintbox. Greenaway describes this
technical tool as being able to "change the shape, form,
contrast, color, tone, texture, ratio and scale of any
given material, then store the resulting infinite solutions
for continual reappraisal" (Greenaway, Prospero's Books
publicity materials). Greenaway takes advantage of this
potential to create infinite and shifting images in form as
well as content.
Following the tempest which Prospero orchestrates to
set the action in motion, a substantial portion of the
film's beginning is taken up with Prospero's account of how
he and Miranda got to the island. In the play, Prospero
narrates the story ostensibly for Miranda's benefit. In
Prospero's Books. Miranda sleeps through his recitation.
i
!
By the nature of the images shown with Prospero's ;
narrative, the film suggests that they are not simply !
visualizations of his words. In one shot, Prospero's
pregnant wife Susanna faces the camera. Unexpectedly, she j
i
reaches up and pulls down the skin that covers her womb
revealing throbbing red organs and a fetus within. The
1 8 4
grisly picture doesn't seem connected to Prospero's fond
reminiscence. It resembles a book illustration operating
in a medical discourse, rather than a widower's memory.
Because Miranda is asleep, the images that accompany
Prospero's story could even be read as her dream images.
The speculative images that we see are not clearly anchored
to any single character's consciousness. This uncertainty
is true of several other scenes in the film.
A scene of Claribel's wedding night in Tunis and a
shot of Prospero with his throat cut both operate as
tableaux. They are outside of the narrative economy and
only vaguely controlled by character psychology.
Claribel's horrific deflowering or Prospero's murder are
scenarios from alternative worlds that intrude on the
flimsy action of the story. The spectacular wedding
celebration for Miranda and Ferdinand which features
singing, dancing and a parade of gifts also stops any
narrative momentum in favor of a gorgeous display. So,
too, do interpolations of the eponymous books which none of
the characters reads during the story, but which pulse,
shake, breathe and come to life on their own. The
i
I speculative nature of these moments is never contained by
[marking them as part of any character's consciousness.
The ontological shifts that characterize video operate
extensively in Prospero's Books. It is a play, a book, an ;
1 8 5
opera, a tableau, an adaptation, a film and a video. In
their relationship, their kinship, through the process of
translation, each medium transforms the others. Is there
such a
speaks
thing as television? If the answer is yes, it only
with the benefit of translation.
I
CHAPTER NINE
Conclusion
1 8 6
The impetus of what I call bulimic cinema is the issue
of control. Who controls the body? Who determines what
goes in the body and what is rejected? Who has the
authority to interpret the body? These are the questions
which characterize the eating disorders anorexia nervosa
and bulimia. These disorders can be seen as extreme
assertions of control. Absolute resistance and the
rejection of understanding masquerade as utter compliance.
The desire to manipulate appearance becomes so intense that
it leads only to an inability to see the self.
Who controls the body?— the represented human body and
the body of the film text— is also the crucial question for
contemporary cinema. In Greenaway's films, all
institutions of power give way to conspiracy; they abdicate
control, relinquish the right to exert influence and to
form judgment. Power does not reside— never resided— in
the figure of the hero, king, father, Arthur, author,
artist, architect, God. The ability to pronounce judgment i
can reside only in the diffuse group of film-goers. This j
diffusion and dispersion of authority leads to the
i
qualities of bulimic cinema: taxonomic, limitless, j
conspiratorial, resistant, excessive, unsolvable, unfixed, j
1 8 7
My discussion reads Peter Greenaway's films and videos
through a metaphor of eating disorders— through the issues
of consumption and control. In Greenaway's films, bulimic
qualities appear repeatedly and intensely, in content—
scenes of eating and cooking, plenteous displays of fruits
and vegetables, art objects incorporated and regurgitated—
and in form— taxonomic narrative structures, excessive
visual design and mise-en-scene, repetition and use of
tableaux. In Greenaway's entire corpus, bingeing and
purging themes are persistent, seductive and horrifying.
A crucial element of my argument— about Greenaway
specifically and contemporary culture generally— is that
the impulse to eat is as powerful and as culturally
manifested as the sex drive, and also that it is basically
different. I have argued along the line of anthropologist
Audrey Richards when she says of ingestion: "Nutrition as
a biological process is more fundamental than sex. In the
life of the individual organism it is the more primary and
recurrent want. . ." (qtd. in Sweetness and Power 4). A
film theory concerned with desire and how it influences
cultural production must address the function of eating,
|
particularly since this function provides the dominant
metaphor used to discuss contemporary media— consumption.
i
The bulimic qualities that Greenaway's films
demonstrate are not, however, confined to his work or to a
1 8 8
European, art-house or auteurist cinema. A variety of
production types demonstrate some of the same
characteristics as Greenaway's films and might be
approached from a bulimic perspective: American
independent (Eating), big-budget Hollywood (JFK), moderate-
budget Hollywood (Alive), German national (Wings of
Desire), experimental, avant-garde (Report), Japanese New
Wave (In the Realm of the Senses), Soviet auteur (Solaris),
quirky genre (Dead Ringers), contemporary British
(Sebastianne. Orlando. Lair of the White Worm).
The recognition of qualities that can be thought of in
anorexic/bulimic terms suggests that cinema, since its
invention at the end of the 19th century, may have
undergone some change. I have suggested that the existence
of television has motivated cinema's shift to a bulimic
mode. Television technology, along with other information
technologies developed and disseminated in the last thirty
to forty years, detaches the artistic product from the
creator. Who made the television series? When does it
begin and end? When we contemplate television's "endless
consumption," its "diffuse regime" (Houston 186), how is it
possible to delimit an object of study?
Television not only unhinges the created object from
I
the creating subject and obscures the object's borders, it j
performs another unfastening: that of the object from its
1 8 9
material existence. The term "media" is perhaps a
misnomer, suggesting as it does mediation between two
distinct entities. Television by this term is not the
thing, but a carrier. Yet, in fact, the television image
is not simply a conduit at all. This image is no longer
simply a representation of objects or events. The image is
the object itself by virtue of having become the commodity.
While it may be relevant to its perception whether the
image is rendered in 3 5mm, 16mm, VHS, Pal, HDTV or
laserdisc in widescreen, pan and scan or letterboxing, it
is not relevant to the fact that the variously-repeated
image is the same commodity. Through television, the image
as commodity has made the symbolic passage that Fredric
Jameson maps in "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism."
Jameson describes the movement from market capitalism, to
monopoly capitalism and eventually to multinational
capitalism associated with postmodernism. As the
representation and function of money and capital shifts
through these phases, so too does the image.
The postmodern image shares the unfixedness of
postmodern wealth, and the representation of landscape—
such as those Mr. Neville draws in The Draughtsman"s
Contract— is the point of departure for the two related
trajectories. The drawings are intended to demonstrate the
wealth of their owner, a wealth that can be seen and
1 9 0
represented. The worth of the drawings, indeed their
entire existence, depends on their physical manifestation.
Like the objects they depict— buildings, waterworks,
gardens— they are always susceptible to destruction.
Corresponding to Jameson's second stage, the
reproducible text or image— which eventually includes
cinema— is analogous to the piece of gold or currency which
resembles and can replace any other. This symbolic
exchange system is fluid and abstract, but still depends on
a physical referent. Finally, though, the symbolic
monetary exchange loses touch with its referent. There are
no objects or events in the physical world to refer to the
circulating imagery, just as there is not enough gold in
Fort Knox to refer to the circulating currency. The image
and its corollaries, knowledge and information, exist not
as a large but still finite series of reproduced versions,
but as a single version with infinite, ahistorical portals
of access which can never be used up or obliterated. How
the image is rendered, the material to which it adheres and
the history of the material— which is, of course, the
history of linkage to the creator's hand— no longer matter.
While television inaugurates this effect, its impact
is far-reaching. Every film is potentially transferable
to, incorporable by, television. Every image is, or could
be, unfastened. Thus the bulimic metaphor of bingeing and
1 9 1
purging is also pertinent to discussions of television.
This pervasive institution/technology is frequently
discussed in terms of consumption, but seldom are the
ramifications of that label investigated. Bulimic
qualities of television could be analyzed on the level of
individual programs, series or even entire channels.
Many programs maintain a complex balance between their
inter- and intra-textual resonances: three Amy Fisher
movies broadcast almost before the events depicted had been
completed— two of them on the same evening; Richard Nixon's
resignation read as grand tragedy in Final Davs: Victoria
Principal ••dreaming" the previous season of Dallas while
her TV husband is in the shower; real-life situations re
created to be solved by real-life viewers of Unsolved
Mysteries. The series Twin Peaks is as much about the
consumption of donuts and cherry pie as it is about a sex
crime; it is characterized by taxonomies: doppelganger
female characters, possible identities for Bob— vision,
dream, drawing, childhood memory, devil— and by excess.
Perhaps the most rapturously bulimic phenomenon on
contemporary television is MTV. The music videos are
ontologically unstable, follow one another in endless
succession, and are entertainment, advertisement, and
commodity all in one.
1 9 2
It is possible to imagine how a metaphor of eating
disorders might also be useful in discussions of
cultural/technological events such as informational
computer networks, interactive video and virtual reality
systems. In a less technological direction, a bulimic
metaphor might usefully consider the prevalent, but under
theorized, Western sub-culture of conspiracy theories such
as John Kennedy's and other assassinations; alien
abductions of humans and livestock; extensive networks of
Satanic child abusing cults. These conspiracies share
themes which are by now familiar: violence to the body; an
absent authority and/or responsible agent; expanding fields
of influence; plentiful "evidence" but no solutions.
At their conclusion, it is customary for analyses of
culture to argue a way in which to assess the elements of
the analyzed work. Are they progressive or regressive;
good or bad; high or low; up or down; male or female; light
or dark; singular or plural; stable or disintegrating;
growth or rot; human or bacterial; the Word of God or burnt
flesh? My analysis returns, finally, to the religious
metaphor, just as Greenaway's films continually return to
The Fall and The Last Supper, the two great Bible stories
of eating. The schism initiated by Eve's eating is
annihilated by eating the body of Christ. By eating we
remove distance and separation. We incorporate, becoming
1 9 3
the same, so that the familiar dualisms of judgment make
less sense. Only in the act of being eaten, as Christ was-
-as the reader Michael in The Cook, the Thief was— is the
ability to pronounce judgment conferred. Interpretation
and annihilation occur together. Growth is rot, the human
is bacterial, the Word of God is burnt flesh.
1 9 4
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abraham, Nicolas and Torok, Maria. "Introjection—
Incorporation, Mourning or Melancholia.1 1 Trans, from
Nouvelle Review of Psychoanalysis. 6:111-122.
Anson, Robert Sam. "The Shooting of J.F.K." Reprinted in
J.F.K.: The Book of the Film. New York: Applause Books,
1992.
Antin, David. "Video: The Distinctive Features of the
Medium." Film Theory and Criticism. 3rd Edition. Ed.
Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
Barnouw, Erik. Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American
Television. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image.
Music. Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977.
.S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang,
1974.
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings.
1927-1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Baudrillard, Jean. "The Anorexic Ruins." Looking Back on
the End of the World/Semiotext(e). New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989.
Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free
Press, A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., 1973.
Bell, Rudolph M. Holv Anorexia. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1985.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Task of the Translator."
Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New
York: Shocken Books, 1969.
."The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction." Film Theory and Criticism. 3rd Edition.
Ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British
Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972.
1 9 5
Bianconi, Piero. The Complete Paintings of Vermeer.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1987.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. New York: Grove Press,
Inc., 1962.
Boris, Harold N. "Torment of the Object: A Contribution
to the Study of Bulimia." Bulimia Psychoanalytic Treatment
and Theory. Ed. Harvey J. Schwartz, M.D.
Madison: International University Press, Inc., 1988.
Boskind-Lodahl, Marlene. "Cinderella's Stepsisters: A
Feminist Perspective on Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia."
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 1976, 2:
2 .
Bowie, Malcolm. Lacan. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1991.
Bruch, Hilde. Eating Disorders: Obesity. Anorexia
Nervosa. and the Person Within. New York: Basic Books,
Inc., 1973.
.The Golden Cage. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1978.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. Fasting Girls: The History of
Anorexia Nervosa. New York: Plume, 1989.
Buscombe, Edward. Theories of Authorship. Ed. John
Caughie. (BFI Series) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1981.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. "The Female Body and Religious
Practice in the Later Middle Ages." Fragments for a
History of the Human Body. Part One. Ed. Michel Feher with
Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi. New York: ZONE, 1989.
Carse, J. Dictionary of World Religions. Ed. Keith Crim.
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981.
Coward, Rosalind. Female Desires: How They Are Sought.
Bought and Packaged. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1985.
Doane, Mary Ann. "The Clinical Eye: Medical Discourses in
the 'Woman's Films' of the 1940s." The Female Body in
Western Culture. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985.
1 9 6
Durling, Robert M. "Deceit and Digestion in the Belly of
Hell." Alleaorv and Representation. Ed. Stephen J.
Greenblatt. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1981.
Eco, Umberto. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1990.
Ferguson, George. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Ford, John. 'Tis Pitv She's a Whore. London: Ernest Benn
Limited, 1968.
Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow.
Trans. Josue V. Harari. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New York: Atheneum,
1969.
Futuyma, Douglas J. Science on Trial. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1982.
Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick
Gregory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1977.
Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies After Marx and
Freud.
Trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage. Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1990.
Greenaway, Peter. The Belly of an Architect. London:
Faber & Faber, 1988.
.The Cook, the Thief. His Wife and Her Lover. Paris:
Dis Voir, 1989.
.Drowning bv Numbers. London: Faber & Faber. 1989.
.Fear of Drowning Bv Numbers/Regies du Jeu. Paris: Dis
Voir, 1988.
.Papers. Paris: Dis Voir, 1990.
.A Zed and Two Noughts. London: Faber & Faber, 1986.
Habermas, Jurgen. The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster.
P o r t T ow nsend, W a sh in g to n : Bay P r e s s , 1 9 8 3 .
1 9 7
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986.
James, David. Allegories of Cinema. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989.
Kafka, Franz. "A Hunger Artist." The Penal Colony. New
York: Schocken Books, 1948.
Kennedy, Sidney H. and Garfinkel, Paul E. "Anorexia
Nervosa." Modern Perspectives in the Psychiatry of the
Neuroses. Ed. John G. Howells, M.D., F.R.C. Psych., D.P.M.
New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1989.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. A Selection. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977.
Laing, R.D. The Divided Self. London: Penguin Books,
1969.
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live Bv.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Lakoff, George. Women. Fire, and Dangerous Things: What
Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1987.
Laplanche, Jean. Life & Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans.
Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976.
Laplance, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. The Language of Psvcho-
Analvsis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, 1973.
Lessing, Alfred. "What is Wrong with a Forgery?" The
Forger's Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art. Ed.
Denis Dutton. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. New York:
Basic Books, Inc., 1963.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "Acinema." Wide Angle. 2: 3,
1978.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen,
1987.
1 9 8
Malcomson, S. "Review of The Draughtsman's Contract." Film
Quarterly. (Winter 1983-84).
Marin, Louis. Food for Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1989.
Mitchell, James E. "Bulimia Nervosa." Modern Perspectives
in the Psychiatry of the Neuroses. Ed. John G. Howells,
M.D., F.R.C. Psych., D.P.M. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1989.
Modleski, Tania. Feminism Without Women. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
Montias, John Michael. Vermeer and his Milieu. Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Morris Meaghan. "Banality in Cultural Studies." Logics of
Television. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington:
Indiana U. Press, 1990.
Mulvey, Laura. "Film and Visual Pleasure." Film Theory
and Criticism. 3rd Edition. Ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall
Cohen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Nietzsche. "The Gay Science." Existentialism from
Dostoevski to Sartre. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Cleveland:
Meridian Books, 1956.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. "Minnelli and Melodrama." Home Is
Where the Heart Is. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: BFI
Publishing, 1987.
Orbach, Susie. Hunger Strike. New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 1986.
Pagels, Elaine. Adam. Eve, and the Serpent. New York:
Vintage Books, 1989.
Palazzoli, Mara Selvini. The Work of Mara Selvini
Palazzoli. Ed. Matteo Selvini. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans.
Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1988.
Perec, Georges. Things: A Storv of the Sixties. London:
Harvill, 1965.
Rank, Otto. Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality
Development. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1932.
1 9 9
.The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Trans. Harry
Tucker, Jr. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1971.
Ratcliff, Carter. "Swallowing Dali.” Art Forum.
September 1982, xxi: 1.
Richards, Ann. Quoted by Sidney W. Mintz. Sweetness and
Power. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.
Rickels, Laurence. Aberrations of Mourning; Writing on
German Crvots. Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1988.
Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a
Cultural System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
Scott, Derek, Ed. Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa: Practical
Approaches. Washington Square, New York: New York
University Press, 1988.
Sitney, P. Adams. "The Falls." Persistence of Vision. 8:
1990.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Random
House, 1977.
Thompson, Kristin. "The Concept of Cinematic Excess."
Narrative. Apparatus. Text. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986.
Walker, John I., M.D., Brown, James Trig, M.D., and Gallis,
Harry A., M.D. The Complicated Medical Patient. New York:
Human Sciences Press, Inc.
Walsh, Michael. "Allegories of Thatcherism." Fires Were
Started. Ed. Lester Friedman. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Mvth: How Images of Beauty are
Used Against Women. New York: William Morrow and Company,
Inc., 1991.
2 0 0
GREENAWAY FILMOGRAPHY
TRAIN (1966)
TREE (1966)
REVOLUTION (1967)
FIVE POSTCARDS FROM CAPITAL CITIES (1967)
INTERVALS (1969)
EROSION (1971)
H IS FOR HOUSE (1973, Re-edited in 1978)
WINDOWS (1975)
WATER (1975)
WATER WRACKETS (1975)
GOOLE BY NUMBERS (1976)
DEAR PHONE (1977)
1-100 (1978)
A WALK THROUGH H (1978)
VERTICAL FEATURES REMAKE (1978)
THE FALLS (1980)
ACT OF GOD (1981)
ZANDRA RHODES (1981)
THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT (1982)
FOUR AMERICAN COMPOSERS (1983)
MAKING A SPLASH (1984)
A TV DANTE, CANTO 5 (1984)
INSIDE ROOMS— THE BATHROOM (1985)
A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS (1986)
THE BELLY OF AN ARCHITECT (1987)
DROWNING BY NUMBERS (1988)
A TV DANTE, CANTOS 1-8 (1988)
THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (1989)
DEATH IN THE SEINE (1989)
PROSPERO'S BOOKS (1991)

Asset Metadata

Creator Biga, Tracy Ellen (author)

Core Title Cinema bulimia: Peter Greenaway's corpus of excess

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television/Critical Studies

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Advisor Kinder, Marsha (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), James, David E. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-682809

Unique identifier UC11343860

Identifier DP22280.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-682809 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP22280.pdf

Dmrecord 682809

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Biga, Tracy Ellen

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA