Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (19
Background
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), a famous and shocking black
comedy, was based on Edward Albee's scandalous play (Ernest Lehman's
screenplay left the dialogue of the play virtually intact). It was first
performed in New York in October of 1962, and it captured the New York
Drama Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for the 1962-63 season.
The film's title refers to Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an influential British
feminist writer who pioneered the 'stream of consciousness' literary style
while examining the psychological and emotional motives of her
characters. [Perhaps the 'fear' of VW refers to the film's characters who are
suffering marital discord in the emotionally-draining film, and who may
have 'known' that she suffered from mental illness and ultimately went
insane and committed suicide.] The title is also a parody of Who's Afraid of
the Big Bad Wolf?, a tune sung in Disney's Three Little Pigs (1933)
animated short film. The names of the two major characters, George and
Martha, are those of the first US President and his wealthy wife - a
marriage of convenience.
The searing film exhibited a fine sense of pacing, comic timing, and
gripping buildup in a series of emotional climaxes. The film follows the
structure of Albee's play, delineated by three acts: "Fun and Games,"
"Walpurgisnacht (Night of the Witches)" and "The Exorcism." The shocking
content - the dramatic portrayal of the destructive, sado-masochistic, and
cruel battles in one couple's tempestuous, love-hate relationship during a
late night (2 am) to dawn brawling encounter while victimizing another
young couple - was thought to be too vitriolic, frank, explicitly blasphemous
and foul-mouthed for the film screen. [It was the first American film to use
the expletive 'goddamn' and 'bugger'.] The MPAA ratings board gave the
film a seal of approval after Warner Bros. appealed and made a few cuts of
the most extreme profanity (such as "Screw you"). It was the first film to be
released with a "Suggested for Mature Audiences" warning.
However, with studio boss Jack Warner's insistence on keeping the
integrity of the play, and the teaming of real-life husband and wife megastars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the film was guaranteed
success. The two portrayed an on-screen couple: a sharp-tongued but
ineffectual professor (Burton) and his complaining wife (Taylor), in the
company of a new professor (Segal) and his mousy wife (Dennis). [The
couple had originally been teamed in the mega-flop Cleopatra (1963).
Robert Redford rejected the role played by George Segal.]
The black-and-white film, masterfully directed by Mike Nichols (in his
directorial screen debut), captured probably the greatest performance ever
of Elizabeth Taylor's career (she won her second Academy Award as well
as Best Actress praises from the New York Film Critics, the Nat'l Board of
Review and the British Film Academy).
Woolf won five Academy Awards from its thirteen nominations: Best
Actress (Elizabeth Taylor), Best Supporting Actress (Sandy Dennis), Best
B/W Cinematography (Haskell Wexler), Best Art Direction and Best
Costume Design. The other eight nominations included Best Picture, Best
Actor (Richard Burton), Best Supporting Actor (George Segal), Best
Director (Mike Nichols), Best Screenplay (Ernest Lehman), Best Sound,
Best Original Music Score, and Best Film Editing. [The film became noted
as the only one in Academy history up to that point to be nominated in
every eligible category. It was also the first film to have every member of
its cast receive an acting nomination.] As compensation for his defeat this
year, director Mike Nichols won the Best Director Oscar the next year for
The Graduate (1967) over Norman Jewison, the director of the Best
Picture victor In the Heat of the Night (1967).
The Story
The film opens under a moonlit sky in the middle of the night on a small
New England college campus (in the town of New Carthage - an allegorical
name). Under the credits, an academic couple walk through the deserted
campus - George (Richard Burton), a 46 year old, bespectacled history
professor, and his 52 year old wife Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), a large,
boisterous, blowsy woman with heavy wrinkles. Martha's drunken laugh
acutely punctuates the title "WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?".
After drunkenly weaving their way home, they enter their home and switch
the lights on. Martha looks around the living room discontentedly and
parodies Bette Davis' mannerisms, exclaiming:
What a dump! [from Beyond the Forest (1949)]
In the sloppy kitchen in a famous sequence in which she munches on a
fried chicken leg and puffs on a cigarette, she repeatedly - with a deep
whiskey voice - berates her husband for not remembering the film the line
is from: "What's it from, for Christ's sake?...some damn Bette Davis
picture, some god-damned Warner Bros epic." Exasperated at her criticism
of his cocktail-party behavior, he inquires: "Do you want me to go around
braying at everyone all night the way you do?"
They have returned at two o'clock early on a Sunday morning from one of
her father's "goddamn Saturday night orgies," according to George. As
they bicker at each other, it is revealed that George is a tired, defeated
teacher, married for twenty years to the daughter of the president of the
college.
When she suggests that they have a drink, he finds out that they've "got
guests coming over" that Martha invited to join them in an 'after-party' party
- a blonde, good-looking, young newly-appointed Math Department
member [Martha is mistaken - he is an assistant professor in the Biology
Department] and his wife, described as "a mousey little type, without any
hips or anything."
Disturbed because she always "springs things" on him, she makes lighthearted fun of his reaction, acting both loving and vicious toward him,
singing to the tune of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush":
NOTE: the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" from Disney's
animation short "The Three Little Pigs" was too expensive to use, so a
different tune (Mulberry Bush, in the public domain) with different lyrics
was used instead:
Poor Georgie-Porgie, put-upon pie...Awwwwwwwwwww! Hey! Hey! Hey!
(She sings) Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf,
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf...Ha, ha, ha, HA! (No reaction) What's the
matter? Didn't you think that was funny? I thought it was a scream...You
laughed your head off when you heard it at the party.
Knowing that Martha acts abominable when drunk, he cautions her to
behave herself in front of the guests. She taunts him back, typical of the
violent, self-destructive arguments they have had in their joint lives
together: "I swear, if you existed, I'd divorce you." Then, he warns her:
Try to keep your clothes on, too. There aren't many more sickening sights
in this world than you with a couple of drinks in you and your skirt up over
your head...
When the doorbell rings, George asks her to refrain from mentioning their
mythical child while the guests are there:
George: Just don't start in on the bit about the kid, that's all.
Martha: What
do you take me for? George: Much too much.
Martha: Yeah? Well I'll
start in on the kid if I want to.
Martha: Just leave the kid out of
this.
George: I'd advise against it, Martha.
As she explodes and yells "GODDAMN YOU!" at him, he flings open the
door and there stand their younger invited guests arriving for a nightcap.
Feeling immediately ill at ease in a socially awkward and uneasy situation
are the 26 year old plain blonde Honey (Sandy Dennis) and her husband,
a 28 year old professor Nick (George Segal). George is pleased with
himself that they have unceremoniously heard Martha's hostile remark coming from a "subhuman monster yowling at 'em from inside."
Too polite and naive to have refused the party invitation in the first place,
Nick and Honey suddenly find themselves pawn-like in the middle of an
intellectual, argumentative warzone in a most unusual evening resembling
an endurance test. After Nick comments on an abstract painting in the
living room, George explains that it is "a pictorial representation of the
order of Martha's mind." Honey is already a bit tipsy from the earlier party
and orders more brandy: "Never mix-never worry." The first indication that
Martha is lewdly flirting with Nick, one tactic in her arsenal of weapons
against her ineffectual husband, comes when she rubs her hand on his
knee, telling him that her "Daddy knows how to run things" at the college.
While everyone is drinking the free-flowing alcohol, George tells Martha to
help the wilting Honey find the bathroom in a famous line:
Martha, will you show her where we keep the...eh, euphemism?
After the two women leave, Nick mentions that George has been at the
University for quite a long time. George answers:
What? Oh...yes. Ever since I married, uh, What's-her-name...ah, Martha.
Even before that. (Pause) Forever. (To himself) Dashed hopes, and good
intentions. Good, better, best, bested. (To Nick) How do you like that for a
declension, young man? Eh?
Early in the evening, George verbally tests the sparring skills of Nick in one
of the evening's first social games, but Nick is caught off-guard and easily
out-matched and outwitted:
All right, what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it's funny, so
you can contradict me and say it's sad? Or do you want me to say it's sad
so you can turn around and say no, it's funny. You can play that damn little
game any way you want to, you know?
Abruptly after his protest, Nick wants to escape and leave as soon as
Honey returns, because he realizes that he is starting to become
embroiled in the middle of marital warfare, but George merely excuses
their behavior as an intellectual exercise:
Martha and I are having...nothing. Martha and I are merely exercising...
that's all, we're merely walking what's left of our wits. Don't pay any
attention to it.
Nick remarks that he prefers not "to become involved in other people's
affairs," but George comforts and cajoles him into lowering his guard and
remaining:
Well, you'll get over that - small college and all. Musical beds is the faculty
sport around here.
George notes that Nick's wife is "slim-hipped," but learns that they don't
have kids yet: "We want to wait a little, until we're settled." Honey listens,
reacting fearfully when George is asking Nick how many kids they plan to
have. When Honey joins their company again, she tells George in a bright
voice: "I didn't know that you had a son...A son. I hadn't known...Tomorow
is his birthday. He will be sixteen." George wheels around after the second
oblique reference to their son, asking: "She told you about him." Then, he
turns and glares upstairs, angry that she has violated their life-long pledge
of discretion by revealing their make-believe procreation of a fantasy child,
an imaginary son, that they could never have: "OK, Martha, OK....Damn
destructive." (The child was created for self-protection, as a scapegoat,
and to provide a common meeting ground for the warring couple.) When
Nick and Honey nervously say they have to go home, George harshly
barks (a subtle and nasty insult showing his incisive insight into the
younger couple's marital problems and lack of children themselves): "For
what? You keeping the babysitter up or something?"
When Martha makes her reappearance in the living room, she has
changed her clothes into something more comfortable and voluptuous,
slacks and a tawdry, tight-fitting blouse - something she rarely does
according to George: "Martha is not changing for me. Martha hasn't
changed for me in years. If Martha is changing, it means we're gonna be
here for days. You are being accorded an honor..." George calls her new
attire her "Sunday chapel dress." Martha lets more sparks fly by bawdily
insulting her husband's position in the History Department:
George is bogged down in the History Department. He's an old bog in the
History Department, that's what George is. A bog...A fen...A G.D. swamp.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, A Swamp. Hey, swamp. Hey, SWAMPY!
Learning that Nick was both a quarterback and a former intercollegiate
state middleweight boxing champion, Martha makes lascivious, obscene
advances toward the attractive young man. She taunts him: "You still look
like you have a pretty good body now, too, is that right? Have you?...Is that
right? Have you kept your body?" Even Honey naively encourages her
observations about his studly body: "Yes, he has a very firm body." Martha
describes how her own "paunchy" husband doesn't like "body talk.
'Paunchy' here isn't too happy when the conversation moves to muscle."
One of the most dramatic, riveting moments of the film blurs fantasy and
reality. Martha brings up another embarrassing wound from the past,
questioning George's manliness. She describes a public boxing match
incident which her Daddy orchestrated in his back yard. When George told
his father-in-law that he didn't want to box, Martha got into the pair of
gloves herself and punched George POW right in the jaw, sending him
crashing into a huckleberry bush. During her story telling, George finds a
shotgun in another room, stalks his prey, and takes aim at the back of
Martha's head. When Honey notices the gun, she screams in fright. Martha
turns her head to face him as he pulls the trigger - out blossoms a brightlystriped umbrella, a symbolic display of his weakness and sexual impotency
in another of his games. He adds sound effects: "Pow. You're dead!" They
laugh, mostly from relief and confusion.
George won't allow Martha to play "blue games for the guests" when they
kiss and she moves his hand down onto her breast: "Everything in its place
Martha, everything in its own good time." Honey asks again about the most
sensitive subject of the evening - their son. The feuding couple use the
imaginary son as a weapon in most of their arguments:
Honey (giggling and drunk): When is...where is your son coming home?
George: Ohhh. Martha? When is our son coming home?
Martha: Never
mind.
George: No, no. I want to know. You brought it out into the open.
When is he coming home, Martha?
Martha: I said never mind. I'm sorry I
brought it up.
George: Him up...not it. You brought him up. Well, more or
less. When's the little bugger going to appear? I mean, isn't tomorrow
meant to be his birthday or something?
Martha: I don't want to talk about
it.
George: But Martha...
Martha: I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT
IT.
George: I'll bet you don't. (To Honey and Nick) Martha does not want
to talk about it...him. Martha is, uh, sorry she brought it up...him.
Honey
(idiotically giggling): When's the little bugger coming home?
George: Yes,
Martha...now that you've had the bad taste to bring the matter up in the
first place...when is the little bugger coming home?
Exasperated, Martha counter attacks and accuses George of having his
own problems by attacking his pride. She brings up more statements which
are either suspect, true, false, or concocted lies. One fact that is
undeniably reinforced is that level-headed, rational George has biologically
participated in the creation of their son. But they argue over their nonexistent son, she insisting that the boy has green eyes, he claiming the
child has blue eyes:
Martha: George's biggest problem about the little...about our son, about
our great big son, is that deep down in the private-most pit of his gut, he's
not completely sure that it's his own kid.
George: My God, you're a wicked
woman.
Martha: And I've told you a million times, baby...I wouldn't
conceive with anyone else, you know that baby.
George: A deeply wicked
person.
Honey (grieving and drunk): Oh my, my, my, my, my...
Nick: I'm
not sure that this is a subject for...
George: Martha's lying. I want you to
know that right now. Martha is lying. There are very few things that I am
certain of anymore, but the one thing, the one thing in this whole sinking
world that I am sure of is my partnership, my chromosomological
partnership in the...creation of our...blond-eyed, bluehaired...son...
Martha: ...George, our son does not have blue hair or blue
eyes, for that matter. He has green eyes, like me. Beautiful, beautiful green
eyes. [Note: The black and white film didn't betray the fact that Elizabeth
Taylor's eyes are in fact purple.] George: He has blue eyes, Martha.
Martha: Green.
George: Blue, Martha.
Martha: GREEN you bastard.
Soon, the constantly harried George wants no more of her vicious
humiliation and gross emasculation, trapped in a marriage with a
demanding, shrewish wife and controlled by her high-powered, successful
"Daddy." He threatens to get angry over her continuing revelations of their
courtship, marriage, and son, and the insulting contrasts she makes of him
to her father. Martha believes George could never stand up to her father:
George: You've already sprung a leak about you-know-what...about the
sprout, the little bugger, our son. If you start in on this other business,
Martha, I warn you.
Martha: I stand warned...So anyway, I married to
S.O.B. I had it all planned out. First, he'd take over the History Department.
Then when Daddy retired, he'd take over the whole college, you know?
That was the way it was supposed to be....Until he watched for a couple of
years and started thinking that maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all,
that maybe Georgie-boy didn't have the stuff, that maybe he didn't have it
in him!...You see, George didn't have much push, he wasn't particularly
aggressive. In fact, he was sort of a FLOP! A great big, fat, FLOP!
On the word FLOP, George startles the guests by breaking a bottle against
the portable bar. But Martha continues her angry tirade:
So here I am, stuck with this FLOP, this BOG in the History Department...
They speak over each other's lines, their voices rising to drown each other
out. Having withdrawn into an inner intellectual world of words and
activities, George has numbed and blocked himself off, losing his "guts":
Martha:
...who's married to the President's daughter, who's expected to be
somebody, not just a nobody, a bookworm who's so god-damn
complacent that he can't make anything out of himself, that doesn't have
the guts to make anybody proud of him. ALL RIGHT GEORGE! STOP IT!
Totally soused, Honey joins George in his singing and he swings her
around in circles: "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Virginia
Woolf..." But then she rushes toward the bathroom in the hall, nauseated
by the movement, dizzy from inebriation, and upset by Martha's crude
behavior: "I'm going to be sick, I'm going to be sick."
While Martha makes coffee for Honey, Nick joins George in the front yard
for more drinks. There, he shares confidences with George about his own
'shotgun marriage' to Honey:
Nick: ...I married her because she was pregnant...It was a hysterical
pregnancy. She blew up and then she went down.
George: And when she
George:
Go on Martha,
(Singing) Who's
Who's afraid of
was up, you married her.
Nick: And then she went down. (They share a
laugh together.)
Both couples are childless - incapable of having children, although George
and Martha have invented a son. He admits to the great, private joke of his
own marriage: "Martha doesn't have pregnancies at all," but we do have
"just one...one boy...our son...Yeah, well, he's a...comfort, he's a bean
bag...You wouldn't understand." George describes his own "messy"
marriage as one of "accommodation" and "adjustment." Nick responds that
his marriage was motivated in part by Honey's money and family pressure
rather than by passionate romance. His father-in-law was a corrupt
evangelical preacher ("man of the Lord") who left his daughter financially
rich and secure.
After their drunken banter has progressed and they appear male-bonded,
George shifts alliances with Nick and states that he is a potential threat:
George: You realize that I've been drawing you on this stuff because you
represent a direct threat to me and I want to get the goods on you...I mean
I've warned you, you stand warned...
Nick: I stand warned. It's you sneaky
types worry me the most, you know. You ineffectual sons of bitches. You're
the worst.
George: Well, I'm glad you don't believe me. After all, you've
got history on your side.
Nick: You've got history on your side. I've got
biology on mine.
The lessons of history have taught George that the younger generation,
represented by Nick, may potentially subvert future history with self-serving
aggrandizement, including the possibility of seducing George's wife:
Nick: What I thought I'd do is, I'd sort of insinuate myself generally, you
know, find all the weak spots...become sort of a fact and then turn into a, a
what? (gesturing toward George)
George: An inevitability.
Nick: Exactly,
an inevitability. Take over a few courses from the older men, plow a few
pertinent wives.
George: Now that's it. I mean, you can shove aside all
the older men you can find, but until you start plowing pertinent wives,
you're really not working. That's the way to power. Plow 'em all!...The way
to a man's heart, the wide inviting avenue to his job is through his wife, and
don't you forget it.
Nick: And I'll bet your wife's got the widest, most
inviting avenue on the whole damn campus. (He laughs) I mean, her father
being president and all.
George: You bet your historical
inevitability.
Nick: Yessiree. I'd just better get her off into the bushes right
away.
George offers his unwilling guest "good advice": "There's quicksand here
and you'll be dragged down before you know it...sucked down...You
disgust me on principle and you're a smug son of a bitch personally but I'm
trying to give you a survival kit.." Nick responds vehemently as they both
move toward the house: "UP YOURS!" George delivers a long monologue
in response:
You take the trouble to construct a civilization...to build a society based on
the principles of...you make government and art, and realize that they are,
must be, both the same...you bring things to the saddest of all points...to
the point where there is something to lose...then all at once, through all the
music, through all the sensible sounds of men building, attempting, comes
the Dies Irae. And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? Up yours.
When their guests insist on leaving, George retrieves the car to take them
home. On their short drive in the car, the subject shifts from Honey's
retching to the reason for their son's constant throwing up - Martha is
described as a destructive child abuser:
George: ...the real reason why our son used to throw up all the time, wife
and lover, was because he couldn't stand you fiddling at him all the time,
breaking into his bedroom with your kimono flying, fiddling...
Martha:
Yeah, and I suppose that's why he ran away from home twice in one
month. Twice in one month! Six times in one year.
George: Our son ran
away from home all the time because Martha here used to corner
him.
Martha: I NEVER CORNERED THE SON OF A BITCH IN MY
LIFE.
George: He used to run up to me when I'd get home, and he'd say:
'Mama's always coming at me.' That's what he'd say.
Martha: Liar!
When the subject of dancing is raised, Honey sees a roadhouse sign for a
restaurant: "Red Basket Cocktails - Dancing" and expresses her interest:
"I'd love some dancing...I want some! I want some dancing!..I just love
dancing. Don't you?...I dance like the wind." George suddenly obliges
Martha's order to stop the car and they go inside. In an overhead shot,
Honey spins around dancing by herself "like the wind" (an "interpretive
dance" she later calls it) to the music of the jukebox, but Nick tries to tell
her to stop acting foolish. She lashes back at him: "You're always at me
when I'm having a good time...Just leave me alone. I like to dance and you
don't want me to."
While Honey and George watch, Nick dances with Martha, somewhat
enjoying sharing Martha's humiliation and castration of her husband. As
their bodies undulate closely together, Honey thinks: "They're dancing like
they've danced before." Using rhymed speech while she dances, Martha is
'encouraged' to mock George and tell more ugly details about his past,
replaying a story which George had earlier told Nick out on the yard in
greater detail:
Well, Georgie-boy had lots of big ambitions
In spite of something funny in
his past...
Which Georgie-boy here turned into a novel...
His first attempt
and also his last...
But Daddy took a look at Georgie's novel...
And he
was very shocked by what he read...
A novel all about a naughty boychild...
Who...killed his mother and his father dead.
And Daddy said,
'Look here, I will not let you publish such a thing...'
George rises, yells: "STOP IT, MARTHA," and unplugs the jukebox. This
ends the dancing abruptly. After being insulted even more, George
declares: "THE GAME IS OVER," but Martha overextends herself by
implying that George's past directly corresponds to the horrifying events of
his unpublished, non-fiction novel - maybe George deliberately murdered
his parents:
Just imagine a book all about a boy who murders his mother and kills his
father, and pretends it's all an accident...And do you want to know the
clincher? Do you want to know what big brave Georgie said to
Daddy?...Georgie said...'But Daddy, I mean...but Sir, this isn't a novel at
all...this is the truth...this really happened...TO ME!'
As Honey ludicrously applauds the violent outburst, George's emotionallycharged intellectual warfare soon turns to physical assault. As he strangles
Martha, calling her a demonic "SATANIC BITCH!" Nick struggles to drag
George's hands from Martha's throat and tear him away. George is finally
thrown to the floor. When a restaurant worker asks them about all the
noise and announces closing time, George excuses everything as one big
game: "We're just playing a game...Ah, one more round...Just give us one
more round and we'll be on our merry way." While they are served a last
round of drinks, George gleefully lists the types of entertaining mind-games
that they can still choose from:
Well that's one game. What shall we do now? Come on, I mean, let's think
of something else. We've played Humiliate the Host - we can't do that one.
What should we do now?...Let's see, there are other games, how about uh,
how about Hump the Hostess huh?...OK, I know what we do. Now that
we're through with Humiliate the Host...and we don't want to play
Hump the Hostess yet...how about a little round of Get the Guests?
George calls his wife by two invectives: a "book dropper" and a "child
mentioner."
With authority over everyone, George brings up more statements which
concern the nature of truth and illusion. He uses ammunition from his
earlier outdoor conversation with Nick to "Get the Guests", telling a story
within a story:
Well now Martha, in her own discreet way, told you all about my first novel.
True or False? I mean, true or false that there ever was such a thing.
Anyway, she told you about it, my first novel, my memory book which I'd
sort of preferred she hadn't, but hell, that's blood under the bridge. BUT
what Martha didn't do - what Martha didn't tell you, what Martha didn't tell
us all about was my second novel. (Martha looks up puzzled) No, Martha,
you didn't know about that, did you? My second novel, true or false. True
or false?...Well, it's an allegory really, probably, and it's all about this nice
young couple who comes out of the Middle West. It's a bucolic you see.
And, this nice young couple comes out of the Middle West, and he's
blonde and he's about thirty, and he's a scientist, a teacher, a
scientist...and his mouse is a wifey little thing who gargles brandy all the
time...and Mousie's father was a holy man, see, and he ran sort of a
traveling clip joint, and he took the faithful...that's all, just took
'em...Anyway, Blondie and his frau out of the plain states came...and they
settled in a town just like nouveau Carthage here...But Blondie was all in
disguise really, all got up as a teacher, because his baggage ticket had
bigger things writ on it. H.I. HI! Historical inevitability...And he had this
baggage, and part of his baggage was in the form of his mouse...But what
nobody could figure out about Blondie was his baggage - his mouse, I
mean, here he was, pan-Kansas swimming champeen, or something, and
he had this mouse, of whom he was solicitous to a point that faileth human
understanding given that she was something of a simp, in the long
run...she tooted brandy immodestly and spent half her time in the
upchuck...But she was a money baggage amongst other things. Godly
money ripped from the golden teeth of the unfaithful and she was put up
with...Oh, and now we get a flashback to HOW THEY GOT
MARRIED...The Mouse got all puffed up one day, and she went over to
Blondie's house, and she stuck out her puff and she said, look at me...I'm
all puffed up. Oh my goodness, said Blondie...and so they were
married...and then the puff went away again like magic - pouf!
Though Honey encouraged George to proceed with his "Get the Guests"
story, she is thoroughly embarrassed when she becomes aware of Nick's
indiscretion, sharing with George their barrenness and violating their
agreement to keep their secret private: "Oh no...You couldn't have told
them, oh nooo!" She runs out of the room, hysterical and sick to her
stomach again. George will not apologize to Nick for telling his "damaging"
story:
By God, you gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are. You
just rearrange your alliances, boy. You look around and make the best of
things.
As Nick and Honey stumble away from the roadhouse, George tells his
loving but vicious wife mockingly that he meant to entertain her: "And
that...is how you play 'Get the Guests'...You bring out the best in me,
baby."
Why baby, I did it all for you. I thought you'd like it, sweetheart, it's to your
taste, blood, carnage and all. I thought you'd sort of get excited, sort of
heave and pant and come running at me, your melons bobbling.
In the parking lot, the sparks fly again - it is a sickening, harrowing battle
lacking all inhibition and restraint in a marriage that has lasted too long:
George: ...You can sit around with the gin running out of your mouth, and
you can humiliate me, you can tear me to pieces all night, and that's
perfectly OK, that's all right...
Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!
George: I
CANNOT STAND IT!
Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT! YOU MARRIED ME
FOR IT!
For decades in their shell-shocked marriage, each of them bring up
weapons of destruction that they wield against each other in a "total war."
Martha domineeringly questions his ability to "wear the pants in the house,"
ruining him by her continual excessive demands:
Martha: I'm gonna finish you before I'm through with you...
George: You
and the quarterback, you're both gonna finish me.
Martha: Before I'm
through with you, you'll wish you'd died in that automobile, you
bastard.
George: And you'll wish you'd never mentioned our son...I said 'I
warned you.'
Martha: I'm impressed.
George: I warned you not to go too
far.
Martha: I'm just beginning.
George: You're a monster - You are.
Martha: I'm loud and I'm vulgar, and
I wear the pants in the house because somebody's got to, but I am not a
monster. I'm not.
George: You're a spoiled, self-indulgent, willful, dirtyminded, liquor-ridden...
Martha: SNAP! It went SNAP! I'm not gonna try to
get through to you any more. There was a second back there, yeah, there
was a second, just a second when I could have gotten through to you,
when maybe we could have cut through all this, this CRAP. But it's past,
and I'm not gonna try.
Martha: I looked at you tonight and you weren't there...And I'm gonna howl
it out, and I'm not gonna give a damn what I do and I'm gonna make the
biggest god-damn explosion you've ever heard.
George: Try and I'll beat
you at your own game.
Martha: Is that a threat George, huh?
George: It's
a threat, Martha.
Martha: You're gonna get it, baby.
George: Be careful
Martha. I'll rip you to pieces.
Martha: You're not man enough. You haven't
the guts.
George: Total war?
Martha: Total.
Martha screeches away in their station wagon without George, picking up
Nick and Honey on her way home. Honey is left in a sickened state in the
back seat of the car. When George forces his way through the latched
front door of his own house after walking home, he knocks into the hanging
doorbells inside the hallway, causing them to chime. On the stairs, he finds
Nick's discarded jacket. He picks it up and realizes that Martha has taken
Nick up to her bedroom. His laughter at the thought soon mixes into painful
tears as he morosely walks out the front door. From the front yard below,
he looks up pathetically and sees their love-making-in-shadow through the
bedroom window.
Honey is in a delirious dreamworld reverie, denying knowledge of anything
going on around her and screaming: "I DON'T WANT ANY CHILDREN! I'm
afraid, I don't want to be hurt." George realizes she privately denies and
represses everything related to her own barrenness and her husband's
impotency, as she tells her own tale of marital woe. She is terrified of
bearing children - a symbol of her own inauthentic and illusory relationship
with Nick:
Does he know that? Does that stud you're married to know about that,
huh?...How do you make your secret little murders? Pills? Pills? You got a
secret supply of pills? Or what? Apple jelly? Will Power?
Honey still wants to know about the bells she heard ringing: "What were
the bells? Who rang?" An idea suddenly springs into George's mind - a
new illusory fact to ultimately destroy Martha. Like Honey, Martha also
dredged up and confessed a private, intimate, and painful secret from their
past. George is prepared to destroy their imaginary, fantasy son because
of it:
...the bells rang and it was a message, and it was about our son and the
message was, and the message was, our son is DEAD!...And Martha
doesn't know, I haven't told Martha...(Very softly in a whisper) Martha?
Martha? I have some terrible news. It's about our son. He's dead. Do you
hear me Martha? Our boy is dead.
Even later in the evening, Martha stumbles out of the house after
replenishing her drink, mumbling to herself and asking where everybody
has gone. The ice in her glass jiggles and clinks loudly, and she repeats
the noise several times: "CLINK! CLINK!" Nick joins her on the front porch
steps, thinking everyone's "gone crazy" - his wife is curled up on the tile
floor in the bathroom with a liquor bottle, whispering: "nobody knows I'm
here." To his wincing surprise, Martha thinks Nick is inadequate sexually
and "certainly a flop in some departments." He explains his impotency by
blaming his ten hours of drinking:
To you, everybody's a flop. Your husband's a flop, I'm a flop.
Martha divulges the way she has habitually attacked George's weak spots
in their tortured relationship. In a remarkable moment of self-revelation,
she acknowledges her deep, authentic, triumphant love and bond with her
soulmate:
You're all flops. I am the Earth Mother, and you are all flops. (To herself) I
disgust me. You know, there's only been one man in my whole life who's
ever made me happy. Do you know that?...George, my husband...George,
who is out somewhere there in the dark, who is good to me - whom I revile,
who can keep learning the games we play as quickly as I can change
them. Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy. Yes, I do
wish to be happy. George and Martha: Sad, sad, sad...Whom I will not
forgive for having come to rest; for having seen me and having said: yes,
this will do; who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of
loving me and must be punished for it. George and Martha: Sad, sad,
sad...Some day, hah! Some night, some stupid, liquor-ridden night, I will go
too far and I'll either break the man's back or I'll push him off for good
which is what I deserve.
Martha insists that Nick be reduced to a "houseboy" or "gigolo" by
answering the doorbell, knowing his opportunistic, "ambitious" nature by
sleeping his way up the University ladder:
You're ambitious, aren't you? I mean, you didn't come back here with me
out of mad-driven passion, did you now? You were thinking a little bit about
your career, weren't you?...Go on, git!...You show old Martha there's
something you can do. Huh? Atta boy.
When he opens the door, a bouquet of snapdragons are thrust into his
face, and George, using a falsetto voice, speaks from behind the flowers:
Flores. Flores para los muertos. Flores. ["Flowers. Flowers for the dead.
Flowers." Note the reference to a similar scene in Tennessee Williams' A
Streetcar Named Desire (1951), another film with a morbid tone and
subject matter about pregnancy and a struggling couple]... (To Nick) Why
Sonny, you came home for your birthday at last!
Nick is kept guessing about more illusory matters and he is exasperated at
his peculiar, unfathomable hosts:
Nick: Hell, I don't know when you people are lying or what.
Martha: You're
damned right.
George: You're not supposed to.
Martha: Right.
George and Martha again manipulatively remind Nick that he is an
impotent houseboy:
George: Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference eh, toots? Eh
houseboy?
Nick: I am not a houseboy.
George: Look, I know the game.
You don't make it in the sack, you're a houseboy.
Nick: I AM NOT A
HOUSEBOY!
George: Then you must have made it. Yes? Yes?
Somebody's lying around here; somebody's not playing the game straight.
Come on, come on; who's lying? Martha? Come on.
Nick: Tell him I'm not
a houseboy.
Martha: No, you're not a houseboy.
George: So be
it.
Martha: Truth and illusion, George. You don't know the
difference.
George: No, but we must carry on as though we did.
Martha:
Amen.
In the wee hours of the morning, George proposes one last really fun
"game to play," although Martha is exhausted and pleads for no more
games. It's called "Bringing Up Baby." George calmly insists: "One more
Martha. One more game, and then beddie-bye. Everybody pack up his
tools and baggage and stuff and go home. And you and me, well, we
gonna climb them well-worn stairs."
When she moves her hand to touch him lovingly, he slaps it away, inciting
her to get mad for "an equal battle" - in an escalated war to the death
including an ultimately vicious and violent purging of her inner demons:
Don't you touch me. You keep your paws clean for the undergraduates.
Now, you listen to me, Martha. (He grabs her hair, pulling her head back)
You've had yourself an evening, you've had yourself quite a night, and you
can't cut it out just whenever there's enough blood in your mouth. We are
going on, and I'm going to have at you, and it's going to make your
performance tonight look like an Easter pageant. Now I want you to get
yourself a little alert. I want a little life in you...Pull yourself together. I want
you on your feet and slugging, because I'm going to knock you around,
and I want you up for it.
He rouses her fury to join in the game, a final dramatic battle to the death:
Martha: All right George. What do you want?
George: An equal battle,
baby, that's all.
Martha: You'll get it.
George: I want you mad.
Martha:
I'm mad.
George: I want you madder.
Martha: Don't worry about
it.
George: Good girl. We play this one to the death.
Martha:
Yours.
George: You'll be surprised.
After assembling everyone together, even Honey ("Honey funny bunny!"),
George announces a "last game...a civilized game." He first reviews all the
happenings earlier in the evening: "we sat around and we got to know
each other and we've had fun and games, curl-up-on-the-floor, for
example...the tiles...Snap the Dragon...peel the label..."
In this final game, George is again planning to peel the label - this time
aiming for the marrow inside the bone, realizing that it may be the one
thing needed to save their crippled marriage and lives:
...and when you get through the skin, all three layers and through the
muscle, and slosh aside the organs...and get down to the bone, you know
what you do then?...You haven't got all the way yet. There's something
inside the bone, the marrow, and that's what you gotta get at.
He brings up the uncomfortable subject of their son, setting up for the
ultimate purging of her unconscious fears and attachments which block her
from accepting the death of their son: "You want to hear about our
bouncey boy, don't you?"
He's a nice kid, really, in spite of his home life; I mean, most kid's would
grow up neurotic, what with Martha here carrying on the way she does;
sleeping 'til four in the PM, climbing all over the poor bastard, trying to
break down the bathroom door to wash him in the tub when he's sixteen,
dragging strangers into the house at all hours...
Martha fortifies herself with a drink and prepares to give what George
refers to as a "recitation" (hinting it is a ceremonial rite), and somber
recollections about their son - a decades-old illusion and fabrication which
has devitalized their marriage. George offers additional quiet asides during
her trance-like delivery of a clearly-remembered birth and childhood:
Our son was born in a September night, a night not unlike tonight, though
tomorrow, and sixteen years ago...It was an easy birth, once it had been
accepted, and I was young...and he was healthy, a red, bawling child...with
slippery firm limbs and a full head of black, fine, fine hair which, oh, later,
later, became blond as the sun, our son...And I had wanted a child...oh, I
had wanted a child...And I had my child...Our child. And we raised
him...and he had green eyes...and he loved the sun...and he was tan
before and after everyone and in the sun his hair became fleece...beautiful,
beautiful boy...So beautiful, so wise...Beautiful, wise, perfect.
Very significantly, George adds: "There's a real mother talking," and Honey
suddenly and courageously in an epiphanic moment announces that she is
ready to reassess the illusions of her own barren life and conceive a child
with Nick:
I want a child....(more forcefully) I want a child!...I want a child. I want a
baby.
In an emotionally climactic point in the film, Martha then makes an abrupt
shift in her story, while George contrapuntally recites a Latin "Mass of the
Dead" in a mock funeral service behind her words - emphasizing the
theme of death once again:
Of course, his perfection could not last...not with George around....A
drowning man takes down those nearest. And he tried, and oh God how I
fought him...the one thing I tried to carry pure and unscathed in the sewer
of our marriage, through the sick nights and the pathetic stupid days,
through the derision and the laughter...God, the laughter, through one
failure after another, each attempt more numbing, more sickening than the
one before; the one thing, the one person I tried to protect, to raise above
the mire of this vile, crushing marriage, the one light in all this hopeless
darkness - OUR SON.
And then George tells Martha that he has "a little surprise" for her about
their "sunny-Jim." He drops the final bombshell in an ultimate exorcism,
purging and demystification to cleanse her of her internal demon spirits.
George tells her that a telegram was delivered with "bad news." Just as
earlier in his own character's life, he had killed a parent in a car accident,
George eliminates their "son" in a similar car accident:
Sweetheart, I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you, for both of us, I
mean. Some rather sad news...I'm afraid our boy isn't coming home for his
birthday...Our son is dead. He was killed late in the afternoon on a country
road with his learner's permit in his pocket, and he swerved to avoid a
porcupiine, and drove straight into a large tree...I thought you should know.
There are remarkable similarities between George's version of their son's
death in a car accident and the past tragedies of his own life. Martha
reacts with emotional and rigid fury and shock, and then moans, slumping
to the floor, with tears running down her mascara-streaked face:
YOU CANNOT DO THAT. YOU CAN'T DECIDE THESE THINGS FOR
YOURSELF! I WILL NOT LET YOU DO THAT!...I WILL NOT LET YOU
DECIDE THESE THINGS... NOOOOOOooooo ...YOU CAN'T KILL HIM.
YOU CAN'T LET HIM DIE.
George chants "Kyrie eleison" after Martha's cleansing, healing and
rebirth.
And then in another fictional statement within the new illusion, George tells
her that he just ate the telegram which brought news of their son's death.
After the long night in an epiphanic moment of comprehension paralleling
Honey's, Nick insightfully says to himself repeatedly:
Oh my God. I think I understand this.
Nick realizes that George and Martha's child doesn't live at all and that
they had filled the void in their marriage and existence with a pathological
obsession and belief in a fantasy child ("And I had wanted a child...oh, I
had wanted a child...And I had my child...Our child.") George explains why
he has the right to restore sanity by killing their son and stripping away the
conceived illusion governing their lives - Martha had revealed their mostprivate secret to Honey: "You broke our rule Martha. You mentioned him,
you mentioned him to someone else."
As the sun rises and dawn approaches, George softly declares: "It's dawn.
I think the party's over." Honey and Nick begin to depart. At the door and
ready to leave, Nick begins a thought (or offer): "I'd like to...," but he and
Honey are quietly, gently escorted out by George. [What possibly was
Nick's thought or offer? Gratitude at the exorcism of his and Honey's
illusion of childless happiness, apology for intruding into a critical moment
of his and Martha's lives, reconciliation with George, sympathetic
understanding of the older couple's trouble, or all of the above?]
There is an exhausted calm after the game playing is over and the guests
leave - the weary hosts are physically and emotionally exhausted. George
turns out the lights as the sun comes up.
Their final words on a Sunday morning are softly spoken in short,
disjointed, monosyllabic phrases. Liberated after externalizing and
crushing the once-comforting son-myth, they must both be reunited in
communion to face life and its emptiness without fear or false illusions (to
not fear 'the big bad wolf'). George gently touches his wife's shoulder
during the final dialogue:
Martha: Did you, did you have to?
George: Yes.
Martha: ...You had
to?
George: Yes.
Martha: I don't know.
George: It was time.
Martha:
Was it?
George: Yes.
Martha: I'm cold.
George: It's late.
Martha:
Yes.
George: It will be better.
Martha: I don't know.
George: It will be,
maybe.
Martha: I'm not sure.
George: No.
Martha: Just us?
George:
Yes.
Martha: You don't suppose, maybe...
George: No.
Martha: Yes.
No.
George: All right?
Martha: Yes. No.
George (singing softly to her):
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Martha: I am George.
George: Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Martha: I
am George, I am.
The camera zooms in on George's hand resting gently on her shoulder as
Martha clasps her hand on top of his. It seems they may have found a new
sense of compassion to each other's needs. [Martha's confession that
she's "afraid of Virginia Woolf" is a realistic admission and confession that
she is afraid of reality, but ready to face it honestly and openly from now
on, without continuing to harbor an illusion about a non-existent son.]
The film is noted as one of the few films without end credits - it concludes
with a placard "EXIT MUSIC" accompanied by soft mandolin music for a
few minutes.