Games of Love and Death Peter Greenaway and Other Englishmen Chronology as Topography Like all good readers of Borges and Calvino, Greenaway has a notion of the past that is more topographical than temporal, and so chronology need not dictate causality. Drowning By Numbers, it appears, was a script finished right after The Draughtsman’s Contract, but at the time the project “failed to get off the ground.” Now that it follows A Zed and Two Noughts and The Belly of an Architect, any similarity with the film that made the director famous becomes vastly more suggestive with the hindsight of an intervening history. Is Drowning by Numbers a return to home ground – the English countryside – after two foreign forays that had a mixed reception? Or a heroic – Greenaway might say “gay” – effort, in the teeth of his previous protagonists’ pessimism and failure, to finish unfinished business and not leave drafts unexecuted? It might even be a film that interrogates his own work’s obsessions, this time not merely through a fictional stand-in for the filmmaker (the coroner joining the cartographers, surveyors, draughtsmen, Peter Greenaway animal behaviorists and architects) but for what his personal obsessions mean within that part of English culture he willy-nilly “represents.” Because Greenaway has become an international auteur he now has to suffer the attendant ambiguities: celebrated abroad, but deeply dividing the critics at home. Shunned by a mass public, though not without a devoted following who tend to use him as the stick with which to beat a (typically English?) parochialism that complains of his emotional “coldness,” his cerebral gymnastics, his treatment of actors as pegs on Games of Love and Death 421 which to hang esoteric ideas. Abroad, especially in France, it is his “Englishness,” his eccentricity and yes, his parochialism that is prized, recognized and that, finally, constitutes a major part of his assets. Contracts and Conspiracies But what secures Greenaway his claim to loyalty and an audience is that, like any other “serious” artist, his vision is shaped by robust and non-trivial antinomies, on which he has, simultaneously, a tragic and a comic perspective. Whether the subject is decay, man’s rage for order, nature’s indifference to violence, pedantic love of detail, or sudden death in an idyllic setting (“Murder in an English garden”), Greenaway has the talent to conceive of his themes as double-sided, and to sustain two contradictory insights with equal conviction. This gives his films a kind of inner drama, an intellectual movement and passion, belied by the apparent banality of a plot that in Drowning by Numbers, is without surprise or suspense. Generated by simple series of three, familiar from fairy tales, nursery rhymes and children’s counting rounds, Drowning by Numbers is not as flashy as The Draughtsman’s Contract, with its court intrigues, verbal duels and power politics. Indeed, it is not at all obvious what could be the intellectual tension in the set piece games, or could make the tableau-like compositions more than the designer’s delight they evidently are. A static, closed universe, jerked into mechanical life by rules, games, and witticisms: this side of the coin is almost too easy to fault, as if the director was in advance disarming the critics by playing even more openly his customary hand. But Greenaway always keeps a powerful motive up his sleeve to propel his figures into narrative: that of the contract and the conspiracy, antithetical and warring principles in one’s dealings with the world. For the hapless but willing victims of Greenaway’s films (Mr. Neville, the Deuce twins, Kracklite, Madgett) the contest leads to death (suicide, murder: the differences – here between Smut’s and Madgett’s end – seem to matter little). To the metaphysician in Greenaway, behind the draughtsman’s as much as the coroner’s contract lies a Faustian wager: to lure Nature into showing her true face, which is evidently not that of Darwinian evolution, or the anthropomorphism of ecological or wild life documentaries, but a more sinister though also serene exchange between life and death, maggot-fermenting pullulation and the night sky’s cold, cosmic nothingness. Sex and food, pregnancy and decay are the manifest agents of the terrestrial side of this trade. It highlights the fundamental asymmetry between masculine and feminine destinies where Greenaway’s males seek the solace of sex in direct 422 European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood relation to their anxious, personal intimations of mortality and loss, as illusory tokens of self-preservation, the women’s predatory behavior is governed by the need to preserve the species (A Zed and Two Noughts, The Belly of an Architect, the youngest of the Cissie Colpitts), or produce an heir and pass on property (as in The Draughtsman’s Contract), in each case with sublime indifference to paternity. Ordinary Misogyny and Male Subjectivity If the contract binds the men and leads them to their death, the conspiracy is generally hatched by women. They are often the survivors, sometimes “excellent swimmers,” who in Drowing by Numbers literally pull the plug on Madgett. He professes envy at their spontaneous solidarity, but the film shows them amoral, voracious, shameless (the Colpitts), promiscuous (Nellie/Nancy) or capricious and teasing (the star-counting skipping girl): a monstrous regiment. They giggle while a corpse is examined by the coroner, crack jokes with the eyewitnesses of a fatal accident, ridicule male sexual anxieties and are erotically stimulated by the sight of death. Alice in Wonderland, nubile nymphomaniac, sentimental good-time girl, bored brassy housewife, comforting maternal bosom: Greenaway has assembled an array of “strong” women characters who are none the less all clearly identified male projections, emanating from longing and loathing in roughly equal parts. As examples of ordinary misogyny, Greenaway’s stereotypes are, compared to the femmes fatales of recent vintage (Blue Velvet or Fatal Attraction), positively nostalgic and old-fashioned. What clings to them are the perplexing questions of puberty and adolescence. Drowning by Numbers is perhaps best seen as belonging to a loose and as yet not very well defined cycle, among them Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, John Boorman’s Hope and Glory and Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives. All are acts of exorcising male childhood traumas, all involve a highly ambivalent reckoning with the mother’s sexuality, and in the course of this testify to a cautious, if knowing encounter – for the sake of biographical or collective self-scrutiny – with psychoanalysis (and religion). This is a relatively new and perhaps overdue phenomenon in British cinema (pace Nicolas Roeg) which has had the effect of opening out film narrative towards more adventurous forms of fiction. A heightened, emblematic or dream-like realism has appeared, for which the implements, objects, customs, the visual (and often musical) remnants of a bygone popular culture have become the icons of subjectivity, allowing these films to move into the area of male fantasy and anxiety in ways Games of Love and Death 423 perhaps comparable to the function that the New Gothic (from Angela Carter to Fay Wheldon) has had for women. “Incest as an Art Form” It seems that Drowning by Numbers, a quintessential Greenaway film according to every auteurist criterion of style and theme, is in fact not entirely sui generis, but part of a symptomatic use of heavily stylized autobiography. If there is a more specifically personal note to the film, one would expect it to point to the director as intellectual loner, someone who can draw for a character like Smut on childhood memories of playing by himself, populating (and also ruling over) an entire imaginary universe. In this respect, Drowning by Numbers shares a quest for origins with quite divergent works (admittedly, a somewhat paradoxical claim, seeing how Greenaway is ostensibly concerned with endings, finalities, exhausting alphabets and series), and it might be time to try and rescue the filmmaker from his own auteurist ghetto, where opinion is so sharply polarized about a “Greenaway film.” Boorman’s Hope and Glory is a good benchmark for comparison, mainly because it so clearly belongs to the genre of nostalgic evocation, and also because, despite being about an auteur’s personal past, its narrative is close enough to mainstream form to be a recognizable, if mildly satirical version of precious national mythologies: about childhood, the Blitz, suburbia, crusty grandfathers, cricket on sunny summer days. It earned Boorman an Oscar nomination and angered the surviving residents of the Surrey Street thus immortalized. Boorman himself sees Hope and Glory rooted in his “admiration, affection and indeed awe for my mother and her three sisters.” In the film, William’s erotic bond with his mother is quite muted, not least because the boy’s curiosity is displaced onto the elder sister and her precocious affair with a Canadian soldier. At one point, however, Boorman makes us share the thrill of witnessing adult indiscretions. With the camera taking Bill’s perspective no more than three feet from the ground, and peering out from behind a rack full of blouses, we see two women in their underwear – his mother and her friend – trying on wartime fashion and talking saucily about sex. The scene strained the credulity of a fastidious TLS critic, who complained that “the womenfolk seem an unbuttoned lot for those days, and young Bill’s nose is forever being rubbed in their intimacies.” But Hope and Glory touches here on a fantasy, which is nonetheless grounded in historical experience. The diary published to accompany the film gives a clue: “When my father went to war, he left me with a house full of women, with no male to curb their female excesses. The inexplic- 424 European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood able and sudden tears, then the crass conspiratorial laughter at some sexual allusion in shocking carelessness of their mystery ... and the stifling embraces when a boy’s face was pressed into that infinite softness, falling, falling, inhaling all those layers of odor only scantily concealed by lily of the valley; acute, knotted, scarlet-blushing, shameful embarrassment.” Boorman keeps these memories at arm’s length with a set piece of a scene and passages of purple prose. Not so Terence Davies: his films are, in a sense, agonized hymns to just such “shameful embarrassment.” Already the opening shot of Death and Transfiguration had the middle-aged Tucker run his hands along a row of hangers in his mother’s closet, sobbing uncontrollably as he buries his face in her clothes. In Distant Voices Still Lives, the mother is such a monument to mute suffering and brutal humiliation that this seems to swallow whatever other emotions the son may feel towards her. But here, too, much of the sexuality is displaced on the sisters, as women, but even more in their dealings with the oppressive, violent father. Religious ceremonies and rituals are called upon, not unlike in Greenaway’s films, to dignify nameless pain. One sister’s wedding and the father’s funeral are disturbingly intercut, confusing the linear narrative, perhaps in order to bring out an inner logic: that only with the father dead can there be a wedding. Yet such is the father’s hold over the film, and thus over the subjectivity that informs every image, that it is the sisters who, each in turn, curse him and wish him dead. The son merely gets himself a bloody fist smashing the front room window, and nearly breaks his neck falling through a glass roof. Distant Voices Still Lives may appear to be made up of a series of barely connected incidents, fixed in place and class but difficult to locate in their chronological sequence. What the nostalgic evocation of fifties’ pub songs and romantic hits from the radio throws into even sharper relief, however, is the domestic mixture of violence and affection, and the question of what emotional identity corresponds to such a schizophrenic family life. Davies is unusual in that he takes the sisters’ point of view – they dominate the image, even where they seem to give in to their boisterously inconsequential husbands. Nonetheless, the film is still narrated through a character, whom the story marginalizes: that of the son. Tony’s shadowy existence has to do with his inability to provoke his father either to friendship or overt violence, such as is handed out to his sisters. In a curious reversal we see them constantly challenge their father’s authority, and it is they who are slapped, beaten, and loved – not the boy. Each vows to kill him, and each mourns his death. The narrative seems unable to define Tony similarly around this love and hate of the father, and the film’s perspective is split between identification with the mother, as abject victim, often enough absent from a scene, but implied by the frontal position of the camera (as in the scene around the Christmas table), and with the figure of Monica/Mickey, the Games of Love and Death 425 sisters’ best friend who occupies the place of a third daughter, as if she was a stand-in for the son. Despite its artless minimalism, Distant Voices Still Lives is quite a complex “psychoanalytic” narrative, insofar as it is a drama of identifications, of a subjectivity refusing to settle into an identity and hence pervasive and unfocused on a single character. Its floating point of view compares interestingly with the multiple perspectives of Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, a more flamboyant use of psychoanalysis for the purposes of piling on fictional doubles and generating out of them a many-layered narrative. At first sight the diametrical opposite of Davies’ spare, formal snapshot memories of nightmares and traumas, The Singing Detective, with its overt play on TV and movie genres, does share with Distant Voices Still Lives an equally intense vision of boyhood anguish and emotional confusion around sex, death and domestic violence. For The Singing Detective coheres not so much around the various incarnations of Phillip Marlow now, then and as his own wish-fulfilling projection, but around the incomplete identification of a boy with his father – this time a weak, ineffectual one – in order to work out erotic ambivalences towards the mother – this time not victim of male violence but sexually active temptress and femme fatale. It may be argued that Potter The Singing Detective uses this version of the Oedipal trauma (with the scope it gives to verbal aggression and paranoia) as no more than a narrative ploy, a sort of Rosebud motif, signaling a mother’s betrayal, constantly activated by scenarios of violent death. But what seems significant is that in both films the emotional appeal of popular music can be joined to the most basic of psychoanalytical plots. In Distant Voices Still Lives the outcome is a narrative about the narrowness and emotional intensity of working class lives as stylized as a medieval mystery play. In The Singing Detective it results in a structure of projections and narrative doublings credible and coherent enough to dovetail the most disparate of genres: film noir, emergency ward drama, wartime memoir and thriller spoof. Some powerful unifying fantasy seems to be at work, which the nonlinear narratives of Potter, Davies and, I would add, Greenaway can explore without naming it outright. That the issue may have to do with male narcissism, and with the possibilities of identification across both gender and generation is even hinted at by Boorman, when he describes what would have been his ideal casting for Hope and Glory: “My own daughters would play the aunt’s parts, and when they told stories of me, my son Charley would act me as a boy. I 426 European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood would do the role of their father, my own grandfather. It would be incest as an art form.” The Son’s Seduction and the Sphinx’s Riddle For this dimension to come into view, Greenaway’s film seems to me exemplary. But in order to “read” the narrative of Drowning by Numbers for its emotional tensions and the inner logic of events, one has to accept that the boy Smut and Madgett the coroner might be one and the same person, just as the three Cissy Colpitts are manifestly three stages/phases of a woman’s life, in relation to men. The fiction works through a fantasy in which the son imagines himself seduced by the mother, in order to help eliminate the father. In one sense the “son” yields and complies, as Madgett does, forever in hope of the desired union with the Cissie Colpitts. But he also identifies too much with the “father” to make this solution to the Oedipal dilemma a lasting one. The first murder, of Jake in his tin bath “naked as the day I was born” is both the killing of a drunken old lecher and an act of maternal infanticide. No wonder Smut (a child grown ageless with adult knowledge) tries to protect himself with rituals, obsessively rehearsing his own anticipated fate. His elaborate animal and insect funerals are particularly telling, because at once archaic and transparent attempts at mastering, through repetition, the anxieties of loss, the fear of the mother. Greenaway leaves in no doubt what sort of fetish mastery is at stake: to please his teasing and inquisitive playmate, Smut not only sets about circumcising himself with a pair of scissors; at his funerals he also lights phallic rockets stolen from one of the symbolic fathers, who is drowned as punishment for brandishing – in a scene that dispenses with symbolic ambiguity – a yellow (!) ice lolly in place of his member. By the logic of this Oedipal fantasy, the triple murders are not perpetrated by the women (which rather improbably would associate them with the law of numbers and the comfort to be found in series). Instead, Madgett’s complicity in the drownings complements Smut’s funerals, and projects the compulsion to repeat onto the Other as a way of getting a grip on his own manhood. After all, the nature of the son’s desire dictates that he should want to rub out his rival(s). But in order for the narrative to have its cake and eat it too, agency is displaced, guilt feelings transferred, and fear is recovered as the pleasure of acquiescing in the inevitable. Smut ceremoniously invents a final game whose beauty lies in the fact that the winner is also the loser, and Madgett, abandoned in his boat, awaits his fate, abundantly prefigured throughout – not least in the many char- Games of Love and Death 427 acters, places and incidents associated with the dying words of artists and kings. As a consequence of these moves and subterfuges – and this may account for a measure of unease and bafflement – the Colpitts’ actions seem necessarily gratuitous. The fantasy attributes mysterious powers to women, in fact, knowledge of the Grand Design itself, but the plot leaves their motivation whimsical, scurrilous, irrational: a vague and arbitrary conjunction of dissatisfaction and opportunity. As soon as each has fulfilled her role as agent of Madgett’s secret fear and wish, Greenaway dismisses them into mythology. It is at this point that the motif of death by drowning merges with its opposite: undoing birth, returning to the womb, trying to reconcile the woman’s desire for the “son” with her indifference towards the “father.” She is the vessel of impartial and violent Nature, a solicitous and even sorrowful executioner, the guardian of life no less, whose element is water, the coastal regions and the tidepools of invertebrate existence. Indeed, a reading of the names leaves all the main protagonists confined to the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder: Madgett/maggot, Cissie Colpitts/cesspits, Smut ... Clerical Necrophilia Greenaway may be reviving the sentimental romantic antinomies of life versus art, creative chaos versus rational order, and investing them with an equally romantic gender division, but he knows that he is implicated, and shows it. His trademark as a filmmaker after all are clever conceits, grids, numbers, exhaustive taxonomies, invented statistics, serial permutations – drawing by numbers indeed. Greenaway would probably agree with Raymond Queneau: “the secret vices of my life are erudition and bad puns.” In Drowing by Numbers such mental binges are, more self-deprecatingly than in previous work, laid bare and opened for inspection. “Games help his insecurity,” says the eldest of the Colpitts about Madgett, and spells out why he and Smut are such obsessive players. In their bachelor household, unable to sustain a productive rapport with the environment, they play competitive games with Nature, as in the one called “Tide and Sheep,” where Madgett tries to master, anticipate and replicate, in a grand and self-condemning gesture, the rhythm that epitomizes the female cycle. Likewise, Madgett’s “Dead Man’s Cricket” is played as a diversionary maneuver, to detract, during the youngest Cissie’s wedding party, from various sexual antics and murderous appetites. Both occasions make game playing gender specific, the somewhat pitiful, pathetic response to the unruly rule of conspiracies, asso- 428 European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood ciated directly and indirectly with female demands. Thus, another reading of the names hints at how women become the objects of male fear and aggression: the Madgett/magic that makes them into Colpitts/culprits is the law of numbers, the rules of the game – what the production notes, in a phrase one assumes is Greenaway’s, call the “clerical necrophilia” of both father and son. Self-appointed administrators of death, they play games, accept coincidence even when it comes in series, indulge the scientific or the taxonomic impulse in order to hold on to the notion that what escapes them – women, nature, and sex – can be controlled by rules, if only they are spelled out clearly. Cadavres Exquis Exposing his intellectual vices to the conflicts of male fantasy must have seemed for the director a tempting impulse of exorcism, or an even subtler form of selfsatisfaction. For the spectator, perhaps, this only works if Greenaway shows himself as vividly committed to the beauty of his visual material as he is to the colder eroticism of his heroes’ bachelor machines, dismantled with such brittle sarcasm but also melancholy in both A Zed and Two Noughts and Drowning by Numbers. In this his incurable romanticism for rural England – here the seascapes, the Suffolk idylls, the windswept, eerily lit night scenes – stand him in good stead. If the modernist apotheosis of romanticism was indeed surrealism, then one can see why Greenaway qualifies for French enthusiasm. Superficially, it is the Delvaux landscapes, the de Chirico still lifes, a beach house as fantastic as a Magritte, or dead fish tagged with numbers that evoke surrealist imagery. But there is more than a hint that Greenaway can distil some truth beyond the painterly pastiche out of situations that appeal to a surrealist imagination of matter, when for instance, one of the Colpitts pours lemonade over her husband’s manual typewriter and then dusts it with sugar. The incident of two cyclists falling over a mound of bovine carcasses that suddenly block the road could – together with the seduction that ensues – have come out of a story by Bataille, and cinematically harks back to the Bunuel of L’Age d’Or, as do the snails (from Diary of a Chambermaid) and the self-strangulation with a skipping rope (from Viridiana). What, however, makes this sensibility less urbanely cinephile and cosmopolitan, and the more haunting and disturbing for it, is the residue of boyhood anguish and raw hurt, underlying the ironic stoicism so ostentatiously on show. In Greenaway’s world, a loner, a solipsist, invents for himself a paranoid world – his heaven and hell – where everything connects, but the design, once revealed, points inexorably towards the self’s own undoing. If the draughtsman’s grid, Games of Love and Death 429 the games and rituals, the architect’s blueprints or Madgett by numbers, are so many ways of demanding a stay of execution, and keeping at bay some darker agents of chaos (be they the double-headed monsters of fertility and decay, or the mafia-like machinations of the art world and the film business), what is more terrible and at the same time reassuring than to discover beneath the chaos a deeper rationality, intentionality and design? They can, it seems, only be faced, as in Borges’ The Garden of the Forking Paths, Kafka’s The Castle, if the flash of recognition illuminates a scene of sacrifice. In Drowning by Numbers the final firework lights up a funeral: a doubly apt metaphor, recalling another filmmaker’s definition of his craft, Jean Cocteau’s “the cinema, death at work.” () Notes . . “Interview with Peter Greenaway” Monthly Film Bulletin, December , . Raymond Queneau, Chene et Chien (Paris: Gallimard, ); vi. Greenaway’s games and puns also call to mind W.D. Auden’s opinion that “good poets have a weakness for bad puns.”
