John Orr

Stranded: stardom and the free-fall movie in French cinema, 1985–2003

Abstract Over the last two decades, French cinema has produced four outstanding female actors—Émmanuelle Béart, Juliette Binoche, Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert—who all share common characteristics. In many of their performances they are neither conventional heroines nor, morally speaking, fallen women who redeem themselves, but figures in a quasi-genre that can be called the ‘free-fall movie’. This form of narrative stresses ontological descent and nausea and is close to Julie Kristevas vision of abjection, which she elaborates in Powers of Horror. The form can be found in many other films of the period, but in the career trajectory of these four actors it creates a consistent pattern that enables us to speak of a perverse stardom in contemporary French film. The free-fall narrative is as indicative of their acting as it is of directorial vision, so that theories of authorship or genre are deficient in explaining the phenomenon. This essay tries to answer questions about the genesis of this narrative form and its prime focus, to which stardom is more central than authorship.

Sam Shepard: The Tragicomedy of the Active Victim

The institutional shortcomings of the American theatre cannot explain in themselves the decline in the tragic form. In the later work of Williams and Miller the slide is all too evident. But the problem runs deeper. It lies in the vital absences of power in the lives of its threatened heroes. Willy Loman is a tragic victim who victimises others, Stanley Kowalski a benevolent tyrant who is king only unto himself and his immediate neighbourhood. Eddie Carbone, another victimising victim, is suitably diminished by his lawyer-as-storyteller. If the bourgeois hero is too integrated to be tragic, the working-class hero is too excluded from the sources of power to engender catharsis. The hubris of power is too limited in scale to evoke any true comparison with Renaissance tragedy. Historically, the moment of proletarian tragedy in American literature points up not for the deeper wounds and losses of violent revolution, but the failure of any kind of revolution to occur at all. In the society of mid-century when there is a substantial industrial and clerical working-class majority in the population, revolution is nowhere in sight. The prevailing ethos of individual opportunity and the global circumstances of the Cold War had marginalised radical discourse in the age of McCarthyism. But the tragic power of that failure in drama has receded as the actual nature of that failure in history comes more clearly into sight.

Modernism and Tragicomedy

This book is concerned with tragicomedy as part of the modernist turn in the twentieth century. The word ‘tragicomedy’ is used consciously and deliberately by Beckett as a description of Waiting for Godot. But definition of it is elusive. In its modern context it signals the final breakdown of the classical separation of high and low styles. In Godot the comic waiting of Didi and Gogo is just as important as Pozzo’s tragic reversal of fortune. Equally tragicomedy is a departure from the realist dramas of bourgeois conscience. It is, by contrast, a drama which is short, frail, explosive and bewildering. It balances comic repetition against tragic downfall. It demonstrates the coexistence of amusement and pity, terror and laughter. But it also delineates a new dramatic form which, from Pirandello onwards, calls into question the conventions of the theatre itself. The modernist turn and the admixture of tragic and comic elements, the sudden switch from darkness to laughter, or vice versa, come together in a twofold challenge. We are confronted with a world in which there appears to be little continuity of character or of action. We are never sure whether people or events referred to in dramatic speech have any objective validity. We never know as an audience how we are meant to identify physical landmarks or characters with peremptory names. Things just happen. Other things may never have happened at all.

Pinter: The Game of the Shared Experience

The terror of the normal is widely seen as the key to Pinter’s modernist powers of invention. The other feature crucial to his tragicomedy but more often ignored is its vast seamless play on sexual sharing. In his diaries Joe Orton claimed that the sexual sharing in The Homecoming was inspired by Entertaining Mr Sloane but that its explicit use was inappropriate for someone whose personal life was as orthodox as Pinter’s.1 To suggest experience as a necessary basis for drama was, of course, part of Orton’s promiscuous bravado. But it is misleading here on two obvious counts. There is no proof that ‘experience’ in Orton’s positivistic sense explains anything. Moreover, the theme of sharing begins in Pinter’s work well before Entertaining Mr Sloane. It starts with the ‘sharing’ of Lulu in The Birthday Party, and continues with the ‘sharing’ of Stella in The Collection and the ‘sharing’ of James Fox by Dirk Bogarde and Sarah Miles in Losey’s The Servant. It takes more oblique forms in A Night Out where the hero is shared in spirit though not in flesh by mother and prostitute, while in The Lower each of the two spouses is shared between the other and the other’s lusting alter ego suitably dressed for the occasion. In this world of split identities, Freud’s bisexual maxim that in any sex act four people are involved is contained by Pinter with superb dramatic tightness in a heterosexual frame.

Samuel Beckett: Imprisoned Persona and Irish Amnesia

The fashionable notion of Beckett’s writing as a coherent unity is a myth. His first published novel, Murphy, with its archaic Johnsonian syntax and collapsing sentence structures, is a mixture of juvenile melancholia and sub-Joycean humour which never finally works. His further adventures into the sustained narrative of depressive psychosis, Watt, Malone Dies and Molloy are a major advance but still grapple despairingly with the problematic of narrative entropy. In writing fiction Beckett often produced stage Irishmen in disguise. In writing plays he projected his Irish heritage onto a universal plane. Like Joyce before him, necessary exile spurred him to artistic greatness. But unlike Joyce, it was not achieved by writing about the city he had left behind him. As the son of an upper-middle-class Protestant family on the outer rim of Dublin, his fiction lacked Joyce’s precise and uncanny hold over the city, that masterly use of visual topography and clinching detail which pervades Ulysses. The city, one senses, was never his. Nor was the language. Exile entailed a mortification of the spirit through the forsaking of native language and its idiom, the curing of verbal excess by a double translation — from novel to play and from English to French, whence the actual text could be translated back again in triumph. This double exile of culture and language which Beckett found in Paris, and his puritanical resolution of it made him more of a genuine successor to Joyce and Synge than when he consciously tried to imitate them. Through the French language Beckett became one of the three great Irish dramatists of the twentieth century.

Shepard II: The Shock of the Normal

Shepard’s turn to the family in the late seventies repeats to some extent the earlier pattern of O’Neill, the move out of a wider social microcosm towards more intense bindings of kinship and the agony of genealogy. Equally, however, the movement away from modern tragedy in its Aristotelian form had by now become total. The European distancing of Brecht and disrecognising of Beckett were things which Shepard had begun to absorb into his distinctively American writing. Yet both had comic and satiric potential which he had not yet fully explored. In Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978), True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983) he was soon to do so. This he did by finding the new focus on the family which had been absent from much of his earlier work, and which involved a return to convention. Here he seemed to accept a more naturalistic frame of meaning, a more restrictive template of dramatic space. In return, however, he affirmed what Pirandello and Beckett had achieved before him, a modernist rapture which made him closer to Kafka than to O’Neill, a sense of how the horrifying and the barbaric can inhere in the ordinary.

The Resistance of Commodities

Play and disrecognising are not merely forms of modernist rupture. Their continuity with earlier structures of feeling is equally vital. Here we can trace their emergence out of the dominant structures of liberal tragedy Williams has analysed from Ibsen onwards.1 These can be seen as complex structures of guilt and imprisonment, where a conscience-stricken hero succumbs as victim to a constraining environment. Williams notes that the naturalist trap of the three-walled room has its origins in romantic melodrama, in the imprisonment placed upon the romantic hero he must cast aside in order to escape and triumph. On Ibsen’s stage such romantic possibilities of triumph are remote. Confinement is usually unending and intolerable. But in addition to that Ibsenist confinement which entices our sympathy are forms of strangeness which puzzle us, a sense of place which is off-centre or peripheral and can make us lose our cultural bearings. We can note the abyss of nature to be found in Little Eyolf and John Gabriel Borkman, or Ibsen’s mocking references to the demonic trolls of folk legend. There is the strange attic sheltering the wounded pet in The Wild Duck, or the harsh ‘nobility’ of lineage claimed by John Rosmer and Hedda Gabler. All these confound our idea of naturalism as ‘natural’ happening, as the faithful reproduction of the normal event. Instead they subvert emphaty through their strange and estranged socio-spatial forms. Ibsen is never natural. He is a constant culture-shock.

Shepard I: The Rise of Myth/The Fall of Community

Of all the American dramatists who emerged in the modernist renaissance of the sixties, Shepard is the one who has clearly lasted and gone from strength to strength. The power of his text, the sheer linguistic impact of the spoken word makes his plays enduring even on those occasions when the dramatic action is erratic or has no outcome. He is a child of modernist revolt in an age of mass culture, but also a captive to American myth which has given him a strange freedom. While never fully breaking with naturalist convention, Shepard can project the dramatic illusion of vastness, a poetics of space that has no limit, dream-visions which cannot be explained away. The frontiers of territory become the frontiers of mind. Shepard is not a playwright of the city but of the country which lurks on the edges of wilderness or the fringes of the desert. There is in his ludic urging a nostalgia for the play of childhood, but that nostalgia is not pastoral. It is a mythic search for an elusive space quested by those who seek release from the traps of a civilisation choking on its monstrous technologies. Shepard thus strikes a common chord, the desired regress to a lost world of innocence echoed in the fully modern cadences of an overpowering myth. His tragicomedy simultaneously admits the contrary notions of such an impulse, its comic folly and its tragic consequences.

Play and Performative Culture

In the theatre, identity is a construct of performance, the stage an arena of illusion. Often the word ‘persona’ seems more precise than the word ‘character’ with its echoes of the complete and observed ‘person’. Indeed if we continue to call players characters it is precisely because we have fallen prey to their vibrant powers of illusion. They embody the passing illusion of a self-contained life. For all characters are actors who perform, who don metaphorical masks, whose job is usually to realise the persona of someone else’s invention. The emerging identity of that persona is a balancing act between the actor’s self, the character that is performed and what might be accepted by the audience as reality in the world beyond the stage. Such a world is always important. The arena of illusion must make reference to a Beyond that is both more real and yet more remote. Once it comes into performance, this world of the Beyond is also trapped by performance, enslaved and wrenched out of its proper habitus. In capturing the Otherness of the world beyond, performance expresses its own nature simultaneously with that part of the world it has briefly captured. The force of dramatic impact upon the spectator usually leads to one conclusion. It is the performance not the world which at that moment is the more real.

Anglo-Tragic: Pinter and the English Tradition

English tragicomedy was born out of two parallel movements, a native renaissance after Suez and the impact of the modernist renewal taking place elsewhere in Western Europe. It was the age of the loss of Empire. In the theatre it saw a direct challenge to the conventions of the country-house thriller and the drawing-room farce. John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and John Arden all had plays produced by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court which attacked the complacencies of the British Establishment. But it was Harold Pinter who presented the boldest challenge in terms of dramatic form. Without doubt Pinter is indebted to the English naturalism which he acted out in repertory duringhis early stage career. He makes as much use, even more use, of its possibilities than Osborne or Wesker. Equally he challenges the whole heritage of dramatic realism. In Pinter the Real is always problematic, always in abeyance. He himself has asserted that his stage does not separate truth from falsehood, or appearance from reality. Character, memory, the past, all action off-stage, anything unseen can be contested. Pinter distances himself from the earlier tragicomic tradition of Shaw and Chekhov through the legacy of modernist innovation. Here the impact of Joyce, Eliot and Kafka was extremely powerful, while the impact of Beckett was absolute.