1. First things first.  Is it “Literature and Film” or “Film and Literature”?  It is “Literature and Film.”  The course catalogue says “Literature and Film.”  But the Emmanuel News—using copy supplied by me for a list of courses I am teaching this year—says “Film and Literature.”  Did I consciously change the order of the conjunction?  No, I did not.  Did my unconscious change signify a certain bias?  Maybe.  At any rate, my conscience has been tweaked. In the course of trying to get a meeting space suitable for this class, I met with Tom Donnelly, the college’s director of buildings and grounds. An inveterate reader, Mr. Donnelly asked me in passing if I was going to assign many books in this class—or were we, he wondered, just going to look at movies?  As we commiserated about The Decline of Interest in the Written Word, I assured him that my students and I were going to read—I named impressive titles: A Passage to India, Death In Venice—but the truth was that I had been thinking, in preparation for the class, not so much about literature as about movies, and about the “sermons” I could “preach” using movies as texts. 

2. One of those sermons involves an invidious comparison between The Exorcist and The Other.  I have been thinking about this sermon for years.  Time now to get it off my chest.  First, an explanation, perhaps necessary, perhaps not: An invidious comparison between two things praises one while damning the other, or at least praises the one at the expense of the other, although the invidious comparison to be offered here praises—if you’ll pardon the crude play on words—The Other at the expense of The Exorcist.  The Exorcist wallows in scatological horror: it is about our disgust at the many admittedly disgusting aspects of the human body.  A priest supposedly exorcises a demon from a little girl.  But is the ultimately exorcised entity, although called the devil, really a spirit entity?  Maybe.  But what the entity is called can be seen—at least in my opinion—as an allusion to something rather disgusting hidden inside that little girl, something disgusting that is in fact hidden inside each of us.  And that disgusting thing is called the alimentary canal, the long tube—necessary for ingestion, nutrition and excretion—which begins at the throat and ends at the anus and contains matter which, especially when made visible, is generally unappealing.  A lot of this unappealing matter is spewed by the possessed little girl and it lands all over the priest. Ugh! Nasty!  But the idealistic religious side of us is just going to have to learn to accept an unavoidable fact of life, reiterated on countless bumper stickers:  “Shit happens.”  The Other is also about the human horror of matter. But the matter it deals with, I would like to suggest, is brain matter.  It deals with the horror that ensues when trust between two people is broken by what may be a material defect in the brain of another.  Now, let it be said that I am reading a lot into what actually unfolds in the plot.  Uta Hagen plays the grandmother of a little boy who is apparently evil.  His deceased twin was good.  But the evil of the surviving twin becomes apparent only gradually.  When I see Uta Hagen’s horror at not being able to talk with a little boy with whom she believed she’d shared an intimate bond, I see a horror of the inexplicably complex matter of the brain.  The Other is a lament that no trust in another human being is perfectly well-placed so long as it must depend on the proper disposition and movement of matter in the brain of the one in whom the trust is placed.  The Exorcist is a lament that we are matter at all.  Thus it flees from a basic fact of life.  The Other stands before that same basic fact—that what we honor as “good” depends on the cooperation of matter—and bravely regrets it.  But perhaps I’m not describing The Other so much as suggesting a theme for a movie on Alzheimer’s disease.

3.  Rereading A Passage to India, I seem to think of the film (not having seen it for some time) as at best an advertisement for the novel.  Publishers welcome this.  I assume that the novel was put out in a paperback edition in conjunction with the release of the movie. I assume that a still from the movie was featured on the cover, and the words “Now a major motion picture.”

4.  Do others feel as I do—awkward, self-conscious—when they are members of a group of people together in a room who have been for some reason compelled to read the same text together silently?  For me, the solitary pleasure at once becomes a disconcertingly competitive activity.  Will the others read faster?  Will they comprehend more?  Perhaps this discomfort arises from annoying memories of the reading-test portions of standardized academic examinations such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test.  But I also often feel an echo of this same discomfort whenever I am silently reading a paper in the presence of its author.  To dispel this discomfort I often read briskly and brusquely, like an editor checking copy on deadline: the “as if” of this performance becomes an actuality: I reduce my response to copy-editing.  But if I want to do the deeper work of editing, I would prefer not at the same time to have to be reading—by an instinctively unavoidable peripheral vision or by equally irrepressible furtive glances—the earnest aura of an actual authorial presence.  Just as I would prefer not to be physically present when a critic is reading my work.  I give in to these various reflections in order to open my mind up to the due consideration of reading as an activity shielded from the actuality of face-to-face social intercourse.  One may—perhaps indeed must—read as part of a reading community.  But the act of silent reading is not part of a public ritual, usually; which is perhaps part of the reason I feel that my privacy is being invaded when I am asked to read silently the same text with others.  To be invite to watch a film with others, on the other hand—why what could be more natural!  That is part of a public ritual!

5. How to discuss books?  How to discuss films?  I hate to crowd works with study questions.  I would like my students to read lots of books, see lots of films, to have appreciable works at their fingertips, before using individual works as gymnasia for discussion.  But, in “teaching” A Passage to India, I would like to ask, What is the very private matter which Adela has discussed with no one and which she probably would not wish to reveal in her public testimony at the trial of Aziz?  Answer:  Her realizing just before entering the Marabar cave that she is not in love with Ronny.  And why is the fact of her having had this realization just before entering the cave important in terms of a morally scrupulous introspection about her state of mind at the time of the alleged assault?  Answer:  The realization might well have unnerved her to the extent of making her an unreliable witness about whom she saw and what she actually experienced just before she fled in a panic from the cave.  What aspect of Fielding’s behavior during the meeting at the club (following Aziz’s arrest) does the narrator call “caddish”?  Answer:  He doesn’t stand when Ronny enters the room.  How does this “caddish” behavior complicate the development of Adela’s doubt about the truth of her accusation against Aziz?  Answer:  Adela seems to grasp at this fact as something that discredits Fielding (so much importance being put on manners), and anything that discredits Fielding—who is an ally of Aziz—makes it easier for Adela to muffle the voice of doubt about the veracity of her allegation. 

6. Faith in Aziz, or being in the presence of those who have faith in Aziz, underscores the degree to which what we call truth is a property of human solidarity, a property of what we believe with others.  In the novel, Fielding says to McBride, “I only wanted to ask her [Adela] whether she is certain, dead certain, that it was Aziz who followed her into the cave.” “Possibly my wife could ask her that much [McBride replies].”  “But I wanted to ask her.  I want someone who believes in him to ask her.”  “What difference does that make?”  “She is among people who disbelieve in Indians.”  “Well, she tells her own story, doesn’t she.”  “I know, but she tells it to you.”  (p. 188)  No doubt for excellent artistic reasons, we are not witness (in either the book or the movie) to Adela’s first utterances of the accusation and its cultivation by those with whom she is in immediate close contact—Miss Derek (to begin with), then Ronny and the Callenders. 

7. Before leaving Chandrapore, Mrs. Moore thinks to herself:  “All this fuss over a frightened girl [Adela]!  Nothing had happened, ‘and even if it had,’ she found herself thinking with the cynicism of a withered priestess, ‘if it had, there are worse evils than love.’  The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as love: in a cave, in a church—Boum, it amounts to the same”(231).  The “unspeakable attempt”—this is of course what Aziz is accused of—the attempted rape of Adela.  As if that alleged crime could be thought an act of love!  But before we become too indignant, might we not want to compare this unspeakable fusion with Professor Godbole’s philosophy of the connection between good and evil, as expounded to Fielding?  Trilling, in his reading of the novel, refers to the hyphenate good-and-evil, and quotes Godbole at length. (E. M. Forster, p. 158). In the opening chapter of the same book, Trilling also discusses good-and-evil, quoting Milton:  “Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.  It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.  And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil”(14-15).  An echo of this theme occurs in the novel Deliverance, under cover of the narrator’s notion of “indifference”:  “It was not that I felt myself turning evil, but that enormous physical indifference, as vast as the whole abyss of light at my feet, came to me:  an indifference not only to the other man’s body scrambling and kicking on the ground with an arrow through it, but also to mine”(154). In the film, Mrs. Moore speaks of “love in caves” and “love in churches” as being more or less the same thing.  This also is fused with the dialogue in which she expresses her skepticism about marriage, referring to it as “centuries of carnal embrace.” 

8.  The book (I speak in general) is a technology. This is easy to forget in the Electronic Age, when one has to look back beyond the Machine Age, to grasp the extraordinary innovation of the codex.  But it is fairly easy, with respect to a book, to have affection for the object itself, and fairly hard, with respect to a film, to have affection for a VHS tape, DVD, or reel of celluloid. One can say, “I love that book,” and speak at once of the story one loves and of the leaves on which it is printed and the covers between which those leaves are bound.  Indeed, the love of a certain book may be inseparable from a firm affection for its material basis.  I recall Lolita as a great novel; I have been looking for the actual paperback in which I read it, by chance, through all of one night and during most of the following day, when I was living in a tiny brick house in Columbia, South Carolina. I here mention my peculiar need to read a certain novel in one particular physical form merely to point out that, by contrast, the video tape, compact disc or celluloid are at best keys to films I love, things to be protected for the access they provide to the object of desire, but, unlike books, not in themselves objects of desire.  One exception to this generalization that I can think of is the nostalgic tenderness with which the movie projector and the old tins of celluloid are treated in Cinema Paradiso. 

9.  A Passage to India (and the film of the same title), Death in Venice (and the film of the same title), and De Profundis (to be read in conjunction with the study of the film Wilde, based on Richard Ellman’s biography of Oscar Wilde), are each in their own way love stories, and I shall call them all stories of unrealized love.  Which is to say, love that does not fulfill itself as it might. All three films deal with or raise various themes in connection with erotic love, but Passage to India is about fraternal love; Death in Venice is about Platonic love; and Wilde is about idealistic love.

10.  What does a storyteller tell, beyond the story?  I ask myself in order to get some sense of what I as an English teacher do in assigning a story, what I do in the way of a meta-activity.  I superintend discussion and reflection on stories told by others, others who are not present.  The verb “superintend” makes me wary of myself: it has an air of “policing.”  Breaking off from this reflection, I reflect on how it is easy to think of Death in Venice as a short story, rather than a novella, owing to my carrying the narrative around in an old Bantam paperback read by my brother twenty-five years ago, a paperback that has his marginal scrawls.  But it is the size of the book, not its personal history as a possession, that makes it seem more story-like, more manageable as a tale that can be taken in by the fire on a cold winter afternoon.  I say “taken in,” not “told,” because I picture a single reader, reading in solitude.  Applying the famous criticism of Hamlet to Aschenbach, a friend of mine indicts the protagonist of Death in Venice for not “taking an action.”  It is never very fruitful to disagree with the interpretation of another; it is best just to differ.  To differ rather than to disagree, that is the trick in literary discussion.  So I say, “I myself do not read the story that way, because . . .”  Nevertheless, I have used my friend’s reading as an antagonistic heuristic device: I say to myself, What actions does Aschenbach take?  And one answer I give myself is: He acts on an abrupt desire to travel.  Writes Mann (or Kenneth Burke, in his English translation of Mann):  “He was quite astonished to note a peculiar inner expansion, a kind of roving unrest, a youthful longing after far-off places: a feeling so vivid, so new, or so long dormant and neglected, that, with his hands behind his back and his eyes on the ground, he came to a sudden stop, and examined into the nature and the purport of this emotion.  It was the desire for travel, nothing more; although, to be sure, it had attacked him violently, and was heightened to a passion, even to the point of a hallucination”(p. 5).  And what is the proximate cause of this passion, this passion upon which Aschenbach does act?  The sighting of a man, a stranger, a person whose “lips seemed too short, they were so completely pulled back from his teeth that these were exposed even to the gums, and stood out white and long”(p. 4).  Death as a vampire, the vampire as a vagrant stranger in an otherwise unoccupied rail station.  This seems to be the proximate cause of Aschenbach’s passion to travel.  Is the trip a flight from death?  Is the contemplation of Tadzio an attempt to keep in view his own vanishing youth? 

11. Compared with the plot of the novel the most significant change in the film A Passage to India is the addition of the scene in which Adela bicycles alone out into the country, some twelve miles from Chandrapore.  This little excursion takes place shortly after her decision not to marry Ronny.  She is disconcerted by the statues she sees, especially the statues of figures in carnal embrace, and then, frightened by a squealing pack of monkeys, she flees back to her quarters.  The scene, which induces Adela to change her mind about not marrying Ronny, is clearly designed to demonstrate Adela’s predisposition to the kind of panic to which she will succumb in the Marabar cave.  Adela, despite her dogged insistence on seeing the “real India,” is not equal to the task of looking bravely at the romantic strangeness of the land; she shrinks before its mystery and its muddle.  Moreover, deep in her heart, she does not have much affection for Indians, as she herself realizes, after attempting, unsuccessfully, despite Fielding’s assistance, to write to Aziz a suitable letter of apology, in the wake of the trial.  The empty truth (in the novel) is that there has been neither affection nor desire between the Indian man and the English woman.  There is in the novel a brief spark of sexual desire between Ronny and Adela, which precipitates the “spurious union” of their brief engagement.  The film, making no allusion to this sexual charge, alludes instead to the possibility of such a charge between Adela and Aziz at the Marabar Caves.  Hesitating outside one of the caves, Adela leans back against a rock, fanning herself, in a posture that suggests a courtesan appearing outside her rooms.  In the novel, Aziz leaves Adela abruptly because of the insult he feels upon being asked whether he had more than one wife.  Forster does not dwell on the cultural content of the umbrage. He writes with great economy.  “It challenged a new conviction of his community, and new convictions are more sensitive than old”(169).  This is pithy, and plain.  But the film cannot tell us even that much, unless it would dare to interrupt the languorous sequence of shots infused with visual clues of a suffocating heat, a sequence of shots that is bringing us closer and closer to the sensational flurry of Adela’s panicky flight down the mountain through the lacerating brambles—to, that is, interrupt the sequence to the extreme of pausing for dialogue in which Aziz lectures Adela (and us) on one historical facet of Islamic identity.  Instead, Aziz excuses himself, and is seen smoking a cigarette in some agitation. In the novel, the agitation is internal:  Aziz is angry with Adela, but there is no behavioral description of this anger.  In the film, there is no anger, internal or external, although, if we interpret the film scene with the book scene in mind, we understandably might assume such to be the case.  Actually, there is in the film only a behavioral indication of agitation: Aziz, who sits smoking under the unflattering glare of a dessert sun, can very easily be seen as a man who is trying to shake off a strong sexual temptation.  And this reading is all the more plausible given the context of Aziz and Adela’s being almost alone together and given the earlier close-up of Aziz’s hand clasping Adela’s as he helps her along a difficult part of the terrain. Also, the possibility of there having been a sexual tension between the two is reiterated in the courtroom scene, when Adela testifies that she had asked Aziz “about love, and thereby had introduced a feeling of intimacy.”  Also it would be well to note that the line between Adela’s private realization about her dubious marriage promise, on the one side, and her public testimony, on the other, a line maintained, dramatically, in the novel, is blurred in the movie, melodramatically, when the accusing witness confesses on the stand that she does not love Ronny.  Ronnie is one of the spectators and this is where and how he gets the news which effectively ends his engagement.  “Very bad form, old girl,” as Major Callender might say.

12. In principle, a film can show anything; the printed page can show nothing, directly.  This is why it was probably an act of directorial wisdom not to show to the viewer the image of Aziz’s late wife, in both of the scenes in which the photograph of her is viewed by one of the characters.  I am not saying that showing the image would have been wrong; but I am saying that I can imagine damage that could have been done to the essential point of Aziz’s showing the picture to Fielding.  Offering a view of the picture is an invitation to an intimacy, and an honor.  And that honor given to Fielding by Aziz might have lost its dramatic exclusivity had we all been able to gawk at the image, as it were, over Fielding’s shoulder.  This is an elementary example of the need to conceal in order to reveal.  In order that he might reveal a small private moment of intimacy between Aziz and Fielding, the director, David Lean, conceals the picture, or rather, the particular face in the picture, from the film audience.  Thus Fielding and Aziz share an intimacy based on this ritual of knowing something alone together.  And this is the most basic sense of what it means to be conscious—to know something with another.  In this small but crucial moment, their shared consciousness must be exclusive.  Forster also understands the need to conceal; or rather, to emphasize the irrelevance of the visual in Aziz’s allowing Fielding to see the photograph.  “[Fielding] was astonished, as a traveler who suddenly sees, between the stones of the desert, flowers.  The flowers have been there all the time, but suddenly he sees them.  He tried to look at the photograph, but in itself it was just a woman in a sari, facing the world”(p.125). Forster is, I think, alluding to the particular deadness of any given actuality, when considered apart from the context in which it is revealed. 

13.  In order to understand the psychology of the difference between the experience of reading and the experience of watching a film, it is necessary to think of the difference between the experience of reading the words, “There was a loud crash,” and the experience of hearing such a crash, whether actual or simulated.  The sentence is a world away from the experience it reports.  A sample sentence:  “One of its arms wrenched around backwards, and it seemed odd and more terrible than anything that had happened that such a position didn’t hurt it”(117).  This is from the novel Deliverance, whose narrator is describing the early stages of the disposal of the corpse of a man whose killing, though legally justifiable, the narrator’s party has decided to conceal.  From the sensory horror of the actual sight is extracted an idea of something “more terrible.”  Incidentally, it might be instructive to construct an anthology of Disposal of the Corpse Scenes.  Immediate candidates, those from Diabolique (the original, French version), Blood Simple, and Eating Raul. 

14. One of the ways to link literature and film is to take a look at some of the literature about film.  Among the best of this literature is the film criticism of James Agee (1909-1955), much of which has been collected in Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies, one part of a series of Modern Library books on the movies.  A blurb from a Harper’s Magazine review of Agee on Film, which appears on the back of the paperback edition, cites the attributes essential to Agee’s capability as a critic:  “A book that will fascinate anyone who is interested either in films or reviewing, or—for that matter—anyone interested in seeing an astute, vigorous, resourceful intelligence confronting popular art and reporting on it in a fine free-swinging style.”  The astute, vigorous, resourceful intelligence need not include—indeed might be better for not including—a practitioner’s technical expertise or a practitioner’s preoccupation with technical matters.  Agee himself says as much in the December 26, 1942, column in which he introduces himself as a movie critic to readers of The Nation magazine. “That my own judgment, and yours, is that of an amateur, is only in part a handicap.  It is also a definition.  It can even be an advantage of a sort, in so far as a professional’s preoccupation with technique, with the box office, with bad traditions, or simply with work, can blur or alter the angle of his own judgment.” 
      This remark is in accord with the tradition and the ideal of ascribing importance to an intellectual understanding of an art or science, as that understanding is described by Jacques Barzun in his book The House of Intellect.  Barzun’s remarks can be reduced to the old adage “You don’t have to be able to make an omelette to judge its quality.”  But having said this, I should remark that I suspect that many students today who are taking a major in English in hope of finding that discipline useful in a career in modern communications, might tend to prize the omelette-maker over the ruminator on omelettes.  To these students, I would like to say that what I myself am able to do with regard to films has no more to do with the art and craft of filmmaking than what a baseball commentator is able to do, has to do with the actual playing of baseball. 
      In saying this, I neither confess nor boast, but merely preface an announcement as to what I wish to emphasize in a course that introduces students to the study of film in conjunction with the study of literature, which is that films, as much as books, are artifacts about which one can ruminate and reflect. There are twenty-six good examples of such rumination and reflection (and analysis) in one of our class texts, Writers at the Movies.  One of the telling words in the blurb on Agee’s book, which I have just quoted, is “confronting”: its writer implies that Agee has the sort of intelligence (“astute, vigorous, resourceful”) necessary for the “confronting of popular culture.”  The key word implies an opposition, and an antagonism constructive in so far as it causes the critic to draw serious lessons even from—maybe especially from—schlock. In the “confronting” there is virtue in a certain kind of superficiality, commentary imparted with an almost chatty-letter informality.  I hope there is a corresponding virtue in the kind of superficiality with which I have been reading the Agee book.  I simply dip in here and there, when I feel like it, seeking inspiration, mainly, in the tone of voice, the reflective tone so far distant from the drums of promotion and from any idea of the movie review as a kind of consumer advisory.  One of my favorite lines in the Agee book concerns a film I doubt I shall ever have the opportunity to see, since, if any print still exists, it is probably tucked away in some obscure archive. Of this film Agee writes, in The Nation of January 23, 1943:  “The best recent war short is Conquer by the Clock.  It develops some questionable emotion over a munitions girl who, through sneaking time for a cigarette in the ladies’ room, sends a dead cartridge to a soldier and the soldier to his death.  It fails to suggest that the same thing might have happened if her visit to the toilet had been sincere . . .”  This is written in highly qualified praise of a director named Slavo Vorkapitch, “one of the straightest and most sharp-eyed men in Hollywood,” though not apparently destined for Spielbergian fame, and it is packed into the final paragraph of a column which is devoted mostly to a review of a biographical film, Tennessee Johnson, but which offers opinions on four other films, Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock, director), The Commandos Strike at Dawn, Journey for Margaret, and The Powers Girl.  But what is perhaps dashed off is done so in prose itself worthy of reflection.  The notion of a sincere—as opposed to an “insincere”—visit to the toilet makes it easy to construe the unsatisfied need for a smoke as a source of physiological distress as poignant as those for which toilets are specifically designed.  And the poignance is compounded by an awareness of an irresolvable tension between unavoidable selfishness and unattainable altruism.  Agee would balance the admonition against selfishness with a recognition of the treachery of unindictable circumstance.

15. I wonder if my students have heard—or use—the term “chick flick,” and, if so, what exactly they might mean by it.  I have assumed it means what some critics rather more politely call a “date movie,” by which I assume they mean some species of romantic comedy.  I have also heard it used (by comedian Bill Mahr) in reference to a film devoted to a “women’s” as opposed to a “men’s” point of view.  I might introduce Sliding Doors as a “chick flick which brings into the foreground such profoundly philosophical issues as complexity theory and William James’ description of a ‘genuine option’.”  The movie could also be paired with The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  Incidentally, when the movie was playing on New Year’s Day, on Showtime, its summary on the TV satellite Master Guide seemed to me to be somewhat misleading.  “After a series of misfortunes, a woman with an unfaithful boyfriend experiences an alternate reality.” 

16.  A Passage to India (both novel and film) has no plot of romantic love.  But there is in the novel a description of a moment of sexual attraction that might well stand as a description of what fascinates movie audiences about The Dramatic Moment of the Kiss, even though this passage is not itself about a kiss.  Adela has told Ronny that she has chosen not to marry him, and they have both begun to make peace with that fact, when they are approached by the Nawab Bahadur, a prominent citizen of Chandrapore, who offers to take them for a spin in his new car.  They accept, and something important happens between them during the first part of a rather bumpy ride.  It is described by Forster as follows: “Her hand touched his, owing to a jolt, and one of the thrills so frequent in the animal kingdom passed between them, and announced that all their difficulties were only a lovers’ quarrel.  Each was too proud to increase the pressure, but neither withdrew it, and a spurious unity descended on them, as local and temporary as the gleam that inhabits the firefly.  It would vanish in a moment, perhaps to reappear, but the darkness is alone durable”(p.94). (Note: “Spurious: lacking authenticity or validity; false.”)  Now this description of a most subtle incidence of interpersonal contact would seem to be very far indeed from the “visual declamation” of (what I shall call) the Classic Hollywood Kiss.  (For the paradigm, think of the lips of Clark Gable meeting those of Vivien Leigh, in Gone With the Wind.)  But what I think most important to recognize is the undeniable excitement of the electrical charge and its occurrence within “the darkness” which “is alone durable.”  The fleeting gleam that inhabits Forster’s firefly can easily be construed as that fleeting connection between lovers which is conventionally (and tragically) conceived as the meeting of two sparks in the night.  This is the ultimate beauty and ultimate futility of the most physically intimate kind of human solidarity, before the backdrop of the inevitable darkness, the backdrop of death.  In many movies the moment of truth is the moment of the kiss.  There is a fine moment of truth in Sliding Doors, between Helen and James, when they are seated alone in a small rowboat on the Thames.  James says something funny, and Helen, laughing, moves closer to him, and slaps him playfully on the arm.  But then she rebuffs James’s almost reflexive attempt to kiss her, apologizing in a manner that suggests an awareness of the moment as informed by an awareness of many movie moments:  “Oh, I’m sorry. I—I know this is an ideal sort of kissing moment, you know, night, moon, boat, water lapping, you know it’s perfect and I’m not not sort of feeling it would be nice, but . . .”  James understands, and in a second or two is covering his disappointment with humor, telling a story about how, as a child, he lost his true love, Pamela, to a boy named Gary Glitter.  Helen leans forward, placing her right hand gently against his cheek, as if to both steady herself in the boat and to hold James in a tender gaze, and kisses him on the lips.  James has been, until this moment, speaking in his usual rapid, joking manner suggestive of the conversational overflow of an inveterate standup comic, and Helen’s kiss seems at once decisive and tentative, as if she might have intended merely to kindly staunch the flow of his words.  This kiss, along with the more elaborate reconciliatory kiss in the rain, on the bridge, at the end of the film, could be included in the anthology of film kisses that brings Cinema Paradiso to its majestically nostalgic conclusion. Could the importance of the facial close-up and the importance of the passionate kiss be linked?  Could the kiss represent the desire to devour the human face, that object of contemplation which is the most spectacular source of the hope that some part of the universe is not blind to our desires.  It may be a short step from the contemplation of beauty to the urge to consume:  we stuff our brains with the spectacular sights of the screen as we stuff our stomachs with popcorn. 

17.  In its original sense to be conscious meant to know something with another. The two most important turns in the plot of Deliverance are two events that the four weekend explorers wish that they knew only with one another.  However, these two events—the rape of Bobby and the killing of his rapist by Lewis—are known, as the weekend outdoorsmen themselves are aware, by at least one other person, the rapist’s companion, who escapes into the woods.  So a consciousness dominated by a “secret” knowledge of these two events is not contained within the circle of the four explorers.  Nevertheless, it is possible to say that these four men are bound by two secrets.  Knowledge of the rape is one; knowledge of the killing is the other.  This changes. But first I must say that “knowledge” is the most neutral word I can employ to describe the nature of their awareness of the fact that one of them has been humiliated in a most physically and psychologically denigrating manner and that one of them has prevented a repetition of the humiliation on another of their party, and has probably saved all their lives, by killing one of the assailants.  What changes is that the shared knowledge of the killing is collapsed into a shared secret knowledge of their operating outside the law in conspiring not to report the killing and to conceal necessary evidence that it ever occurred.  Lewis argues that the jury that sits in judgment of him will be a jury of the dead man’s mountain-country peers and that he will not be able to receive a fair trial and will therefore be found guilty of murder.  Drew, the one most opposed to the plan, never challenges Lewis’ argument per se; in effect, he simply reproaches Lewis for even making it; to him, there is no genuine option between reporting the killing and not reporting it.  I daresay that Drew, in this situation, is the reader’s representative, in so far as the reader must be coaxed toward a “willing” suspension of disbelief.   But what Lewis says to convince his companions need not convince the reader, in order to make plausible the men’s decision to conceal the killing.  His words need only find a plausible home in the mind of Ed (the book’s narrator), in order to in turn render plausible the thoughts Ed has which precipitate his casting the deciding vote in favor of concealment.  Ed writes (he does not speak to his companions) of “having always been scared to death of anything to do with the police,” and, ruminating on the point Lewis has made, shows imagination in considering what might unfold were they to turn in the dead body and report what happened.  Owing perhaps to his more or less complete ignorance of criminal law, Ed’s imagination of possibly being held without bail, which includes notions of confinement among “county drunks,” and of “feeding on sorghum, salt pork and sow belly,” might be judged by the reader to be a bit overheated.  But his outline of future connections with lawyers, and his revulsion at the thought of drawing his family into what he calls “the whole sickening, unresolvable mess” ring true.  Of course the “mess,” legally speaking, might well be resolvable; what might not be resolvable, however, is its “sickening” nature, as suffered and witnessed by the four men, and the most sickening thing about it is not, presumably, the killing, but Bobby’s rape.  The question that intrigues me is whether the effects of that most sickening thing the four men know together might not have been made more explicit, whether there might have been in the novel an exploration of the desire to conceal the fact, only in so far as the fact is the key to certain dread feelings of humiliation and despair. 

18. Sliding Doors alternates scenes from two alternative narratives.  Speaking metaphysically, I would say that these two narratives represent events in sequence drawn from similar stories in two separate universes.  Speaking in specific reference to cutting back and forth between the two narratives, I would say that Sliding Doors is a braiding of two narratives, in which events from each narrative, while having no cause-and-effect relation to events in the other narrative, nonetheless color our feelings about those events, and make them more psychologically plausible.  For example, in one narrative Helen discovers that James is married.  In the cut back to the other narrative the other Helen’s suspicions about Gerry’s infidelity seem to be coming to a head, as if the Helen who knows the technical truth about James’s marital status has been able to communicate with the Helen who is still in the dark about Gerry.  To take another example:  In one narrative Helen is able to intercept a call from Lydia to Gerry and to score an audience-pleasing sarcasm against Lydia, who has telephoned Gerry to tell him that she may be pregnant.  Now, this Helen is most emphatically not the Helen who the other Lydia in the other narrative has dressed down on a false charge of having delivered contaminated sandwiches.  Nevertheless, we may well have the feeling that the Lydia of the one universe is getting her comeuppance for the behavior of the Lydia in the other universe.  In turn, it may well seem to us that the Lydia of one universe is exacting revenge on behalf of the Lydia in the other universe (the Lydia who has suffered Helen’s telephone put-down) when she arranges to have Helen discover the truth about Gerry in the most cruel manner imaginable, as if the one Lydia were able to communicate with the other Lydia.  I say, I repeat, as if.  The Helen of one narrative does on at least two occasions have something akin to déjà vu about the existence of a different possible universe; the first occurs as Helen is walking with Anna along the Thames: she remarks on having a feeling of already knowing there would at this instant be a boat race going on;  the second occurs near the end of the movie when Helen closes her eyes and sees, along with the image of the closing doors, an image of the diner where she has gone with James, in the other narrative.  But the drama of the braiding does not have to have this metaphysical dimension for any of the characters in order to be psychologically interesting to the audience. 

19.  I call one narrative Helen Finds Out Sooner, the other, Helen Finds Out Later, or, for short, Sooner and Later.  What Helen finds out either sooner or later is that her live-in boy friend, Gerry, is carrying on with Lydia, an old flame, newly rekindled.  The Sooner narrative and the Later narrative are a bifurcation of one beginning, which goes as follows:  Helen leaves for work.  As soon as she goes, Gerry hops out of bed and into the shower, preparing for a morning tryst with Lydia.  Helen arrives at work, where she learns that she has been fired (a trumped up reason, having to do with borrowed champagne: the firm really resents her superior talent).  Helen leaves the office, gets into an elevator, accidentally drops an earring.  A man on the elevator picks up the earring and hands it to her.  She thanks him and they go their supposedly separate ways.  Helen takes stairs down into the subway.  The first flight of stairs is clear.  But midway in her progress down the second flight, a little girl running the feet of doll along the stair railing is coming up the stairs directly in her path.  Helen pauses for an instant to avoid a collision with the child, then continues on to the subway platform.  She arrives a moment too late:  the sliding doors of the subway car close in her face.  At this point the narrative is literally rewound:  The shot is run backward so that Helen is seen climbing the stairs in reverse.  When Helen is back at the top of the stairs the film resumes its forward motion.  This time, a woman accompanying the little girl sweeps her up out of Helen’s way, so that Helen’s progress toward the subway platform is not impeded.  Helen then manages to reach the subway car just in time to force her way between the sliding doors.  She takes a seat beside, as it happens, the man who retrieved her dropped earring in the elevator.  At this point the film switches rapidly back and forth between shots from the Sooner and shots from the Later sequences of events.  Meanwhile, in both Universes, in both narratives, Lydia has arrived at Helen’s apartment for her tryst with Gerry, and she and Gerry are making love in Helen’s bed.  In the Sooner narrative Helen catches the subway, and catches Gerry and Lydia in the act.  In the Later narrative she misses the subway, takes a cab, is mugged after getting out of the cab, is taken to the hospital to have stitches sewn into her forehead—and does not learn of Gerry’s affair with Lydia until near the end of the movie.  The question that drives the Sooner narrative is, Will Helen find a new life with James, the charming man she meets on the subway?  In the Later narrative, the question is, Will, or, rather, when and how will Helen find out about the deception?  (A note on this note:  I know that my imagination has been captured by a story when I eagerly engage in plot summary, a critical chore I do not ever “enjoy.”) 

20. Some literature I’ve found useful in connection with this movie: Selections from two of William James’s essays in popular philosophy, “The Dilemma of Determinism” and “The Will to Believe.”   Maybe I would have been too clever by half had I included these readings on the syllabus.  After all, who, having signed up for a course in Literature and Film, would wish to feel that they had been tricked into a course in Moral Philosophy.  But such readings would be very much at home in a course called “The Philosophy of Popcorn: Ideas at the Movies.”   I rather wish I had attempted to use at least selections from these two works, because of the clichés the movie seems to have inspired.  One is, “It was meant to be.”  The other is, “Everything happens for a reason.”  Both these statements might be true, but in the interests of higher literacy we have, I think, to get behind them, to produce in response to this film something more than the usual folk wisdom.  The James essays have helped me to do this, or to start to do this.  For one thing they caused me to ask myself the following rhetorical questions.  When we talk about fate are we talking about a predetermined outcome, something that had to be? Or are we using the word “fate” to suppress the shudder that comes from the thought some outcome—good or bad—might have been otherwise?  For example, that some Good Outcome might not have occurred without the help of some Chance which, by definition, didn’t have to be.  Or, on the tragic side, that some Bad Outcome might not have occurred if we had made a different Choice along the way. 

21.  In “The Dilemma of Determinism” James draws out the practical significance of the terms chance and fate.  Those of us who march under a belief in fate, he says, are better said to march under a belief in determinism.  Those of us who march under a belief in chance are marching under a belief in indeterminism.  Determinism.  Indeterminism.  I think it should be obvious that these words have a technical, or jargon-like, sound, that they are not nearly as dramatic and succinct (or as aesthetically pleasing) as the words fate and chance, both of which seem to lose a great deal in their respective translations.  But what is lost might be a dramatic or romantic attitude best put aside when attempting a sober examination of the implications of each term.  James’s sober examination is an exercise in New England plain-speaking.  The doctrine of determinism, he writes, “professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts will be.”  The doctrine of indeterminism, in contrast, “says that the parts have a certain amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the other parts will be”(p. 150).  James himself was an indeterminist. So am I.  And, I am willing to assert, so are all of my students. 

22.  Fate and chance are two sides of the same coin.  That coin is no currency for free will.  Users of “fate” imagine that events ultimately have some theological or metaphysical order and purpose; users of “chance” imagine that they do not.  But to focus on either word is to ignore the part that the will of human beings might play in causing or affecting certain events in the world.  When I say the will of human beings, I must be careful to add that I do not mean, simply, human beings, although human will cannot be conceived apart from human beings.  No determinist would ever say that human beings play no part in the workings of the world; to say that would be absurd.  All determinists agree that a woman who “decides” to poison her husband, and who does so, is a woman who has had her own effect on the world.  The determinist, however, would prefer to keep that word “decides” in quotation marks.  For she knows that the word implies the possibility of “choice,” and she is wary of the loose and condescending use to which that word is often put in casual conversation, as, for instance, when a woman who has never for an instant in her life thought of doing any harm to anyone, says of some killer condemned to death, “Well, we all have a choice.”  Our determinist is prey of the creeping notion that all parts of the world—even, perhaps especially, those parts that are gray matter inside our skulls—operate according to the blind force of the same physical laws that we use to explain and to some extent predict and control the motion of matter, not only the inscrutable motion of atoms and molecules, but also the microscopic motion of neurons and the visible motion of bodies in space—ourselves and other animals, behaving. 

23.  My own view is that, while free will may indeed be a myth in the sense that it cannot be proved true by certain methods sanctioned by modern science, it is also a myth in the sense of a belief that cannot be shaken off.  My contention is that, however determined we may believe our actions to be, we still have to speak as if we had a choice.  We cannot abandon the language of choice.  Not yet.

24.  But what we call choices are often not choices in any very real sense.  For example, in our “what if” thoughts about Helen and the sliding doors on the subway, we sometimes tend to speak as if we thought the opening or the closing of the doors through which Helen wishes to pass involved some sort of volition on her part.  Yet, whether or not Helen is “free” in behaving as she would have to behave if she believed that it would be better to catch that subway (the one that is about to depart now) it cannot be said that in catching or failing to catch the subway she is exercising a choice.  No “choice” exists, because there is, in this case, no genuine option. 

25.  Instead of talking about choices, I would like to talk about genuine options.  I borrow the term from “The Will to Believe.”  In order to have a genuine option, you must have a choice between two live hypotheses.  A hypothesis is anything that can be proposed to your belief.  “It would be good to drink this Pepsi”—that’s a hypothesis.  It is a live hypothesis to the degree that you are willing to act upon it, to quaff that beverage when it is offered you.  Keep in mind that the liveness or the deadness of an hypothesis is not a property of the hypothesis itself; it is a property of your own willingness to act or not to act.  If you have a choice between two live hypotheses you have met one requirement of a genuine option:  a choice between two hypotheses, each of which has some claim, however slight, on your willingness to act.  The second requirement for a genuine option is that it be unavoidable.  If a little voice tells you, “I should drink this Pepsi,” and if that voice is to some degree a “temptation,” then you have one of the two necessary live hypotheses.  If another little voice tells you, “I should not drink this Pepsi,” and if this voice, too, is to some degree a “temptation,” then you have the second of your two necessary live hypotheses.  And you also have a choice that is unavoidable.  So you have two of the three necessary components for a genuine option.  The third requirement is that the choice has to be what James calls “momentous.”  It cannot be trivial.  It is here that my example might fail me.  For most of us this choice, as so far sketched out, would not be “momentous.”  It would be trivial.  But let us imagine good reasons both for drinking and for not drinking the Pepsi, reasons that would make the choice momentous in its possible consequences.  Suppose that you believe there is a fifty-fifty chance that you will die of thirst if you do not drink the Pepsi, but also a fifty-fifty chance that you will die of an allergic reaction if you do drink the Pepsi.  Then, my friend, you not only have a choice, you have a genuine option.  Of course, there is always a chance (a fate?) that you will be released from the gambler’s grip of the genuine option by a change in your circumstances.  Someone could show up with some non-carbonated beverage that poses no threat to your health.  Water!  My thesis is that we hate genuine options, and that we are always waiting for “Water!” to bail us out.

26. Back to the movies!  Is there an instance of a genuine option in Sliding Doors?  I believe there is one that stands out.  It is the genuine option that presents itself to Gerry in the form of the following conflicting hypotheses.  “I should tell Helen about Lydia”;  “I should not tell Helen about Lydia.”  Now, pathetic, weak Gerry does try to confess his infidelity to Helen.  “Helen,” he says, “there’s something I want to tell you, something I need to tell you, something that has a little bit to do with the brandy glass and a little bit to do with the woman you met today . . .”  But, alas, Helen has fallen asleep, has heard, at least consciously, nary a word of this, and Gerry does not again summon the nerve to broach the subject.  It is as if he wanted to believe that in Helen’s falling asleep Fate had spoken, saying that he should not have tried to confess, that his confession was not meant to be, that it was destined, as the philosopher J.L. Austin might have put it, to be void.  I am not saying that this is part of Gerry’s conscious motivation.  What I am saying is that this is the kind of “as if” that a novelist might mention in order to explain why Gerry does not try to confess again, when he is sure that Helen is awake.  The “explanation” need go no further than a psychologically credible report of such a rationalization by Gerry as I have suggested—that Helen’s being asleep was some sort of sign from fate or chance.  There are probably those who would say that Gerry’s “confession” is of a piece with the conversations he has with himself in the mirror, which is to say, that it is narcissistic in the sense that he has fantasized the sleeping Helen an actual auditory presence just as he fantasizes his mirror image an actual auditory presence.  This is a credible novelization, but not a credible reading, of the screenplay:  I don’t think the viewer has any reason to believe that Gerry isn’t really attempting to confess, that he doesn’t believe Helen is awake, that he hasn’t had to summon a good deal of nerve to get out the words that we hear but Helen doesn’t.  At the same time, his knowingly “confessing” to a sleeping woman might be considered consistent with his knowingly “conversing” with his own reflection.

27.  Somewhere near the end of the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman John Fowles writes that readers will tend to accept the second of two endings as the more real of the two and more indicative of the kind of statement the author finally wishes to make, his or her last word.  By this standard, the last word in Sliding Doors is, for Helen, happiness!  But the happy ending has caused some of my students to forget that things do not in each of the two narratives come out all the same.  In the Sooner narrative, Helen finds love with James, blossoms in her career, and dies.  In the Later narrative, she lives, and, “belatedly,” meets James.  But the narratives are the “same” only if one is so blinded by the thought of Helen meeting her “one true love” that it matters only that Helen has found her man, not at all that—in one narrative—she doesn’t have much time to enjoy him or to fully realize her potential in her work! 

28.  What novels and screenplays—even novels and screenplays with more than one ending—remind us of is our intense desire to make the world rational in terms of the principle of causality.  William James does not in the least disparage this desire—on the contrary, he embraces it—when he asserts that the principle of causality “is but a postulate, an empty name covering simply a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears”(p. 147).  The demand described here becomes stronger when one is being entertained with a narrative.  In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster makes a distinction between “story” and “plot,” both of which are necessary to the novel.  Of the two, Forster selects story to represent the lower of the two processes.  The story is merely a sequence of events, the “this happened and then that happened” aspect of reality:  “The king died, and then the queen died.”  That, says Forster, represents elements of a story.  Plot enters the picture with the notion of cause and effect:  “The king died, and then the queen died of grief.”  A well-plotted novel not only gives into the ordinary demand for a principle of causality, it gives into it with a vengeance, such a vengeance that it creates its own artistic demands, foremost among them that each character be part of the picture for a reason—a demand we could never make of each “character” we meet in our lives.  For example, in terms of its place in a very large picture (A Passage to India, the novel), the character of Miss Derek is only a few skillful brush strokes.  Yet I do not doubt that Miss Derek’s presence in the novel can be justified, in, as it were, pedagogical terms.

29.  A thought about Sliding Doors: There is a Pro Life Helen of the “Later” Narrative (in which she’s in the dark about Gerry’s affair until the climax of the movie, but is increasingly suspicious) and the Pro Choice Helen of the “Sooner” Narrative (in which she catches Gerry in bed with Lydia, leaves him, and falls in love with James).  (I do not of course mean to imply that either of these Helens takes a political position on the issue of abortion, only that each would seem to give support to one side or the other.)  Each Helen is revealed during a scene with Anna in Anna’s apartment.  In the Later narrative, the scene begins with Anna saying to Helen, “Is Gerry excited about being a Daddy?”  “I haven’t told him yet,” Helen replies.  “It never seems to be the right moment somehow.”  Determined to make the news a happy occasion, Anna says, “Let’s celebrate with a proper drink.”  “That’s a marvelous idea!” exclaims Helen, adding, as she moves to get the drinks, “I really shouldn’t in my condition, but I’m really going to.”  Helen has by no means been reluctant to tell Gerry she is pregnant.  In fact, as soon as she discovers she’s pregnant, she telephones Gerry in his room at the hotel in Dorset.  She attempts to enhance her intended revelation by dramatically delaying it with a little narrative (“I fainted at work today, and I hardly ever faint, so . . .”).  Gerry, shacked up with Lydia, has to cut the conversation short, leaving Helen, when the line is dead, holding the phone and saying to herself (and to us), “Anyway, I took a test and it turned out that I was pregnant. I just thought you’d like to know.”  She says this with a sad sweet smile.  I read this as an indication that Helen hopes the revelation of the pregnancy will be the good news needed to smother the intuition that something is wrong.  She might have doubts about Gerry, but I find it easy to interpret the smile as nothing but the most tender anticipation at the thought of having the baby.  At the same time, the “dangerous” celebratory drink with Anna can, I think, be interpreted as the weary declaration of a strong doubt that the baby she is carrying will be born into a home. 
      In the Sooner Narrative, Helen enters Anna’s living room, presumably from the bathroom, carrying the implements of three pregnancy-test kits.  She holds up one of the indicator sticks, wordlessly, and Anna, immediately understanding, says, “James?”  Helen replies only with a faint shy smile, which is all the reply needed since she and Anna seem to have an intimate understanding of each other.  However, Helen has apparently not told Anna of her earlier intimacy or intimacies with James, for Anna says, in disbelief, “Since last night?” To this she receives in reply another, longer smile, another “telepathic” communication of unspoken understanding between friends.  “Sorry,” says Anna.  (A remark about this “sorry.”  I don’t think Anna is offering an expression of condolence for Helen in her condition.  Nor do I believe it an actual apology.  It is merely an instinctive acknowledgement by Anna of having intruded, albeit necessarily, on Helen’s privacy.)  Their shared consciousness of the possibility of Helen’s being pregnant is certainly not the shared consciousness of an unmitigated joy:  What they immediately seem to share is a pensive apprehension.  Anna says, “You can’t tell from one, they can be inaccurate.”  But Helen has already acted on that hypothesis.  “I bought three packets,” she says.  “Two in a packet.  That makes six.  You can tell from six.”   Anna asks, “What are you going to do?”  The scene ends here—we don’t get to hear a reply from Helen—and we are left with the sense that the answer is indeed not settled in Helen’s mind, that she might, or might not, choose to have the child.  Neither pregnancy offers an occasion for joy—but the Sooner narrative leans toward the assumption that a baby will be born while the Later does not. 
      I would repeat that the issue of abortion is not an issue that the film “takes up.”  Nevertheless, as I have demonstrated, the film has both a Pro Life and Pro Choice spin (which of course makes it Pro Choice), and it is certainly not silent on abortion.  This seems all the more true when we remember that the pregnancies are part of what is essentially a romantic comedy, and that the thought of the unborn child is introduced (comically) early in the Sooner narrative when James remarks to Helen on the subway that their generation had to have a fondness for the Beatles since they had absorbed the group’s music by osmosis in the womb, so much so that they all had been “Feotles.” However, the essential “feel good” element of the film is protected by a story which precludes, for Helen, in both narratives, the appearance of a “To Have or Not to Have” genuine option—by having her lose the baby through no fault or intention of her own. 

30.  Why didn’t James tell Helen about Claudia, his wife?  Neither James nor the movie answers this question, but I do not think we are in any way cheated for not getting an answer.  Quite the contrary.  It’s necessary only that we be convinced that James himself doesn’t know why, or that, if he does know, consciously or unconsciously, that he is honorably exercising his discretion in a delicate situation.  James:  “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you, there were so many times I wanted to.”  If he’s dissembling, he’s not dissembling as Gerry dissembles, which is to say, lying just to cover his ass.  If I were a novelist, assigned to “novelize” the screenplay, I think I would endeavor to explain why James couldn’t speak of Claudia.  For as intimate as he and Helen have become, it will be many years, if ever, before he is able to tell her how he once was so deeply in love with Claudia.  That is the tender secret the time is not ripe on the rain-swept bridge to tell.  This, however, is only my extension of the scene into the resonance of an imaginary novel.  There is no evidence that this is “the” reason, in the movie.  Which is not to say that my novelized extension is inconsistent with what we know about the relationship between Claudia and James.  The tenderness in their manner of parting (as man and wife) certainly suggests a shared memory of a love that was.  There is a less romantic way of addressing the issue, however, a way that ushers  into the account an explicit confession of screenwriting logic. Taking such an approach, I can imagine James, in trying to win Helen’s confidence, spilling out the unspoken thoughts of his creators:  “Helen, oh Helen, I’m so sorry, but I couldn’t tell you until now, not until the bridge scene.  If I’d told ya earlier I would have ruined that little extra flavor of suspense ya need to make the ending sweet, that little sliver of doubt that the audience needs to have about my intentions, that nasty little terrible thought that you might, that you just might be getting the worst of both worlds.  And if I hadn’t waited until now, there wouldn’t be this beautiful cutting back and forth between the climaxes of the two narratives, the cutting back and forth between the affirmation of our love in the Sooner Narrative and the terrible shock you so cruelly get at Lydia’s house, in the Later narrative.  Don’t you see, Helen, don’t you see.  It may seem cruel, it may be cruel.  But in the interests of cinematic art, it had to happen as written. ”  This, by the way, is what Mad Magazine does in its often very funny movie spoofs.

31. The narrator of John Cheever’s short story “The Cure” manages to “think compassionately” about a peeping Tom, whom he imagines “[leaving] his home and [wandering] at night in a strange neighborhood, at the mercy of dogs and policemen, only to be rewarded in the end by the sight of a man reading . . . or a woman feeding pills to a sick child or somebody eating chili con carne out of the icebox.”  This reminds me that there is something voyeuristic in our enjoyment of motion pictures—film or video—even when there is nothing sensational on screen.  From across the street we watch one of our neighbors pick up the paper from his front lawn, walk back to his front porch, open his front door, and step inside.  Never in actual life do we have the opportunity—as we seem to have when watching “neighbors” at the movies—to see him shut the door behind him and toss the paper across the room onto his easy chair. 

32.  I have just finished reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the novel I decided not to assign, although we are studying the film.  In thinking of what I might say to my class about the book I recall a remark made to me in passing on the elevator by one of my students in reporting that she didn’t much care for one of the novels I have assigned, A Passage to India. “It just didn’t do it for me,” she said.  Upon hearing that, I made a mental note to reflect on what “it” might be that a novel must “do” in order to satisfy a reader, since, whatever “it” was, A Passage to India is a novel that has done it to my satisfaction, not once but four or five times, and I have come to a sort of provisional answer, or set of answers, based on my experience of reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  I should say first that as I read I alternately believed and did not believe that the novel would do it for me.  What is this “it” that needs—for me—to be done?  Speaking of novels, “it” is, for one thing, the evocation of the sense that one entire life has been traversed from beginning to end.  This does not mean, I hasten to say, that the novel must trace the life of at least one principle character from the cradle to the grave.  It does mean, though, that even if only a day in the life is described, the reader must have the feeling that the day is in some sense an epitome of the life.  The “it,” for another thing, is what John Updike has called “a thickening of circumstance,” a symphonic complexity that makes an interruption of reading during and after the book’s climax seem like the interruption of a piece of music.  Another “it”:  language as a texture that creates a sustained virtual world.  Another:  intellectual substance that is, however, never violated by ideas.  Most good novels, I would suppose, have embedded in them a number of essays or bits and pieces of many essays, but the informative function of such buried essays has always, I think, to be subordinate to the mystery of the drama.  As I read the early chapters, it seemed to me as if the novelist, John Fowles, had not been able to transcend his considerable knowledge of Victorian England, as if he were a talented teacher, lightening the lesson with a little story, rather than a novelist using his historical knowledge to create an imaginative projection of a world.  It only heightened my resistance when I discovered, at the beginning of chapter 13, that Fowles had anticipated my objections, writing, “perhaps I am trying to pass off a concealed book of essays on you.  Instead of chapter headings perhaps I should have written ‘On the Horizontality of Existence,’ ‘The Illusion of Progress,’ ‘The History of the Novel Form,’ ‘The Aetiology of Freedom,’ ‘Some Forgotten Aspects of the Victorian Age’.”  Such comments have the effect of forcing readers into an ironic distance from the narrative immediately before them: they are not to become at all carried away by suspense:  they are supposed to read with a little wry smile of superiority.  I say “the narrative immediately before them” because the masters—Henry James is the most obvious example—will be building up a suspense or a narrative interest surreptitiously, as it were, catching readers in some narrative built on bits and pieces of their own supposed analytic or ironic distance.  In the end, I think, Fowles succeeds in this, proving in the process than he wears no wry smile of superiority to his characters. 

33.  One kind of suspense that I did not feel in the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman was the suspense that might have been engendered by an evocation of a man battling to suppress a forbidden inclination toward physical love.  The novel’s narrator is jaunty and modern in his description of the sexual temptation.  “Charles’s thoughts . . . were all variations on that agelessly popular male theme: ‘You’ve been playing with fire, my boy’ ”(p. 152).  But Fowles’s dramatization of the idea of free will as invoked during such a dilemma constitutes one of a number of the novel’s passages that might provide good texts in connection with ideas raised by Sliding Doors.  One of those ideas in that of human volition, responsibility, capacity for choice, free will—say it as you may—representing a small window of opportunity for meaningful and effective human action in the face of the “blind”  working of physical forces.  “Fate” and “chance” are two different descriptions of the same “blind” forces.  Fate and chance are supposed to be opposites.  Yet I wonder if they might not be complementary notions, one vaguely theistic, one vaguely atheistic, interlocked in their exclusion of the moral will of human beings as a dramatic factor in the universe.  Constructing an interior monologue for Charles, the narrator writes that he “would be to blame, of course, if he did not remove himself, and for good, from the fire.  That, he would take very good care to do.  After all, he was not a moth infatuated by a candle; he was a highly intelligent being, one of the fittest, and endowed with total free will.”  Fowles then plays on the idea:  “And so, leaning on free will quite as much as on his ashplant, he descended the hill to the town.  All sympathetic physical feelings towards the girl he would henceforth rigorously suppress, by free will.  Any further solicitation of a private meeting he would adamantly discountenance, by free will. All administration of his interest should be passed to Aunt Tranter, by free will.  And he was therefore permitted, obliged rather, to continue to keep Ernestina in the dark, by the same free will.  By the time he came in sight of the White Lion, he had free-willed himself most convincingly into a state of self-congratulation.” (p. 153).  A good essay-test task would be to ask my students to discuss Gerry’s own brand of self-congratulation, in Sliding Doors, in the scene between Russell and Gerry, when Gerry falsely claims to have broken off with Lydia during their tryst at the Dorset hotel—to discuss it, that is, in light of free will versus fate and/or chance. The passage might also be related to Frederick Douglass’s report of how he felt, having learned to read, and to read political arguments against slavery, while he was still a slave.  In the seventh chapter of his The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass writes:  “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.  It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.”  Though certainly less dire, Charles’s condition is also “wretched,” in so far as he is tormented by (slave to) his passion for Sarah.  But, unlike Douglass, he is too unconsciously literate to feel language itself as the source of his torment.  Rather, he finds in language—specifically the language of “free will”—a false consolation, the illusion of an incantatory remedy.

34.  Five quotations on love and/or marriage, snippets to keep in mind when discussing Sliding Doors and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. From Veronica Geng, “Teaching Poetry Writing to Singles”:  “The power to see the world as a configuration of couples linked inextricably in Holy Matrimony is the possession of everyone.”  From Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”:  “Socialism annihilates family life, for instance.  With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear.  This is part of the programme.  Individualism accepts this and makes it fine.  It converts the abolition of a legal constraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of a man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling.”  And from the climax of the penultimate chapter of The French Lieutenant’s Woman:  “At last she looked up at him.  Her eyes were full of tears and her look unbearably naked.  Such looks as we have all once or twice in our lives received and shared; they are those in which worlds melt, pasts dissolve, moments when we know in the resolution of profoundest need, that the rock of ages can never be anything else but love, here, now, in these two hands’ joining, in this blind silence in which one head comes to rest beneath the other . . .”  From Michael Ryan’s essay on the film Dead Man Walking: “She [Sr. Helen at the execution] is there behind the glass in the observation room, and acts to serve as what she calls ‘the face of love’ for Matt as he dies”(p. 233). And from Gore Vidal, “Love, Love, Love”:  “ ‘Love love love love love love love love love’—give or take a few ‘loves’—was the entire lyric of a song by Charlie Chaplin and I herewith propose that it be adopted as the American theater’s official anthem.  Just name your problem, sit back and let love solve it:  race prejudice, foreign relations—even Job reeling beneath the unkind attentions of a dubious Yale God gets off in the end through Love, which has now replaced the third-act Marines of a simpler time.” 

35.  In the movie The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Charles realizes that he is Sarah’s first lover at the moment of penetration.  Had Ingmar Bergman, rather than Karel Reisz, directed the film, Charles would probably (or so I like to imagine) have realized the same, as he does in the novel, only later, while dressing, when he sees blood on his longshirt.  This would have led (or so I like to imagine) to the quintessentially grim Bergmanian imagery outlined in the novel as follows: “Some fifteen minutes later you might have seen Charles stark naked and engaged in an unaccustomed occupation:  that of laundering.  He had his bloodstained garments pressed against the side of the vast hip bath that had been filled for him and was assiduously rubbing them with a piece of soap.” (p. 289)

36.  Vladimir Nabokov writes:  “In reading one should notice and fondle details.  There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected”(p. 1109 of the Norton Anthology).  I am glad to know that, by the standards of this great writer, I might qualify as a good reader.  I note three “sunny trifles” marked, by the marginal scrawl “nuance,” on pages 7, 8, and 10, respectively, of my copy of A Passage to India.  The first appears only a page after we have met Aziz, who is sitting down to enjoy a pipe with his friends Mahmoud Ali and Hamidullah:  “[T]hey were [Forster writes] discussing as to whether or no it is possible to be friends with an Englishman.  Mahmoud Ali argued that it was not.  Hamidullah disagreed, but with so many reservations that there was no friction between them.”  The second appears where Hamidullah “raised his voice suddenly, and shouted for dinner.  Servants shouted back that it was ready.  They meant that they wished it was ready, and were so understood, for nobody moved.”  The third appears where Forster writes of Hamidullah Begum having “much to say” to Aziz on the occasion of his visit “about a family circumcision that had been celebrated with imperfect pomp.  It was difficult to get away, because until they had their dinner she would not begin hers, and consequently prolonged her remarks in case they should suppose she was impatient.” To return to the inspiration for this little exercise: Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita, after a detailed review of Americana (such as details of motels), writes, “I itemize these sunny nothings mainly to prove . . . [etc.]”(163).  In his Afterword to the novel, Nabokov “picks out for special delectation” ten details which might be called “sunny trifles,” and which he identifies instead as “the nerves of the novel . . . the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted”(316). 

37.  A possible lecture opening:  When I was a senior in high school I had to take a course in American Government.  There were three government teachers and they hooked up together to team-teach.  Mr. Phillians was the Lecturer.  Mrs. Corley was—I’m not lying—the Staff Sociologist (she told us whether we were introverts, extroverts or something in between).  And Mr. Rutherford, the rookie, fresh out of college, was—I think I’m remembering this correctly, but it may have been a joke among us smart alecks—Mr. Rutherford was—Mr. Rutherford was—the Projectionist.  Yes, the guy who—showed the movies.  Naturally, you may already realize why I happen to be thinking these days of Mr. Rutherford, or Rutherford, as we then referred to him.  Because it’s certainly crossed my mind that some of you may be thinking of me as—the Projectionist. 

38.  Thinking back on the Nabokov remarks about reading, I think my classroom battle cry should be:  Sunny trifles! Not Symbols—Sunny Trifles! 

39.  The remarks above about merely being a projectionist are a projection of some guilt about the amount of time spent watching movies in Literature and Film class.  In future classes I will try to avoid the current arrangement.  For a class that requires the viewing of films, there should be available some equivalent of a screening room, a place where students can view the films more or less on their own schedules.  I am not fond of classroom desk-chairs, and I like them even less as theater seats.  The comfort required of the audio-visual culture, with its love of “entertainment centers,” is not necessarily comfort to be entirely eschewed in academia.  My ideal Literature and Film class would encourage the art house-coffee house ambience.  But back to guilt.  A flyer distributed by a dean in Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences advises teachers that class time is not to be spent on films and other audio-visual aids.  This seems reasonable.  We don’t generally spend class time reading the assigned literature.  And there does seem to be something wantonly negligent in filling up too much class time with material from the audio-visual world, as if one were heedless of the dander of defiling the temple of the intellect in furnishing it too fully with objects from the consumer-world of passive indulgence.  My feelings here are old-fashioned, of course.  The temple of the intellect is no more than an old idea, and the last vestiges of distinction between the world and the university are being erased by the ubiquitous presence of the computer.  And the schools are well on their way toward becoming themselves entertainment centers.  So.  I am thinking along these lines during the classroom showing of the Tim Robbins film about Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking, and my thoughts are all the more glum for my being impatient with the early parts of the film and for my being bored during these parts, during this, my third or fourth viewing of the film.  But the end of the film is moving.  I for one have to affect a certain sinus discomfort and to peer a little too sharply over my reading classes, in order to force back tears.  We have a short break after the film and then hold class for twenty or thirty minutes.  There is a center of gravity in the room, which comes from our having had, together, the experience of watching the film.  In view of this good gravity, I am wary of such an experience only in so far as it could eventually become too glib an introduction into the classroom of the necessary drama.  The necessary drama.  I should be careful of that phrase, in so far as the classroom must tolerate also a necessary tedium.  Tedium is neither good nor bad, though to endure it may be better than to avoid it by means too artificial (bliss or excitement, pharmacologically induced, for example). 

40.  From the first paragraph of Middlemarch, by George Eliot, in description of the novel’s main character, Dorothea Brooke:  “She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in guimp and artificial protrusions of drapery.”  The anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences:  anxiety is everywhere in Dead Man Walking, but not these anxieties, not those of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences.  I recall no scene, no line, in which Sister Helen Prejean expresses concern for Mathew Poncilet’s soul.  That would be vulgar, would it not? That would be crude, old-fashioned, fundamentalist, would it not?  That would be to put oneself on the side of those who deep down welcome the coercive help of the state in obtaining vindictive conversions—would it not?.  In the memoir on which the film is based, Sister Helen twice quotes Albert Camus, approvingly, in opposition to the death penalty.  The quotes are taken from Camus’s essay “Reflections on the Guillotine.”  But Sister Helen must also have read Camus’s The Stranger, which deals with a man who, facing execution, finds dignity in refusing the consolation offered by a priest, whom he turns away abruptly, as if the man come to help him save his soul were a villain to be vanquished.

41.  These remarks about the Tim Robbins film Dead Man Walking are a response to an essay by Michael Ryan, which appears in the collection Writers at the Movies: Twenty-Six Contemporary Authors Celebrate Twenty-Six Memorable Movies.  Ryan admires the film more than I do, but I myself admire it a good deal, and I also respect Ryan’s admiration, which is why I am using his appreciation of the film as a crutch for my own often contrary reflections.  To start with one small point, a mere sentence fragment.  Ryan writes: “Neither of the two times I saw Dead Man Walking in a theater . . .”  There being no comma after the title and and after “theater,” to set “in a theater” apart as a restrictive clause, I assume that Ryan saw the film more than twice, and that he was able to write with reference to a video tape of the film.  I assume that this is the case with most of the other essayists.  This is important.  The main title of the book might make us think of writers as keen, unfazed observers of some quickly unfolding, emotionally-charged public event, such as a circus or a political rally.  But Ryan’s essay, and many of the others in the book, suggest that a more accurate title would have been Writers Home Alone with Movies as Texts. Writing in appreciation of the Fassbinder film Berlin Alexanderplatz, Susan Sontag remarks that, while adapting novels into movies is a “venerable” endeavor, the reverse of that endeavor, adapting movies into novels, “seems . . . barbarous.”  I do not know why in principle this would have to be the case with every “novelization.”  But I do not wish to argue the point.  I wish only to wonder aloud whether it might not be the case, that when a writer is able to work with a movie-text—the video, with or without the screenplay—his or her prose is more likely to be a species of novelization.  You don’t work from memory. To describe a scene, you work from the “text.”  You describe what passes in pictures, and to what you describe you add, sometimes, an explicit expression of intention or an explicit declaration of a connection with another part of the film, things not immediately apparent during the viewing.  You begin, in a very real, though perhaps basic sense, to “novelize,” to turn the film story into a written narrative.  Like many of his fellow “writers at the movies,” Ryan has produced what might be called a fragment of a novel, an internal monologue reflecting one man’s experience, his own, of Dead Man Walking.  Ryan’s tone is benedictory.  He writes as if he were speaking to a group of people who had just watched the movie with him and were still under its spell.  I would like to write under the spell of the film, but not under the spell of Ryan’s benediction.  Hence the following titters.
      Ryan: It is not a violent film . . . But it is certainly about violence, both its causes and its consequences.  No it isn’t. Dead Man Walking is not about violence, not about its causes, not about its consequences.  It is about a nun’s ministry to a prisoner on death row, and also to some extent about her attempts to reconcile that ministry with a ministry to the families of murder victims.. 
      Ryan:  [T]he guards call Sister Helen away, so they can come manacle Mathew to walk to his execution . . . Mathew is sobbing, then he stops, and swallows, and opens his eyes.  He doesn’t say anything.  There are no violins on the soundtrack, no music to instruct us how to feel.  True, there isn’t any music, not at this moment.  But listen to what is cued up a minute or two later when the guard says “Dead man walking” and Mathew begins his walk to the death chamber, Sister Helen’s hand on his shoulder:  a hauntingly religious hymnal chorus.  Implied praise for no music at a certain point—“no violins . . . to instruct us how to feel”—deprecates the instructive value of cinematic sound.  We are cynical about “being manipulated” only when we are not moved.  Yet whether we are moved or not moved, the critical task is to inquire into the nature of the instruction, or attempted instruction, being offered.  My view is that the music for the murder and execution scene instructs us to sit in reverence of death as a universal fate rather than to rise up in protest against this killing in particular and capital punishment in general.  Instead of being asked to rage against the dying of the killer’s light, we are advised to be reconciled to the dying of our own light.  Incidentally, Ryan errors in identifying the soundtrack under the murder-and-execution scene as the voice of Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.  Khan’s eerie “moaning, keening” underscores an earlier scene, in which glimpses of the nighttime crime—or one version of it—are intercut with shots of Sister Helen driving by day through the Louisiana countryside.  The instruction of this devotional music?  It suggests to me an animate articulate landscape evoking both the longing of a human voice and the indifference of the wind. 
      Ryan: Some reviewers, citing the aerial view of the woods and execution table, criticized Tim Robbins for arguing that these deaths are “morally equivalent.”  Even if you could translate camera angles into statements, this ignores the previous two hours of the movie, which shows that every death is the death of a specific person with specific consequences for many other specific people.  Here Ryan blends the phenomenon of death with the phenomenon of killing.  I would like to separate them. Death is “the ending of all vital functions without possibility of recovery  . . . the state of being no longer alive.”  Killing is “the cause or occasion of the loss of life.”  This definition of killing is also given as a definition of death (Webster’s Third International), as in “Drinking was the death of him.”  But the colloquial or metaphorical use of the word death should not undermine the importance of the distinction I am trying to make between the cessation of a life and the human actions which cause that cessation.  All of us will die.  Only a very few of us (thank goodness) will be murdered. The distinction, thus elaborated, draws out the point I was trying to make in class when I said, “Maybe opponents of the death penalty should refer to it as the killing penalty.”  On reflection I am not sure that “killing” has greater negative force than “death.”  But even if it doesn’t, the word “killing” might nonetheless help us to focus on the behavior of the executioners, rather than on the result of their behavior on the condemned.  An execution is a ritual of human sacrifice, the performance of which helps all concerned (except the person sacrificed) to reconcile themselves to their universal fate by giving them the momentary redemptive relief of knowing that for now they have been spared.  To be realized as a ritual, an execution must have the co-operation of the condemned.  From the point of view of those who want this ritual to succeed, or at least not to have appeared to fail, what must never be witnessed is the horrifying spectacle of the condemned fighting for his or her life. The executioners must be seen as executioners—not as “mere” killers. Near the end, Dead Man Walking cuts back and forth between shots of the state killing of Poncilet and shots of Poncilet and his companion’s killing of two teenagers. What Robbins’s critics were undoubtedly suggesting was that this intercutting is intended as a statement that the legal retribution is no less reprehensible than the homicides.  Although I assume that Robbins is against the death penalty (he may not be, for all I know at the moment), I myself think that the intercutting could be read as a justification of “eye for an eye” retribution.  But whatever Robbins’s intention, or the effect of the scene, or the “argument” that may be implied by the scene, the political debate might be better conducted on a less metaphysical footing, a footing perhaps found more easily by talking about the various contexts and consequences of killing rather than the various contexts and consequences of death. 
      Ryan:  Parental love, so rarely packaged in Hollywood without a saccharine coating, is here presented variously and specifically . . . Another unusual aspect of this unique film is to focus on this kind of love without any “romantic interest” to distract from it.  There’s no boy-gets-girl subplot, none of the usual divination of romantic love.  Sister Helen’s pastoral relationship to Matt is maternal, not sexual (where he originally tries to steer it) and as loving as her mother’s relationship is to her.  The film is adapted from the memoir of the same title, and the film character Mathew Poncilet is a composit of two actual condemned prisoners for whom Sister Helen Prejean served as “spiritual advisor.”  In her memoir, Sister Helen records no instances of either of these killers, Patrick Sonnier or Robert Willie, behaving to her in any “untoward” manner; Robert Willie merely expresses a polite curiosity about her celibacy.  In the film, however, the composite is more aggressive.  “Don’t you miss havin’ a man,” Poncilet says. “Don’t you want to marry, fall in love, have sex?” When Sister Helen explains that she has friends with whom she can share her deepest feelings and that she has enjoyed intimacy without sexual relations, Poncilet leers at her and says, “We got intimacy right now, don’t we, sister?”  Sister Helen ignores the remark, saying, “I went to see your mother.”  But Poncilet ignores this attempt to change the subject.  “I like being alone with you, sister,” he says insinuatingly.  At this point, Sister Helen rebuffs him, gently but firmly. “Look at you,” she says.  “With death breathin’ down your neck and you’re playing your little man on the make games.  I’m not here for your amusement.  Show a little respect, Mathew.”  Ryan finds the film more commendable for its doing without “romantic interest,” the “boy-gets-girl subplot.”  But he might have gone on to wonder—had he been concerned, which he was not, with the film as an adaptation—why the explicitly sexual element was added.  I think the element “plays” very well, in the scene just recounted, especially in so far as it allows the two main characters to explicitly acknowledge their sexuality.  In a way, it allows for everyone, the film makers and the audience, to openly acknowledge the subject so that everyone can move on.  But it has, I think, to be openly acknowledged.  Sister Helen is Poncilet’s spiritual adviser.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  But Sister Helen (in the movie) is also Susan Sarandon and Poncilet is Sean Penn and Hollywood movies, even Hollywood movies made by the independently-minded Tim Robbins, are always to some significant degree about movie stars, and movies about a male and a female movie star are always to some degree about the chemistry between the stars, and chemistry between the stars means sexual tension, and so it is not at all improper—and might well be quite useful—to ask in what sense the relationship between the nun and the condemned man is romantic, or parallels a romance, to ask in what sense Sister Helen is indeed Poncilet’s paramour.  Of course, there is no such tension in the book—although I suppose most any post-Freudian might find easily find evidence to the contrary—and I am quite content to read the memoir, a work of non-fiction, sincerely and politely, at face value, as personal testimony and as a simple but powerful piece of advocacy journalism.  But the film does not discourage—may even encourage—a psychoanalytic reading.  Having no trouble calling maternal the love Sister Helen shows Matt, I must at the same time acknowledge its passionate nature, and reflect upon the almost instinctive restraint such passion requires.  How many of we sons have never kissed our mothers—ever—on the lips, and how many of us have never felt, at a certain age, the irascible need to wrest away from those caresses wherever they might fall?  The romantic kiss, the cinematic moment of salvation, would of course have been perverse at the climax of Dead Man Walking.  Oh, but there is a kiss—did you see it?  When Sister Helen takes her hand from Mathew’s shoulder she touches her lips to the sleeve of his T-shirt.  Their relationship, from a few moments before Matt’s confession until his execution, is one of religious ecstasy.  Ryan says that the “facial expression of feeling” is the film’s “main language.”  I tend to agree, with the caveat that I found most astounding Sarandon’s facial suppression of feeling during the few moments earlier in the film when she ignores Poncilet’s remark “We got intimacy right now, don’t we, sister?”  They don’t, of course, not then.  There is another woman to consider—Matt’s biological mother—and Sister Helen invokes her name.  But the condemned man and his spiritual advisor at last achieve a non-tactile intimacy when Matt tells Sister Helen the truth about the killings. Non-tactile does not mean Platonic. Neither does it mean, necessarily, non-physical, for the intimacy is sensuous without being sensual. Sister Helen, seizing the moment, has said, “Let’s talk about what happened.  Let’s talk about that night.”  She’s referring to the rape and double murder. There is no reason to think the nun’s interest is in any way prurient.  But she says these words with great feeling—with a kind of passion—and it does not seem improper to wonder to what degree her own well-being depends on an almost physical need to know the truth. 
      Ryan writes:  [T]he four minute rape-and-murder-and-execution sequence, for which Robbins was also harshly criticized, is . . . essential.  Its horror is not mediated, even through Sister Helen’s close-third-person point-of-view.  She is there behind the glass in the observation room, and acts to serve as what she calls “the face of love” for Matt as he dies.  But the camera is inside the execution chamber and in the woods.  We are not so much with her as with It: the worst fear realized: this happening to your child.  How could this happen to anyone?  The movie shows us how.  It renders a media headline as experience, not ignorable information.  The receding aerial view is a kind of mercy to us, a literal lengthening of perspective, after the dual dramatic climax resolving the suspense of what’s going to happen to Matt and what really happened in the woods and merging them into one timeless, unforgettable event that we have finally witnessed.   Unlike Ryan, I think the horror is mediated.  The only unmitigated horror that I can think of is the actual physical fear of impending pain or discomfort.  Unmediated horror is not even to be found in the worst horror movies.  Some find the virtual fear of an anticipated shock tedious, some find it pleasurable. (When we find it tedious, we start berating the distressed damsel for not taking the simple steps she could take to escape the clutches of some fiend.) Making perhaps useful poetic generalizations in comparison of film and writing, Ryan writes that film “makes dreams of the apprehensible world;  writing makes the dream of consciousness apprehensible.  Both are best when they tug at their anchors.  A movie that is nothing but spectacle is boring;  spectacle is its tendency and temptation.”  The evocation of the rape and murder in Dead Man Walking is dreamlike;  you may, if you wish, call it a nightmare, but are most of us feeling the sort of dread we actually feel during an actual nightmare or its simulation in a horror movie?  I suggest that most of us are not;  I suggest that what we feel is the curiosity of the dreamer, which is alternately satisfied by the revelation of images and frustrated by their ephemerality—by their being revealed only to be concealed.  Ryan uses “spectacle” to indicate a mode of presentation contiguous with dreamlike images.  But to me “spectacle” suggests realities unambiguously revealed, for consumption, delectation, edification, with no aura of concealment.  By these definitions, an “unmediated horror” is one that gives in to the temptation of spectacle.  Good horror movies require their own kind of mediation; the more spectacular they become, by my notion of spectacular, the more they become merely gross and vulgar.  The rape and murder is an exquisitely revealed and concealed reality.  Ryan acknowledges as much when he calls the “receding aerial view” a “kind of mercy” for the viewer.  Being highly mediated, the rape-and-murder sequences do not—contrary to what Ryan suggests—reveal  “what really happened in the woods.”  To be sure, Ryan describes in some detail the criminal behavior of Poncilet and his partner, but his description is not, I think, an accurate reflection of the effect of these film scenes; it is a testimony to the forensic diligence with which the writer has examined the video-textual “evidence.” 

42.  I gave my class a specific question to address after their viewing of the film Death in Venice, and after (presumably!) their reading of the novel.  What is the nature of Aschenbach’s interest in Tadzio?  Since Aschenbach says aloud—though not directly to Tadzio—“I love you,” I said that it would probably be virtually impossible to eliminate love from consideration.  But what is the nature of Aschenbach’s love for the boy?  I suggested four possibilities, none of them exclusive of any other:  paternal, fraternal, romantic, perverse.  Of the four the only one I would eliminate in a multiple-choice configuration would be fraternal love.  And my first choice, if I had to choose one, and if I were leaning especially on my recollection of the film, would be paternal love.  There is in the film evidence that Aschenbach is still unsettled by the death of his young daughter, and merging different impressions from the text and from the film, it is easy to place the interest paternally.  Page 53: “And he was stirred by a paternal affection, the profound leaning which those who have devoted their thoughts to the creation of beauty feel toward those who possess beauty itself.”  I have to confront the possibility, however, that I am in my choice doing what most critics throughout most of the twentieth century did—downplaying or ignoring the homosexual theme, the motif of a literal sexual desire.  The amateur scribbler of notes cannot in this case forget that there is a veritable magic mountain of criticism and commentary on Mann’s work in general and on Death in Venice in particular.  Moreover, the director Visconti, a highly regarded artist in his own right, has received a great deal of critical attention.  And of course, there is a third artist involved in the adaptation, the composer Gustav Mahler, parts of whose third and fifth symphonies are the life-blood of Visconti’s film.  Mann uses some features of Mahler in his description of Aschenbach, and Visconti makes Aschenbach a composer.  In the case of this novella and this adaptation, then, it would seem questionable to encourage direct, “naïve” responses when there is so much serious criticism available.  Yet I wonder if the plethora of criticism might not, on the contrary, be a good reason for encouraging the “uninformed” response as a preliminary means of exploration. 

43. In his memoir An Orderly Man, Dirk Bogarde, the actor who plays Aschenbach, shares his recollections of making and helping to publicize Death in Venice, among them an anecdote which includes a brief, demystifying profile of Bjorn Andresen, the boy who plays Tadzio. Bogarde was a fine writer as well as a fine actor and these recollections allow me to imagine—just imagine—a Day for Night kind of movie about the making of Death in Venice, with life on location and the life created for celluloid being played off one another for ironic contrast, the viewer being allowed to appreciate the ethereal mute beauty of Tadzio all the more for having come to know a decidedly non-ethereal Bjorn Andresen.  The Day for Night approach also allows us to play (and play havoc) with the question “What is the nature of Aschenbach’s interest in Tadzio?” by asking the gossipy question, “What was the relationship between the young man who played Tadzio and the older man who played Aschenbach?”  Bogarde does not address this question directly.  But the anecdote he produces is a brilliant gloss on both the film and the novel.  Andresen confides to Bogarde that he thinks the actress Silvana Mangano, who plays Tadzio’s mother in the film, is beautiful.  Bogarde advises Andresen that he should pay the compliment directly.  Bogarde agrees to accompany Andresen.  The compliment, to be properly delivered, must be delivered kneeling, says Bogarde.  And so the older man and the young man—who, when in character, are committed to the reflection and pursuit of a Greek ideal of masculine beauty—kneel before the actual feminine beauty of Mangano. The recollections are a nice rejoinder to the ponderous artistry of both Visconti and Mann, especially the descriptions of Andresen, who, writes Bogarde, spoke in American disk-jockey slang and wanted nothing more in the world than a motorcycle.   I like to think that Bogarde, in writing of Andresen, was informed by Nabokov’s Lolita, and that he was humorously suggesting what Aschenbach might have been in for had he, like Humbert Humbert, failed to heed the admonition, “Look, but don’t touch.” 

44. Here is a high-level answer to the question of Aschenbach’s interest in Tadzio.  See page 70:  “His eyes took in the whole noble form [that of Tadzio] bordered with blue; and with a rush of enthusiasm he felt that in this spectacle he was catching the beautiful itself, form as the thought of God, the one pure perfection which lives in the mind, and which, in this symbol and líkeness, had been placed here quietly and simply as an object of devotion.”  Then see page 72, where Socrates instructs Phaedrus: “[B]eauty alone is both lovely and visible at once; it is, mark me, the only form of the spiritual which we can receive through the senses.  Else what would become of us if the divine, if reason and virtue and truth, should appear to us through the senses?  Should we not perish and be consumed with love . . . ?”  Aschenbach’s philosophical position, in the film, is stated quite clearly:  He believes in a realm of the mind, connected to the spirit, which is something totally apart from the senses.  He might be able to indulge his interest in Tadzio, in so far as one may indulge the need to see the spiritual embodied in a form.  But Aschenbach cannot maintain his interest in Tadzio as an object of merely contemplative devotion.  In the film, he fantasizes touching Tadzio’s hair, though this fantasy is, as it were, chaperoned, by being situated in Aschenbach’s reverie about warning Tadzio’s mother of the plague, in the presence of her children.  And in the book (page 75) he is one day “about to lay a hand on [Tadzio’s] head and shoulders; and some word or other, an amiable phrase in French, was on the tip of his tongue.”  But:  “Suddenly . . . [h]e was afraid of arousing his curiosity and causing him to look back questioningly.” 

45.  When Aschenbach orders his first meal in the hotel dining room (I speak of the film) he says he wants only fish and soup.  He speaks in a tone I take to be emphatic and defensive, as if determined to hush in advance any suggestions of a more varied and sumptuous repast.  Thus he does, at least at this moment, deny at least one sense, that of taste.  He is a man of frail nerves.  He does not wish, as we would say, to “over do it.”  Yet through the sense of sight he may well feel in danger of becoming a voluptuary, a role which he can play, up to a point, without any pressure to participate in the scene.  There is a passage in Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man which seems to me a fine background for the atmosphere of observation created by Visconti’s camera:  “In the mid-19th Century there grew up in Paris and London, and thence in other European capitals, a pattern of behavior unlike what was known in London or Paris a century before, or is known in most of the non-Western world today.  There grew up the notion that strangers had no right to speak to each other, that each man possessed as a public right an invisible shield, a right to be left alone.  Public behavior was a matter of observation, of passive participation, of a certain kind of voyeurism.  ‘The gastronomy of the eye,’ Balzac called it; one is open to everything, one rejects nothing a priori from one’s purview, provided one needn’t become a participant, enmeshed in the scene.  This invisible wall of silence as a right meant that knowledge in public was a matter of observation—of scenes, of other men and women, of locales. Knowledge was no longer to be produced by social intercourse. / The paradox of visibility and isolation which haunts so much of modern public life originated in the right to silence in public which took form in the last [i.e., 19th] century.  Isolation in the midst of visibility to others was a logical consequence of insisting on one’s right to be mute when one ventured into this chaotic but still magnetic realm.”
      In this cultural context Aschenbach eventually experiences in Venice what is often experienced by those of us who have lived for some years in precarious anonymity in some busy urban locale:  the feeling of an overwhelming need to speak with the “strangers” with whom we are most familiar, people whom it would seem natural to honor as our “neighbors.”  Pages 79-80: “Nothing is more unusual and strained than the relation between people who know each other only with their eyes, who meet daily, even hourly, and yet are compelled, by force of custom or their own caprices, to say no word or make no move of acknowledgment, but to maintain the appearance of aloof unconcern.  There is a restlessness and a surcharged curiosity existing between them, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally repressed desire for acquaintanceship and intercourse; and especially there is a kind of tense respect.”

46.  Breaking the Waves.  The movie.  Why did I like it?   I could not say, not very precisely, when asked by one of my students, who most decidedly did not like it.  Now I have to confess that one of the elements of the story which I thought was handled very well was one that most disgusted my student: The recently paralyzed man’s telling his wife to go to bed with another man and to come back and tell him about it.  A desperate measure, perhaps, for a desperate situation.  But works of art are not only (or even mainly) representations of reality; they are also dreams and day-dreams of possibilities which we might or might not reject in our day-to-day lives, but which we might accept as morally instructive in the world of the imagination. 

47. From p. 306 of Lolita, a caption to fit the reverie scene in the movie Death in Venice, in which Aschenbach tremblingly brings his hand to Tadzio’s lovely hair:  “Thomas [the doubting disciple of Christ] had something.  It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments, our main, if not only, handle to reality.”

48. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Having awakened from a Midsummer Night’s Dream-like slumber on Hanging Rock, Miranda, Marian, and Irma, get up in slow motion and climb a little bit, disappearing, one by one (Irma is the last), between two rocks. Just at the instant Irma disappears, the fourth hiker, the frumpish, malcontented Edith, screams in terror.  We see Edith running down toward the picnic grounds, and hear from her two more terrible screams.  Immediately after the third scream the scene cuts to Mrs. Appleyard’s office. We see Mrs. Appleyard standing at her desk.  A look of concern suddenly crosses her face, quite as if she had just heard the screams from the rock.  She walks to the window.  Looks out.  Sees a flock of geese.  Having watched her give her little send-off speech to the girls assembled as if for a group photo at the foot of the school’s steps, it is easy for us to think of this flock of geese representing that other flock under Mrs. Appleyard’s administrative charge.  But Mrs. Appleyard does not appear to take comfort in the well-being of the flock now before her eyes; she still wears a pensive look as she returns to her desk. 

49. Mrs. Appleyard’s send-off speech:  “Well, young ladies, we are indeed fortunate in the weather for our picnic to Hanging Rock.  I have instructed Mademoiselle that, as the day is likely to be warm, you may remove your gloves once the drag has passed through Wood End.  You will partake of luncheon at the picnic grounds near the rock.  Once again, let me remind you that the rock itself is extremely dangerous and you are therefore forbidden any tomboy foolishness in the matter of exploration, even on the lower slopes.  I also wish to remind you that the vicinity is renowned for its venomous snakes and poisonous ants of various species.  It is, however, a geological marvel, on which you will be required to write a brief essay on Monday morning.  That is all.  Have a pleasant day and try to behave yourselves in a manner to bring credit to the College.” 

50.  Tadzio has but one worshipper.  Miranda has three:  Sarah, Mademoiselle de Portiers, and Michael. 

51. In Picnic at Hanging Rock there are two main unresolved mysteries: (1) What happened to Miss McCraw and the three girls at Hanging Rock.  (2) And how did Sarah and Mrs. Appleyard each meet her death.  I can live with the mystery of the Rock.  In fact, to put the matter more strongly, I cannot live without the mystery of the Rock.  I believe that to a great extent the movie is about not knowing.  So comfortable am I with this particular form of bliss-born-of-ignorance, that I almost suspect Peter Weir (director) and Cliff Green (screenwriter) of leaving rough edges of ambiguity around the deaths of Sarah and Mrs. Appleyard in order to shake people like me out of our complacent acceptance of the other mystery.  It is as if the filmmakers, borrowing two key words from Forster’s A Passage to India, had decided to instruct people like me on the dangers of too much mystery, by appending to the mystery of Miranda the muddle of Mrs. Appleyard and Sarah.  So if I am not particularly rankled by the ambiguity attending the account of the deaths, I am nonetheless perplexed, and I cannot resist sounding out others for their speculations.  Did Mrs. Appleyard murder Sarah?  Or did Sarah fling herself from the window of her room, dying by her own volition after crashing down through the glass of the greenhouse?  If Mrs. Appleyard killed her, she would have been almost deliberately incriminating herself with the elaborate lie to Mademoiselle about her having helped Sarah pack and having seen her off in the safe keeping of her guardian.  Does this make sense?  Was Mrs. Appleyard herself a suicide?  Or the victim of foul play?  Or a victim of an accident?  If any of these questions can be convincingly answered by clear signals from the movie, then we have no unresolved mystery.  If not, there is a deliberate ambiguity.  Deliberate ambiguity is the theme of Lawrence Raab’s interpretation of the movie Blow-Up (Writers at the Movies, 192-200).  I found Raab’s essay fascinating, just as I found Blow-Up tedious.  It is tedious for me because it seems an assault on ordinary narrative expectations.  Clues are accumulated but they do not add up.  The lack of resolution goes too much against the grain of the rules of plotting; it’s like listening to atonal music.  Something interesting is being done, perhaps, but most of us just don’t like listening to it.  I do not feel so strongly about the unresolved story of the deaths of Sarah and Mrs. Appleyard.  Their mystery is to the transcendentalist mystery of the Rock as the movie trailer is to the movie—something rather more sensational than the whole, but still not so sensational that an answer must be produced. 

52.  There is a sound, something like the distant roar of a volcano, connected with the rock.  Perhaps this sound can be compared to Forster’s characterization, in A Passage to India, of the sound of the echo in the Marabar Caves:  a sound that returns whatever it is given as if whatever it was given were the same as everything else:  “The crush and smells [of the cave Mrs. Moore] could forget, but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life.  Coming on a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, ‘Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.’  If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same—‘ou-boum’ ”(p.165).  There is no hierarchy.  There is no nuance.  And nature is deaf to human aspiration.  By contrast, in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the distant volcanic roar brings an aura of curiosity to the premonition of doom.  And the pan flute music suggests a lyrical melancholy adventure:  in so far as it instructs, it instructs me to believe that Miranda and Marian have transcended, if not all nature, then at least human nature.  Indeed, there are mystical suggestions—made through the brooding presence of the bemused Michael—that Miranda lives on, as a swan.  I note that in the movie of A Passage to India, there is no flat echo, but a loud reverberating echo, an echo which assails Mrs. Moore as Edith’s screams assail us.

53.  At what, exactly, is Edith screaming?  At all that is beautiful, good, and true?

54.  The Titicut Follies.  Before seeing the film, I write:  Fearful of my propensity to panicky incompetence in the presence of machines, I petitioned the distributors of Frederick Wiseman’s film about the criminally insane to let me rent the video tape instead of the two-reel 16 mm film.  They declined, which will make it more difficult for me to pretend that I am merely a bystander to the cinematic appropriation of the misery of a number of wretched men.  No, I will not be a mere curioso;  I’ll be an impresario of some really strange sights—that’s me, yes, that’s me, Mom, up there in the projection booth, bringing celluloid pictures of now long-dead naked fellows into the light of night, like a college guy shooting black-and-white porn onto the living room wall of his frat house.  Or perhaps not.  Perhaps it will be a very tasteful evening.  “We’re all adults here, right?”
      I could say, “I don’t know what to expect.”  I could say that, but I won’t, because, thanks to Stephen Dobyns’ excellent essay (Writers at the Movies, 71-96), I know pretty much, if not exactly, what to expect:  a lot of scenes of what might be benignly called “man’s inhumanity to man.”
      I did not have the courage to cancel.  I did not have the courage to decline to see the movie and then to write about why I declined to see the movie. I did not have the courage (or the audacity) to try to do what Arlene Croce did vis-à-vis the Bill T. Jones dance-with-video production about people dying of AIDS:  to say, stay away from this, as I have, it’s not necessary to see this in order to be inspired to join the fight against the suffering here on display. 
 These are preliminary reflections.  Not my last word.

55. On The Titicut Follies there will be no last word, unless it be the last words of the song being sung by the staff and inmates at the end of the film.  I write now having seen the film twice. An opening comment. In an earlier note (41) I wrote of the concept of novelization as applied to writing about movies when one had “fixed” access to the movie-text, the video (or the film itself) with or without the screenplay or shooting script. Naturally, I was curious to see how Steven Dobyns had novelized The Titicut Follies.  Without giving a detailed answer I’ll mention one small part of Dobyns’ narrative of the bullying of inmate Jim Bullcock. Dobyns writes: “Another guard asks, ‘You play the piano, Jim?’ / ‘Yes,’ says Jim. / So the guards ask him where, and Jim says at his home in Fitchburg—84  Arlington Street. Then the guards ask if he is a schoolteacher. Jim has begun to speak very clearly, with no trace of the disturbed man who was dancing just seconds ago. He says he taught arithmetic and mathematics for a short while in a junior high school and had attended Fitchburg State Teachers College, Fitchburg Normal School, Fitchburg Business College, and Fitchburg High School. / Then a guard asks, ‘You graduate with honors, Jim?’ / Jim notices the mocking tone. He had been speaking with a touch of pride, but, hearing the tone, Jim realizes that the question is not motivated by interest, but is part of his torment. He grows thoughtful, then sad, as if he had told himself never to trust them, never, never to fall for anything they might say, and here, once more, foolishly, he had let it happen. He too had trusted a bit of the illusion. And so he says nothing.” The reader who has not seen the film might be surprised to learn that after the mocking question is asked, Jim’s face remains on the screen for perhaps two seconds, three at the most. The essay description is a quite plausible inference, but is by no means unavoidable. My criticism here is by no means censorial. I like what Dobyns wrote. I am merely pointing out what Dobyns himself suggests by his use of the words “as if.” He has no access to Jim’s mind, cannot say with absolute certainty that Jim has been speaking with a “touch of pride,” that he is “sad,” etc.

56. Homage to artistry of an unsettling sequence of images and sounds. Sounds: an irreverent thought: is there an original cast album of  The Titicut Follies?

57. A catalogue of images in The Titicut Follies along with some impressions.  Divided by numbers into scenes. Typed from notes taken during my second viewing of the film.  This note is a revision of an error-ridden “rush-job” handout distributed at the class-screening of the film (see Preface).

REEL ONE. 

(1) The Titicut Follies. Singers in funny hats begin the movie show. 

(2) A number of men, some of them naked, many of them unshaven, being signed into Bridgewater: like an army induction physical that includes the elderly and the infirm with overtones of the cattle-car ambience of the concentration camp.

(3) First scene of interview with a young man by a heavily-accented psychiatrist. The young man has been convicted of molesting an 11-year-old girl and during the interview admits to having sex with his daughter.  During the first scene of this interview the camera is on the young man most of the time, although the voice of the psychiatrist is prominent.  The psychiatrist smokes, is absurdly inept, a clown. The young man is extraordinarily polite and compliant, although we are “told” by the psychiatrist that he has been involved in some fighting.

(4) A return to the check-in room. Black man taking off pants.  Has on only white jersey undershirt.  Pulls this off.

(5) A return to the interview between the psychiatrist and the handsome young child molester. Many close-ups of the face of the young man. Large eyes, which may be green, close-cropped hair (like all the inmates).  Eye-brows merge into one long line of hair. He looks slightly embarrassed, not distraught or remorseful, as if he were being turned down for a car loan because of delinquent debts.  The psychiatrist questions the young man about his sexual feelings. “You never have guilt feeling when you masturbate?”  No recorded answer to the question. 

(6) Cut directly to close-up of an inmate whose head is bobbing in such a way as to suggest that he might be masturbating. The man says some things, speaks long enough and is filmed in such a way as to dispel the first impression, and also perhaps to keep the cut to him from being a mere "heckling" comment on the psychiatrist's question about masturbation. So the head-bobbing image is a piece for film continuity, not a silly joke. 

(6-a) The camera returns to the interview between the psychiatrist and the child molester.  The psychiatrist’s comments are moralistic, as he gently berates the young man for his criminal behavior.  The dialogue strongly suggests that there is no program of rehabilitatiion. 

(7) The camera returns to the admissions room.  Close-up of the man who originally appeared to be masturbating.  Sounds of the room.  Man’s talk.  General sounds.  From general sound the first sounds of the voice of the man I shall come to think of as The Narrator, owing to the way in which his appearanaces are spaced and positioned throughout the film.  He is an extremely long-winded talker.  But his voice does not immediately dominate the acoustic space. Gutteral muttering sound, human utterances, but very primitive-sounding. Gradually, from this sound there emerges the voice of The Narrator.  Much of his talk in unintelligible, which only gives an added clarity to the words and phrases that are intelligible. “I want all these men arrested,” he says. His speech is rather like that of an auctioneer at work, or an auctioneer who has become a neurological casualty of his work.  I might have called him The Dictator, because the Hitlerian endurance of his harrangues gives an idea of the oppressive vocal redundancy that the other inmates have to endure, even though some of them cannot help smiling. “Therefore, I have completed my mission in life,” says The Narrator.  At the end of what I think may be his first long speech the Narrator says, “You’re listening to the wrong fucking people!”  He is waving his arms about, and he “concludes” the waving, as if conducting himself to a close. 

(8) The young man who has had the interview with the clownish psychiatrist is walking in the company of two guards. They go down one long hall, another long hall, up two flights of stairs. The camera follows faithfully, watching. The men reach a large room. The young man removes all his clothes. The camera follows him as he is led to a large wooden door: number “8,” it says. The door is opened. the young man enters. The door is closed behind him, but a small square hole with a tiny door, almost like a cuckoo clock, is opened so that those outside can see inside the locked room. The invisible camera squints right into the cuckoo-clock hole. We see the young man standing at a window looking out. We see the back of his head, his naked back, the top of his naked backside. Although we can’t see his face we might imagine him staring silently at whatever he sees outside. The camera lingers here, as it lingers almost everywhere else. New details? What new details can there be? One is reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, imprisoned, writing a description of his cell:  “The less imagination you use, the better idea you’ll have of where I am.”  Or words to that effect. So the camera presides over the moments when the young man first stands in the heavily-filtered but astounding light: the first few moments of the young man’s imprisonment at Bridgewater. There is a radiance in the blurring of the light, as if the naked man were meant to be a figure of beatific contemplation.  And as the camera lingers, there is a distant sound, from far outside the cell, the distant sound of an indefatigable trombone. Details from the scene: the sound of footsteps during the long walk to the wooden-doored cell. The cigar held by the teeth of a guard who has freed his hands to work a key into a door lock. The same guard, seeming to give the most superficial pat-down search imaginable to the naked young man, checking the young man’s hands as the men walk together toward the locked room, touching the back of the young man’s head with the tips of his fingers. 

(9) The trombone belongs to the exercise yard, a man in the exercise yard. Close-up.  Face of a man, black man, head jerking rather violently.  A medium shot of him standing in the yard, looking off into space.  I rather casually notice, as if it is the most ordinary thing in the world to see, that the man is “playing with himself,” albeit more or less discreetly.  His penis is outside his trouser flie but still inside his underwear.  The camera watches from the middle distance, from the middle distance and not for too long. We are the camera. We see. We register. We look at something else. It does not seem quite right to speak of “looking away.” Behind the camera, can we ever look away? It seems impossible. We can only look at something else. This gastronomy of the eye, to use a phrase of Balzac’s, does it not seem to require some deep philosophical definition of curiosity, something censorial vis-a-vis curiosity, something, I think, about which the philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote? Look it up.

(10) We remain in the yard. But we stand in the shadows looking at the sun lavishing its attention on the wall of the huge brick edifice. Men seated on benches along the wall.  The Narrator walks into the scene, waving his arms about crazily, but we do not have to—do not get to—listen to him this time. 

(13). Shot of a long corridor.  Guards are opening up doors on both sides. Apparently a new day is beginning.  Sounds of shuffling in the corridor.  Doors opening and closing.  Keys jingling.  A voice says, “They’re not vicious, I hope. A man could get hurt.” 

(14) A guard talking to a closed door, to someone barely audible behind a closed door marked “Ward F.”  Guard:  “You going home in ten days?” 

(15) Back to the long corridor. More opening of doors. 

(16) Somewhere else?  A man standing next to a wall is being interrogated.

(18) Another locked room?  A naked man inside. 

(19) Taking Jim from his “room” to another room where he will be shaved.  The scene “novelized” by Dobyns in Writers at the Movies. The dramatic armature of this scene consists of the journey to the shaving room and the shave itself.  We are aware of the danger of his being cut by the razor.  Believe that there is a cut, blood wiped away with a towel.  The sense of comfort and repose hedged in by danger.  How can Jim put himself so trustfully into their care?  The attention given the supine Jim during the shave “foreshadows” the attention given the supine emaciated man who is force-fed.  After the shave, Jim is encouraged to get a drink of water.  As he bends to drink, pauses, says, “On the house, isn’t it? 

(25) Still on the yard.  A rant from someone?  Man singing “The Ballad of the Green Beret.”  Trombone player standing silently, holding his trombone.  The screen goes dark. 

(1)  Clownish psychiatrist looking into an inmate room.  Then seen talking on the telephone.  An inmate refuses to eat.  Hasn’t eaten for three days.  Plans made to force-feed the inmate.  Scene of the emaciated man being led to a room to be force-fed.  He covers his privates with his hands when he walks.  When he is on the hospital table, a member of the staff drapes a towel over his genitals.  It does not seem right to speak of nudity in connection with this film.  The word is nakedness.  And the idea that comes to my mind is the thought of the vulnerability connected with male nakedness:  possible danger of genital injury.  The camera does gawk at private parts.  Genitalia, when they appear, appear in a whole context of nakedness, a context which includes notions of giving an advantage to the keepers over the kept, of the accepted inferiority of kept to the keepers, and of the more or less accepted psychological vulnerability of the undressed man, the naked inmate.  In a novelization much might be made of the placing of the towel over the emaciated man’s genitals.  The camera doesn’t gawk, as I have said, but the man might still need protection from prying eyes, like protection from physical injury.  Title for a monograph:  “Nakedness, Not Nudity.”  The force-feeding scene is described by Dobyns in detail.  Cuts during this scene to scene of the emaciated man being prepared for burial.  Wiseman regrets this “didactic” move, but the attempt to thus “manipulate” the viewer need not have failed.  The first two or three cuts to the embalming are so sudden (with no foundation given in preparation) that they almost seem like weird fantasy sequences.  No fantasy, the close-up of the force-feeding: the stubbled chin, the tube, the “listening” eyes of the unresisting patient.  A significant point in the grammar of film editing:  sight and sound of door being closed on the emaciated man after he has been returned to his room-cell linked to the sight and sound of the door to the morgue vault being shut after his corpse has been placed inside.