Dramatizing the failure to
jump the culture/nature gap: the films of Peter Greenaway.
by Vernon Gras
Peter Greenaway’s films display a cultural criticism that deeply doubts the
capacity of a cultural achievement to have lasting significance. Their
self-reflective aspects apply this skepticism to himself and his own work,
raising doubts about his own future as an artist. The films’ chief unifying
elements are the failure of his protagonists to succeed and the multilayered
metaphorical meaning underlying each scene. His ’Prospero’s Books’ is
considered as a partial escape from this cycle.
PETER GREENAWAY’S FILMS share the absurdist premises of Beckett and Pinter but
not their minimalist understatement and choked up silences. He likes to do
"talkie" films and stuffs them as full of information and citations of
past culture as the film’s problem or conflict will allow. Similar to other
postmodern artists whose works are informed by the current "loss of center,"
Greenaway’s films are filled with quotes and allusions to the cultural
monuments of the past in architecture, painting, sculpture, landscape,
scientific theory, religion, and myth. He has been criticized by some as an
elitist for the heavy load of intellectual freight his films carry. But many
critical reactions to his work have been profuse in their admiration of its
multilayered richness.(1) In an interview with Joel Siegel in City Paper (April
6, 1990), Greenaway argues that his many cultural allusions are not affectation.
Rather, he feels, they help in the development of an introspective approach to
film making. He grants that cinema must be realistic, that is, reproduce the
external world, but it must also render a multilayer of metaphorical meaning.
Thus, Greenaway’s films are far richer in their mise-en-scene than in montage.
More attention is given to how a particular scene is framed and shot than to
fast cuts, changing camera angles, and the suspenseful development of a story
line. The latter he contemptuously refers to as "the Hollywood cinema"
and a "St. Vitus Dance use of the camera."(2) In defending his
financially successful The Cook, the Thief His Wife and Her Lover from being a
Hollywood sellout, Greenaway asserted that "this is a metaphorical film.
There’s no way that the American cinema ever deals in metaphor. The only
decent metaphorical filmmaker you have here is David Lynch. Americans don’t
understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They’re extremely good at making
straightforward, linear narrative movies which entertain superbly. But they very
rarely do anything else. The whole purpose of my cinematic effort is to explore
metaphor and symbol."(3)
It is precisely this thick visual and verbal texture in his films that induces
pleasurable anticipation in his followers and perhaps contributes more to the
viewer’s interpretive interest than do the storyline of his characters. With
confirmed regularity, Greenaway places his dramatic conflicts into a thick
cultural tapestry whose allegorical meanings and oppositions, though enlivened
by the surface activities of his characters, usually do more for his films than
does the plot. I’m looking for ways of structuring films that coexist with my
thematic material but that also have their own identities and interest. In some
ways my films are more satisfactorily explained by the aesthetic one brings to
painting than to movies. The sense of distance and contemplation they require
has much more to do with painting. When you go into an art gallery you don’t
emote, by and large, like people do in the movies. I know my work is accused of
being cool and intellectually exhibitionistic. But I’m determined to get away
from that manipulated, emotional response that you’re supposed to have to
Hollywood cinema.(4)
The recurring allegory, metaphor, or subtext in all his films, underlying their
more immediate and superficial action, is the inevitable failure of whatever
ordering principles his protagonists engage in. The same self-awareness and
reflexivity about their art found in writers like Borges, Calvino, Barth, and
Pynchon, find thematic and cinematographic expression in Greenaway. On more than
one occasion, Greenaway has admitted fondness for Borges, Calvino, Smollett, and
their influence on his work.(5) Like many postmodern writers, Greenaway makes
the creative process itself the main issue in his films. It is human creativity,
the artistic activity itself--meaning giving--that functions sub voce as the
hero. Excluding Prospero’s Books, Greenaway’s major films have depicted this
theme as serious actions in a tragic mode. Beginning with The Draughtsman’s
Contract (1982) and continuing unabated through A Zed and Two Noughts (1985),
Belly of an Architect (1987), Drowning by Numbers (1988), and even The Cook, the
Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), we witness the frustrated attempts of
various male protagonists to achieve some lasting cultural achievement before
their death. None accomplish this goal. Only Prospero’s Books (1991) achieves
both a happy ending and artistic self-justification for the protagonist.(6)
Just how far Prospero’s Books reflects a change from Greenaway’s earlier
feature films, we will discuss in the last section. Most of this article will
investigate the paradox of a filmmaker who, using cinematic codes brilliantly,
undercuts the possibility of art (including film) to make any significant and
lasting statement at all. We will discuss this paradox by taking a closer look
at three films. In each we will detect an allegorical staging in which an
artistic process or language game, momentarily and often laboriously imposed by
the protagonist on an unruly world, fails because the world refuses to be
contained and bursts the code’s limits. Film, of course, is itself an
interpretive code, so that Greenaway’s own artistic activities share in the
tragic implications of his portrayals, often through a self-reflexive ploy.
II
A survey of Greenaway’s earlier films makes possible these generalizations:
(1) a continuation of the metaphoric approach to drama already found in Beckett
and Pinter which includes their use of place or site visually to figure forth or
allegorize the human condition; (2) within this metaphoric mode, a thematic
reiteration of a loss of center, of any continuity principle between nature and
culture; (3) the motif of earth goddess with dying and replaceable consort
repeatedly used to dramatize this cultural instability or lack of permanent
union (the dying god or replaceable consort is always the artist or more
generically, the interpretive function); (4) a privileging of nature over any
cultural classification with the latter usually tied to some despicable and
crass commercial interest which controls and subordinates the meaning-giving
process.
The first two generalizations continue the tradition of Absurd Theater. Time is
incorporated and compressed by allusion. It is made both heavy and trivial in
that past and present failures to account for the world coalesce to nullify any
hope for amelioration of the human condition in the future. Spatial and visual
images dominate the temporal flow of events. The site exfoliates metaphorically
to incorporate time so that its multiple layers resonate with historical and
cultural allusions which illustrate the futility of ever jumping the
culture/nature gap. This central opposition of culture/nature is already
involved in the sites and their associated activity. The country house and
gardens with its derisive green man versus the twelve different views through
which the draughtsman wishes to render them (The Draughtsman’s Contract);
L’Escargot, the muckland home of Alba Berwick and the lowly snail versus the
zoo with its scientific constraints and experimentation (A Zed and Two Noughts);
the two bellies or gestations of Kracklite and his wife, of art and nature,
against the backdrop of Rome, whose present corruption aborts the former while
it co-opts the latter (Belly of an Architect); the tidal river plain with its
three river goddesses versus the ceaseless efforts to coerce and tame the river
in games and water towers along its shore (Drowning by Numbers); the restaurant
where the raw is turned into the cooked, where the kitchen with its French haute
cuisine mediates between a shambles of raw and rotting meat out back and an
expensive front dining room of plush red velvet, gold gilted decorations, formal
set tables, and oil paintings on the wall (The Cook, the Thief His Wife and Her
Lover). Reverberating outward from these metaphoric situations with rather
obsessive reiteration is the tragic failure in each case of some signifying
effort to classify or endow with meaning, via image or narrative, the presented
world. This tragic (sometimes black comic) outcome is costumed and staged with
great historical variety. But underneath all this variety, like an archetype or
musical configuration, exists the earth goddess with her dying consort. Whatever
transient biological coupling happens between these representatives of the world
and its idea, nature usually renews herself while the artist dies.
To support these generalizations, let us examine some Greenaway films. As we
can’t do them all or even those selected with the same detail, let us take the
earliest, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), and the later, The Cook, the
Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), with one from the middle, Drowning by
Numbers (1988). This leaves out A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) and Belly of an
Architect (1987), while reserving Prospero’s Books (1991) for separate
treatment. When possible, appropriate short citations to those films left out
will be included.
III
In The Draughtsman’s Contract, whose action takes place circa 1694, twelve
drawings of an English estate are to be made by a draughtsman, Mr. Neville,
under contract to Lady Herbert so that her husband, Lord Herbert, will be
confirmed in his proud possession and reconciled to both it and his wife (to
whom the land belonged). Mr. Neville, popular, self-assured, and arrogant in his
representational abilities to render "what is there," has agreed to do
thirteen drawings--allowing the option of one refusal to arrive at a final
twelve--for Lady Herbert. He has agreed to do these drawings only after much
beseeching from Lady Herbert and her daughter, Sarah Talmann, and only if Lady
Herbert will submit to his daily sexual demands. This she agrees to, in a
contract written and witnessed by Mr. Noyes.
Six drawings of house and gardens are begun, with the locations changing every
two hours from morning to evening. Furthermore, the drawings of the house and
gardens are rendered on paper measured off in squares by looking through two
viewers whose superimposed grids guarantee a single perspective with controlled
and precise ratios and proportions between drawings and the original. The
draughtsman prides himself on his neutral eye and on rendering only what the eye
sees. By the end of the film, these "objective" drawings undergo
diverse interpretations so that they conceivably could be allegorized so that
the first six drawings indicate that a conspiracy had existed to murder the
owner, Lord Herbert, whose body is found in the moat, and the last six to reveal
that the next in line to inherit the estate, Mr. Talmann, had been cuckolded.
These possible interpretations cause the draughtsman to be killed and his
"incriminating" drawings burnt.(7) Meantime, the daughter of the
murdered owner has used the draughtsman to get pregnant and to insure a
successor to the estate because her husband, Mr. Talmann, is impotent. Thus,
instead of the draughtsman imposing his will and design upon Lady Herbert and
her estate, mother and daughter have skillfully manipulated, seduced, and
deceived him into regenerating their lineage and power. Such wry irony reappears
frequently in Greenaway films to become almost a trademark.(8) Women
protagonists, in Greenaway’s early films, always represent nature’s
reproductive, renewing force; men protagonists either engage in the futile
cultural effort to order nature’s changing ways or interfere in this
civilizing and spiritualizing process by exploiting it commercially. In The
Draughtsman’s Contract, Greenaway appropriates the fertility ritual of the
dying and resurrected god to symbolize the inevitable passing away of cultural
understandings now viewed as transient and historical. Originally, the myths of
dying and resurrecting gods focused on the life/ death opposition. The
widespread and profound reaction of humans to the cycle of summer and winter,
with its concomitant birth and death of vegetation, culminated in fertility
rituals of the Year Spirit, whose death and resurrection was celebrated annually
at agricultural festivals under various names as Adonis, Tammuz, Attis, or
Dionysus. As part of this fertility ritual, an agon or fight between life, food,
and fertility on one side, with death, famine, and barrenness on the other, took
place. At this recurrent festival, the advent of a new god, for example, Dio
(god) nysus (new), ushered in a new age while the old god, weak and decrepit,
was relinquished and expelled. The mother goddess, who abides as consort
followed consort, is always on the side of the young against the old. The
Eniautos-Daimon, through its expiation, redeems the world from the pollution of
the past, thus relieving his suffering mother and bringing about the rebirth of
green woods and fields.(9) That the fate of the Eniautos-Daimon functions as the
central metaphor for the transience and death of the artist can be corroborated
with other details. For example, Mr. Neville is to deliver twelve drawings which
happen to coincide with the twelve months of the year. The first six drawings
show him in sexual ascendancy over Lady Herbert. He controls the activities and
views of house and garden. However, anomalies begin to appear in the shape of
Lord Herbert’s clothing strewn over the property like the sparagmos of the
former lord. Mr. Neville incorporates these into his drawings and suddenly finds
himself blackmailed by their possible interpretation. They seem to indicate
foreknowledge of a conspiracy to murder Lord Herbert. Using these six drawings
with Lord Herbert’s clothing strewn over lawn and bushes as leverage, Sarah
Talmann arranges a separate contract with the draughtsman for sexual favors. But
now it is she who dictates the terms, who gains sexual ascendancy, and who
controls the activities and views of the house and garden. That mother and
daughter together replicate the earth goddess as Fortuna is almost palpable.
When Neville returns to the estate one week after he left to take on another
job, he offers to finish the thirteenth drawing, not finished because it
happened to be the site where Lord Herbert’s body was found. Though still
August, the climate has suddenly changed from summer to fall. Leaves are
blowing, rubbish fires are burning, smoke is in the air. He brings pomegranates
to Lady Herbert which she eats while retelling the Demeter/Persephone myth and
which we have heard the nurse recounting in German to Talmann’s nephew at the
beginning of the film. The Demeter and Persephone myth, es dames Frazer points
out, is just another variation on the birth and death of the year.(10) As she
squeezes out the pomegranate, Lady Herbert explicitly compares the color of the
juice to blood: that of birth and death (murder), the inevitable process of
nature’s cycle.
The draughtsman’s attitude to Lady Herbert has changed. He feels she has been
humiliated by their contract and the loss of her husband. He wishes now to be
her lover and suitor. She seems to acquiesce and offers the possibility of a new
contract, much to his delight. But it is too late. Already, there is a new
draughtsman on the premises whose plans will be impressed on the landscape next
spring under Sarah Talmann’s supervision. Lady Herbert briefly deludes him
into playing the role of lover, gives him a pineapple (symbol of hospitality) in
return for the pomegranates, reveals that in getting her daughter pregnant she
has fulfilled her aim, and sends him to draw his last picture, unaware it is to
be a memento mori of his own death.(11)
Though Mr. Neville is guilty of coercing nature (house and garden) into his
simplified landscape views, the violence done to him and his drawings has other
baser causes: greed and profit from the possession or sale of the estate. Though
he is innocent of all the perverted motivations ascribed to him and though he
claims none of the interpretations given his drawings can be substantiated, he
is murdered and his art destroyed because the world is motivated less by
aesthetics than by wealth, possessions, and envy. In the last contract imposed
on him by his murderers, his eyes, and thereby his powers of observation, are
first removed, his shirt then torn from his back, to serve as a scarecrow
against the birds or "strewn about the estate as an obscure allegory"
about a draughtsman of mediocre talent whose presence and disappearance hold
little consequence. Then he is thrown into the moat to reprise the death and
sparagmos of his predecessor, who also had naive thoughts of domination and
control.
Next there is the green man. Greenaway has given some historical explanations
for his presence but not for what he does or why he is green.(12) John Fowles,
in an essay on trees, which also serves as his personal poetics, has this to say
about the prevalence of the green man in myth and folklore:
Ordinary experience . . . is in fact highly synthetic (in the sense of
combinative or constructive), and made of a complexity of strands, past memories
and present perceptions, times and places, private and public history,
hopelessly beyond science’s powers to analyze. It is quintessentially
"wild," one might say unphilosophical, irrational, uncontrollable,
incalculable. In fact, it corresponds very closely . . . to wild nature. . . .
This notion of the green man ... seen as emblem of the close connection between
the actuality of present consciousness (not least in its habitual flight into a
mental greenwood) and what seems to me lost by science in man’s attitude
toward nature--that is, the "wild" side of his own, his inner feeling
as opposed to the outer, fact-bound, conforming face imposed by fashion--helped
me question my old pseudoscientist self.(13)
Fowles went on to achieve the insight that "nature as names and facts and
nature as internal feeling" need not conflict. These two modes of seeing or
knowing could in fact marry and "take place almost simultaneously and
enrich each other."(14) They have never done so in Greenaway, though
Prospero’s Books may indeed be a pivotal work in celebrating just such a
marriage. We investigate it below. But the opposition of nature to culture
remains insuperable in all the films discussed here. The green man is green
because he belongs to the colorful house and grounds which we look at through
the viewing grid of the draughtsman as he seeks to reduce their rich multeity
into black and white squares. (This reduction to measurable, black and white
squares is repeated in A Zed and Two Noughts with the same failure on the side
of naming [the alphabet] and scientific measurement of various kinds. Darwin’s
eight stages of evolution end as "a dreary fiction," a metanarrative
just as dubious as Genesis.)
The two actions performed by the green man in The Draughtsman’s Contract are
derisive of human interpretive hubris. He removes a commemorative obelisk from
its pedestal in order to stand there himself. Then he urinates, a mocking
commentary on what he has displaced. At the end of the film, with the
draughtsman killed and disposed of like his predecessor, the green man dismounts
from the saddle of a horse’s statue, leaving the statue as funeral motif for
the now absent rider--the artist himself. During the last sequence of the film,
this riderless statue is seen framed through the square grids of the
draughtsman’s viewer, a self-reflexive inclusion of the film in the transience
of all codes. The green man then reappears, bites into the pineapple provided by
the allegorical Demeter, looks derisively at the viewer, and spits out the
pineapple into the moat where lies the body of the artist.
IV
Perhaps the most appropriate site to stage the recurring tragic conflict between
nature and culture is on the shore of a tidal river. Rivers, quite early in
literature, have symbolized temporal loss, change, and renewal. The tidal river
in Drowning by Numbers has an attendant goddess, Cissy, who is personified in
three women with the same name: Cissy I, II, III. They are grandmother, mother,
and daughter, respectively, and have husbands symbolizing the historical stages
of civilization from agricultural, mercantile-business, to present-day
consumerism. Each husband is drowned in historical order by his wife, and when
each wife disposes of the ashes, she also disposes of his emblem: a garden fork,
typewriter, and radio. Madgett, a coroner, is asked to provide a legitimating
reason after each death. He does so. As a coroner, Madgett is obsessed with
death, or rather with providing a story or meaningful pattern when it occurs. He
is helped in this project by his son, Smut, who numbers and records violent
deaths, as well as leaves on a tree and hairs on his dog. They both continually
indulge in playing games, willfully imposing patterns on actions and events
which parody the insecure nongrounded relation of any human interpretation to
what it seeks to understand.
Providing a legitimating reason for death (a former theological and now
scientific endeavor) degenerates in Drowning by Numbers into "language
games": in fact, into the ghoulish black humor of Smut’s commemorative
rituals "honoring" the unexpected violent departures. He shoots off
rockets at the death spot and paints the spot either red or yellow depending on
the day of the week death occurred. Tuesdays and Saturdays are the two best days
for violent deaths (mostly highway casualties of small animals). After painting
the spot and setting off rockets, the place is marked with a stake, and time and
place are also marked on a map. Smut and Madgett call this The Great Death Game.
Obliquely, Greenaway reminds us of our own funeral rituals which try to impose
significance and pomp over our transition into nonbeing. Note the lowering into
"scientific" banality and trivial ghoulish humor what in earlier times
had attracted high seriousness and even ostentatious solemnity.
Madgett’s other favorite game, Deadman’s Catch, seems also to be
Greenaway’s. It appears in all his films: "The players throw an object
around in a circle. If a player drops it, the next time he or she must catch it
with one hand, then on one knee, then on two knees, then in his or her lap . . .
if this fails the player is out. Madgett’s game starts by throwing a red
skittle, which is joined by two more red skittles and then a black one. The out
or `dead’ players lie on a sheet on the ground in the centre of the
circle."(15) The way the characters drop out of this game foretells their
departures from life: Hardy, Bellamy, Smut, and Madgett. In the meantime, the
three Cissies "play on strongly . . . with two skittles--one red and one
black (DN 33). Recognizably, Greenaway’s grand theme receives another
allegorical variation in this futile contest of the protagonists with nature’s
representatives.
Two other games add playful commentary to this leitmotif: the paperchase game of
Hare and Hounds in which a single runner with a mailpouch throws out paper
streamers as clues for a group of runners to follow; and the film narrative
itself whose title reveals that the frames are organized by having the numbers
one to 100 appear consecutively. Self-reflexively, the film is included as just
another effort to organize human behavior into some meaningful pattern. In the
first game, many of the VUEs (violent unexpected events) have coincided with the
paper streamers left by the hare as clues for the hounds to follow. Two-thirds
of the way through the film, the water-tower conspirators (relatives and friends
of the dead husbands) join the hounds in tracking down the clues. Led by those
two redoubtable victors over water, Moses and Jonah, the water-tower faction
desire nature’s amoral life force, represented by the Cissies, to be contained
and controlled. No untamed rivers for them; water belongs in towers,
domesticated for civilized consumption. In Greenaway’s films, nature’s chief
representative is female. Thus, what Moses and Jonah do with Nancy (that is,
subdue her into utter dependency), they also want to do with the Cissies. But
the Cissies escape them, and they also elude Madgett and Smut.
In the film, now recognized as a game, the numbering scheme supposedly
organizing the action is arbitrary and contingent. Right at the start, the girl
skipping rope enumerates stars by name up to 100 and indicates the point of the
film. In answer to the query--"Why did you stop?"--she says, "A
hundred is enough. Once you have counted one hundred, all other hundreds are the
same" (DN 4). Most of the games introduced into this film illustrate the
philosophical point that an indefinite number of theories, principles, systems
fit the observed facts more than adequately. The film is as good an illustration
of the underdetermination of theory by empirical data as W. V. Quine could
want.(16) Like numbering the stars, there is little point in using more numbers
than 100 to begin and end this story because other ordering principles will do
just as well. Meaningful transhistorical categorization goes down in defeat. Any
principle of order will be equally adequate (or inadequate) to the task and
destined for replacement amid a weary acceptance of futility as the river bears
everything away. Thus, the three Cissies share a tolerant amusement for Madgett
as well as an indifferent amorality toward their husbands. They each reproduce a
new generation and do whatever it takes to bring it about. Ordinary values or
attachments become matters of complete indifference or at best a stoic
acceptance of inevitable loss. Through their indifference, Greenaway wants to
subvert any possible comfort in whatever pattern (trivialized throughout
Drowning by Numbers as just games) human imagination could possibly engender.
Madgett, whose name suggests both magic and maggot, the two poles of imaginative
construction and ceaseless decay he struggles to mediate, has grown weary of
game playing. As a last gesture, he offers a tug of war to settle "good and
evil." Depending on the outcome, he will do the behest of nature’s life
force or culture’s law and decorum.
The Hare arrives to be the judge of this contest. But there is no decision. Smut
pulls out of the game. He has been informed that his romantic interest, the
skipping girl, following his advice, had ventured out into the street to skip on
the safest day of the week and had been killed by an automobile. As punishment
to himself, Smut leaves to play The Endgame: "The object of this game is to
dare to fall with a noose around your neck from a place sufficiently off the
ground such that a fall will hang you. The object of the game is to punish those
who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions. This is the best
game of all because the winner is also the loser and the judge’s decision is
always final" (DN 111). Smut falls but breaks his neck in the Y-fork of two
branches. The skipping rope is still slack so he violently departs under no game
description. His death escapes classification, and so ultimately do life’s
contingencies.(17)
This leaves Madgett out in a row boat taken there by the three Cissies after
Smut’s defection. As the consummate game player, the one who could
imaginatively construct any pattern or narration for the events around him,
Madgett had unsuccessfully tried sexual union with each Cissie. They were not to
be had. In his automobile, Madgett had taken one after the other to his
"trysting field"--with its beautiful pun on romantic hope and tragic
disappointment--only to be played with coquettishly and then refused. He had
wistfully told Cissy I, "I’ve loved you for years. May I see what I’ve
always wanted to see? . . . You without any clothes on" (DN 66). Using the
sexual act as an analogy for overcoming the subject/object, culture/nature
polarities has a long epistemological history in Western literature. As the
Cissies enter the river from the scuttled boat, they invite Madgett into their
element, to resolve, finally, the enigma motivating his game playing. They tell
Madgett to take his clothes off. His ultimate desire will shortly be fulfilled:
to jump the culture/nature gap. He is going to drown.
V
The mythic pattern of the great mother with her dying and resurrecting consort
underlies the conflicts in both films described above. But in myth, the life and
death enigma finds its resolution in a god who dies and returns to life.
Greenaway borrows this recurring pattern from the mythic past but superimposes
the artist (or rather the meaning-giving function) into the god’s role where
he (it) undergoes the god’s death, but without any religious transcendence.
The defeated "artist" has no resurrection but is merely replaced by a
successor. So far we have encountered no progress in the interpretive efforts of
Greenaway’s protagonists. Both their efforts and their lives end absurdly.
Undoubtedly, the most shocking use of the dying god myth occurs in The Cook, the
Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. The film savagely critiques the values of our
present consumer society. Greenaway despised Thatcher’s England and the
general trend of capitalism. He stated,
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is a passionate and angry
dissertation for me on the rich, vulgarian, Philistine, anti-intellectual stance
of the present cultural situation in Great Britain, supported by the wretched
woman who is raping the country, destroying the welfare state, the health
system, mucking up the educational system, and creating havoc everywhere. But
still she remains in there. There’s a lull in the film where Spica says to the
lover who is reading, "Does this book make money?" That line really
sums up this theme. In England now there seems to be only one currency, as
indeed one might say about the whole capitalist world.(18)
The restaurant, Le Hollandais, provides yet another rendering of the
nature/culture conflict. A great variety of flesh, vegetables, fruits, a virtual
cornucopia, surrounds one in the kitchen. All the cooks, waiters, washers, and
so on, under the direction of the chef transform the raw into the cooked, nature
into culture. Each day of the week has its own menu on which is listed the
transformations of that day. Turning raw flesh and produce into haute cuisine
becomes a shorthand reference to the civilizing transformation of brute
material. The restaurant’s back end is a shambles filled with putrid flesh,
rotting garbage, and scavenging dogs. The front end is red velvet, heavy
carpets, gold gilt furniture, formal table settings, paintings on the wall,
especially one huge painting by Franz Hals, Banquet of the Officers of the St
George Civic Guard Company (1614). In between the front and back of the
restaurant lies a cathedral-like kitchen where we watch the ritual processes
which turn the raw into the cooked, accompanied by the innocent song of a boy
whose religious obligato spiritualizes his physical task of dishwashing into the
petition "wash me clean, make me holy" (Psalm 51). Albert Spica, the
thief, wishes to possess the restaurant and everything in it. He deposes the
former owner (Roy or king), coerces the restaurant personnel to submit to his
domination, and drastically interrupts the transforming process. He usurps
through extortion what is not his to control. He interferes with the kitchen
help, tells the boy not to sing, eventually even buttons his lip, tries to
intimidate the chef, and suggests that he could increase profit margins by
providing the chef with cheaper raw materials.(19) He and his cohorts dress like
the Dutch merchants in the Franz Hals group portrait but the happy coexistence
between commerce and culture found there has undergone an extreme perversion.
Spica denies all transubstantiation or spiritualization of matter. Instead, his
greed turns haute cuisine, art, manners, style, even love into secondary effects
of the alimentary canal. Meaning giving takes on a very low status in the
mouth-to-anus worldview of Spica. He denies any spiritual communication and
translation. Books have no place in a restaurant, he tells Michael. Albert
can’t even read. Refined distinctions of palette and mind have no importance
for "they all turn into shit, anyway."
Georgina, Albert’s wife, has had three miscarriages. No regeneration seems
possible under the Spica regime, nor does she seem able to free herself from
him. Michael, the intellectual lender of books, calls himself a gynecologist who
could help her escape her present sterile condition. They become lovers, but
Spica discovers the affair and murders Michael. Like Ishtar weeping for Tammuz,
Georgina inconsolably weeps for Michael. Greenaway augments the wailing
acoustically so that it resonates in a cavernous vault magnifying this moment to
enclose that ageless grief which announces that Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus is
dead--that ageless weeping for the lover who cannot stay. But in the archetypal
ritual, laments turn to joy as the god is reborn, as the earth goddess brings
forth new life. In all his earlier films, Greenaway with great irony and mordant
wit has sacrificed the consort, usually at the hands of the goddess who having
become pregnant now finds the consort inadequate or superfluous. This pattern
can be observed in The Draughtsman’s Contract, Belly of an Architect, Drowning
by Numbers, and somewhat in A Zed and Two Noughts. The Cook, the Thief His Wife
and Her Lover differs from all these in that the goddess remains sterile and
fails to generate new life.20 Georgina’s sterility has its source in her
present consort, Albert Spica. When Albert kills Michael before he can deliver
on his promise, Georgina is left desolate. So, under the modern perversion of
all values to consumerism, she offers her husband an inverted mass and then
shoots him. Eating the god in "the American age" can no longer
function as a rite of transformation but only literally, as a cannibalistic
feast. Yet, unlike his earlier films, Georgina, nature’s representative, is
not pregnant and does not figure in any symbolical renewal. The Cook, the Thief
His Wife and Her Lover, though more explicitly political, critical, and angry in
its variation of the central theme, seems bleaker and more pessimistic in its
tragic denouement. Nor did it seem likely that Greenaway was going to change his
tune in the near future. In his 1990 interview, his last words were these:
"I suppose I have a concern for this extraordinary, beautiful, amazing,
exciting, taxonomically brilliant world that we live in, but we keep fucking it
up all the time. That’s hardly an original message, but maybe that accounts
for my misanthropic attitude toward the characters in my films. At their best,
they’re mediocre, and at their worse, at their very worst, they are appalling,
evil, horrible people. I can’t really see that changing either."(21)
VI
But, hopefully, Greenaway’s attitude has changed. As we have already
indicated, Prospero’s Books does not fit into the above generalized pattern.
It differs significantly. For the first time we find comedy, not tragedy. The
artist hero does not die. Instead, he succeeds in imposing his will upon nature
(the island with its nymphs, fauns, spirits, beasts, witches, and so on). The
Antonios, Sebastians, Alonzos of this world are also defeated. The philistine
world of money, politics, trade, and self-interest has always won in
Greenaway’s earlier films. Here its power is neutralized and absorbed in the
general amnesty of the "brave new world" brought on by the
Miranda/Ferdinand marriage. In the earlier films, self-reflexivity deliberately
foregrounded the ephemerality and lack of staying power of art, the gap between
culture and nature. The excess of nature ultimately cancelled out every cultural
representation. In Prospero’s Books, the ubiquitous self-reflexivity has been
increased--if that’s possible. But now it serves a different purpose. The
focus is no longer on art’s duration but on the artistic process. The
Greenaway/Shakespeare Tempest shows Prospero in the author/magus role of
creating Shakespeare’s The Tempest with, of course, Greenaway revisions. The
title of Greenaway’s film refers to the books Prospero so loved (and which
cost him his dukedom), some of which Gonzago had placed in the boat on which
Prospero and Miranda had been cast away. These books gave Prospero the power to
subjugate the island as well as his civilized enemies (the philistine world of
power and wealth). Greenaway selected (invented) these books (twenty-four in
number because film travels at twenty-four frames a second) and made them a
compendium of Renaissance knowledge.(22) They suffer the fate of all cultural
ephemeralities and must undergo eventual destruction (by fire and water).
Greenaway made a special trip to Japan to use their high resolution computerized
TV laboratories to illustrate the contents of these twenty-four books. He
animates the contents, makes geometrical forms move, turns biological sketches
into real organisms, and changes architectural designs (like Michelangelo’s
Laurentian library) into actual pop-up buildings. The books’ contents often
have thematic relevance to the story. Either the illustrated designs become a
"real" setting in Prospero’s Books (like Michelangelo’s stairway)
or provide a relevant context for characters and actions, for example, The Book
of Earth for Caliban, The Book of Love for Miranda and Ferdinand, and The Book
of Mythologies for the marriage masque reflecting the three aspects of the earth
goddess (Iris, Ceres, Juno). But the purpose of all these collages and
superimpositions is to call attention to a past "dead" culture. None
of these books has currency now except as a historical document and curiosity.
Thus, they undergo the inevitable destruction brought on by history and the
indefatigable human imagination (spirit). Embedded in this rich textured
Renaissance culture, Prospero/Shakespeare, quill in hand, scratches out the
script of The Tempest while Gielgud/Prospero reads all the lines as they are
being written. His words in turn evoke the filmic staging of the story as it is
being written/told/created. We watch as a better world emerges right before our
eyes.
If worlds and selves are a product of human imagination and desiring, they are
open to change and new directions. Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a celebration
of art and its possibility of renewing the fallen world. Greenaway embellishes
Shakespeare’s script so that at the end it is Caliban who saves
Shakespeare’s thirty-five plays and the just completed Shakespeare/Greenaway
Tempest from drowning. Compare this self-reflexive gesture with the ending of
The Draughtsman’s Contract. Particularly, keep in mind that it was this same
Caliban who earlier in the film urinated on, vomited over, and befouled books,
who would not take learning from Prospero, who wanted to rape Miranda, and who
beseeched Stephano and Trinculo vehemently that they should first of all destroy
Prospero’s books. If this obdurate thing of earth reverently bears these works
of art to safety from water and fire at the end, it could be assumed that even
he has come to realize that without the transforming/forgiving power of
imagination, we are lost, left in the shit, so to speak, in the world of Albert
Spica. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be Greenaway’s last word. He
seems unable to commit to a dialogical conception of art, even when it means
saving his own film making.
Postmodern art has gone in two main directions: either embracing the liberating,
debunking deconstructive mode or assuming a more positive dialogical posture. Up
to Prospero’s Books, Greenaway was totally in the deconstructive mode,
insisting on the disjunction between art and reality. Each film could be
interpreted as calling in bquestion the very activity that brought the film into
existence.(23) In Prospero’s Books, for the first time we have a dialogical
overcoming initiated by the imagination (Ariel) of love over hatred, forgiveness
over revenge, benevolence over egotism, knowledge over ignorance, and
civilization over usurpation.
Julian Barnes, in his History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, records a
chronology of failure quite similar to those found in Greenaway’s early films.
But in his half chapter entitled "Parentheses," Barnes states:
Love and truth, yes, that’s the prime connection. We all know objective truth
is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of
subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some
Godeyed version of what "really" happened. This God-eyed version is a
fake--a charming, impossible fake.... But while we know this, we must still
believe that objective truth is obtainable.... We must do so, because if we
don’t we’re lost, we fall into beguiling relativity, we value one liar’s
version as much as another liar’s, we throw up our hands at the puzzle of it
all, we admit that the victor has the right not just to the spoils but also to
the truth.... And so it is with love. We must believe in it, or we’re lost. We
may not obtain it, or we may obtain it and find it renders us unhappy; we must
still believe in it. If we don’t, then we merely surrender to the history of
the world and to someone else’s truth.(24)
A similar parentheses occurs in Prospero’s Books when Ariel (in three
embodiments) takes over writing the script to encourage Prospero into
imaginative empathy with the victims suffering from his wrath. He relents and
forgives his enemies, even his traitorous brother. But Barnes’s admittedly
lopsided inclusion of one short half chapter balanced against ten chapters
showing how horribly ludicrous the world goes finds no echo in Greenaway’s
vision. He follows Shakespeare’s script and allows the possibility of
imaginative amelioration to the extent that Shakespeare’s artistic works and
his own film find grateful preservation by Caliban. But in later interviews on
Prospero’s Books and in his last film, The Baby of Macon (1993), Greenaway
downplays any lasting or significant influence to art (and his films). In The
Baby of Macon he returns to the excoriating tone of The Cook, the Thief, His
Wife and Her Lover. Selfish greed and human perversity once again interrupt
nature’s life force, induce famine and infertility, and make escape
hopeless.(25) Specifically, when asked about the staying power of art evident at
the end of Prospero’s Books, Greenaway concedes the Caliban gesture as
optimistic but points out that what we hear on the soundtrack at the end is
"this huge splash and we’re right back again at the beginning of the
play, which began with those single drips. So--the final release of the spirit
(Ariel jumping out of the film frame) when you’ve thrown the knowledge
away." To the interviewer’s query whether "our civilizing projects,
art and so on, are worth doing," the ever skeptical Greenaway replies:
"Well, there’s a way in which maybe that’s only merely decorating the
nest."(26)
To conclude: The saving of the Shakespeare/Greenaway Tempest arose from
distinguishing the process of creating an artwork (which, after all, is what
Prospero’s Books is all about) from its limited but necessary historical
embodiment. Thus, Shakespeare’s loving farewell to art could have been taken
as Greenaway’s decorous and warm hello. But this was not to be. In place of an
ongoing dialogical reciprocity between culture and nature, there remains an
insuperable gap. The American age, which equates with the "selling of
everything to everyone," proves an implacable and unregenerate foe.(27) We
find no balm in Greenaway no possible alternative vision. His films remain
agnostic, even nihilistic about any possible cultural improvement, while they
continue scathingly to censure our animal rapacity to "fuck things
up." Paradoxically, his trenchant critique works self-reflexively so that
it effectively undercuts its own existence and, one fears, his ongoing viability
as artist. One cannot remain fixated on self-doubt and register the same note
continually like an organ with a faulty stop unless one little cares whether the
audience is still listening.
[Figures 1 to 4 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
NOTES
(1) For a fine sampling of both positive and negative reviews, see the survey of
Peter Greenaway’s life and work in Current Biography (February, 1991), p.
26ff.
(2) Karen Jachne, "The Draughtsman’s Contract: An Interview with Peter
Greenaway," Cineaste, 13, no. 2 (1984), 14.
(3) Gavin Smith, "Food for Thought," Film Comment (May/June, 1990),
59.
(4) Marcia Pally, "Cinema as the Total Art Form: An Interview with Peter
Greenaway," Cineaste, 18, no. 3 (1991), 8.
(5) See Smith, "Food for Thought," 59, who quotes Greenaway on his
self-reflexive interests in the making of The Falls (1975-78). See also Peter
Greenaway, ed. Daniel Caux (Paris, 1987), p. 116.
(6) Howard Rodman, "Anatomy of a Wizard," American Film (Nov./Dec.,
1991): "For me . . . The Tempest is extremely self-referential, and I
always tend to feel the most sympathy for those works of art which do have that
sort of self-knowledge, that say, basically, ’I am an artifice.’ I very much
like the idea that when somebody sits in the cinema and watches a film of mine,
it’s not a slice of life, it’s not a window on the world. It’s a constant
concern of mine to bring the audience back to this realization" (38).
(7) Of course, these interpretations are motivated by the wealth and power that
goes with the estate. Greenaway detests the commercial pursuit of money and
profit that traduces, sullies, and abrogates the meaning-giving process.
Material greed functions as the spoiler in many of his films, for example, Belly
of an Architect, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and The
Draughtsman’s Contract. It functions only slightly less balefully in the
philistinism of the "watertower conspirators" of Drowning by Numbers
and in the exploitation of the animals by the zoo administrations in A Zed and
Two Noughts.
(8) See, for example, A Zed and Two Noughts and Drowning by Numbers.
(9) See James Frazer, The Colden Bough, abridged ed. (1922; New York, 1963), pp.
344-462.
(10) See Frazer, p. 456ff.
(11) I was informed that the pineapple is a symbol of hospitality by one of the
guides at the George Mason estate where it can be found as an architectural
ornament. However, it is also an emblem of Cybele, the Great Mother. See J. C.
Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols (London, 1978), p.
132.
(12) See Jachne, "The Draughtsman’s Contract," 15.
(13) John Fowles, "Seeing Nature Whole," Harper’s Magazine, 259
(1979), 53.
(14) Fowles, 54.
(15) Peter Greenaway, Drowning by Numbers (London, 1988), p. 30; hereafter cited
in text as DN.
(16) W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, 1969). See
also Richard Rorty’s discussion of Quine in Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature (Princeton, 1979), p. 192ff.
(17) The script calls for this irony, but the film shows him hanging from the
rope. See Greenaway, Drowning by Numbers, p. 112. While his death did not happen
as planned in The Endgame, yet the last number in his notebook--99--fits the
chronological ordering of the film. Order and contingency overlap in a dark
funny way.
(18) Joel E. Siegel, "Greenaway by the Numbers," City Paper (April 6,
1990), p. 22.
(19) Greenaway literalizes the metaphor, a kind of visual pun. But a boy forced
to eat his own excised belly button could work out into a splendid new metaphor,
viz., that without meaning giving (transformation), no continuance of human life
is possible. The message finds reiteration in Georgina’s barrenness. She also
reminds Albert--who on seeing the human repast prepared for him shouts
"Jesus, God!--that it’s not God, but only the dead Michael.
(20) Not only does Georgina remain sterile but the Franz Hals picture reflecting
a more harmonious marriage between art and commerce shows up soiled and stained
like a bit of refuse in the rear alley.
(21) Siegel, "Greenaway by the Numbers," p. 26.
(22) Marlene Rodgers, "Prospero’s Books--Word and Spectacle: An Interview
with Peter Greenaway," Film Quarterly (Winder, 1991-92), 11-16.
(23) Often basic orientations or themes of great artists can be seen more
clearly in early works. Greenaway’s deconstructive orientation, in the
debunking and absurd comic vein and somewhat Swiftian in temperament, can be
seen especially well in A Walk Thru H (1978) and The Falls(1980).
(24) Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (New York, 1989),
pp. 243-44.
(25) No American distributor picked up the option to show The Bany of Macon in
the United States so, as of my writing, the film has only been seen in Europe.
My comments are based on a review in The New York Times (6 February 1994) and
the review of Geoffrey MacNab, "The Baby of Macon," in Sight and Sound
(September, 1993).
(26) Rodgers, "Prospero’s Books," 16.
(27) The quotation comes from Dennis Potter whose Singing Detective (Boston,
1986) does provide an alternative vision after he had written a long series of
excoriating TV plays about present Western values. His loathing of the
Reagan/Thatcher era matches Greenaway’s.
