CSotD: Sometimes a vague notion
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I thought of one of my favorite films, Jules et Jim, this morning, when I came to The Quixote Syndrome and Peter Mann's absurdist dialogue — or, actually, non-dialogue — between real-life spouses.
I first saw the film a few weeks after breaking up with a spectacularly beautiful, impossibly turbulent woman and, by "breaking up with," I mean finding out she was sleeping with my roommate and best friend.
So it was very much like Jules et Jim except for the part where Jules keeps coming back for more, not because I wouldn't have but because she was not extending the option.
And, anyway, it's Jim who makes the absurd choices, because he also has the possibility of Gilberte who is much more emotionally stable and maybe that's why, in the end, he … well, no spoilers.
In any case, the cartoon made me think of this scene, which at first glance appears to be its polar opposite:
– Hello!
– Hello, Jim. How's it going?
– Fine.
– lnteresting, huh? Her name's Denise. Don't bother talking to her. She won't answer. She never talks. She's not an idiot, just empty. lt's empty in there. She's a "thing."
– A pretty thing!
– Yes, a lovely object. Only sex… nothing but pure sex!
– Well, goodbye.
– Come, Denise: Say goodbye to the man.
– Sir…
Truffault's point, je croix, is that Denise is uninteresting, not because she is "stupid" but because she brings nothing emotionally engaging to the table. He seems less successful, however, in conveying the obsessive attraction of the willful, enigmatic, troublesome, self-indulgent, self-destructive Catherine, other than stating that Jules and Jim were immediately obsessed with her as an objet d'art.
And you can't explain self-destructive obsession simply by stating it, or even by showing the behavior it causes.
Denise is absurd, but Mann's imagined scenario with Sartre and de Beauvois is equally ridiculous, and I probably like this cartoon for the same reason I like that scene.
The way to demonstrate the obsessive attraction of a Catherine is not to depict what she is but to depict what she is not. Not empty, like Denise. Not silly, like the playful Therese. Not stable and thus boring, like Jim's long-time lover Gilberte.
And if you attempt to get her to explain her thoughts, she will simply change the subject by leaping into the Seine. Or driving there.
Of course, Mann here is satirizing the writing of Sartre and de Beauvoir by assuming it extended into their personal lives, and, given that they were real people, it's entirely possible that they came home to tickle-fights and soda bottle wars.
But I like this scenario better: The safe sterility of endlessly examining life instead of experiencing it.
Sometimes you need to just not be there for a little bit.
Key word: "Sometimes."
That can mean retreating to the emptiness of a Denise, or it can mean engaging in endless, emotionless analytical discussions, or it can just mean wishing you could retreat to the sterile invulnerability of a completely bland, non-sexual relationship where you can be uninvolved without being alone.
The key, again, is "sometimes." Before you condemn Neil Young's expressed wish for someone to just take care of him without asking or offering any kind of emotional involvement, bear in mind — as long as we're speculating on the private lives of public people — that he did, indeed, fall in love with an actress who became better known for her toxic, turbulent relationships than for her prodigious professional talent, and that what we saw of their relationship hints at deeper damages only they knew.
It's not a matter of whose "fault" anything is. There does, however, need to be some healthy place somewhere between the mad turbulence of a Catherine and the bland emptiness of a Denise, and retreating into over-intellectualized emotional unavailability can't be the answer, either.
But, boy, am I seeing a lot of purposeful refusal to become emotionally available these days, expressed if not achieved.
For my part, what I miss most about the period closing in (good lord!) on a half-century ago is the conscious emotional vulnerability with which we charged ourselves.
Still, for all the power of the era's zeitgeist, the pedantic over-analysis of everything which Mann spoofs in today's strip was sometimes a hidey-hole for those who were afraid, or who had gotten burned.
And sometimes, it wasn't about sometimes.
But this is supposed to be a blog about comics, not about the nouvelle vague movement in French cinema.
Nor is it about archy the cockroach except in that George Herriman drew him. Still, archy got it:
the lesson of the moth
i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself
It is possible to outgrow obsession without giving up romantic ideals, or even giving up examining them. You can be quite romantic without being a damn fool.
Those who want to explore that concept may continue the discussion by screening Erich Rohmer's "L'amour l'après-midi" and "Ma nuit chez Maud," after which we'll all meet at a coffeeshop and hope to God the waiter doesn't ask about cream.
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