The Servant

Saying that The Servant is about reality is like saying that a great poem like “Ozymandias" is about reality. "Ozymandias" is about reality, but it has a peculiar relationship to reality. Thus you could say the Joseph Losey masterpiece, with screenplay by Harold Pinter, currently revived at Film Forum (today is the last day of the run), is about colonialism, about sado-masochistic sexuality, or about servitude (Dirk Bogarde’s portrayal of the title character, Hugo Barrett, is a tour de force). The iconography of colonialism is everywhere from the Georgian mansion with its military portrait, the sexuality with its mixture of submission and resignation and the master servant relation which gets reflected in the convex mirror brilliantly based on van Eyck’s,  “The Arnolfini Marriage.”And then there is this one piece of narrative which brings everything together. Tony (James Fox), the fey upper crust master is building cities in the Brazilian jungle, while in effect the movie charts a jungle being released in the middle of one of the most posh areas of London. But the genius of the film is that none of the themes which one might extrapolate adequately account for its power which is that of music. Speaking of music Cleo Laine singing “Now While I love You Alone,” is one of the leitmotifs, which include the dripping of water, the falling of snow and rain and a bookshelf which is also a door. In music you speak of cadences and keys. In The Servant indenture and unraveling are the river on which human debris flows. The integrity of personality is shattered and the lines divided the self and others is blurred. There’s a wonderful scene in restaurant where conversations between a pair of prelates, an arguing mother and daughter and Tony and Susan all meld into one, a harmonious cacophony, with each reflecting the other,  like the mirrors which are ubiquitous in the movie. In another scene Hugo Barrett’s girl, Vera (Sarah Miles), tells Tony, “I love Hugo,” but the words come out sounding like “I love you, though." “Oh I forgot to tell you. I found a man servant,” Tony tells his girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig) at the beginning. “A what?” she laughs in disbelief. At first you wonder what’s so hard for a woman of Susan’s class to understand. Then you find out.

Swells

Every red blooded American boy needs to experience dispossession. It’s what makes America great and it’s what creates the dynamic quality of American life, to the extent that this country has no real hereditary aristocracy (as De Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America). The downstairs of one generation can become master of the house in the next. Joseph Losey’s The Servant (with screenplay by Harold Pinter) brilliantly captured the potentiality for such role reversals in the British context. In America, Raymond Carver was the poet of dispossession. Latter-day incarnations, like the short-story writer Wells Tower, whose work has received a great deal of critical attention, wear dispossession on their sleeves, but Carver exuded what Henry James called “felt life.” In one famous passage, a garage sale becomes an emblematic act of self-revelatory excoriation.

 

After the stock market crash of l929, many of the entitled saw their fortunes fade, and more recently many great families who had invested in blue-chip firms like Lehman Brothers saw their fortunes turn sour overnight. There are undoubtedly support groups for super wealthy individuals whose net worth dropped from hundreds to tens of millions in the market turmoil. What would it be like without Aspen and Palm Beach, without the Connaught and the Hotel du Cap, without Gstaad and Cortina in the winter? Everything in America occurs at such breakneck speed that there is really no time to accommodate a leisure class. By the time one generation has accumulated enough wealth to live like royalty, the wealth is already gone and they are writing memoirs, or, like the Beales of Grey Gardens fame, they're the subjects of documentaries about the decline of yet another age of swells.