Carol

Todd Haynes' Carol evidences the same disconnect that infuses the lives of its two central characters Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) and Therese Blivet (Rooney Mara). At one point a young Times reporter, Dannie (John Magaro) who’s got a crush on Therese comments “I’m charting the correlation between how characters behave and what they really feel.” The scene in question takes place in the projection room of a movie theater and Dannie could be commenting on the movie we're watching. One understands why the sexual orientations of Haynes two characters, deriving from the l952 Patricia Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt, or Carol, on which the film is based, run afoul of the mores of the Eisenhower era New York the film portrays. However it’s at the same time hard to comprehend the why and wherefore between Carol and Therese. The idea of the relationship makes total sense, particularly with reference to the cocktail of transgressive sexuality and class that fuels the action, but there’s little magnetism between the two characters (at least as they are portrayed by Blanchett and Mara) There are all kinds of wonderfully subtle touches. Blanchett is the reticent seductress, yet it’s her ambivalent prey who ignites the actual sexuality. In the end, Mara’s eyes seeking out those of her lover never seem to hit their mark. And there are memorable lines. “Just when you think things can’t get any worse, you run out of cigarettes,” Carol says. “I never say no and it’s selfish,” is one of Therese’s signature remarks. The movie’s Manhattan is pure Hopper, off center silhouettes in window frames and lonely street corners illuminated by harsh overhead light. Carol takes the form of a mystery, but the true mystery lies in the nature of an attraction between two people that, at film's end, still remains an enigma.

Strangers on a Train

Coleridge famously scribbled “the motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity” about Othello in his copy of Shakespeare’s works. Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) offers three propositions at the beginning of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which recently was exhibited as part of the Hitchcock retrospective at Film Forum: ”I’ve got a theory you should do everything before you die...My theory is that everyone is a potential murderer...Each fellow does the other person’s murder so there is nothing to connect them.” QED, the world is an evil place, courtesy of Raymond Chandler who wrote the brilliant script, based on the Patricia Highsmith novel. Bruno when you think about it is a character right out of the Elizabethan/Jacobean theater. Like Iago  he attempts to plant insidious notions in his innocent foil, a tennis star named, Guy Haines (Farley Granger). Strangers on a Train is a series of oppositions that verge on paradox. Miriam, Guy’s slutty unfaithful wife wears thick glasses and looks more like a librarian than a temptress. Her murder is foreshadowed by the screams coming from a so called Tunnel of Love. Bruno’s dotty mother is painting a horrific portrait of a saint (Francis in this case).  She shares a countervailingly pathological misperception of her son, i.e. that he's sweetness and light, when he's in fact horrifying. The one person who can provide an alibi for Guy, a tipsy professor of mathematics offers a definition of integration (“a function is given and the differential is obtained”) while defying moral calculus. By so skewering reality, the movie turns Bruno’s cynical hypothesis on its head. It's impossible to hide motive by the simple act of switching perpetrators, as Bruno suggests, since everyone and everything is, in fact, connected. And the reversals are almost symphonic.  The director makes his obligatory cameo appearance carrying a cello which is the counterpart to the music store that Miriam works in and in which she and Guy quarrel. Miriam's glasses reflect her own murder and again appear on the face of the innocent Barbara Morton, played incidentally by Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia who cheerfully mimics the murder plot when she says, “I still think it would be wonderful to have a man love you so much he would kill for you."  Bruno creates the sound of a bullet shot as he bursts the balloon or bubble of the young boy who is shooting at him with a fake pistol. Guy’s tennis match is paralleled with Bruno’s attempt to retrieve the incriminating lighter (Desdemona’s handkerchief). And lastly let’s not discountenance the homoerotic connection between Bruno and Guy, which continues to provide a pay day for psychoanalytic interpreters of the movie. A runaway carousel is the finale of Hitchcock’s apocalyptic battle between good and evil, and it’s a dazzling scene in which the dark forces of misunderstanding and enlightenment—a child’s screams of delight are countermanded by horrifying spectacle of a wooden horse leg turned into a weapon. The movie begins with a brilliant series of crosscuts, in which we see the shoes and luggage of the two antagonists before we actually meet them. Just as montage creates meaning in cinema, the fate of the film’s two strangers is sealed before they ever meet.

Little Tales of Misanthropy

One of the most disconcerting elements about the search for beauty is its lack of conscience. Creativity and humanism can be strange bed fellows which is another way of saying that many famous artists are shits. Bergman was notorious for his many failed marriages and relationships and if the portrait of the writer in Through a Glass Darkly is any reflection of his parenting, then we can conclude that he wasn’t much interesting in child raising. Updike’s Too Far To Go is a heartbreakingly beautiful description of the breakup of a marriage, but the breakup of Updike’s first marriage was the palette and one can’t help wondering if the breakup were not somehow unconsciously staged for the sake of the writing. Philip Roth’s one time wife Claire Bloom has documented the deficiencies of her former husband’s character and V.S. Naipaul’s extreme sadism towards woman has been described in Patrick French’s biography. Saul Bellow was married five times and fathered a child when he was 84. On the female side Doris Lessing abandoned two young children and husband to pursue her career and reading the way Patricia Highsmith discarded lovers, it’s not surprising that she wrote a collection a collection of stories called Little Tales of Misogyny. In spite of the extended tantrum of fame and the greater amounts of opportunity that fame produces, are these creative geniuses any more narcissistic or sadistic than your average Jack or Jill? Or does the destructive behavior of talented individuals stand out in relief since we consciously or unconsciously idealize those who mirror our heart’s desires? Is the average Joe, the man amongst men, whose goodness derives from his more modest level of self-absorption and ambition, any less selfish and sadistic in either his real or fantasy life, or is the problem simply that we expect more from the artist?