ACTING SOCIAL: the CINEMA of MIKE NICHOLS by C. Kyle Stevens

ACTING SOCIAL: THE CINEMA OF MIKE NICHOLS by C. Kyle Stevens BA, University of South Carolina, 2000 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in English University of Pittsburgh 2009 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH School of Arts and Sciences This dissertation was presented by Curtis Kyle Stevens It was defended on September 28, 2009 and approved by Mark Lynn Anderson, Assistant Professor, English Department Marcia Landy, Distinguished Professor, English Department Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor, English Department David Shumway, Professor, English Department, Carnegie Mellon University Dissertation Director: Lucy Fischer, Distinguished Professor, English Department ii Copyright © by Kyle Stevens 2009 iii Dr. Lucy Fischer ACTING SOCIAL: THE CINEMA OF MIKE NICHOLS Curtis Kyle Stevens, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2009 This dissertation argues for the study of director Mike Nichols by elucidating his aesthetic, historical, social, and political importance. He ushered in the turn from ―Classical‖ to ―New‖ Hollywood, and studying his work illuminates unacknowledged similarities and differences in both periods. Furthermore, looking at the cultural significance of his oeuvre deepens our understanding of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, as well as key events in the ensuing five decades of American social history. By analyzing the methods for crafting scenarios that Nichols carried forward to the cinema from his seminal work in radio and theater, I generate new insight into the representation of the interpersonal on-screen, particularly through the lenses of gender and sexuality. There is no scholarship devoted to Nichols‘s study, and I look at what his exclusion from debates in Cinema Studies tells us both about his films and about the dominant approaches and theoretical paradigms used to interpret the cinema, particularly regarding concepts such as character, performance, dialogue, the psychological, the human, and the social. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Chapter One: The Avoidance of Mike Nichols……………………………...1 II. Chapter Two: The Sound of Silence in The Graduate…………………..…60 III. Chapter Three: Carnal Knowledge: Emotion, the Face, and the Crisis of Male ―Performance‖…………………………………………………...….124 IV. Chapter Four: Listening to Nichols and May……………………………..182 V. Chapter Five: New Hollywood‘s Comedy of Remarriage………………..233 VI. Chapter Six: Nichols and the Streep Paradox…………………………….283 VII. Conclusion: Of Middle Brows and Middle Grounds……………………..363 v Chapter One: The Avoidance of Mike Nichols ―I think it‘s a strange mistake to take the kind of work I do seriously, to think of it as important or lasting. Plays are forgotten. Film crumbles. We all tend to make the mistake of thinking film is forever…. There was a time when I really thought about this. And I concluded: ‗The biggest kind of schmuck wants to be remembered. And the next biggest kind of schmuck wants to remember you. And the least schmuck of all simply gathers information to take to his grave.‘‖ – Mike Nichols (Gelmis, 282-283) ―The history of films is in great part the history of our attitudes toward our bodies, as they have been expressed and as we have attempted to imitate the fleeting film images.‖ – Leo Braudy (217) In 1975, Leonard Probst interviewed director Mike Nichols as part of his exploration of ―the nature of the superstar‖ (which, according to him, was a new type of star, self-conscious and ahead of the public). Nichols had already been a household name in America for almost twenty years. He had been half of the wildly successful comedy duo, Nichols and May, during the 1950s, had become the most successful comedy director in American theatrical history, and had directed the landmark films Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), Catch-22 (1970), and Carnal Knowledge (1971). Probst begins his interview with Nichols by asking if he is possibly correct in observing that Nichols‘ films are ―very heavily social but not political‖ (109). Nichols responds: Yes. I think that‘s possible and accurate. When I worked with Elaine May, our concerns were with personal behavior, usually between men and women because we were one of each. We tended, as individuals, and together, to be more concerned with behavior than with ideas purely political. That is not to say I don‘t have strong political feelings, but that my work, it seems to me, is more concerned with things interpersonal than political. Political things tend, in movies and plays, and God knows, in sketches, to be general rather than specific. I‘ve always been interested in specific things between people. Nichols‘ investment in the social goes some way towards explaining his films‘ consistent investment in understanding the ontology of cinematic characters.1 Nichols‘ quote directs us to 1 It has become commonplace among academics to assert that ―everything is political.‖ While this is surely true, it can be an unhelpful generalization when discussing the representation of people in screen fiction. It can degrade the importance of particular identities that have historically grounded power relations, as well as reduce subtly interesting human actions into a hunt for their points of origin. Nowadays we also make use of the term ―socio- political,‖ popularized in the 1960s through journals like Partisan Review and The New Left Review, to denote the convergence of the two domains. While it may be true that concerns we often call political (such as the consent of 1 consider behavior as expressive of the social, of the interpersonal as behavioral—and for behavior as the space of the interpersonal—calling attention to the phenomenon of expressivity, its role in communication, and, ultimately, the possibility of knowing other people. After more than forty years and over twenty feature films, Nichols remains a prominent and respected Hollywood director who continues to comment on the American social vista. Needing two individuals to create an interpersonal scenario, Nichols‘ attachment to representing the interpersonal on-screen also hints at a reason his work has been neglected, for it speaks to both an interest in the microcosm of the social and in the possibility of representing psychologies—an unpopular view in the contemporaneous and burgeoning field of cinema studies. As cinema studies settled in the academy in the 1960s and early 19070s, it was on avowedly political territory. The concepts of the individual and the ―human‖ were not estimable at this time in academia, but rather, were thought to smack of a bourgeois sensibility. The desire to demonstrate cinema‘s political significance—and the concurrent desire to prescribe filmmaking procedures seen as more efficacious for a progressive politics—resulted in the derogation of Hollywood as the product of capitalism and, in turn, chastised its devices as promulgating an unhealthy attention to the individual. Such attitudes diminished the field‘s capacity to engage and value the complexity of representing interpersonal behavior: in short, the cinematic character (as individual, not just social type) and her social relevance. As there are no individuals without minds and no minds without individuals, engaging the vicissitudes of psychological realism is a primary formal concern for Nichols. In his films, socially relevant meaning emerges from the meeting, and meting out, of performance and character, identity and action. the governed and the distribution of wealth) are basic to the movements in the twentieth century (such as civil rights and feminism) that we might properly call social, I do not want to assume contiguities to the detriment of elucidating the particular ways that Nichols reveals the cultural negotiation of this discourse. 2 This is true of even those Nichols‘ films that tempt us to call them political, such as Primary Colors (1998) or Catch-22: when he aims at the political, it is through the specific. His most recent film, Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), is typical in this respect; it features great performances, a narrative centered on human relationships embedded in a very real American socio-political moment, and is uneasy to locate generically. That the story involves events that contributed significantly to America‘s current predicament with Afghanistan and its post-9/11 atmosphere, and that the film was produced and exhibited during wartime, might lead one to nominate this film as ―political‖ in earnest. But Nichols historicizes the nation‘s largest covert war through an interpersonal relationship between two individuals, Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) and Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks). Employing two of Hollywood‘s most commercial stars, Nichols‘ film is a story of people effecting change by working within an imperfect system. Just to make sure we do not misread Nichols‘ agenda, in a scene where Joanne makes public recent footage of the conflict in Afghanistan, she demands to know what the government will do in response to its greatest threat since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Congressman Charlie replies, ―Well, I don‘t think making another movie about it is going to help if that‘s what you‘re asking.‖ The primary aim of this dissertation is to analyze Nichols‘ cinematic works, and, despite his critical neglect, this project is timely. I ground Nichols‘ cinema firmly in the 1960s; this period marks his emergence as a cinema director, and his most lasting influence as the pioneer of what came to called ―New Hollywood.‖ The 1960s, of course, witnessed a great

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