A Continuation of Myth: the Cinematic Representation of Mythic American Innocence in Bernardo Bertolucci’S Last Tango in Paris and the Dreamers
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A CONTINUATION OF MYTH: THE CINEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF MYTHIC AMERICAN INNOCENCE IN BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI’S LAST TANGO IN PARIS AND THE DREAMERS Joanna Colangelo A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of The requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS December 2007 Committee: Carlo Celli, Advisor Philip Hardy ii ABSTRACT Carlo Celli, Advisor The following thesis aims to track the evolution and application of certain fundamental American cultural mythologies across international borders. While the bulk of my discussion will focus on the cycle of mythic American innocence, I will pay fair attention to the sub-myths which likewise play vital roles in composing the broad myth of American innocence in relation to understanding American identities – specifically, the myth of the Virgin West (or America-as-Eden), the yeoman farmer and individualism. When discussing the foundation of cultural American mythologies, I draw specifically from the traditional myth-symbol writers in American Studies. Those works which I reference are: Henry Nash Smith’s, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Leo Marx’s, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America and R.W.B. Lewis’s, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. I focus much of my discussion on the applicability of the myth of innocence, rather than the validity of the actual myth throughout history. In this sense, I follow the myth as a cycle of innocence lost and regained in American culture – as an ideal which can never truly reach its conclusion for as long as America is invested in two broad definitions of innocence: the American Adam and the Noble Savage. By considering “innocence” as both naïve and pure (in the sense of Adam) and violent and primitive (in the sense of the Noble Savage), I propose that the myth of American innocence finds its timelessness in its cultural malleability. That is, as long as the myth continues to evolve with cultural and societal advances, its relevance will be omnipresent. However, in order iii to widen the field of myth-symbol scholarship in American Studies, I have opted to filter the myth of innocence through an international lens of Italian cinema. After establishing an understanding of mythology in American culture, I dedicate the bulk of my thesis to tracing the myth of innocence through Bernardo Bertolucci’s films from 1972 – 2003, paying specific attention to Last Tango in Paris and The Dreamers. While discussing the initial impression of American identity in post-World War II Italy, I conclude that it was through traditional American literature and cinema that Italians formed a sense of Americanism not wholly different from national American identities. However, by exploring Bertolucci’s depiction of Americanism through his films, I ultimately conclude that the application of American innocence, while certainly colored by an international perspective, nonetheless does reflect a cycle of the American Adam and the Noble Savage in much the same way that American culture reinforces the same mythic cycle. I conclude that this international mythological approach to America as either Adam or Noble Savage is contingent upon America’s political, social and economic positioning in the world community. iv AKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Carlo Celli not only for his guidance and knowledge on all things related to Italian cinema, politics and history, but perhaps even more importantly, for his insights into battling pneumonia while in Italy without a personal physician. I will always be indebted to Phil Hardy for his dear friendship and his deep understanding of my academic interests and passions. I could not thank him enough for providing me with the academic liberties – both in undergrad and graduate work – to explore these interests without boundaries. To Don McQuarie, Gloria Enriquez Pizana and Dorothy Grassley at Bowling Green State University: thank you for bending every which way possible for allowing my international travels to play a vital and integral role in my graduate experience. I most certainly would not have discovered America without having left it for as long as I did – thank you. I must also thank Joanna Schneider Zangrando, Wilma Hall and Greg Pfitzer for reminding me of the greatness of American Studies. Finally, I would like to thank my family – Nonnie, Lead and Ah-Ah – for their unyielding support, excitement and encouragement for whatever adventure I decide to take. I share whatever it is that I have done or will ever do, with them. v TABLE OF CONTENTS: INTRODUCTION ………………………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER I. THE FORMATION OF A MYTH: The Births of Adam and the Noble Savage ……………………………………………... 8 CHATPER II. BECOMING BERTOLUCCI: John Wayne Cowboys, Indians and Poetry …………………………………………….. 29 CHAPTER III. “I’M NATURE BOY”: Noble Savagery in Last Tango in Paris ………………………………………………... 56 CHAPTER IV. CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’: The Rebirth of the American Adam in The Dreamers ………………………………… 87 V. AFTERWARD .……………………………………………………………………. 110 NOTES …………..……………………………………………………………………. 115 BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………….. 119 1 INTRODUCTION Bernardo Bertolucci, the Italian-born filmmaker, made his first English language and American studio funded film with 1972’s Last Tango in Paris. The plot of his film was quite simple: a recently widowed, middle-aged American finds himself searching for passion, love, escape and purpose in Paris. However, thirty years later, Bertolucci would find himself revisiting – and reworking – the identical themes in Last Tango in Paris, in 2003’s The Dreamers. Like Last Tango in Paris, The Dreamers focuses its plot around another American – this time a young college student – who relocates to Paris to study cinema. The two films, while thematically similar, work in conflict with each other primarily in their depiction of American character, behavior and identity. However, the divergence of the films’ two characters, I propose, correlates closely with the cyclical nature of the myth of American innocence (and the subsequent, loss of innocence) and in this sense, the two films are more alike in their representations of Americans than they are different. Thus, I intend to study in this thesis, the evolution of an inherent American myth and to discuss how myths can be translated and interpreted by European cultures. Through Last Tango in Paris and The Dreamers, I hope to illustrate the cultural and societal motivations behind the evolution and construction involved in the perpetuation of the myth of American innocence. Before discussing the films, or even Bertolucci, I intend to devote my first chapter to the methodologies pioneered by American Studies myth-symbol scholars. This section will focus largely on the birth of myth scholarship through the works of Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden and R.W.B. Lewis’ The 2 American Adam. While these works all deal with separate myths, I will introduce the idea that American innocence is a type of umbrella myth, encompassing other sub-myths in American Studies, namely: the virginal west, the American Adam, agrarian sufficiency and New World idealism. I will also address the many critiques of myth-symbol scholarship; that is, I will both recognize the flaws in this type of scholarship, but I will also argue why it is necessary to work within such a methodology for this thesis. Specifically, I will honor the recent scholarship in American Studies which denounces myth-symbol thought as being representative of only a selective privileged class. Yet, I will also contend that the sheer visibility of such myths in contemporary society (in this case, Bertolucci’s films) calls for a reexamination of the relevance of myth-symbol scholarship in American Studies. I will diverge from the methodologies of Smith, Marx and Lewis, who relied on traditional American literature for their myth applications (which also led to the root of their criticisms). Instead, I will construct a myth analysis neither through an American nor a novelist, but rather through a cultural outsider. In this sense, I hope to both broaden the field of myth-symbol thought in American Studies, while also distancing myself from the almost universal criticisms of myth-symbol scholarship. Most importantly, in this section, I will not make explicit claims regarding the validity of the myth of American innocence – or the academic genre of American mythology, in general – but I will merely use mythology to trace a European’s perception of American character and identity. After establishing a foundation on which to analyze the myth of innocence, I will briefly discuss the cycle of the myth; that is, how the myth of innocence relies both on an understanding of innocence and on an expectation of a loss of innocence. In the past, 3 scholars have attempted to track the point at which America lost its innocence; I am not particularly interested in trying to answer such a seemingly rhetorical question. Rather, I will suggest that one such specific moment has not definitively occurred. Historians have traced the end of American innocence from everything ranging from Pocahontas’s death, King Philip’s War, The Civil War, the end of World War I, the end of World War II, the late 1960-early 1970s (Vietnam and social revolution) to, most recently, September 11, 200l. Yet, in every one of those deaths of innocence, America must have somehow regained her innocence in order for her to lose it once again. This begs the questions: why does the myth continue to reinstate itself and why do Americans continue to reinvest in a myth that technically died before the country even began? Here, I will introduce my theory on the application of American innocence. I will present that there are two ways that American innocence is lost: the first involves what I would call a “preemptive loss.” This could be applied to a situation in which America actively engages in an action or activity that shatters the perceptions of our own myth.