"A Working Class Hero(ine) Is Something to Be": Affliction, The Dreamlife of Angels, and the NaturaUst Tradition

Christopher Orr

Paul Schrader's Affliction {\99^), adapted from a 1989 Russell Banks novel, is about Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), a policeman in a small New Hampshire town whose life unravels before us. The Nolte character appears to be the victim of a tradition of male violence that has been passed on for generations. Erick Zonca's The Dreamlife of Angels (1998) chronicles the experience of two women in their early 2O's, Isa (Elodie Bouchez) and Marie (Natacha Regnier). who live from hand to mouth in the city of Lille in northeastern France. Both films exhibit a class consciousness that is absent from much of mainstream contemporary American and French cinema. Affliction harkens back to the social problem films of the 193O's and l940's, while Dreamlife recalls the French poetic realist movement. As such, both films carry on the naturalist tradition as they emphasize how their characters' lives are circumscribed by instinct and environment. Because of this emphasis on biological and environmental determinism, the naturalist movement, originating with Emile Zola and represented in the United States by such writers as

36 Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, John dos Passos and the proletarian novelists of the 193O's, offers an ideology that is at least in theory inherently critical of the existing social order. Not surprisingly, naturalism, according to many literary historical accounts, reached its moment of greatest influence during the Great Depression—also known as the red decade—and went into decline during the 195O's. Thus the emphasis that both films place on the plight of the marginalized worker in late, multinational capitalism amounts to a kind of retum of the repressed. While Zonca's Dreamlife of Angels lacks the beady optimism of such poetic realist films as Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) or Grand Illusion (1937) made during the era of the Popular Front, the film nevertheless gestures toward the Utopian values of that distant past. Affliction, on the other hand, presents us with a naturalism that has been twisted and distorted by our dominant neo-conservative ideology.

Alienated labor in The Dreamlife of Angels

Schrader's Affliction, according to the opening voice-over spoken by the protagonist's younger brother Rolfe (Willem Dafoe), is a recounting of the "strange criminal behavior and disappearance" of Wade Whitehouse, the sole police officer in a dying New Hampshire town who also works as a crossing guard , snowplow driver, and well digger Wade is embroiled in a futile custody battle with his ex-wife for his daughter, Jill, and is planning to marry his waitress-girl friend, Margie (Sissy Spacek), to improve his chances in court. Meanwhile a

37 visiting union official, Evan Twombley, is killed in a hunting accident. The Nolte character suspects that Jack Hewitt, the hunter's guide, and Gordon LaRiviere, Wade's employer and a local real estate entrepreneur, are involved in a murder conspiracy. Haunted by images of the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his alcoholic father (played by James Cobum), Wade's investigation of this apparent conspiracy leads to the loss of his job and his involvement in further deaths; he bashes in his father's skull with a rifle butt and later shoots Hewitt. Schrader's film ends with a shot of the desolate snow-covered wilderness into which the hero has disappeared. We are told in the voice-over spoken by the Dafoe character that accompanies this shot that Hewitt's truck was found abandoned in a shopping mall outside Toronto. Curiously, Wade's younger brother Rolfe appears to have escaped the family curse. He left Lawford, the town of his birth, directly after completing high school and teaches history at Boston University. In Banks's novel, he is a high school teacher in a Boston suburb. Nevertheless, as Schrader points out, it is Rolfe who has "spiraled his brother into self-destructive insanity, if not death" (Quart 3). Specifically, Rolfe encouraged Wade to pursue his investigation of the possible murder conspiracy. In his column in The National Review, John Simon objects to the ending of Schrader's film: "Great tragedies, however inexorable, are cathartic for both protagonists and audiences. Here, however, we are sucked into the thrashings of a trapped animal, unrelieved by so much as blank verse" (2). Simon's response may in one sense reflect an elitist interpretation of Aristotelian theory that denies tragic stature to the common man. An alternative explanation for Simon's discomfort with Affliction can be found in Brecht's critique of Aristotelian drama: namely, that the successful catharsis of the emotions of pity and fear effects an affirmation of the existing social order. The problem then with Schrader's film from Simon's perspective is that it fails to affirm the notion that all's right with the world. Yet ironically, Affliction offers a version of naturalism that appears to support neo-conservative values. Eirst of all, Schrader's film raises the issue of political corruption. Wade suspects that Twombley's death is part of a scheme to divert union funds to the development of a ski resort. The film then dismisses this suspicion as an expression of the Nolte character's paranoia. Or, as Schrader puts it, the social issues in

38 the film are "displacements of family dramas" (Quart 3). However, the key way in which the film exploits naturalism for reactionary purposes is in its treatment of the nature/nurture conundjoim, and in the relationship it presents between nurture and the socio- economic conditions of our existence. Within the naturalist tradition, how one understands nature and biology, and the importance one attaches to them, can have significant ideological implications. For example, in Zola's 1889 novel. La Bete humaine, the affliction of Zola's protagonist, Jacques Lantier—his predisposition to murder the women to whom he is attracted—is presented as a genetic defect, allegedly the result of the alcoholism of his male ancestors. In Zola's defense, this presentation of Lantier as genetically flawed was a reflection of the beliefs of his times: Zola accepted a body of scientific opinions exemplified by the theories of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso that were heavily weighted in favor of nature and were moreover designed to justify racism, colonialism, and the exploitation of the poor. Nevertheless, Zola's belief that heredity is fate does not significantly interfere with his critique of Second Empire French society in La Bete humaine. Even a critic as hostile to naturalism as Georg Lukacs admits that Zoia "fought a courageous hattle against the reactionary evolution of French capitalism" (85). In Zola's novel, Lantier's struggle with his "biological" affliction is a source of tension, suspense and even terror. The hero's problem, however, does not serve to exonerate those guilty of exploitation and political corruption. In other words, while La Bete humaine reflects and incorporates the popular science of Zola's historical moment, Zola's primary concern is to demonstrate how the social mechanism exploits and circumscribes the lives of his characters. The tradition of male violence that afflicts the hero of Schrader's film—a violence described by the narrator of Banks's novel as a "barely controlled hysteria" (108)—is uncannily reminiscent of the "savage beast" that Zola's Jacques Lantier "could feel inside him" (69). Yet in contrast to Zola, neither Banks's novel nor Schrader's film suggest that the protagonist's violent tendencies have been encoded into his genetic makeup. Wade's affliction is something he has learned through the nightmare of the family experience and, in this respect, the film does address a genuine social issue. The problem, however, is that the Nolte character's affliction, while technically an effect of nurture, takes on the character of a natural trait. In the film's concluding voice-over.

39 which is quoted more or less verbatim from the Banks novel, the Dafoe character tells the audience that the individual can make an effort to overcome this tradition of male violence presumably with the help of the mental health industry. Yet this diegetic narrator also tells us that Wade's story "describe[s] the lives of the boys and men for thousands of years; boys who were beaten by their fathers, whose capacity for love and trust was crippled almost at birth." While it is obvious that male abuse of women and children has occurred for thousands of years, this in itself does not justify the position implicit in Schrader's film that this abuse is simply an inevitable fact of nature. In other words, what is objectionable about the film's treatment of this theme is that the very real problem of abuse within the family is effectively divorced from any larger social context. In this respect, the strategy of raising the issue of a corrupt society—Wade's investigation of the death of Evan Twombley—and then dismissing it as a paranoid delusion, dissuades us from thinking about how, for example, the Coburn character's abuse of his wife and children was a product of the real conditions of his existence. Schrader's Affliction can thus be seen as part of a reactionary attempt to naturalize naturalism.

Wade, frozen in time, directs traffic in Affliction In order to think about the film politically, we are forced to read against the grain. In his review, Stanley Kaufmann argues that the film is not ultimately about a "father passing on to a son a tradition of wife abuse" as Rolfe's concluding voice-over would have us believe. Rather, Affliction " is about a stratum of society trapped in a societal jet lag, a

40 frontier ethos marooned in a more complex world" (2). Wade's father, while brutal and despicable, is also to be pitied. In the novel, he is described as a "workingman who hated his job and whose cross, impoverished family only served to remind him of his failings" (97). He had been employed for much of his life as a mill worker in a neighboring town until the mill closed down and he was forced to retire. Thus his economic plight is not a result of his lack of ability or dedication but of market forces beyond his control. This is not to excuse either his alcoholism or hrutishness. Rather it is simply to point out that this behavior does not occur within a vacuum. Moreover, the same market forces that have destroyed the economic base of the town of Lawford have turned it into an asset as a site for leisure activities to accommodate a growing number of affluent tourists. The murder investigation that leads to Wade's undoing can thus be seen as a failed protest against a form of progress exemplified by the impending invasion of Yuppies driving BMW's that has left him and the other members of his social class behind. In the concluding voice-over, Rolfe tells us that Lawford has ceased to exist as a community but has instead become an economic development between two neighboring New Hampshire towns. In this respect, Affliction is not, as Schrader claims, a film where social issues are displacements of family dramas, but rather a film in which family dramas are both a displacement and a disavowal of social issues. Affliction then can be thought of as an attempt to create what might be termed "neo-con-naturalism," an appropriation of the naturalist tradition in the service of neo-conservative ideology. Fortunately, this effort to disavow the social and political dimension of the lives of the characters in the film is flawed and ultimately unsuccessful. On the other hand. The Dreamlife of Angels does attempt to resurrect the spirit of Zola-esque naturalism and the poetic realism of the Popular Front era. Although none of the film reviews I surveyed mention poetic realism, let alone naturalism, I would like to begin my discussion of Zonca's film by placing it within the context of a body of contemporary French films that have been explicitly linked to poetic realism, the genre of quality costume/historical dramas of the 198O's and 199O's funded and/or promoted by Mitterand's socialist government, the heritage film. Jack Lang, the socialist Minister of Culture, conceived of film as "high culture for the masses" and promoted "the filming of France's historical and cultural past as a form of national education" (Austin 144). As Michael DeAngelis suggests

41 in the previous essay, the primary motivation behind the heritage film is the need to maintain a sense of French cultural identity in the face of a "consistent and powerful American influence." Nevertheless, Lang's promotion of this cinematic movement was, according to Guy Austin, inspired by a nostalgia for the poetic realist cinema of the Popular Front era. Further, Jean Renoir, the exemplary director in the poetic realist movement, became "an important touchstone for the heritage film" (Austin 143). Yet while Lang may have believed that his support of the heritage film embodied the spirit of poetic realism, the connection between these two movements is suspect. Granted, one can perceive similarities between the visual style of heritage films with their reliance on long takes, deep focus and long shots, and the style of Renoir and the other poetic realist directors. Nevertheless, the historical costume drama is a rarity within the poetic realist canon. La Marseillaise (\93S),'mtQnded as a view of the French Revolution from a Popular Front perspective, was the only historical drama that Renoir made during the 193O's. Moreover. La Marseillaise was a commercial failure because Renoir chose to present "an anonymous history with anonymous players" instead of using "the movie stars of the day to play the heroes of yesteryear" (Andrew 294). In contrast, heritage films on the French Revolution such as Wajda's Danton and Scola's La Nuit de Varennes (both 1982) do use international stars to play the heroes of yesteryear. Arguably, the defining trait of poetic realism—a trait inherited from literary naturalism—is its insistence on exploring the depths of the everyday lives of ordinary people existing on the margins of society. What Dudley Andrew calls poetic realism's "peculiar conjunction of ethnographic curiosity and intimate subjectivity" can be traced back to Zola, which is why Zola was considered indispensable to the French cinema of the 193O's. Andrew goes on to claim that Renoir's adaptation of Zola's La Bete humaine was "arguably the best poetic realist film" (162). In 1993 during the era of the heritage film, Claude Berri adapted Germinal., Zola's most politically overt novel. Berri's adaptation is competent in the sense that it provides its audience with the contents of a literary classic: it describes conditions within the coal mining industry in France during the nineteenth century; it evokes Zola's political message, and it appeals to popular taste through the use of recognizable movie stars, including the ubiquitous Gerard Depardieu.

42 Germinal was perceived by most reviewers in tbe U. S. as a didactic and hence disappointing example of the European art cinema that not even the presence of Depardieu could save. Nevertheless, the film did succeed in presenting France's "historical and cultural past as a form of national education" as it became a cause celebre among French workers and leftists protesting the 1993 GATT conference in Paris. Even so, Berri's Germinal lacks the "intimate subjectivity" or poetic depth one finds in Renoir's La Bete humaine or Zonca's The Dreamlife of Angels. Zonca's Dreamlife opens by introducing us to Isa, an optimistic tomboy with short cropped hair who has wandered into Lille with her backpack. Discovering that the friend she had hoped to stay with has moved on, Isa takes a sewing job in a small garment factory. Even though she loses this job within 24 hours, during this work experience, Isa befriends one of her co-workers, Marie, who is taking care of an apartment for a mother and teenage daughter who have been in a car accident. Later we learn tfiat the mother has died and that Sandrine, the daughter, is comatose. Marie becomes involved with Chriss, a spoiled rich kid who owns the club that the girls visit occasionally. Marie sees Chriss as her escape from the poverty she has come to despise. As expected, the affair ends disastrously. Isa in the meantime begins making daily visits to the comatose teenage girl whose apartment she occupies. In the hospital, Isa reads to Sandrine from Sandrine's diary in what seems a futile effort to help her regain consciousness. Then, upon learning of the girl's miraculous recovery, Isa ceases her visits. In contrast to Isa, Marie is the more typical naturalist heroine. In some respects, her story resembles Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Crane's Maggie is a victim of what might be termed the Cinderella myth: tbe culturally imposed fantasy of escaping one's sordid environment through love. Blinded by her "self-destructive romantic illusions" (Pizer 128), Crane's heroine misrecognizes a young man of her own class as the proverbial knight in shining armor. Seduced and abandoned by her lover, she finds herself forced into prostitution, after which she commits suicide. In contrast to the innocent Maggie, Marie is cynical and sophisticated. Early in the film, she and Isa stalk and harass young businessmen in the city's shopping center, an act that seems both a leftist, feminist statement and a parody of the Cinderella myth. In addition. Marie appears to possess a healthy sense of class

43 anger; one of her favorite recreations is busting the taillights of overpriced SUV's. In this respect, Zonca's Dreamlife offers a more disturbing analysis of environmental determinism than does Crane's Maggie. Marie recognizes the Cinderella myth as false consciousness but is controlled by this myth just as effectively as Crane's naive heroine. Having grown up in one of Lille's working class suburbs, Marie left home at the age of 16 because she could not stand her father and has been surviving in the city ever since through a series of menial jobs. Marie, like Wade Whitehouse, has apparently grown up in an abusive family environment. Yet Zonca's film suggests that the male violence his heroine experienced was primarily the result of economic deprivation and not, as in Schrader's Affliction, a product of some inevitable fact of nature. Withdrawn and narcissistic, Marie hates being poor, and because of her family background, she is more susceptible to the cultural message that if one has nothing, then one is nothing. Consequently, Marie is obsessed with attracting a rich suitor such as the nightclub owner Chriss, while recognizing at some level that an affair with the spoiled playboy would simply duplicate the exploitation she has experienced in the workplace. This ambivalence is moreover reflected in the way she dresses. Her shabby clothes are both an affirmation of her class status and a source of constant humiliation. Isa, on the other hand, is indifferent to her equally shabby appearance. At the beginning of the affair, Chriss takes Marie to an expensive hotel. In the following scene, we recognize that for Marie, sex with Chriss is a masochistic experience that gives her no pleasure. Yet it is Marie's indifference that goads the spoiled playboy into continuing the relationship. His goal is to wear down her resistance and in effect make her a willing and grateful accomplice in her own exploitation. Once Marie has deluded herself to the point where she believes she has found someone who will make her happy, Chriss drops her. (Not having the courage to confront Marie, he relays his decision through Isa). Before her disastrous affair with the spoiled playboy, Marie had started a relationship with a member of her own class, a bouncer named Charley who coincidently is employed by Chriss. While Charley is not physically attractive (when they first meet, Marie calls him fat), he is a perceptive and decent human being who gives money to Marie not in exchange for sex but out of a genuine concern for her welfare. Charley is something of an idealized proletarian figure reminiscent of

44 Charles, the long suffering sweetheart of Estelle in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936). After being seduced by the capitalist entrepreneur Batala, Estelle is reunited with Charles and the couple looks forward to a happy life within the collective the workers form in Renoir's film. This type of resolution is, of course, impossible for Marie. No longer able to relate to members of her own class and seeing no escape from her poverty, she jumps to her death out of the apartment window. Isa, on the other hand, is comfortable with members of her own social class as we often see her participating in various instances of class solidarity or mutual respect among the film's characters who exist on the economic margins. Isa is constantly pressing Marie to abandon her obsession with Chriss and spend more time with their bouncer friends, Charley and Fredo. However, Isa's daily visits to the comatose girl mirror Marie's behavior. As Stuart Klawans puts it, she is "disappearing into the imagined life of someone with property" (2). Marie's behavior, however, is motivated by a futile dream of social mobility and a self-loathing that expresses itself through a hatred of her class origins. Isa's immersion in Sanddne's Ufe, on the other hand, is a gesture toward a utopianism in which class differences are dissolved through recognition of a common humanity. Her behavior is wholly altruistic. She acts virtuously with no expectation of reward or, as Iris Murdoch would say, Isa is good for nothing. Thus when Isa hears of Sandrine's miraculous recovery, she simply leaves the hospital. In this respect, Zonca's Dreamlife recalls however faintly such Popular Front films as Grand Illusion and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange in which this Utopian ideal is imaginatively realized within the world of Renoir's films. In describing the style of The Dreamlife of Angels, Amy Taubin writes that the film "is both an unusually well-observed piece of realism and a subjective vision that's filtered through the fantasies, desires, and adrenaline rushes of two young women The fluidity of [Agnes Godard's] framing and her ability to capture urban landscapes meld with [Zonca's] understanding that people, no matter how alienated they are, never exist in isolation" (2). What is striking about Taubin's impression of Dreamlife is the extent to which it echoes scholarly assessments of poetic realism. Recall, for example, Andrew's description of the genre as a "peculiar conjunction of ethnographic curiosity and intimate subjectivity." Nevertheless, one would be hard

45 pressed to demonstrate that the visual style of Dreamlife actually imitates that of the poetic realists. As stated earlier, the poetic realist style is associated with long takes often involving a mobile camera, deep focus photography, and an extensive reliance on establishing and long shots. Eor Andre Bazin, the films of this genre are key examples of the cinema of realism, a cinema that calls upon the spectator to observe and understand. Bazin opposes this type of cinema to mainstream or Hollywood films based on dramatic montage, whereby emotion and meaning are controlled by the filmmaker through the editing or arrangement of images. The Dreamlife of Angels does rely extensively on long takes. Yet in these long takes, Agnes Godard, the film's cinematographer, maintains the characters in tight composition as she follows them with a hand-held camera. In other words, there are far more close-ups and medium shots in Dreamlife than in the typical film, let alone the kind of films that Renoir made during the 193O's.

The fragile solidarity of Isa and Marie in The Dreamlife of Angels

The problem then is that if we accept the validity of Taubin's impression of the film, we need to explain how Zonca is able to create what amounts to poetic realist effects while using very different formal techniques. In mainstream cinema, the close-up is often used to develop emotional intensity, thereby encouraging the spectator to lose him or herself in the dramatic moment. It would follow that an indiscriminate (i.e., non-dramatic) and excessive use of close-ups and medium shots

46 would have the opposite effect. It would encourage the spectator to be mentally acdve rather than passive. Instead of immersing ourselves into the figures on the screen, Zonca's close shots prompt us to observe how his characters are contained or circumscribed by their environment. To her credit, Godard avoids the contemporary fashion of using soft focus backgrounds. In this respect, the style of The Dreamlife of Angels communicates the same kind of message as the establishing and long shots of the poetic realist cinema. Another factor that is relevant here is that the actors in Zonca's film were anonymous or relatively unknown, which would influence the audience to perceive them as ordinary people living through a documentary situation. In the final scene of Zonca's film, we observe Isa beginning a new j o b in a factory manufacturing computer cables. This scene mirrors the sequence at the beginning of the film when Isa begins work sewing the sleeves of blouses in the garment factory. The condidons in the computer plant are better, and Isa demonstrates a natural ability in her new job, in contrast to her incompetence as a seamstress. Yet the job she has taken—she will be spending her time inserting 78 color coded wires into their appropriate slots—gives new meaning to the concept of alienated labor. As Isa begins her job, the camera tracks right to show us the faces of her co-workers, a camera movement that defines her as part of a group of women condemned to meaningless work. Surprisingly, the young woman who appears at the end of the shot turns out to be Sandrine, the now recovered comatose teenager whom Isa had visited in hospital. What can one make of this? Why is someone of her background working at this job? Does her presence signify an instance of solidarity between the working and middle classes? Or, does it emphasize the precariousness of anyone's place in the class structure of contemporary capitalism? Through no fault of her own— her mother was killed in an auto accident—she has been banished from her comfortable pedt bourgeois existence and become part of the marginalized proletariat. The remarkable thing about the ending of Zonca's film is that it is able to convey both of these meanings. On the one hand, Dreamlife presents a realisdc assessment of the insecurity that both the middle and working classes face under the new world order of muldnational capitalism. On the other hand, it offers a glimmer of hope in the struggle against this threat through solidarity among the classes. While this sense of possibility that Zonca's film holds out to us is a far cry from

47 the optimism of the Popular Front era, it is certainly preferable to the message of resignation one finds in Affliction.

Hyperalienated labor in The Dreamlife of Angels

The cable assembly

48 Works Cited Andrew, Dudley. Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film. Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1995. Austin, Guy. Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1996. Banks, Russell. Affliction. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Kaufmann, Stanley. "Accepted Fates. ''New Republic 1 Feb. 1999: 24 (3). EBSCOhost. Klawans, Stuart. "Touched by an Angel." The Nation 22 March 1999: 34 (3). EBSCOhost. Lukacs, Geog. Studies in European Realism. New York: Gossett & Dunlap, 1964. Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1966. Quart, Leonard. "These Are very Uncertain Times: An Interview with Paul Schrader." Cineaste 24A (1998): 12 (6). EBSCOhost. Simon, John. "Small People, Great Pain." National Review 8 March 1999:55 (2). EBSCOhost. Taubin, Amy. "Opposing Forces." Village Voice 6 April 1999: 126 (3). EBSCOhost. Zola, Emile. La Bete humaine. New York: Viking Penguin, 1977.

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