Affliction, the Dreamlife of Angels, and the Naturaust Tradition

"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.

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