The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
BORN AGAIN OOOOOO OOOOOOOO THE SCREEN The images in Robert Altman's 3 Women have a cookie-cutter quality to them, reproducing themselves identically as if stamped out by some mechanical...
...A person like Millie is so pitiful a modern type that making a movie about her is by nature, practically, an effort to bring someone back from the dead...
...Adoption seems their only hope for a child and introduces them to a new batch of "understanding" professionals...
...Evon Millie has her double, in Pinky...
...Indeed, the people themselves seem to be little more than a part of this imagery at first...
...It marks the evolution of a lower form into a higher, into a human being at last...
...they are often aggressively antirealistic as the characters play all the people in an encounter or speak directly to the audience...
...from jokes into small horrors...
...After her suicide attempt, Pinky does, almost literally, come back from the dead...
...He has to resuscitate her the way the ambulance crew does Pinky after she is hauled out of the pool...
...Among the other employees at the geriatric spa where Millie works are a pair of twins so identical that they smooth their hair at precisely the same moment with precisely the same gesture...
...Ashes recounts the attempts of a childless couple to become parents...
...After Millie and Pinky have each had an unconsummated affair with him, Willie has his still-born child...
...Since the play is about losses, the closing in of possibilities, making do in an imperfect world, Anne and Colin finally conceive only to lose the child and, in the process, all possibility of further conception...
...The swan dive she takes into the pool leaves her comatose until after her parents come from Texas to visit her in the hospital...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Indeed, beyond mere evolutionary process, beyond phylogeny, Pinky's rescue from the pool becomes a religious mystery as well...
...The occasion was the opening of Ashes at the Public Theatre in a production that had already played at the Manhattan Theatre Club...
...The emergence of Pinky's new personality at that point is almost like an evolutionary process...
...although Rudkin says in the published script that there is no "thematic significance" to this doubling, surely all the figures function as outsiders to the small core of pain and love that the Hardings represent...
...there are musical jokes, set lyric speeches, philosophic ruminations...
...The bottom of the pool has been covered with bizarre frescoes by Willie, who is a painter...
...Rudkin is not after such easy game...
...the next year saw the American premiere of Ashes at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles...
...Finally, it is the determination of Anne and Colin which stills the comedy in the situation...
...Their deep desire for parenthood stifles the satiric impulse, or at least shunts it to the edge of a play which deals feelingly with two people being dehumanized in the search for a fuller humanity...
...The irony was that the "new voice" had been trying to make itself in the theater since 1960, when A/ore Night Come was produced at Oxford where the 24-year-old Rudkin was working on an M.A...
...Pinky is not only from Texas' and named Mildred like her roommate, but has used Millie's Social Security number, it turns out, on all the forms at work...
...Although his view of nature's medical helpers is not particularly sanguine, he intends them to be characters not caricatures...
...All these keep the tears from rising and yet allow the couple to develop as completely realized characters...
...Beyond merely duplicating each other, Millie and Pinky actually become the same person in the end...
...In order to deal with this non-sequitur and make birth and death follow once more from each other, you have only to see the exchange of personalities between Millie and Pinky as a process of being born again, of coming back from the dead...
...Every time she gets in her car, for instance, Millie (Shelly Duvall) closes the door on a little corner of her dress which protrudes outside...
...Thus Pinky's emergence from the pool seems almost an emergence of life itself from some primeval swamp, some ocean of prehistory...
...Colin goes back to a funeral in Northern Ireland, finds his country moving toward a destruction that appalls him and discovers that he is no Ulsterman in their eyes, cut off fro~-n a line of inheritance just when he cannot start a line of his own...
...Funny as this detail is the first time it occurs, it becomes almost annoying when we see it over and over again...
...But it also ceases to be just a sight-gag that's being worked to death and becomes something more like a fact of life...
...The spa becomes a great ark containing everyone within it in pairs and floating on the deluge of the mineral springs that bubble up beneath it...
...The night that Pinky steps out of their apartment to throw herself in the swimming pool and commit suicide, she catches her housecoat in the front door iust the way Millie is always catching her dress in the car...
...It is not unusual for an English playwright to be unknown in this country (v...
...ASHES AND AFTER 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE STAGE "An Arresting New Voice from Britain...
...This repetition, we realize, is in the very nature of the world where Millie lives--a world of package foods, manufactured expectations and ready-made tastes...
...Millie's diary, in which Pinky snoops early in the film, seems later to have been taken over by Pinky herself...
...3 Women begins with people who are dying of old age, the people at the geriatric spa, and ends with a birth...
...The danger at this point is that the comedy could be replaced by sentimentality, but Rudkin avoids that trap too-- largely by means of the technical devices he uses...
...Much of the early part of the play shows Anne and Colin Harding following the often conflicting advice of a doctor, a semenologist and a gynecological surgeon...
...The single person Millie and Pinky become is in fact the third woman referred to in the title, Willie (Janis Rule), the wife of the man who owns the apartment where the girls live...
...Charles Wood, David Pinner), but Rudkin was still so uneasy a presence on the English theatrical scene that he could write in Contemporary Dramatists (1973), "Ten years in the writing business, and I still find no outlet for what gifts I have...
...In her work reptilean preterhuman beings writhe in fury...
...All the characters other than Anne and Colin are played by one actor and one actress...
...Rudkin can be a difficult playwright, as his fascinating radio play Cries trom Casement as His Bones Are Brought to Dublin (1973) indicates, and he is never a congenial one as, say, Tom Stoppard and Simon Gray are, because-his subject matter tends to be abrasive...
...There are signs all along that there is really only one of them...
...Their small pomposities, their clumsy kindnesses, the inevitable distance between their income-producing professions and the pain of the Hardings turn well-meaning lines like "Well then, why aren't we conceiving...
...The repetitions that kill the joke make us feel sharply as well the deadness of Millie's whole existence, its reduction of life to something no longer even organic...
...There is a touch of overstatement in the lament since Rudkin has had more than a dozen productions on stage or in television since he began writing, although only a few of his plays have been published...
...It re-enacts the myth of baptism...
...He wants to overcome our instinctive contempt for her, to individualize her and make us take her seriously...
...It completes Airman's re-creation of the trinity Commonweal: 369 in the name of the Mother (M//lie), the Daughter (Pinky) and the Holy Ghost (Willie...
...There are ashes and ashes...
...Everyone else in the film has an identical twin in some other character too...
...BORN AGAIN OOOOOO OOOOOOOO THE SCREEN The images in Robert Altman's 3 Women have a cookie-cutter quality to them, reproducing themselves identically as if stamped out by some mechanical process...
...Altman's films have often dealt in stereotypes before, and they have just as often been content to leave it at that, ending with characters still the same mere caricatures they were at the beginning...
...The best friend of a MiddleEastern girl employed at the spa is the only other nonEuropean working there...
...The scenes are brief although they get longer as they play goes on--usually ending in blackout...
...Then he himself dies mysteriously, and the three women move in together...
...The night they arrive, Millie catches this aging couple making love at the apartment where she puts them up, and the next morning Pinky is born again at the hospital, coming out of the coma at last with a completely new personality...
...As we come to the end of the play, we and they learn that they have been turned down by the adoption officials, that "Laughter of children in our house, not for us...
...The phrase was headline on Mel Gussow's very good interview with David Rudkin in the January 23 New York Times...
...Both the chronicle of failure and the social-political extension ot~ the infertility 10 June 1977:370...
...Dignity," snaps Anne as she assumes the dog's position that the semenologist thinks may aid conception...
...Reading a few passages out of it makes Millie now the snooper...
...The unshaven young doctor who runs the spa has his counterpart in an unshaven old man who turns up as the father of Millie's roommate Pinky (Sissy Spacek...
...To accomplish this he really does have to breathe life into her somehow...
...Resuscitate is the right term for it too, for what finally opposes all the imagery of mechanisms in Altman's film is an imagery of water...
...Pinky's twin in this as in everything else, Millie is also born again, at least figuratively, in 3 Women...
...These three women get life backwards just as all Altman characters do---as do those in Nashville, for example, which begins with a recuperation and ends with an injury...
...At the beginning Millie and Pinky descend into the waters of the spa along with the dying old people in their care, and later when Pinky is rescued from the swimming pool, both women, in effect, emerge from the water again...
...Before the audience and the characters learn the results of the application for adoption, the play opens out, the personal begins to be social...
...Much of the humor comes directly from Colin and Anne, self-defensive gestures that help protect them from the processes which reduce them to laboratory specimens, machines, animals...
...It took fifteen years for A/ore Night Come to make it to the United States, a production at Long Wharf in New Haven in 1975...
...But this time, having begun with a character whose hopes and values are so trite, so mass-produced, they are scarcely human at all, Altman wants to transform her by the end...
...Since many of the lines at this point are funny, it would be a simple matter to convert Ashes into an acid satire on the methods and results of scientific sexologists...
...Anne, newly aware of the natural ruin around her, of fellow Englishmen (human beings) who want to get theirs now and let the future go hang, recounts a devastating dream which ends with the ambiguous "Take oH your dead...
...Nowmwith the successful revival of A/ore Night Come at the Royal Shakespeare in 1974 and the reception of Ashes in this countrymhe stands a chance of escaping the dream he reported in Contemporary Dramatists in which, at the end of a party in his honor, he found him~lf clearing up the dirty dishes...
...Amen...
...They too seem to have been mechanically reproduced...
...Whatever is...
Vol. 104 • June 1977 • No. 12
