SEX IN THE HEAD

...Art is at the eye of every turbulence...

...At this point let me offer a single paradoxical remark about the nature of improvisation: generally, it makes an actor sound like a real person at his worst, that is, when he is measuring every word to determine whether it is what a real person might say...

...All the more reason, then, to hold the man strictly accountable to his own terms of discourse, and, for once in his life, take his thinking solemnly enough to confute it...

...For this quality, whatever its name, is what deprives the characters of their peculiarly human dignity, drags them down—a congenial critic would say "restores" them—to a level of animal subsistence, sets them to fornicating, and cries out to the audience, "This is what you are and what you must be...

...Late in Carlyle's career, Henry James, Sr., complained of him that he had grown to be "a palpable nuisance...

...Yet the send-up is crude, it gets rapidly too extreme, and besides, the given structure of Last Tango calls for a seriousness toward Jeanne comparable to the attitude taken toward Paul: at the very least, a serious portrayal of her superficiality...

...The phone rings, a wrong number in this empty place, but Paul and Jeanne hang onto the extensions and listen for the sounds of their breathing...

...In any event I want to make my meaning plain and define hatred by its opposite...

...Or is it Deep Throat...

...But a larger issue is at hand...

...Paul stands under a bridge and shuts his ears as a train passes overhead, Jeanne does a jump-rope step over the broom of a street sweeper...

...Is it a film by Bernardo Bertolucci or a private catharsis of, by, and for Marlon Brando...

...I would say that Bernardo Bertolucci, the director of Last Tango, falls somewhere between these poles of genius and intolerable carry-on: much, but not all, of what jangles in his latest film was calculated for effect...

...Mailer has already confessed that "There is a monumental abstractedness about hard core...

...In this, in his stature as a commentator on the cultural issues of the day, in his brilliance and arrogance and half-willed craziness, and in the unstable ratio throughout his work of difficult sense to pernicious nonsense, he most nearly resembles Thomas Carlyle...

...I will venture that the parallel drawn between this movie and The Rite of Spring may be attributed to the syncopated triplets of the theme, mixing, in the mind of the enthusiast, with memories of a vaguely similar effect in Stravinsky...

...Yet his theology has about it something of the contrived...

...Brando has certainly improvised in the past, with far more grace than in Last Tango, but he is our most powerful actor because he puts the toughest fiber of tension into lines that were there before him...

...Pornography can make no such claim...

...Apparently, Mailer feels sure that his movies are at any rate more likely to interest a discerning public than the average Hollywood fare, whereas in truth his product differs from Hollywood's mainly in being more shoddily put together and less diverting...

...For Bertolucci has constructed his movie, as it were, on an axiom...

...Works of art in history, like people in the world, are quite removed from Mailer's conception of them, and not because they are simpler than he supposes but because they are subtler...

...True, Brando is sometimes able to write good period lines from the fifties in his own head...

...But if by freedom one means a capacity for sustaining affection for people who will deliver no reward, for living and acting with decency and self-command, for entering into sex as something more than a randomly roving id, for taking part in all those rich and various activities which require for their satisfaction a degree of consistent self-knowledge, then on this calculus only the sensible man can ever be free...

...No names, Paul will insist, they can know nothing of each other's lives...

...in the cinema, Renoir, Truffaut, Bergman...

...Once, creeping on all fours into the apartment, like a cat, Jeanne is caught in mid-stride by the sound of conga drums and continues as if buoyed up by their pulse...

...There is a touching scene where Brando meets his wife's lover, a grim little intellectual who worries about physical fitness, and they are both dressed in the same bathrobe, and Brando wonders what she could ever have seen in him...

...For the sex has been simulated, whereas "Brando's real cock up Schneider's SEX IN THE HEAD real vagina would have brought the history of film one huge march closer to the ultimate experience it has promised since its inception (which is to re-embody life) ." Again, in this spirit, he remarks that Last Tango had great possibilities because it dealt with the grandest of subjects...

...Yet I think we must allow that his impurity derives from the circumstance that Mailer does not, when all is said, agree with Nietzsche or Lawrence in rejecting out of hand the life of society: that his name, at this writing, continues to shine from the masthead of a quarterly socialist journal testifies to his own belief that he is a reformer, perhaps in some sense a revolutionary, but not a wholly destructive force in his intended relation to society...

...After the great first act they fall apart panting, and later, downstairs, Paul indicates that they will have occasion to meet again...

...My mother was—very poetic, and also a drunk...

...Still, when we have allowed for the rallying cries which an ambitious and somewhat botched piece of work may be expected to attract, what accounts for the fervor of our public acceptance of Last Tango...

...The mother-in-law is a mope-about hysteric of the most fulsome variety, and we recognize her from many Hollywood vehicles: the scene between her and Marlon Brando is among the poorest in the film...

...Or, for that matter, to Mailer...

...All the same, Last Tango is impressive in a number of respects...

...But also shrewd after the ways of her class: when Paul finally overstays his welcome and grows importunate, she murders him as an ordinary rapist, knowing there is no possible motive, hence no crime...

...Two people fucking on a screen are simply an inferior version of two people fucking...

...Jean-Pierre Leaud has a part similar to his own in, say, Masculine Feminine, only Bertolucci makes him visibly bloated with the secret narcissism of the Godard adolescent...

...I must add that we all know it to be dehumanizing...

...Last Tango in Paris is an expressionist film in the line of Fritz Lang, Jean-Luc Godard, and Paddy Chayefsky...

...To the critic who insists that movies are a radically new medium, hence demand a less severe regimen than whatever forms have preceded them, we can reply: clear your mind of cant...

...I must say that I have never been able to believe it, which is to admit equally: I have never been able to believe that he believes it...

...I intend to argue against Mailer, and shall do so on the following basis: he is an irrationalist but an impure one...

...There is Brando weeping at his wife's bier, cursing and then asking forgiveness, one of the two or three strongest moments in his career...

...However, to speak of pornography in so limited a context is to misread Mailer's own commitment to it—for he imagines working a change on the base metal of skin-flicks to produce some higher luminous alloy—and at the same time to underestimate his importance in areas of our public existence where pornography figures only as one symptom among others...

...Is it Chaplin Mailer speaks of, or Fellini...

...Paul is the ostensible but Jeanne the true believer in this ideology, and when Paul violates its law and wants to isolate sex in a single room no longer, she regards the offense as punishable by death...

...Which movies, in particular, have sealed the promise that the ultimate experience of cinema is to reembody life...

...The "uterine colors" of the apartment, much publicized by the director, leave no one guessing about how far in we are symbolically meant to go...

...For Mailer has offered his own improvisational films for us to brood on, and we have merely to ask: why are they so bad...

...But these are exceptions to the rule...

...Enough so that he can have us agonizing over a tongue-tied Brando who tirelessly expounds the philosophy that nothing matters except what happens "in here...

...But of those other professionals he can yet say that they are better qualified to come alive in movies on their own than with the help of a writer or a director: "Are they not more likely to contain instinctive knowledge in their ambulating meat...

...I t is altogether fitting that the man who has contributed more than anyone else to the making of this climate, Norman Mailer, should have designed a lengthy apology for Last Tango and then buttressed his appreciation with a criticism of the movie for not going far enough...

...Last Tango is positively doting in its cruelty toward the people it depicts, and, in forcing his tender hatred beyond God's, Bertolucci has eschewed the appropriate middle distance of the artist...

...Pleased and a little bewildered by her American who is un peu bizarre, Jeanne is naive, smirky, and cute...

...What we, the audience, learn of their lives outside the apartment is interlarded with the sexual episodes, which play at high temperature and involve perversions yet are visually never shocking...

...How far does Bertolucci himself believe in his chosen axiom...

...Now this seems to me a remarkable assumption...

...Life may be split into two components: the times when we are intimately involved with the flesh of another person, and when we are not...

...When Paul is murdered, he walks out onto a balcony overlooking the city, and the view is a spiritless one, woven of mottled beiges and grays, the facades of anonymous buildings, as the camera fixes upon Paul's last sight on earth before marking the spot where his body lies fallen...

...Myself, I would feel disqualified from speaking of any film from such a premise, and I am accordingly happy to find that there are others who feel differently...

...Thus, while a good many of his favorite notions tend toward the inaccessibly private, and do not ask to be approved by other men, they are still couched in a language rational men speak...

...But then his early inventions in English, as in the "no names" sequence, are equally poor...

...How would it become any the less abstract when the organ we happened to be watching belonged to Brando...

...As they do...

...I should like to be convinced that in pursuing a Chayefskian earnestness—the dialogue gives plenty of support to this apparent conceit— Bertolucci has deserted his muse, that it will be a temporary lapse, that the symphonically haunted visual surfaces and verbal echoes of The Conformist still represent his best vein...

...A director like Godard can make good movies with a considerable element of improvisation, but then, he has lived a lifetime with his craft—just as Mailer, if he should choose on occasion not to rewrite, has lived with his...

...The tango itself is a set piece of a kind that Bertolucci has, of course, composed often in the past, though to realize this makes it no less marvelous too see: the tango dancers with their frozen gestures, and Brando, since this is a movie about inventing new gestures, baring his ass and grunting derision...

...No doubt there is a religious element in Mailer's thinking, and to the extent that there is my questions are unfair...

...There is in most of his writing an implied appeal to principles that can be commonly agreed on...

...And it remains a question whether we can ever know as much about two people from watching the fluids that pass between them as we can learn from hearing them exchange words now and then...

...I cannot see how Last Tango would be thought pornography, in the sense by which it declares itself through arousing the spectator...

...We could wish these little lessons were gratuitous...

...His God is by now, as one sees from crossexamining a single word, utterly bound up with his airiest rhetoric...

...Perhaps it would be best for reviewers not to mix media any more than is necessary...

...surely, they are among the few artists whom everyone cares about...

...Its urgencies are quite narrow, they have to do with sex, and the tone of righteousness with which they are accepted, or acquiesced in, may fairly prompt one to speak of decadence...

...In some part the answer is that Mailer is without visual sense, that he and his supporting actors seem to have only one mood (the histrionic), that his movies place altogether too low a value on coherence...

...The situation is disheartening...

...As, with Brando in Last Tango, the face is infinitely more eloquent than the words...

...Those kindly and influential critics who struck the note of unfettered praise were speaking, surely, in deference to its promise rather than its performance, and though they are to be commended as, in some obscure way, friends of the art, the continuing success of Chayefsky ought to be a warning that generosity of this order can go too far...

...But it holds out no transcendence beyond itself...

...There are, in short, interludes that are loving, direct, artistically worthy...

...About this aspect of Last Tango the reviewers have not noticed the obvious, that it is a parody of Godard, and a parody gone wildly out of control...

...DAVID BROMWICH If Mailer were to transform himself, like these figures, into a thoroughgoing irrationalist, he would not make himself a better novelist...

...The Deer Park and An American Dream are, in fact, indirect source material for Last Tango, but what these works share is not, strictly regarded, the pornographic imagination...

...Is it any accident therefore that those scenes involving the more gentle and ungenital side of life for Jeanne and Paul utterly fail to satisfy...

...Expressionism, after all, seeks to distort...

...To much of what happens in the apartment our response is complex—the gallows humor, the recounting of life stories without names ("You've been had, beh-bee," says Jeanne, "I don't want to hear anything about your past"), Jeanne's infatuation with Paul which is also Maria Schneider's excitement about working with Brando: all this is bound to be winning—yet here again it is the failure of the whole and not the triumph of a few moments that bears thinking about...

...Paul walks over to Jeanne, asks if she will take the apartment for herself, warns her she had better think fast, then sweeps her off her feet in the classic over-the-threshold pose, sets her delicately against the wall, and most indelicately mounts her...

...The film as we have it is certainly very far from being a masterpiece or a breakthrough...

...It may be that Bertolucci has closer affinities with an author like Montherlant...

...In the meantime, wth Paul buggering Jeanne, Jeanne manually buggering Paul, Paul watching Jeanne masturbate herself when he is too surly to assist, the film has put no orifice out of bounds in its dogged insistence that this is how a man and a woman play out the passions of their deepest selves...

...Certainly, Last Tango is his weakest film to date, for in this instance his abdication of feeling is also an abdication of intelligence...

...It explores and, while appearing to document, exploits our divided conscience about sex...

...The latter part of Mailer's own essay is given over to a defense of improvisation, which, like sex, he wants to see establish itself deeper in movies than it has done in Last Tango...

...Contemplate it as you can and learn from it, for here is life, here is destiny...

...If Brando's gone through all this, then we can go through it with him"—or words to that effect—is the line I remember one reviewer as taking...

...As an event which brings into conjunction the personalities of Marlon Brando and Norman Mailer, the excitement over Last Tango has a special pathos...

...To the distinctive modern malaise which Professor Marcuse once termed "repressive desublimation" Mailer has lent his theoretical support, and he has done so by regularly violating the whole man in favor of the—if one may employ a helpful mixed metaphor—diviningrod man...

...Mailer has often professed to believe in the devil, but, though he has earned every 428 right to be called an inverter of values, he is himself less formidable than the Fallen Prince for this reason: he does not yet comprehend how serious his own plight has become for himself and for others...

...As for the look of the film, it is dominated by brassy yellows and browns, a fine metaphor for the physical opulence and metaphysical dreariness of this particular affair...

...but there can be no doubt as to its centrality in the film...

...Yet one is disagreeably conscious in both instances of the chronic lack of an enabling means for putting the energy into action...

...Of the sins an artist can commit, hatred of his own characters is surely among the least pardonable...

...No...

...There were portents of this flaw in Bertolucci throughout The Conformmist and in parts of Spider's Stratagem, and they have now taken on their full significance: only a time like ours, in which the ideology of sex looms so large, could have mistaken the quality for something else— daring, perhaps...

...Art has a special context: it necessarily enforces a cerSEX IN THE HEAD tain detachment...

...To compound the mystification, by deriving an aesthetics of sex from Last Tango, is to mistake the Slough of Despond for the Celestial Railroad...

...The cynicism about sex in Last Tango is the inverse but still the near neighbor of the sentimentality about love that suffused Bertolucci's first film, Before the Revolution: and of sentimentality I take J. D. Salinger's useful definition that it means to show more tenderness toward a thing than God shows...

...Inseparable from its smallness of spirit is the degree to which, though ambiguously, Last Tango is a purveyor of an ideology of sex...

...How would Mailer feel about a young writer who, having settled down to the typewriter from some less august trade, cried out that he had discovered the experience of which writing over the centuries had given only a dim promise, that experience being the profound visionary dazzle that comes of an abstention from all revision...

...The refracting lens, throughout Lang's German period and in Godard through the first half of Weekend, is altogether under control...

...Two people are going to fuck in a room until they arrive at a transcendent recognition or some death of themselves...

...It is that art ought to be neither better nor worse than life: art is separate but always equal...

...424 As a result of this hedging we get the merest cipher for one half of the relationship...

...Maybe one ought to call it soullessness...

...Tough...

...Discipline has not ceased to SEX IN THE HEAD be the working habit of art...

...If we make ourselves aware of the dichotomy and observe how the two divisions of our existence reflect on one another, we will have discovered something profound...

...Yet the film is curiously doctrinaire in its advocacy of a view which, if consistently adopted, would elevate pornography to the status of a very high form of art indeed...

...We can put a question in response...

...To construct an aesthetics of performance around this melancholy fact is to make a sublime necessity out of failure...

...To be as abrupt as possible: the movie has no heart...

...Genitals tugging at each other in the void thus turn into the sum of our experience...

...Yet Mailer is one of those who pretend, in Emerson's lovely phrase, to publish in the parlor the secrets of the laboratory...

...If he of all others has been vouchsafed this treasure, must not the upshot be vital...

...Paul and Jeanne are footloose in Paris: an American expatriate of about fifty, familiar in type as the outcast writer or actor, and a smart native bourgeoise, quick with the arrogance of youth but still on friendly terms with Maman...

...Much of the improvisational acting in Last Tango involves the spectacle of Brando defending his practice of improvisational sex, but there are also, of course, vignettes of the practice itself, including the notorious line about the farts of a dying pig together with Brando's Maileresque elucidation of the anality of social conventions...

...About sex isolated from life as about sex isolated from art, there is always and only that monumental abstractedness...

...After hearing him out, we are obliged to reaffirm the distinctions he wants to obscure...

...But it is, alas, the mindlessness of Last Tango that has provoked the exaggerated DAVID BROMWICH critical reaction on both sides...

...Incidentally, it sounds to an untrained ear as if Brando were improvising some of the dialogue in French...

...This does not mean that it is dispassionate...

...The music, the photography, the music- and film-editing have a highly individual power, a found rythm, which is very rare in movies, and if one did not have the passionately committed mindlessness of the scenario one might indeed suppose it was a great film...

...Paul's wife has just taken her life and he is in ambivalent mourning: she has had at least one infidelity, has been loved and hated...

...Despite his pose of reverentially lifting the veil, Mailer is the most reductive of psychologists...

...Mailer's essay is entitled "A Transit to Narcissus"—the significance of this eludes me—it appeared in the New York Review of Books, May 17, 1973, and it comes with illustrations: a caricature of Brando, and then two quasi-antique etchings that depict, in turn, a man and a women undressing and a young maidservant looking through the peephole of master's door...

...And in what sense does Mailer use the word "re-embody...

...I have said that the assumption seems to me remarkable...

...Examples, in the novel, would be Tolstoy, Dickens, Faulkner...

...But he has found out the theory of film...

...But on the more prosaic ground that belongs to art offered up to public scrutiny, Last Tango is guilty of a pervasive bad faith...

...To admit this at the outset is to minimize any risk of understanding the phenomenon too quickly...

...There must be no priests at the funeral, he tells his French mother-inlaw, since priests are not respecters of suicides...

...It would be ungracious to request a more detailed account, but having committed myself this far I cannot resist the temptation...

...To what omega point of the divine mystery was he than made privy...

...I can think of no more terrible portrait of an unfree soul than that long, depressing, and indigestible Victorian document, My Secret Life, whose author is without a name...

...q...

...They meet in an apartment they are both looking to rent, and they circle each other slowly, warily, like jungle beasts savoring the scent of an encounter...

...Always, with Mailer, the idea of a given performance is more impressive than what is performed...

...The film poses many questions and there are those who will want to think it poses them honestly...

...There is no need to pursue this any further...

...Possibly the justification for this comes in An American Dream when a voice representing the hero's conscience-cum-libido says to him, "The sensible are never free...

...These set the tone...

...When Paul and Jeanne first slam together and fall to clawing each other, we are shut out from their experience...

...In case anybody should miss the joke, Jeanne delivers a monologue straight into the camera about her racist peasant housekeeper, her imperialist father, the barnyard animals of her childhood, to serve as a reminder that one has grown used to such things in La Chinoise and elsewhere...

...What is lost in fidelity to fact is gained in the imaginative truth of the form: or so we are asked to believe...

...When I reembody something, do I make a faithful rendering of it according to my own imaginative need, or do I make a simulacrum...

...The jazz score is by Gato Barbieri, and it sets a hyped-up continuity theme against the romantic pastiche of the tango: the sound begs comparison with Herbie Hancock's jazz compositions for Blow-Up—rather a minimal score, in contrast with Last Tango's—and I think gains in the comparison...

...Let us stop for a moment and, at the risk of seeming overly literal, ask some questions...

...But the consensus just now, especially among intellectuals, is a peculiar one...

...The truth is that sex depends on conditions quite apart from the relative charm of this or that organ...

...Perhaps we are to ponder some essence-of-movie exclusive of all the movies yet made...

...A second counterpoint in the movie is Jeanne's love affair with and impending marriage to an aspiring film-maker...

...One may feel this way about Mailer and yet understand that his presence, like Carlyle's in his time and place, seems to be a mixed blessing that is entirely necessary to our culture...

...The same goes for actors...

...Are not movies rather a form of art concerned to give a picture of life...

...After a survey of the audience in whose company he saw Last Tango, the men with "wife-swapping mustaches" and so forth, Mailer intimates that his initial pleasure at the sex in this movie was followed by disappointment...

...How incalculably they have been helped and hurt by each other's existence...

...Rather, it is the bold and steady avowal that the sexual arena is our great domain of conquest, of marvelous victory and ignominious defeat, the proving ground for whatever may be dear to us which quite universally, as in Last Tango, splits life into sex and not-sex and which has a bearing on everything around it of base to superstructure...

...It is at times like these that real people give the impression of being bad actors...

...because to meditate the feel of a living thing takes more time than a split second while the cameras are running...

...One stricture, in my opinion, takes care of the entire world of pornography...

...On the other hand, Chayefsky is an expressionist by default, a naturalist bent out of shape, and beyond redemption by the facts...

...The tragic conclusion of Last Tango seems to say that all was not well—nor can it ever be?—in this claustrophobic paradise, yet the weight of nonsense that has gone before is just too much for one turn of the plot to cancel out...

...For it is he and not Brando who publicly states his conviction that we can fuck ourselves into transcendence...

...There are artists who do not become as evil as their subject, who will not compromise themselves on this essential matter of stance...

...He would merely have become a more honest man...

...What, in the last analysis, are we being asked to judge in Last Tango...

...The climate of opinion being what it is, however, he finds himself praised for all that is meretricious in Last Tango and ignored for the rest...

...Lang and Godard belong to the small group of commanding figures in the history of cinema precisely because they knew the character of their enterprise...

...My father was a drunk, a whorefucker, barfighter—supermasculine...

...Read Lawrence's literary criticism, read Nietzsche's music criticism, and you will find no such appeal...

...The man, the woman, the time, the place, the juncture in life, not only chronologically but also temperamentally, all of these things make a difference, and you are never going to succeed in keeping them out of the bedroom unless you are willing to become an emotional cripple beforehand...

...The final turn of the screw, if I may say so, is the narrative twist that sets Brando as a foil against Leaud, with the implication that Brando in sex is a more resourceful improviser, a better artist, than this Godardian di 426 lettante could hope to be...

...It is concerned with life and the things of life...

...How strangely their lives seem to have run parallel, with the unjustly low reputation of one decade making way for the fashionable applause of the next...

...Against the ethic which identifies freedom with a full possession of oneself, Mailer and Bertolucci make their case most roundly in pleading the virtues of improvisation...

...We know that the consensus of any age gets what it wants and, when confronted with something that looks a bit like what it wants, dutifully hacks off what remains as excess...

...Of Brando Mailer asserts: "If he has been our first actor for decades, it is because he has given us, from the season he arrived in Streetcar, a greater sense DAVID BROMWICH of improvisation out of the lines of a script than any other actor...

...Since he has, presumably, known transcendence once in a while, though not without the corresponding times when he knew "some death" of himself, what can Mailer reveal to us about the promised land of which fucking-as-such afforded a glimpse...

...I will register my own sense that they are two of the great American geniuses...