BIRTH OF A MYTH: Ondaatje's Use of History as a Backdrop for Fiction

THE BIRTH OF A MYTH:
Michael Ondaatje’s Use of History
As a Backdrop for Fiction
(Lit 336: Lyric and Narrative, History and Imagination in Contemporary Literature)

Myth (n) - a traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural
beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type in the worldview
of a people, as by explaining aspects of the natural world or delineating the
psychology, customs, or ideals of society.

Michael Ondaatje has a fondness for taking real characters or real historical events and creating fiction around them. In virtually every one of his books, he has used a real event or a real person, then taken what is known and constructing a world that makes that historical figure or event seem almost surreal and larger than life. In one book, Running in the Family, the figures he elevates are his own family and the world they inhabit in Ceylon. In the other, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Ondaatje takes an historical figure about which little is known, and capitalizes on Billy the Kid’s already-mythic prestige in order to tell Billy’s own story.

In Running in the Family, Ondaatje uses family anecdotes told to him by relatives and friends of the family, blended with his own recollections and discoveries, and his poetry, as a way of creating his family's history. It is meant to be a memoir of Ondaatje's family and their days in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) when his parents were young and his grandparents were still alive. His primary sources of information are his family and friends of the family, who have vivid recollections of the past – some of which may or may not be true. The verity of the stories is of only minor consequence to Ondaatje. He treats all the stories with the same respect – as if each one is the teller’s own truth, and that’s good enough for him. It makes for a more varied and interesting history, though perhaps not truly “historical” in nature. One of his aunts takes Ondaatje and his sister on a tour of the island, to places he hasn't seen since his childhood, before he was sent to England as a boy. Until then, Ondaatje admits, his memories are in bits and pieces. Stories of his father's misspent youth, his grandmother's eccentricities and of her death, all come together with relatives filling in the spaces.

Ondaatje weaves the tale of his family and their lives together using narrative prose and family pictures, some of which he never fully identifies. Each chapter moves from one memory to another, reminiscent of how family anecdotes are told, with one story inspiring another memory, which turns into another story, and on and on, until the bulk of the story gets told.

The book is a collective memory, blended with Ondaatje's memories melding with what his sister recalls, and the tales their aunt tells them. Rather than narrow the focus to factual information, Ondaatje delivers the revelations in a way that most family histories exist. Once family history gets blended into anecdote, the figures in the story become mythic. In every family anecdote, there are heroes and fools, saints and mini-gods, both in and outside of the family. Ondaatje’s is no different. He begins the book with a dream he has, one that propels him to travel from Canada back to the land of his birth and early childhood. Fantastic visions from his dream bleed into reality as, for the first time as an adult, he finds himself in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to explore his family and their history.

He moves into the big lie his father told as a youth, where his father pretended for nearly three years that he was attending Queen’s College at Oxford University in England, when in actuality, he was spending his father’s money on living the life of a bon vivant. As Ondaatje tells it, when his father elaborate deception is uncovered, and he is confronted by his family, Mervin Ondaatje’s way out of the mess is to go out to dinner that very night and become engaged to a young girl from a wealthy, prominent family. Already, we know that the Ondaatje family, as depicted in the book, has a fairly unusual way of dealing with conflict and dissent. We know we’re in for a fun ride, as long as we’re willing to go his way and suspend disbelief.

Interestingly, though Ondaatje tells these stories from a personal perspective, there is a part of him that remains unattached and apart from it. Some of that is understandable, as much of the history took place before he was born, or outside of his presence. He relates these stories without injecting himself much at all, other than to occasional give a first-hand accounting of something he himself experienced.

Whether the distance is intentional, in order to give him the freedom of choosing any voice he needs to at any point in the story, or subconscious, as a guard against remembering painful memories, is not altogether clear. However, his observational stance allows Ondaatje to tell some of the most harrowing stories of his youth – the loss of relatives, his parents’ checkered romance and eventual divorce, his father’s descent into alcoholism – with a sort of cool, calm collectedness that lets the reader experience the emotion.

These painful memories do more to tell us about the Ondaatje family than anything he could write. In one chapter, called Dialogues, he steps out of the way and lets the tellers tell. These stories consist solely of people’s personal recollections of Ondaatje’s father. One of his siblings relates the story of a near-fatal car accident, caused by Mervin’s drunkenness:

Once he nearly killed us. Not you. But the three older children. He
was driving the Ford and he was drunk and taking the corners with great swerves
and you know those up-country roads. We began by cheering, but soon we
were terrified. Yelling at him to stop. Finally, on one corner he
almost went off the cliff, he almost went off the cliff. Two wheels had
gone over the edge and the car hung there caught on the axle… We were in the
backseat and once we calmed down, we looked in the front seat and saw that Daddy was asleep. He had passed out. But to us he was asleep, and that
seemed much worse. Much too casual. (“Family”, 173)

He blends several types of genres – narrative, family recollections, passages of elaborate prose, and poetry – to tell the story of his family in a larger-than-life, mythical way. Ondaatje’s family may be no more eccentric or unusual than the next person’s. Almost everyone can point to a Lalla in their family tree – the person who only follows rules she makes, who shuns social constraints and lives according to her own agenda – and most people can point to a Mervin or two – someone who’s life was once so promising, but who fell victim to a hunger or an addiction over which they were powerless. What Ondaatje chooses to tell, and the way he tells it, with fluid, evocative language, unedited recollections, and even his own poetry, builds a fantastic world of odd, passionate, emotional people that become irresistible in his surroundings.

At the same time he tells us the history of the Ondaatje family in Ceylon, he is also telling us the story of Ceylon and the cultural and social battle that was being waged between Europeans and the Sinhalese. Ondaatje does this incredibly subtly, almost interstitially, by using quotes from prestigious British writers – Edward Lear, Paul Bowles, D.H. Lawrence – to illustrate the arrogance and condescension with which most Europeans treated Ceylon and its people. He calls them “Karapothas” – which he has earlier described as a large, unpleasant monitor lizard the size of a crocodile, which are generally viewed as smelly, harmful and something to be avoided by the native population of Ceylon.

Ondaatje uses subtle contrast to discount the harsh words of foreigners:

"The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt the least musical people in the
world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line
or rhythm.” – Paul Bowles (“Family”,76)

Immediately, Ondaatje counters this statement with his poem entitled “Sweet Like A Crow”:

Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed through a glass tube
Like someone has just trod on a peacock
Like wind howling in a coconut…(Family, 76)

This is how Ondaatje tells us the reality of what life was like as a European colony, at the mercy of people who had little respect or regard for Ceylon, as experienced by the Sinhalese themselves.

By contrast, in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Ondaatje has no source of information on his subject. Unlike Ondaatje’s family, Billy the Kid comes with his mythology “factory-installed”. Though there is very little factual information about Henry McCarty, alias William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, two pictures have been drawn of him in history. He was either a cowardly thug with extraordinarily poor impulse control, or he was a dashing hero figure who represented the last vestiges of the Outlaw West, depending on which camp you side with. Ondaatje prefers the latter characterization, and he uses fictional correspondence and newspaper interviews, together with poetry from or about Billy to give Billy a voice that tells the story as Ondaatje sees it. He also writes some essays from the perspective of others – Angela Dickinson, Billy's prostitute lover, Pat Garrett, his assassin, etc. -- to further fill in the blanks, and to contrast the difference between how Billy sees himself in the world, and how the world sees Billy.

Billy’s “collected works” not only reflect the story of Billy the Kid, but of those who figured prominently in his life, such as Sally Chisum, Paulette Maxwell and Garrett.

The actual history of Billy the Kid, and some of the best known mythology that encases him, become a framework from which Ondaatje can hang his version of Billy's story. Who he slept with, who he rode with, who he robbed, who he killed, and why -- all of these known facts become pegs that support the weight of Ondaatje's story of Billy.

Ondaatje's poetry, set between his narratives, gives the events in Billy's life an ornate, grandiose feeling to them. Yet, oddly, the more Ondaatje creates the florid embellishments of Billy’s life, and the more mythical he seems to be, the more human is seems as well. Billy is no longer just a cardboard cut-out, black-and-white, good-or-evil symbol. Ondaatje raises him to mythic proportions, but imbues him with the complexity and ambiguity of a mortal human being.

In Ondaatje’s story, Billy is at once a brutal man, capable of killing with impunity if threatened with capture or harm, but also a dapper, vain youth, concerned with his physical appearance, eager to charm the ladies. In fact, the women who know and love Billy describe a different person, even from the person Billy himself presents.

It’s Paulette Maxwell, one of the many women in his life, who expresses her feelings on the most famous photo known of Billy, where he appears disheveled and unkempt, leaning on his rifle.

In 1880, a traveling photographer came through Fort Sumner. Billy posed
standing in the street near old Beaver Smith’s saloon. The picture makes
him rough and uncouth. The expression of his face was really boyish and
pleasant, He may have worn such clothes as appear in the picture out on the
range, but in Sumner, he was careful of his personal appearance and dressed
neatly and in good taste. I never liked that picture. I don’t think it does
Billy justice. (“Billy”, 19)

Ondaatje’s use of photographs – and the absence of them – only bolsters the image of Billy as a mythical hero/villain. Ondaatje uses blank pages with captions to indicate where photographs of Billy should be, but aren’t. It gives Billy almost a supernatural quality, as if he is a vampire whose image cannot be captured photographically. Other images Ondaatje uses serve to give us a glimpse into Billy’s world – a sparsely furnished room with a cot, a rough woolen blanket and a bare wood floor, such as one Billy might have inhabited while on the run; the open range, where Billy rustled cattle and did most of his killing and running; a man and woman, husband and wife, seated stiffly, posing for the photographer, whose body language indicates that, though married, these people are not close.

It’s almost as if Ondaatje has used images to show us what Billy saw, in the same way that he uses the poetry to convey how Billy felt, and yet, leaves any images of Billy himself out. We can see what Billy saw, and know what he felt, but what he looked like, save for the scratched tin-type on the book cover, is for us to imagine, the way we might imagine what Zeus or Aphrodite looked like.

The only image besides the cover image of Billy the Kid occupies a tiny corner of a mostly blank page. It is Ondaatje at about age 9, dressed in a cowboy hat and chaps, with his trusty six-shooters in hand. This is the little boy, captivated by the myth of Billy the Kid, who in the real world, may or may not have been a coward, may or may not have been a dandy, who may or may not have been a kid caught up in a world that swept him away. But in Ondaatje’s world, his Billy is so big he defies those narrow descriptions. Much as the Greek and Roman gods existed, full of jealousy and mischief, too large to pin down to a single explanation, this Billy the Kid lives in a Mount Olympus of Ondaatje’s making, where he will live forever as the legend of America’s last days of the West.

Works Cited
Ondaatje, Michael. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.

Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.

"Myth." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 4th ed. 2000.

CRAZY LADY: Abuses... Dramatized in FRANCES

CRAZY LADY:
Abuses of Women in Mental Institutions as
Dramatized in Frances

(Lit 383: Psychology Of Women Through Literature And Film)

The movie Frances opens in 1931, with a 16-year-old Frances Farmer reading aloud her essay, entitled God Dies. First, she is reading it to her mother, who beams proudly at Frances’ precociousness and independence. She is clearly young Frances’ biggest fan.

Frances’ essay wins first prize in a regional scholastic competition, and when she reads it aloud for her community, and it is not well received. Immediately, we see that Frances is a woman who thrives on nonconformity. Lillian Farmer has fostered a quality of independence in her daughter, rare for the era, and rarer still for Seattle, Washington, which is still a small, provincial town in 1930’s America. However, as Frances matures and begins to chafe under her mother’s controlling influence, Lillian begins to feel alienated from her daughter.

This is the beginning of betrayal in this story. As Frances begins to move out into a larger world, away from the little pond where she was such a big fish, she begins to experience one disappointment after another. The world, which had once been so promising for a bright, provocative 16-year-old girl writing an essay on her loss of faith in God, is now pressuring her to conform to a world she does not understand and in which she has no interest. Her stage career in New York flounders, forcing her to move to Los Angeles and become a contract player at Paramount Pictures during the heyday of a studio system which controlled every aspect of a young actor’s life – what they wore, what they ate, what they read and, above all, how they behaved when in the public eye.

Frances not only dislikes this system, she has no resources with which to cope with it. The more she feels pressured, the stronger her response. When she is pushed, she pushes back – a classic case of an irresistible force colliding with an immovable object. This, coupled with her propensity for excessive alcohol consumption, leads Frances into direct confrontation, initially with the studio, and eventually the law. Her fall downhill begins to pick up speed and momentum, until she finds herself in a courtroom, listening as her mother begs the judge to consider sentencing Frances to time in a private sanitarium, rather than to jail. The judge agrees, and Frances finds herself at the start of what Phyllis Chesler refers to as a “psychiatric career.”

In retrospect, it might have been better for Frances had she simply gone to jail for a few months. Her interactions with institutionalized mental healthcare doom her from the start. The open-ended patriarchal structure of the sanitarium, coupled with what is for Frances an intolerable hypocrisy that they are doing it for her "own good," leaves her with no choice but to try to assert herself in any way she can. Frances refuses to “play the game,” even though by not doing so she prolongs her incarceration. She continually confronts her psychiatrist, Dr. Leonard, calling him on his hypocrisy, and taking pleasure in intimidating him by seeming unpredictable and out of control. At one point, she notes that he is afraid of her because, she tells him, “I’m not doing what’s expected of me.” She makes a conscious choice not to be the meek, subordinate female, docile and subservient to her male caretakers. She chooses instead to continue to be unflappably, relentlessly Frances, without apology, knowing that doing so puts her in danger.

Chesler indicates that for any woman who attempted to hang on to and assert her own personality and individuality in the institutional system, the repercussion for her was frequently punitive. In the sanitarium, Frances' expressions of anger are treated initially with insulin shock therapy which nearly kill her, and then by heavy doses of barbiturates to control her. This was a very common practice in institutions where women were punished for expressing ambivalence about accepting the traditional female role of passivity and obedience. Women in a psychiatric career in the early part of the twentieth century were expected to adapt to a parent-child relationship with their therapists and caretakers. Many did this all too easily, because it was a condition that many women found comfortable and familiar. For those unable or unwilling to adapt, however, punitive therapeutic “treatments” were likely to be administered (Chesler, pg. 76).

Frances’ relationship with her mother, Lillian, fuels her continuing difficulties. When Frances refuses to return to the Hollywood system she hates, her mother calls her “crazy” and Frances realizes that her mother will bludgeon her with the threat of recommitment whenever Frances refuses to obey her. In a sense, Lillian has actually set Frances up for her fall, by initially encouraging her as a young girl to wave off the traditionally feminine traits of being the “good” girl, and then by trying to force her to be subservient to Lillian’s will as an adult. With one hand, Lillian offers Frances the opportunity to define herself on her own terms, without having to bow to the conventions set for women by society – what Jean Baker Miller calls “personal creativity.” (pg. 25) With the other hand, Lillian pulls it away when Frances’ personal creativity becomes inconvenient for her.

Frances’ interactions with the men around her – studio heads, directors, and her psychiatrists – are straightforward and assertive. She does not back down from direct conflict or confrontation, she refuses to defer, speaks openly and forthrightly, and refuses to accept anyone else’s restrictions of her behavior. Rather than use her beauty and her femininity in subterfuge or manipulation, as Baker Miller suggests is common for women in conflict situations, she simply confronts the men in her life in open-ended conflict (Baker Miller, pg 16). The result is that she is continually punished for it. Frances is a perfect example of the consequences that a woman could face, particularly in the early part of the 20th century, if she overtly challenges the men around her. (Baker Miller, pgs. 18 – 19) This is the threat that all women endure, but particularly those women who are institutionalized.

Chesler speculates that the reason that more women than men gravitate to psychiatric institutionalization is that the condition more closely replicates their experience in the world and in the family than it does for men. Chesler quotes Erving Goffman, who documented patriarchal structures in mental health facilities in his book, Asylum, as saying that the average man would be better off being in prison than in a mental institution because of the potentially debilitating effect for a man of being treated “like a woman” (i.e., as helpless, sexless, dependent and unreasonable – all traits ascribed to the traditional female role) (Chesler, pgs. 74 – 75). I suspect that this is the reason that Frances does not adapt well to her surroundings in the private sanitarium. Lillian has raised Frances outside of the customary feminine role of the era. As the essay scene implies, she is proud that Frances has eschewed the traditional expectation of womanhood as docile and faithful and obedient (until it inhibits Lillian in her attempts to control Frances, that is). Frances approaches her life much as a man would. When offered opportunities to travel or to advancing her career, she does not think twice about any negative impact these things might have on her image. She does not apply different standards to herself than she does to the men around her, and when the people in power over her force them upon her, she openly resists them.

In a very real way, Frances thinks, speaks and behaves in accordance with the male role, as it is defined in Western culture. She puts the primary emphasis of her life on meeting her own needs, sating her own wants and rising to her own ambition, with little or no thought of how this might inconvenience others or fail to meet their needs. Frances puts her own needs first. The traditional expectation for women is that they meet the needs and expectations of others – parents, husbands, children – rather than concentrating on their own needs. Their own needs are, in fact, largely dismissed as being unimportant and insignificant (Baker Miller, pg. 18). Frances not only refuses to do this, but the idea of doing it does not seem to occur to her.

In addition, Frances has absolutely no editorial faculty in the things she says and does. If she feels it or thinks it, she says it, without regard for any possible repercussions. This is a demonstration of what Baker Miller terms “authenticity.” She believes whole-heartedly in her right of self-determination, without apology. This sets her apart from most women, who are conditioned from earliest childhood to be afraid of their potential for power and self-determination (Baker Miller, pgs. 116 – 118).

Frances is also set apart from other women because she has absolutely no fear of angering the men around her. The example that she's had modeled for her -- the marriage of her parents, the strong, vocal Lillian and the passive, malleable Ernest -- must certainly have helped fortify her view of strong women voicing strong opinions, without contradiction by men. Frances meets these men head on and refuses to back down. She takes for her equality with them for granted, and behaves accordingly. This is shown in the scene when she is arrested at the Knickerbocker Hotel for an outstanding traffic warrant, and upon being questioned by the desk sergeant about her name, she replies with an obscenity, much as a man might. It is not done with any kind of coyness or naughtiness. She spits it back at him the way he comes at her – head on, with no hesitation. Even when she should be afraid of angering those around her, she simply does not sense that danger (much to her detriment, as it turns out). This is where Frances differs from the average woman who has been steeped in the psychology of covert conflict and subliminal resistance (Baker Miller, pg. 122, 123).

Frances’ response to her condition as a mental patient is defiance. She manages in spite of years of institutionalization to resist becoming indoctrinated with the idea of her own insanity. Some of this may be denial, especially where it concerns any possibility of alcoholism. Still, years later, when she appears on an episode of This is Your Life, when host Ralph Edwards asks about this time in her life, she maintains that she was never mentally ill, but “when one is treated like a patient, one is apt to behave like one.” (Interestingly, this is one of the only quotes, besides her high school essay, that we can directly attribute to the real Frances Farmer, rather than just as well-crafted movie dialogue.)

One of the most harrowing scenes in the film is the depiction of Dr. Walter Freeman’s trans-orbital lobotomy. Regardless of whether this procedure was actually performed on Farmer in reality (and this is by no means certain), the procedure itself is graphically portrayed in detail. Freeman (as portrayed in the film) treats his patients as if they were something less than human. His claim during his lecture that the insertion of an ice pick through the bone of the occipital lobe and into the frontal lobe of the brain without the benefit of anesthetic is “completely painless, I assure you,” is preposterous, even to the nonprofessional. However, his treatment of women as animals is not out of character for the mental health community of that time. Both male and female clinicians have been defining traditional womanhood and the nature of the female in the narrowest, condescending of ways (Chesler, pg. 110, 111).

The irony of a movie made in the 80's (not a high-point in the women's rights movement) about a movie star from the 30's who seems to embody the most modern ideal of sexual equality -- that a woman can be just as abrasive, stubborn, outspoken, opinionated and irritating as a man, if she'll only give herself permission -- should not be lost here. It is clear, at least in relation to the film, that much of Frances' behavior (alcoholic binges, violent outbursts) cause her many problems. However, it is also clear that had Frances been born a man, her outspokenness, her passion, even her alcoholism would have been much better tolerated and overlooked by the Hollywood community. The roguish behavior, sexual promiscuity and alcoholic binges of actors like Clarke Gable, Robert Mitchum and William Holden were not only tolerated, but also facilitated, and then covered up by the studios.

The message of Frances is one that applies not only to studios, but also to the world at large. It applied in the thirties, and to a certain extent, it applies today. Boys will be boys -- but let a girl try to be a boy, and she becomes not only dangerous, but downright certifiable. Chesler notes that, though the vast majority of psychotherapeutic clinicians have been male, the vast majority of published literature on madness and mental illness focuses on women. Is this because women are actually more inclined to mental illness than men, or is that men have broader latitude in what constitutes "acceptable" behavior? Is it because women seek psychotherapy more frequently, and cooperate in studies more readily? Or is it, as Chesler points out, something a little darker and more universal?

"I think something deeper has tempted and excited male psychiatrists for the
last century to write about the Eternal Feminine gone 'mad.' I think it is both
safe and 'therapeutic' for them to do this. In women, they could study madness
without dread. They would not be turned to stone or pigs -- Valerie Solanas is
no Medusa; Zelda Fitzgerald is no Circe; mad women have no power." (Chesler, pg.
110)

For Frances, who generated so much fear and confusion in the men around her, declaring her crazy was the only way to render her "toothless." In an institutional environment, Frances might be unpredictable, but she could be controlled and observed. Because she refused to do "what is expected of me," as she puts it, she needed to be neutralized in the most effective way possible -- to dismiss her as merely "crazy." The label of "crazy lady" strips her of her power.

It should be noted that the film, Frances¸ is entirely based on two books -- Shadowlands by William Arnold, and Farmer's ghosted "autobiography," Will There Really Be a Morning. The former is the book that first postulated the Frances Farmer/lobotomy story, and it provides no independent corroboration that such a procedure was ever performed on Farmer. The latter, ghost written by Farmer's close friend, Jean Ratcliff (who was also the principal heir to Farmer's estate), was written almost entirely after Farmer's death in 1970, of esophageal cancer. After certain outrageous inaccuracies in Will There Really Be A Morning were brought to light, Ratcliff admitted that she had exaggerated details of Frances' commitment in Western State Hospital (such as the gang rapes, for example) in order to make the book more "saleable." Arnold's book is full of errors and contradictions, including the details of Farmer's life after she was discharged from care and had relocated to Indianapolis. In spite of the fact that Frances Farmer denied for years that she had had a lobotomy, these statements were merely dismissed, both by Arnold and by Ratcliff in their efforts to tell what was supposed to be her story (Kauffman).

The irony is that the real Frances Farmer, who contrary to Mr. Arnold's account, remained fairly outspoken and irrepressible in Indianapolis after her psychiatric career had ended, was still the target of people who wanted to exploit and control her, even posthumously. The film, Frances, is inarguably compelling and a fine depiction of what life might have been like for an outspoken, strong-willed woman committed for speaking her mind. However, it is also a further exploitation of Farmer, because it is based on two sources that have been proven not only inaccurate (see Kauffman), but also make claims that Farmer herself denied. This is what both Chesler and Baker Miller identify as the main problem when a woman is treated in a patriarchal psychiatric environment. She is subject not only to the stripping of her power, but also to the complete denial of her spoken needs, her expectations and even her own history. Merely by being a female, a woman -- any woman -- becomes subject to having her story co-opted and rewritten, in total contradiction to her express wishes, by people who "know better" than she about her needs, wants and past experiences.

In the end, this betrayal is at the heart of the story of Frances Farmer, both as a film character, and as a living, breathing woman.


Works Cited

Film:

Frances. Dir. Graeme Clifford. Perf. Jessica Lange, Kim Stanley, Sam Shepard, Bart Burns, Jonathan Banks, Jeffrey De Munn. EMI Films (Independent), 1982.

Books:

Baker Miller, Jean. Toward A New Psychology of Women. 2nd ed. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986.
Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1989.

Internet:

Farmer, Frances. God Dies. 1931.
Kauffman, Jeffrey. Shedding Light on Shadowland: The Truth About Frances Farmer. 1999.

BACKWARDS and in HEELS: An Analysis of Sally Potter's The Tango Lesson

BACKWARDS AND IN HEELS:
An Analysis of Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson

(Lit 383: Psychology Of Women Through Literature And Film)

“Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in heels.”
~Author unknown~

I was constantly reminded of this saying during Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson, the story of a British film director and an Argentine dancer who search for common ground, both in the tango, and in their love affair. Who leads, who follows, how, and why – these are all questions that Potter tackles in the film.

Potter demarcates the film in lessons – initially referring to the dance lessons themselves. However, after Lesson Three, the dance falls away and becomes a backdrop to their relationship, and the lessons themselves are about learning to love, to trust, and to surrender control.
One of the first things that Potter says to Veron after watching him perform is he doesn’t “give away too much,” meaning he isn’t overtly expressive or emotional. Tango is, by nature, a study in subverting and underreporting emotion, allowing it to simmer between the dancers, without being overtly expressed. In a way, it mimics what Jean Baker Miller refers to in Toward a New Psychology of Women, when she talks about the “covert conflict” that exists in dominant-subordinate relationships. By contrast, Potter, an outspoken, independent women who is not used to taking the passive role in real life, brings their differences into the open, by telling him what she does and doesn’t like about the way he behaves with her.

Yet even in her “passive” role in the tango, Potter finds ways when she’s dancing to assert herself, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Veron is constantly giving Potter the message that she must subvert herself – her will, her feelings, her energy (which he refers to as “tension”) -- in order to make the tango work. This is especially emphasized in the film when, while he and Potter are rehearsing to perform together, Veron berates her for “doing too much.” He tells her over and over to “let go,” but she seems unable to give him what he wants. He explains that it is her job, as the subordinate partner – as the follower – to simple let go, let him lead, let him do all the work and take all the credit, so that it appears that they are one. It is clear that, though, when he refers to them being and moving as “one,” he is talking about his one, not hers. In the tango, if she completely submits and subverts all aspect of herself in the dance, she ceases to exist, and the only one that will be seen is him.

Potter does make a concerted effort to submit to the extent that she is able, no matter how difficult it is for her. She starts the film being a terribly British woman – everything contained and inside her space. In one of her first dance hall experiences, before she learns to dance, she is seen sitting in a too-small chair against the wall, trying not to catch anyone’s eye. Her hair is pinned up, her long legs are tucked into nearly the fetal position and her hands grip her knees tightly. She is a sensible woman, in all walks of life. Her hair, her shoes, her clothing – they are all practical and without embellishment. Bit by bit, she begins to release things that have thus far defined her – her hair comes down, she purchases a pair of three and half inch high heels, her clothing slowly evolves toward the alluring, with attention to detail.

It could be argued by some that perhaps this is only because of her attraction to Veron. However, this is not the message that Potter conveys. Potter isn’t merely trying to attract Veron, but is wrestling with a side of herself she has suppressed for a long time – the sexually attractive side, the side that seduces. She is struggling about taking on a role that she’s never sought before, that she doesn’t trust, and that she may not want in the end. She is allowing herself to surrender to her own status as a subordinate – perhaps because she is seduced by Veron and the tango, or perhaps because it is just another part of herself that must be revealed so it can be done away with.

For his part, Veron is walking bundle of contradictions. After he stands her up for their New Years Eve date, he later charms himself into her apartment, and tells her that it would be best if they didn’t act on their attraction – that they should “sublimate our attraction into the work.” “Sally,” he tells her, “I really have to keep my distance.” Then he lies down on the bed beside her and promptly falls asleep. He doesn’t get jealous, he tells her, yet when she dances with the Spanish tango dancers in the last third of the film, we see that he does indeed get jealous. He is constantly rewriting his “rules” of what is acceptable and unacceptable.

In terms of what Baker Miller terms the “covert” vs “open” conflict between dominants and subordinates, as opposed to equals, The Tango Lesson plays the different conflict levels out not only between the lovers, but also between the dancers. Tango is a classic case of the struggle between dominant and subordinate, where the more invisible the subordinate becomes, the better the dance works. Much as in society, if the woman can simply manage to blend her aspirations with the man as cleanly and effortlessly as possible, the smoother everything runs – for the man.

Though this film is certainly about conflict and struggle, it also depicts the other side effect of dominant and subordinate positions – trust. If one person is indeed the subordinate and one the dominant, then it follows that at no time can they ever fully trust one another. The subordinate must never tell the dominant her true feelings, lest she risk the structure that she’s come to depend upon. And the dominant must never let the subordinate see signs of weakness and vulnerability, as part of the agreement is based on the man “leading,” and so his step must not falter. How do you have an intimate relationship with someone you cannot possibly trust? Yet that is what men and women are expected to do every day. No wonder the divorce rate is around fifty-eight percent. In the film, as in life, each wants something from the other, yet neither is able to come right out and ask for what they want – he because he doesn’t want to admit that she might have something he needs, and she’s because she has been conditioned not to come out and ask for what she needs.

In the end, it is Veron who finds himself confused by their encounter. When Potter tells him that she loves him “with her eyes – through her work,” he asks, much as a woman might, “Is that all?” He confesses to her that he belongs no where – not in synagogue, not in church, not in France, not in Argentina. He tells her he wants to know why they met. Ultimately, he tells her, his worst fear is that he will vanish and leave nothing behind to show for his life.

Interesting how the worst fear this man has is the reality that most women have – that their lives are relegated to playing second lead in someone else’s psycho-drama, and that there will ultimately be nothing left of them but what was allowed them by the people who were leading in the dance.

~C~