December 17, 2009 at 6:00 P.M. A letter was deleted from this essay. I have now restored that letter. I am working at a public computer. Many more attacks against this essay must be expected, until Ms. Milgram's departure becomes final.
"Holy Smoke" (1999). Director, Jane Campion; writers, Anna Campion and Jane Campion; Kate Winslet as "Ruth Barron"; Harvey Keitel as "P.J. Waters"; Pam Grier as "Carol Waters"; Sophie Lee as "Yvonne"; Julie Hamilton as "Mum"; Tim Robertson as "Dad."
November 2, 2009 at 1:26 P.M. Two previous attempts to post this review were obstructed by New Jersey cybercriminals. I will continue to struggle to post this revised work.
January 10, 2009 at 12:02 P.M. This review was also vandalized yesterday. I have corrected it again. (Compare "'The Reader': a Movie Review" with "The Duality in Christian Feminine Identity.")
May 31, 2008 at 11:37 A.M. New "errors" and vandalism have damaged this essay and many others overnight. I will do my best to make necessary corrections. ("Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
May 3, 2008 at 6:45 P.M. I believe that this is the seventh time that I will post this essay, after alterations by N.J. hackers. I was unable to print from my computer today. My efforts to print the cast list from this movie leave me with a blank piece of paper bearing this address:
http://view.atdmt.com/OY6/iview/drvtmscf0020000141oy6/direct/01click=http://servedby.advertising.co... (NJ State Police?)
I am afraid that my thoughts may be deemed "controversial." My discussion will draw on the following sources and readings:
Om Ratnasambahva Tram (Representations from Western Tibet, 15th Century). The Dhyani Buddhas, often depicted with feminine features, "transmute the poisons of ignorance, anger and hatred, pride, lust and envy into the Five Wisdoms."
The Way of the Divine Mother: Questions and Answers by Mother Meera (Meeramma, Ithaca, NY).
Andrew Harvey, Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening (New York & London: Penguin, 1991).
After struggling against the usual obstacles to writing and thinking, I feel like ... well, like Ruth Barron. I will struggle against all of these obstacles to write this review.
This essay is for M.S. & I.G.M.
Susan Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), pp. 116-165.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 18-45.
Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (New York & London: Pantheon, 1984), translation by Patrick O'Brian, p. 3, pp. 348-445.
June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New Theory of Sexuality (New York: Anchor, 1977), pp. 25-66. ("In the Midst of Chaos the Woman Danced.")
June Singer, Boundaries of the Soul (New York: Anchor, 1973), pp. 97-120.
I. "I feel like an animal."
The plot of this film is deceptively complex and multi-layered. I say "deceptively" because it seems very easy-going and obvious to the viewer. In fact, there is a lot going on under the surface of this movie. Visually, the style is surrealistic and deliberately, suggestively, over-the-top. The aesthetic vocabulary is postmodern. In terms of the history of art, we experience a fusion of references to diverse painters, from Hieronymus Bosch and Georgia O'Keefe, to Salvador Dali and Joan Miro. The music is just right.
The film explodes with ideas and spiritual energy. It is a theological and psychological essay that contains a philosophical argument concerning the importance of the feminine in human life. In terms of novelists, I suggest a return to D.H. Lawrence and Patrick White -- the Aussie Nobel laureate who would be horrified to be associated with the ideas in this film (or with my review), for whom the Australian "outback" is a psychic territory.
Ruth Barron (Kate Winslet) experiences a life-altering epiphany during a trip to India, when a guru's touch allows for a moment of transcendence, experienced in terms of the "eternal feminine" -- Lakshmi/Kali/Shiva, woman as protector and destroyer -- the central "eye" in Ruth's forehead is the spiritual locus of selfhood and becoming from which we perceive and become the world.
Ruth's center is the feminine principle which allows for the emergence of the masculine principle, in the dialectic of self-becoming. Choosing to remain in India, Ruth arouses the concern of her parents -- especially, her mother's hysterical fears. Mum's trip to India is both farcical and tragic. This movie is, simultaneously, a political satire and very black comedy.
Kate Winslet is one of the few actors -- and this is not simply because of her beauty -- whose genius is enough for me to see a film. That genius is on display from the moment that we discover (to my ears) a flawless Australian accent all the way to the end of a harrowing mythic journey captured on celluloid. Ms. Winslet is dancing as well as acting in this movie. (I wish I could say "Yeeeh," like the Aussies.)
Ruth's inner journey is also a dramatization of the hero/heroine's metanoia of the spirit, represented in the haunting, burning landscape of the desert fused with the red, gold, orange colors of sky and sun. Like Jesus wandering into the desert, Ruth will be tested by her daimon or shadow-other, the masculine principle.
PJ Waters (Harvey Keitel) is an expert in "exit" strategies or methods of getting people out of cults. Keitel's method will also be the director's strategy: 1) "isolate"; 2) "remove props"; 3) lift the "clouds of unreason." This is, in fact, what will happen to the audience during the course of this movie. It is not Ruth, but her parents and others -- the audience members, perhaps! -- who are clinging to mythical and dangerous notions of normality, and in need of being relieved of their illusions. Do not "adjust!"
Isolation happens by virtue of the darkened theater. Cinematic experience overwhelms our senses. This film does exactly that. Empiricists beware. Removal of props follows from transportation to a new fused psychic-horizon, shaped by the values of these artists creating a "truthful illusion" and the willing interpreter of the aesthetic work choosing to meet these artists by entering into their world, that's you. Finally, the "clouds of unreason" are lifted as we exit the theater with a new appreciation of the need for feminine sensibility and freedom, balancing the masculine urge to dominance and control.
The phallic urge to imposition collides with the feminine discovery of eros as power, the life-principle (woman) encounters the death principle (man). This dialectic of love and death is within all of us. It is also in the world, as civilizations shift between masculine and feminine orientations to history. Eros encounters Logos. The result is Mythos.
Myth is the fusion of phallic and vaginal images of heroic archetypes and journeys that are universal. There are phallic and vaginal myths. Greatness is about integration of the two perspectives into a fused human view of life. ("A Doll's Aria" and "What you will ...")
The disproportion in power in Western civilization and consciousness between an oppressive masculine principle and oppressed feminine principle is examined by way of the symbolic characters, Ruth and PJ. Science and technology (in masculine terms) must not deny art and spirituality (in feminine terms).
The point of total destruction of the feminine is Winslet's nakedness and urinating in the desert, which is also the most powerful representation in cinema -- of which I know or that I can recall -- of the physical imprisonment of the human spirit in our embodied condition. It is comparable to Lear's wandering on the heath. This is what we are: naked, dying, brutal animals, with a hunger for meaning and beauty, yearning for love or deep connectedness to others, which is spirituality. We are all the prisoners of time; we are all transcendent of our bodily envelopes.
This crucial scene is often cut, severely damaging the cinematic work of art, which shifts from the point of nothingness to the restoration of female power through eros or love. The film explains why there is something rather than nothing. Ms. Campion might have called her film, "Being and Nothingness" -- except that this title is already taken by an obscure French philosopher.
With the acceptance of desolation in the human condition, the return is made possible for Ruth. Ruth's father, like most men in this film, is a shit. Suburban disconnections from reality and inauthentically expressed religious beliefs are seen as bandaids, opium for the masses, even as spirituality is respected and celebrated in ancient feminized forms.
When her mother visits India and tells Ruth that her father is ill -- a cruel lie -- Ruth is obliged to return home to the land of incomprehension and suburban hypocrisy. Henry Miller's "air conditioned nightmare" of comformity to normality is our every day world. Ruth is soon suffocating, longing to return to "mother" India. Interestingly, Ms. Winslet is attracted to these artsy expatriots, like the woman in "Hideous Kinky." Ms. Winslet lives in New York. There seems to be a concern with abandonment issues for children in Ms. Winslet's work as well as an effort to understand the woman (?) responsible for such a terrible action. Please see my secretary on your way out. See you next week, Kate.
Sophie has found her own way of coping through eros and fantasy as well as the sacrifice of the intellect. The women comfort each other. The men -- like Ruth's dad -- fornicate and play golf. The homes (and middle class lives) are non-descript, banal. Ruth will die, spiritually, if she is required to live in a place like this, surrounded by such people, however well-meaning they may be. I know someone like that. I am like that.
II. "Why are you here?"
Ruth finds freedom only after departing from her suburban Australian home, aptly called sans souci. The term means "without care" which was the summer palace (I believe) of Marie Antoinette, just before the French Revolution struck and brought many "cares" into the Queen's life. The residents of this paradise of earthly delight -- a kind of Australian New Jersey -- are blissfully unaware of their sleepwalking state. Similarly, PJ is in need of discovering his feminine side, externalized in the red dress and lipstick, and coming to terms with love and his first glimmers of mortality. ("'Revolutionary Road': A Movie Review.")
Pam Grier is underused as "Carol," PJ's wife, who is the older version of Ruth. These two are clearly one woman, depicted in Christianity's dichotomy of Mary "Mother" of Jesus and Mary "Magdalene" the "beloved apostle." Carl Jung captures this dichotomy in the Western feminine soul in the division between amant and soror spirituelis. These two are always one woman. These two archetypes are every woman's duality. They are everywhere in world mythology. See Da Vinci's "The Virgin of the Rocks." Any time you see a relationship between a younger and older woman -- especially centering around a male character -- time issues are probably invoked. Classicists will think of the "Judgment of Paris" symbolized by three women and the hero's choice. Apple? ("'Diamonds Are Forever': A Movie Review.")
PJ ends in a place of greater meaning and peace, carrying twins, creative, productive, masculine and feminine, centered. Ruth's journey continues as a more masculinized femininity (the lesbian dance scene is only a hint of her androgynous nature), as she finds outlets in travel with a new "boyfriend."
PJ's quotations from scripture: "It is" hint at the ultimate mystery. "We are." You must "be." The Western distance from being is accomplished through barbie doll status or computer games. All of these are ways of escaping life, which is only another way of dying (spiritually) while living (physically). Accumulating wealth or power is more displacement of the final confrontation. Moon and sun, woman and man in the language of symbols, call us back to life:
"Jung said that he alone of all Freud's followers logically pursued these two problems which most interested Freud. He recognized the large part that sexuality plays as an essential -- though not the sole -- expression of psychic wholeness. But Jung's main concern, he said, was to '... investigate over and above the personal significance and biological function [of sexuality] its spiritual aspect and its numinous meaning, and thus explain what Freud was so fascinated by, but unable to grasp.' ..." (Singer, "Boundaries," p. 100.)
Eros as power for woman has a classic psychoanalytic explanation:
"If the premise is accepted that at this time in ... Europe there was a true psychological and spiritual separation between men and women ... then it would follow quite reasonably that this sort of alienation would find for its target of expression sexuality. If a wife were, for example, out of true spiritual contact with her husband, if they did not think alike or feel alike, ... where was her misery and unhappiness to find its outer expression? Quite naturally, in ... the marriage bed." (Singer, "Androgyny," p. 26.)
Jane Campion is not demonizing men -- femi-Nazis and psychobabblers should take note! -- since these characters are symbolized and abstracted aspects of universal human archetypes. (Ruth says: "It's symbolic, not literal.")
December 17, 2009 at 6:15 P.M. Three "errors" were inserted in this essay since my previous review. ("Debbie Poritz Likes the Ladies!" and, soon, "Sybil R. Moses Joins the Lesbian Love-Fest.")
The transformation of PJ and Ruth into Beckett's two sad tramps waiting for God, within themselves, leads only to the invocation of Harold Pinter's silences, grasping at one another, experiencing the overwhelming pity and despair at the sheer helplessness and dignity of the dreaming animal's inevitable disintegration. Think of Keitel's magnificent pathos lying on the sand in the desert. Winslet and Keitel deserve Oscars for their brave work in this movie. We come from nothing and return to nothing:
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
Where all that was to be, in all that was,
Whirl'd for a million aeons thro' the vast
Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light --
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
Thro' all this changing world of changing law,
And every phase of ever-heightening life,
And nine long months of antenatal gloom,
With this last moon, this crescent-her dark orb,
Touch'd with earth's light-thou comest ...
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore --
Tennyson, De Profundis.
