Double-Doubles: In The Cut

A movie about (shooting at) garbage

The second, and later film from Jane Campion, In The Cut is not quite as “critically acclaimed,” as they say, but it should be. At least, it should be given more credit cinematically, since Campion perfects her already solid technique and creates a really impressive narrative, rich and cohesive, with elements swirling around in remarkable unity despite the appearance of chaos. Not wholly unlike The Piano, In The Cut delights – perhaps even finds its chief meaning – in turning conventionally accepted notions/expectations/commonplaces/pleasures on their heads. The first shot of the film from within Frannie’s (Meg Ryan) apartment shows the ambiguous image of small, lightweight, white objects falling from the sky. The immediate instinct is to assume it’s snow, although they seem too big to be snow. Soon thereafter we come to understand that it couldn’t be snow, considering the time of year and the weather. Later still, Frannie’s sister reveals to Frannie that they’re petal-like leaves falling from trees. Do not believe your eyes; this is largely the message of In The Cut. Appearances are deceiving, things aren’t what they seem, and so on.

Seeing ain't knowing

The strong identification, or character engagement, with Frannie attaches the viewer to her at the outset and almost never strays from her. Exceptions are momentary and wrought by narrative necessity. The suturing is stronger here with Frannie than it was with Ada in The Piano. Since this film adds the component of a whodunit? to its narrative, the film progresses better with the audience basically knowing only what Frannie knows. The dark aura that pervades the film affects the feel significantly, contributing to a post-idealistic urban setting, a dystopic microcosm, bound to highlight the sinister in society. The cops add to this vibe at least as much as anyone else, and rightly so, considering the course of the story. They’re fundamentally no different from any other members of society, as much potential suspects as anyone else, as much scumbags, as much sleep-buddies.

No Blade Runner, but still dark

Frannie and her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) stand as possible opposites, the independent woman and the dependent woman, respectively. Pauline’s pathetic stalking of a married man, her shameless fatal attraction to him leading to a restraining order, contrasts extremely with Frannie, who rarely ever dates and is constituted by a lack of desire for another. Her regular meetings with a handsome and hungry student lead to him punishing her for being a “bitch” – that is, being a woman who will not let herself be desired, will not return the gaze that caters to the desiring man. When Frannie finally does couple with a man, that coupling is defined by a reversal of traditional roles. Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) tells Frannie that he will be “anything you want me to be,” and so on. The relationship exists on her terms, for her pleasure. He willingly submits to her control, and her desire is not a desire for him, but rather for naked fulfillment. In a word, she uses him, and he knows it. All the while, she suspects him of committing the crime that is the catalyst for the film’s central mystery.

Sadistic

Having firsthand knowledge of the key piece of evidence needed to solve the crime, she withholds it. She seems to do this in order (1) to draw out the satisfaction she can experience through Malloy and (2) to solve the crime herself. Regarding the second, her day job as a high school teacher makes her an authority figure, a woman with knowledge and power. The meetings with her student are for the purpose of learning street vernacular from him so that she can give a more accurate portrait of urban life in the book she is writing. This is another instance in which Frannie uses a male for her own ends rather than letting herself be used, rebelling against gender norms. Regarding (1), it is important to note that the pleasure she experiences from Malloy is directly related to her suspicion that he is the murderer. Their romance is marked by sadism. After being mugged in an alley, Malloy has Frannnie re-stage the mugging in her apartment,  with him posing as the mugger. They do not get very far into the reenactment before arousing one another through the suggestion of violence. Toward the film’s finale, Frannie handcuffs Malloy to the wall in her apartment and proceeds to discover what appears to be incriminating evidence in his jacket pocket. The ensuing events leave Malloy stranded, cuffed to the wall like an animal as he becomes angrier and angrier. Once again, there is no question here concerning with whom the power lies. The climax in the following sequence has Frannie seizing the instrument of violence and overcoming the male villain.

Imprisoned

That climax is the second scene in which Frannie interacts with blood to a rather heavy degree. In the first, she enters a space that is extremely bloody, a space that happens to be the most intimate space of her sister’s, the bathroom where she has been murdered. This room is a sort of primal cave, penetrated through a violation of the worst kind, perhaps even on par with a violation into the womb. The bathroom already figures as the most personal, intimate space in a domicile. When Frannie enters it, not only is the evidence of the murder spread everywhere for her to see, but her sister is literally spread everywhere for her to see. This is an intrusion of the most violent sort, and Frannie walks straight into it, voluntarily surrounding herself with the bloody evidence. She is distraught, but also fearless and angry. In this way, the scene is somewhat reminiscent of the “castration” scene in The Piano.

Violated

It’s also reminiscent of that scene in another way, however. Right off, perhaps the main difference between the two scenes is that in The Piano, the act of violence is being done to Ada herself, whereas in In The Cut the act of violence has been done to Frannie’s sister. Returning, however, to the earlier point about Frannie and Pauline acting as opposites on the feminine spectrum (in terms of established archetypes or stereotypes), could they not essentially “be” the same person? There is, after all, a blurry line separating an opposite from a double. Consider not only the idea of two warring sides of a person embodies in two separate persons (something that wouldn’t be original to this film), but also the otherwise strange plot element of Pauline’s murder. Why, exactly, is she murdered? She and the murderer have never met and have no reason to meet. Their encounter only takes place as a direct result of Frannie getting a lift to her sister’s apartment. Pauline’s murder is an act supremely premeditated not only in terms of the murder itself but also in terms of the murdered person’s identity. Unless Frannie and Pauline essentially constitute two sides of the same person (from a thematic point of view), Pauline’s murder is a hole in the plot; it makes little or no sense.

Faker

If she – Frannie/Pauline – is the same person, however, then Malloy and Rodriguez (his partner) are also the same person. The two cops are partners. They work together and even hang out at the bar together. Frannie and Pauline are sisters – stepsisters, to be exact. They share the same father and spend a good deal of time together. Within the film, they’re defined in terms of one another; their identities are only clear in relation to one another. The same applies to the two cops. It’s in the bar that the difference between the two cops becomes most apparent. It’s there in the bar where Malloy tells Frannie how he’s willing to be whatever she wants him to be. Moments later Rodriguez makes some shockingly misogynistic comments (to say the least) about women that stand in polar opposition to Malloy’s words. Perhaps most importantly, it is their shared tattoo that creates the main misunderstanding fueling the film’s mystery.

Incriminated

Further still, recount the sadistic relationship that Frannie and Malloy share, and how that sadism plays out in their desires. Perhaps in this case, seeing Frannie-Malloy as “polar opposites” of Pauline-Rodriguez isn’t appropriate. Rather, significant overlap between the different couples makes them in some ways more similar than different. Another one of these overlaps concerns the guns of the two officers. We learn earlier in the film that Rodriguez carries a bright yellow squirt gun on his belt in place of a real firearm on account of losing his gun privilege due to – NB! – his wife taking the gun and using it. After cuffing Malloy to the wall, Frannie takes his gun with her (a second theft of a police gun by a woman) and rides off in Rodriguez’s car, though he is unaware that she is carrying. Her victory over him by means of a gun not only concludes the cycle for Rodriguez’s character of losing his gun to a woman (yes, folks, that’s castration), but Frannie’s theft of the gun from Malloy solidifies his status, already strongly hinted at, of being a male without an instrument of power.

Coming out bloody & on top

This is the kind of frustrating yet gratifying film that feeds on its own interpretation. The more that one sees in it, exponentially more will spring up before one’s eyes. Precious few films can submit to – what a terrible word; how about, “permit” – this kind of a reading without having violence done to them. In The Cut is a deceptively simple film, one that appears disturbing and complex but that is in fact very tight and coherent. It’s as much a Western as anything else, except in reverse. There are a hero and a villain, but instead of knowing who they are at the beginning, we aren’t fully sure until the end. Someone saves the day, but instead of fortifying established norms, the film challenges them and turns them over. At this point I’m struck with the realization that I’ve said nothing here about Frannie’s very interesting and imagined “flashbacks” to her father’s proposal to her mother and how violence fits into those. We could point to the identification between the primal, blood, and the woman that was already explored in the bathroom scene. Certainly issues of parenthood are of importance to this film, not only via the proposal flashbacks and constant talking about their father but also through the bracelet Pauline gives Frannie, suggesting Frannie as a mother. That the baby carriage breaks off of her bracelet while Frannie overcomes her mugger seems to solidify the possibility that Frannie is abandoning the maternal notion of Woman for something more powerful and independent. While there’s plenty more to discuss about this, time and space presently forbid it.

Castrated mother?

She came, she saw, she conquered

Fetish Objet Petit A: The Piano

Two from Jane Campion, in order from older to not-as-old. The Piano is one of those films that peppers syllabi throughout film studies courses, functioning as it does as a textbook case of numerous cinematic motifs and psychoanalytic themes. As a plus, it’s a somewhat “feminist” film, in the vein of a Mildred Pierce or something. At least some of Campion’s other efforts are also in this vein. The point isn’t so much to create a feminist world as to depict the plight of women in a decidedly non-feminist world and allow a woman to come up out of the water, as it were (and in The Piano, it were).

First viewing of this film was only a clip or two, in order to illustrate the notion of castration. Ada (Holly Hunter) is mute by voice but quite eloquent via her piano. Thus the removal of her instrument from her life constitutes the removal of what voice she has; perhaps not quite true, since she does have her daughter (note, not a son) to interpret her signs and vouch for her when she is being wronged, as she often is. The identification of woman with the o/Other, the foreign, the exotic, is confirmed by her romantic affair with Baines, a man who has adapted to the Maori ways completely. Ada’s staged marriage is bound to be unhappy; her husband does not respect her voice but rather instructs her to teach Baines how to play – as if a woman’s voice is good only for amplifying a man’s. Baines’ lack of interest in playing may seem sweet of him, and the film seems to want it to seem sweet, but the moves he makes on Ada makes her the instrument of his happiness. Unless he can fully “have” her, however, his happiness cannot thrive.

Ada’s husband Alistair (Sam Neill) understandably doesn’t like the backdoor shenanigans and decides to make the quintessentially castrating gesture: chop off Ada’s finger, thus rendering her handicapped to play. The role her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) has to play in the discovery of Ada’s guilt is highlighted by the somewhat excessive squirt of blood from Ada’s digital stub that lands on Flora. Ada’s silence even after this event is of course consistent with her additional loss of voice, but her emotional resilience in the face of violence and blood works as another instance of the woman’s reign over blood territory. This theme will be highlighted and explored much more fully in Campion’s later film In The Cut.

So many overt signs in this film distract the viewer from what is a pretty complex web of meaning below the surface. One gets the strong impression that Campion knows the tools with she is working very well, particularly since the project is, in many ways, Woman. The way filmmakers in recent years have created decidedly feminine portraits of women staged in eras of male dominance keeps the feminist presence bumping into the glass ceiling. It forces a level of restraint that a contemporary setting would not have to respect. This is fitting, since the contemporary world has plenty of active proponents doing the sorts of things Campion wants to happen; the main problem now isn’t so much “the now” as the history of suppression and voicelessness that have defined women for ages upon ages. Campion and others are retroactively giving a voice to the voiceless throughout history.

Voices aside, though, what The Piano reveals in its big picture is an intuitive fact the has certainly dominated history, no matter how white or male are the historians: events, from the greatest events (think Cleopatra) to the least significant, are what they are because of women, even if the women are given no acknowledgment in the history books. This isn’t to say that women “control” history, but it is to say that men certainly don’t, either. It is Ada’s presence in the filmic setting of The Piano that provides the drama. She is the catalyst for every male action, whether chauvinist or not. The film could have easily been shot from a different point of view, reducing Ada to the level of a pawn in a war between two men. Instead, the men become something like pawns of hers, and she is able to remove the socially-inflicted crutch of an object petit a (the piano),  though it nearly drowns her, on her own without any male assistance. This is a structured and restructuring deconstruction of the heretofore prevailing idea that men are the power-holders. In the all too a priori world of psychoanalysis this may always be the case (with regard to the phallus), a film like The Piano shows men without any real power and woman as the one who has only to release herself from herself – not from man – in order to possess it.