Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur + Thoughts on Women in Art

Sometimes you see something and a few thoughts seem to fall into place. Or at least into place a bit more. I saw Agnes Varda's film Le Bonheur from 65 last night, and it seemed to fit like a piece of a puzzle I've been trying to put together, on the topic of feminism, women artists, and the like. I've been trying to figure out this kind of thing for a long time, and jotted down several quotes from different places that I find helping. So this is mainly a bunch of pretentious quotes strung together into a half baked political framework, that in the end is probably still severely lacking, and only intended to absolve myself for my lack of activism in this regard. Nevertheless, it is nice to try and think stuff like this over from time to time, and a good thing about a blog is that it allows oneself to air thoughts that one haven't really resolved sufficiently, and that one might abandon in due time. Anyways, here they are. Spoilers, of course.

Talk talk talk. And then the scene in question from 7:00 onwards. Two unforgettable inserts at 8:30...

The thing that triggered these thoughts is the ending of the film. While relaxing in a park, Therese has heard that her husband Francois has begun an affair, an to begin with she seems to accept his explanation, that his actions has only made him happier and that this happiness has made his love for her even greater. But then, while he takes a nap, she wanders of and drowns in a pond. I deliberately don't say that she drowns herself, for the film seems a bit ambiguous on this point. A short shot shows her in the water, grasping at a stick, perhaps trying to stay above water. The ambiguity, and the shot where Francois holds the drowned Therese in his arms, reminded me of the fate of Ophelia from Hamlet. And immediately afterward, it reminded me of this poem by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, named Reading Hamlet:

A barren patch to the right of the cemetery,
behind it a river flashing blue.
You said: ”All right then, get thee to a nunnery,
or go get married to a fool...”

It was the sort of thing that princes always say,
but these are words that one remembers.
May they flow a hundred centuries in a row
like an ermine mantle from his shoulders.

(from the collection Poems of Akhmatova from Mariner books, translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Go find it on Amazon, it is really, really good...)

Akhmatova wrote a few of these poems, about women who gets lost in the struggle of men, such as Lots Wife who turned into a pillar of salt (Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem / too insignificant for our concern?), or Cleopatra (Tomorrow they'll put her children in chains...). As a Russian artist in the first half of twentieth century, she was of course a target of the Stalinist purges. But she was never hurt herself, her ex-husband was executed and her son was interned. She is very famous for the poem Requiem she wrote about her experience as the mother of a deportee. It begins with something Instead of a Preface, in which she is recognized standing in line outside the prison in Leningrad, and another woman asks her: ”Can you describe this?” / And I said: ”I can.” / Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face”



The French postmodern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard began his work The Differend with a rumination on the then new phenomenon of Holocaust deniers. As he described their solipsistic argument, the only proof of the Holocaust they would except would have been someone who could prove that the gas chambers had been used to kill people. And since everyone who had witnessed the gas chambers in function had died from it, this could not be proved, and ergo Holocaust could be denied. He used this extreme example to, amongst other things, draw a distinction between a plaintiff and a victim (in §9 on page 8 of the English edition from Minnesota University press). ”A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means.” It is to remain a plaintiff and not become solely a victim, that the woman in the line in Leningrad asks Akhmatova if she can describe this wrong that are committed against them, if she is able to bear witness to it. By giving voice to victimized women from the past, Akhmatova also tries to turn them into plaintiffs. As a plaintiff you still have hope for revenge, or recompense. Once your a victim, that hope has been taken from you.



But of course, the question remains: Could Akhmatova really describe these wrongs? Don't get me wrong, it is a magnificent poem, a masterpiece even, but can we be sure she actually described the feeling of this other women? Can we be sure that she captures the feelings of Ophelia or Lots Wife (disregarding the fact that they are constructs...). Is she not, in a small way, perhaps doing them another wrong by using them to make her own description stronger? If this woman from Leningrad perhaps had written her own account, it would probably be disregarded, for it is inconceivable that it would ever be as brilliant as Akhmatova’s Requiem. Another extreme example is Dante and Beatrice. Beatrice is immortalized in Dante’s Divine Comedy. She is described as the most perfect woman ever, who is sitting almost next to God and Christ in the highest realm of Paradise. But has Dante immortalized Beatrice, or has he removed the actual woman from the annals of history, and substituted her with his own cleansed picture?



And this brings me back to Varda's film. For while every person in the film seem inherently sympathetic, Francois, the adulterer, has at least one major fault. He talks. He talks and talks and talks, yet he never really listens. He perpetually tries to explain his own acts and feelings, but never wants to hear anything about anyone else. And Therese doesn't tell him. She just wanders off, and then she drowns. Francois might be the archetypal male thinker. He thinks and thinks and talks and talks but his thinking remains completely self involved. He doesn't take the feelings of the two women into consideration. And this might be the point, a point that I think only a female director could have made. When male artists want to speak out about women's rights, they have a tendency to create women whom they themselves think are strong and good. And then voice their opinions through these characters. This strategy can lead to great results – I'm reading one of the greatest examples, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina at the moment – but it is quite different from what Varda is doing. She didn't create any strong women in this film. In fact, they are quite weak willed, also the other woman, Emilie, whom Francois to begin with loves because of her independence, but who is quickly domesticated after she assumes the role of wife to Francois. But Varda instead perhaps showed why they are weak. Because they are not allowed to speak for themselves. They can therefore never be plaintiffs, only victims.

Such quiet, determined grace. Such beauty. Almost unnatural...

Another scene with a women drowning has been on my mind since the first time I saw it. It's from the Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi's beautiful Sansho the Bailiff. The young woman has helped her brother escape from their slave camp, but since she fears that she would probably disclose which way he went if tortured, she chooses to walk into a pond, and drowns herself. She gracefully wanders into the water, and then the film cuts to small ripples on the water, where she has subsumed herself. I've seen Mizoguchi described as a filmmaker with 'a feminine universe' (by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema 1 – The Movement Image, also from Minnesota, page 192), as a filmmaker who was interested in the plight of women. But in this scene, the action undertaken by the woman is supposed to be a sacrifice, it is seen as good and noble. But is it really a healthy picture of women? Someone who sacrifices themselves for the good of their family? (Admittedly, Deleuze points to Mizuguchi as feminine in contrast with Kurosawa, and he is definitely more feminine than him. But who isn't?) It is interesting to contrast these two scenes of women drowning themselves, for the moment that Mizoguchi has removed from the sequence, the moment where the woman actually drowns, as in dying with water coming over her and into her lungs and last breaths and all those grisly details, is the only moment that Varda shows the audience in her version. And I wouldn't be surprised if that is deliberate on Varda's part, the film is quite allusive, as films of the Nouvelle Vague are wont to be. But this also points to another difference, that the sacrifice of the woman in Mizuguchi's version actually accomplishes something, that the brother is able to escape, while the drowning in Le Bonheur just seems pointless and in vain. A few minutes later, Francois has married his lover, and life seems to go on without any one really mourning... This ending is another twist on Shakespeare: where Francois seemed like Hamlet when he held his substitute Ophelia, after her burial he acts much more like Gertrud... But this ending, with one woman replaced by another, and happy lives continuing as if nothing particularly important has taken place, this ending seems to me to show 'patriarchy' in effect, in all it's petty pervasiveness, where women are completely defined by men, and their only other choice is to 'opt out' of it, so to speak, since they can never ever hope to be allowed to define their own life. And I think that this ending could only have been created by a woman, a man would have done it otherwise, he would not have shown the bad effects of patriarchy so clearly, perhaps since he as a male artist, with a strong effect on defining societal discourse, he is in fact part of the problem. And even if he created a completely new path for a woman to take, created the strongest, best female character he could possibly create, then he would inexorably have created a new woman defined by a man, and would then sadly just have become an even bigger part of the problem...

Well, to get to the point of these pretentious ramblings – and wow, they ended up being even more pretentious than I planned them to be... - this points to a problem I have with a lot of my own writing. I'm a male, heterosexual WASP. And I think and write quite a lot about race, gender and sexuality. And I kinda feel like I'm wrong in doing it. I once came to the conclusion, that I wouldn't consider myself a feminist, for that implied that I fought and spoke on their behalf, and as I've tried to explain, that can easily turn into usurping their fight and using it for my own gain. So I promised myself I wouldn't do that. I try not to speak on behalf of women, and minorities of every kind. But I try to listen. And I do my own interpretations of what they say, which can never be done without doing some kind of violence to the original, and which I feel is kinda wrong. But what to do... I've gotta write about something.

Oh what a boring, obvious, noncommittal conclusion. Let me instead end with yet another poem by Akhmatova, let Akhmatova get the final word:

Epigram (1960):

Could Beatrice have written like Dante,
or Laura have glorified love's pain?
I set the style for women's speech.
God help me shut them up again!

Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, are you the Destroyer? : Gender and Sexuality 2

And another translation of an old piece, this time on one of the most widely wellliked albums of the last decade. The features of Hissing Fauna are wellknown. Cheerful, bouncy dancepop hiding dark, disturbing, depressed lyrics. The story behind the album is wellknown as well: Traveling to Norway to provide healthcare for his little daughter, Kevin Barnes, singer and central songwriter of Of Montreal, got a severe depression – understandably, Norway is a sad place... - which drove him and his wife apart. The album was written after his wife left him, but luckily the couple got together again just before it was released, ensuring a happy ending and a less depressed mood on the ensuing albums. The tale as it is told on the album is slightly different, though. Themes of multiple personalities and gender and sexuality has been added. Kevin goes to Norway, becomes depressed, and other elements of his personality begins to bubble up inside of him. His wife leaves him, and on the central, 12 min monolith The Past Is a Grotesque Animal, he suffers a mental breakdown, after which he takes on the personality of Georgie Fruit, a middle-aged, transsexual, black man. The rest of the album follows Fruit, as he dances through town, trying to immerse himself in an orgy of transsexual promiscuity.



Lets repeat that part: He has a MENTAL BREAKDOWN and becomes transsexual and promiscuous. And this breakdown is caused by the dissolve of his heteronormative life. Not the most progressive view on sexuality, to say the least. On the second half of the album, we have some really dark lyrics. How about: 'Eva, I'm sorry, but you will never have me / To me you're just a faggy girl / and I need a lover with soulpower' (Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider) Or: 'There's that girl that left me bitter / Want to pay another girl to just walk up to her and hit her / But I can't I can't I can't'. (She's a Rejector) So we've got the coupling of 'queer' sexuality with first of all mental instability, but also with violence against women, and a use of the word 'faggy' as a put-down. I can't understand why it hasn't been focused on more by the media or the blogosphere, it seems unfortunate at first glance, to say the least. Where Magnetic Fields emptied gender roles of any and all connotations, and used that strategy to talk about prejudice, then Kevin Barnes uses 'perverse' sexuality to show the abnormal, the sick, the disturbing parts of his mind.



And this was what I had planned to write, when I first started writing this piece, a long time ago. Magnetic Fields = Good, Of Montreal = Bad. But during the research phase, I had to read the lyrics more carefully, and that made me reconsider my opinion. The point behind the queerness was a bit more complicated than I originally thought. I found a possible explanation in a key passage from the aforementioned The Past Is a Grotesque Animal: 'I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met / who could apreciate Georges Bataille / Standing at a Swedish festival / discussing Story of the Eye' I do not know a lot about Georges Bataille or Story of the Eye, but wiki is your friend and... it is perverse to say the least. Eros and Thanatos are mixed, as the main couple copulate while people expire apparently. Blood and semen and pee is mixed, and eyes are inserted into stuff... And this is what brought Kevin Barnes and his wife Nina Barnes together in the first place... This is a central piece of information, it shows their heteronormative relationship to be founded on a common interest in perversity! Paradoxically, perhaps... So then, the second part of the album could be seen as trying to regain heteronormativity, through a reconnection with perversity! And it is an important detail, that he doesn't dare to live out the perversity! As the lyric says, he can't he can't he can't! It is a failed attempt at rediscovering perversity. Now, I don't know enough about Marquis de Sade and Bataille and stuff like that, but the second part of the album seems to be inspired by their books, as the narrator tries to describe the unhealthy part in him by emerging himself in perversity. And that he fails to do so becomes a bit sad, he doesn't dare to go through with it.



Would it have been a problem if the album had just simply coupled mental instability with diverting from normative sexuality? Not really. It is important to remember, that the album at most only claims to be a description of the specific breakdown of Kevin Barnes. Therefore, it never proposes that all promiscuous or transsexual people are mentally unstable. Or the other way around, that all mentally unstable people are promiscuous or transgendered... And besides, I can think of few things more boring, than a description of a mental breakdown, that has been sanitized to be more politically correct. And besides besides, the detail with Georges Bataille shows that there was never any heteronormativity to begin with. But I honestly think it is a problem, when discussions of the album glosses over the complicated lyrics on it dealing with sexuality and perversity. Because it IS an unhealthy view on gender and sexuality, it seems to me as if it is meant to be, and is meant to show how badly unstable Kevin Barnes has become. And that it passes without much comment into the public sphere seems to suggest that this theme is something that reviewers/bloggers are perhaps not really focusing on. There was a discussion some time ago (less time ago when the Danish version of this post was posted, it is still an interesting essay), on a difference in the ways race is presented by Coco Rosie and Vampire Weekend, and in some ways, their strategies mirror the strategies I have claimed to be central to Magnetic Fields and Of Montreal. Like Vampire Weekend does with race, so does Magnetic Fields treat gender and sexuality as if there is no problems related to them, thereby perhaps normalizing both things in society. And Coco Rosie as well as Of Montreal draws attention to how messy and problematic the common discourse on race and gender and sexuality still remains. But the problem is, not a lot of attention has actually been drawn to the gender/sexuality question, at least in the case of Of Montreal. I haven't seen a lot at least. And if that is the case, then it might point to a blind spot in our culture as a whole.

[Part I: Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs]

Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs : Gender & Sexuality 1

This is not a defense of 69 Love Songs. This is not a re-review. I happen to think that this albums is one of the best albums ever, but this post is not trying to establish why this is a great album. This album is one of the least reviewable ones there is, to look at it and decide what the ratio of good to bad songs is, is kinda missing the point. I have a hard time figuring someone who won't find at least a few songs they will love, and a few songs they will think of as filler.

But some of the specialness with this record stems from how it portrays gender and sexuality. Throughout the record, the sound shifts, the genre shifts, the gender roles shifts, we have happy songs, sad songs, platonic love songs, explicitly unplatonic lovesongs, lovesongs from boy to girl, girl to boy, boy to boy, girl to girl, a single boy to dog one, although luckily that's one of the platonic ones, and a whole lot of songs where the gender of singer and sung-to is indeterminate. It all becomes overwhelming and confusing. And in this way it manages to question our normative genderroles. If not in society as a whole, then at least in popular culture and in the normal lovesong. This is a discussion of how the album does that, a discussion of how Gender and Sexuality functions throughout these 3 discs and 69 songs. And oh, this is a translation of a blogpost originally written in Danish. Sorry if the syntax is a bit weird here and there, I'm working on my translating skills.



As I said, the album is overwhelming. There is so many songs, and no clearcut development. The placing of the first and last song seems alphabetically determined, from Absolutely Cuckoo to Zebra, and while the first song is about the early stages of love (the precise opening lines are 'Don't fall in love with me yet / we've only recently met) the last one is about a lover who has been given everything, but remains unfulfilled (which could be seen as a slightly aggressive, though kinda humorous, attack on the listener...).But there is no narrative, the album seems made for the CD-age, for the shuffle button or the creation of personal mixtapes. It is therefore a bit difficult to figure out where to start, but let me begin with a song from CD 3: Acoustic Guitar. Seems like a simple lovesong, although lesbian. Girl wants guitar to play well, so she can get girl back. But doesn't this subject seem to fit better, if the voice of the girl is meant to sound like a young man? The idea of a suffering artist, trying to get the girl through his artistic ability, that is normally a role associated with men. And why determine the gender based on the voice? In The Night You Can't Remember, the male voice is definitely meant to portray a woman, as she gets pregnant during the story... And in The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side, the deep voice is supposed to be a young infatuated man (probably about 16, he is the only one of his friends with a car) but he really sounds less like a young man than the singer of Acoustic Guitar. It's probably just a traditional boy-girl lovesong, just performed by a woman.



But if that is the case, then we should probably reconsider several other songs. Like Come Back From San Francisko. Once again, it is a woman singing, the song is aimed at someone meeting 'pretty boys in discos'. If the singer is a woman, well then the addressee is bi-sexual, boy or girl, hard to tell. But it probably makes more sense if it is once again the voice of a young man, and all the involved are gay men. Again in Reno Dakota where the woman sings 'Have I annoyed you / or is there a boy who / well he's just a whore' It makes more sense if they are all supposed to be boys.



But why talk about 'sense' in situations such as these? Because we have certain preconceptions of gender roles. Boys play guitar, boys dance in discos in San Francisco. Once you realize this, the role of gender becomes kinda muddled in a lot of songs. On of the most wellknown songs is The Book of Love, which is mainly about the features of aforementioned lovebook. But, while the singer is a bass, in the chorus he inhibits the role of the receptor in the relationship, traditionally associated with women: 'I love it when you sing to me / you could sing me anything' and 'I love it when you give me things /you aught to give me wedding rings' Why not just place a woman in the narrating role of this song? But on the other hand, why not just a man who likes to receive presents? And who knows whether the giftgiver is male or female, the song never offers any kind of answer to that question. But a lot of songs really don't, yet we always just presume that they are heterosexual lovesongs. I have read several 'alternative' interpretations of love songs, proposing that they are actually about love of heroin, but very few ones that propose the song to be about homosexual love, or even just love from girl to boy instead of the more common opposite.



The theme of gender as construction, and gender as performance, runs through the record, constantly being varied and repositioned. And at this point, I would like to offer a ridiculous overinterpretation based on a drawn out explanation of a bad joke. Bear with me. It's about that boy-dog lovesong, Fido Your Leach Is Too Long. Every verse ends with the joke, that we presuppose the singer will use a dirty word: 'You scare me out of my wits / when you do that shit/-zu, Fido! Your leash is too long' and 'I don't care what you fo(ck)/-xhounds do, 'cos your leash is too long' It's an old joke, but under the circumstances it could be seen as attaning a more significant meaning. The humor arrives from the fact that we prematurely judge what the next line is supposed to be. We become prejudgmental! As we finish the sentence before we have all the facts, so does we in everyday life 'finish' the views we hold of people before we have all the information! It is completely human, piecing together a mental composite image out of all the signs we receive, we do it in language, we do it all the time everyday, without contemplating it. We cannot function in a highly complex information society without doing it all the time! Judging that the weather must be cold because people are wearing lots of clothing, judging that the driver of a big SUV must be environmentally insensitive, judging that a gay guy must be overtly effeminate, or a gay girl must be really butch and hate men. In essence, it is all graduations on the scale of prejudice! Though of course, the consequences are completly different. I don't want to make it sound like Stephen Merrit + co trivializes prejudice. But they do show how common it is, and how hard it would be to completely get rid of it.

So what are we supposed to do to fight prejudice based on gender or sexuality? Well, the record does not hold the answer. In the end it just presents a lot of different people and doesn't judge them differently whether they choose to live up to normative genderroles or subvert them. How you present yourself is always a performance, the amount of acting you want to do is up to you. One moment in A Chicken With It's Head Cut Off it says Let's Just Be Lovers, and the next one we should pretend to be bunny rabbits... The message I get from the record is that love is always a mix of Just Being and Pretending. As long as you are aware of this, and tries to be the least judgmental person you can be, then it'll probably work out. Kind of an old school hippie vibe.



In that way, 69 Love Songs end up questioning our genderroles and conceptions of sexuality. Not by drawing attention to how arbitrary and oldfashioned they are, but simply by discretely destabilizing them, through several songs that doesn't really make sense. As a good friend of mine – who blogs about music in Norwegian – pointed out, the title of the album points to a sexual position that gay and straight couples alike are able to perform. And so would any pairing of boy and girl be able to 'perform' the scenarios sketched out by these oftentimes brilliant songs. As I said, I don't want to argue whether this album is a masterpiece or a classic or whatever. But it has a rather unique and nuanced view on gender, for a rockalbum.

[Part II: Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?]