Modernist Reality

     The film In Cold Blood directed by Richard Brooks and based on the true story novel by Truman Capote truly brings to light just how life-like the modernist era of literature was.  The film holds a number of the common attributes of Modernist literature, even though it is and entirely real story.  The story has a non-linear plot line, an interior reality, a tight form, an experimented perspective, impressionist attention to lighting, a look at psychoanalysis, internalized time, psychological epiphany, and to an extent, an open ending. All of these attributes lay present in the film and each one is used to create the overall feel of the movie that by the end has its crowd feeling sorry for what many would call a cold-blooded killer, named Perry Smith.

     The non-linear plot line of the film plays a large role in understanding the characters in the film. It actually manages to bring into play many other aspects of Modernism. The major breaks in the plot line is that the murder is cut out of the middle and is instead not shown until the end of the entire investigation.  This allows for the unique opportunity of the viewer having a prolonged introduction into the characters, specifically into the psychology of Perry Smith so that by the time the viewer sees the act they are able to see Perry as a human being.

     There is also a heavy dose of experimentation in form throughout the film. The scenes cuts actually end up being run together as if they were simply changes in camera angles.  The end of one scene is some action whose opposite action begins the next scene but in a different place.  For example a scene ending with a man leaving through a door would cut to a man entering through a door as if it was the same man and the same door. This tightening of form plays a key role throughout by giving a sense that the characters are very interconnected and that symbolically they are never very far away from one another, even when Hickock and Smith are in Mexico.

     Three attributes that tend to become intertwined throughout the film are the perspectivism, the interior reality, and the psychoanalysis.  Though the film is technically told from a third person point of view, there is a sense that Smith is telling the story to the audience, as it follows his movements.  During Hickock’s late night in Mexico, the audience is introduced to the extent with which Smith was affected by his disturbing past, and the face of his father is seen where the executioner’s should be. The mood of the scenes also is very closely tied to Smith’s psychology, as the viewer struggles through awkward silences and tensions early on, then gets no sense of comprehension of the murder on Smith’s part, then sees him, in and epiphany, realize the disrupted psychology he had had which releases the tensions a bit, and stammers into realizing the cost of his actions moments before he is to hang.

     Time is also internalized in the film, and it is also focused around the psychology of Smith.  The actions leading up to the arrival at the Clutter household are somewhat slow-going.  But Smith and Hickock’s flight to Mexico is a very quick happening where almost no actions are shown in full, but rather seem to happen in a rush.  The murder actually happens in real-time, though the pace speeds up at the end with Smith’s rising emotions.  And after, the time of jail is told in a very broken sense of waiting, without much of a sense of time apart from that given by the narrator. All of the actions of the film can be said to have happened in real time because they remained at the pace at which one can imagine such events would.

     The impressionist attention to lighting detail can be seen in the film by the specific way that any shades of gray in the black and white film were lost, leaving only the black to completely contrast with the white.  That account of light directly translates into the often used metaphor of black, white, and shades of grey as right wrong, and shades in between.  To leave out the shades of gray actually becomes a powerful symbol of the judicial system and lack of understanding for the psychology of Perry Smith.

     The last attribute is more in a moralistic sense than usual, but it applies all the same. Though the plot ended in a closed ending with the two similar deaths of two different men, Brooks made sure to add in a discussion at the end between Smith’s attorney and another man (Capote?) that indulged that an innocent man had hung, and in a month, it would probably happen again. This opens the ending moralistically leaving the viewer, who by the end has most likely almost pardoned Smith completely to wonder at the harshness of the current (1960s) legal system.

     The fact that In Cold Blood was a film that exhibited many aspects of Modernist literature in itself is no major thing to discuss, but the real meaning lies in a realization just a bit deeper than that.  In Cold Bloodwas a real story line. Capote learned the story and wrote the non-fiction book about it which was then, with Capote’s help, turned into a screenplay. The entire goal of Modernist literature was to express the actuality of life, as harsh as it may be, and in this film, one sees those two (real life and modernism) actually intertwine. The film is a representation that modernism is what it’s cracked up to be, a perception of actual reality.

Psychological Reality in the Tyrone house

While the word “epiphany” suggests positive enlightenment, it is only negative in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night.” Each family member undergoes a bitter revelation within the course of only twenty-four hours. Through self-examination, the four family members all finally grasp the causes of their sorry lives.

James Tyrone’s epiphany occurs in the form of a personal confession to his son, when he admits he would have enjoyed his life if he had continued pursuing acting rather than letting money rule his decisions. James reluctantly acknowledges that his childhood poverty led him to be a miser:

A dollar was worth so much then. And once you’ve learned a lesson, it’s hard to unlearn it.

His fear of the poorhouse ultimately causes James to realize that

Maybe life overdid the lesson for me, and made a dollar worth too much, and… that mistake ruined my career as a fine actor.

Abandoning his passion as a Shakespearean actor ultimately desecrated his life. He tells Edmund,

I’ve never admitted this to anyone before, lad, but tonight I’m so heartsick I feel at the end of everything, and what’s the use of fake pride and pretense. That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in- a great money success- it ruined me with its promise of easy fortune.

At this moment, when James is honest with himself, he finally realizes that money has shattered his potential and caused him a despondent life.

Jamie, one of James’ sons, lives in a world much unlike his father’s, but like James recognizes that his life holds no real substance. Jamie abhors the worthless person he has become. He claims he “hates life” and “has been dead for so long.” His lifestyle of bars and brothels causes him nothing but self-pity, depression, and jealousy. Jamie admits to his brother, Edmund, that he never wanted his brother to succeed and “make [him] look worse by comparison.” He even goes so far as to say that he hates Edmund for his mother’s addiction. He quickly revokes this statement, claiming,

I love you more than I hate you. My saying what I’m telling you now proves it. I run this risk you’ll hate me–and you’re all I’ve got left.

By confessing what he has hidden behind for thirty-four years, Jamie plummets toward rock bottom. At this point in his hollow life, it becomes evident he cannot overcome his doubts and failures. When the optimism he places in his mother’s sobriety falters, he says “I’d begun to hope if she’d beaten the game, then I could too.” This discouraging confession confirms the desperate future ahead for Jamie.

Mary also uncovers much about her self-destructive nature. The mask behind which she hides disappears momentarily during a morphine relapse. Like her husband, Mary regrets the choices in her youth that led her to drug addiction. If she had followed her dream and joined the convent, morphine would play no part in her life. Toward the end of the play, Mary longs for the faith she has lost:

I remember when I had it I was never lonely nor afraid. I can’t have lost it forever, I would die if I thought that. Because then there would be no hope.

During her soliloquy, Mary muses, “If only I could find the faith I lost, so I could pray again!” These lines suggest that Mary’s prediction has come true: by losing her faith, she lost all hope. Without this hope, Mary struggles with her substance dependency and feels shameful and weak. As Mary begins to pray, she stops and proclaims,

You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words! You can’t hide from her!…I must go upstairs. I haven’t taken enough. When you start again, you never know how much you need.

This confession is the only time Mary verbally admits she can not overcome her addiction, and it signifies her surrender. In Mary’s last line, she revisits her long-ago decision to leave the “Blessed Virgin” for James Tyrone. Her constant retreat into her past confirms her revelation that by not following her dream, she created a life of sorrow.

Edmund arrives upon his epiphany in the same manner as his mother, by reflecting on his past. He discloses his realization to his father over the drunken card game:

It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!

Edmund always feels tremendous guilt for his mother’s condition, which was caused by his birth. His statements suggest an inability to cope with the difficulties in his life, therefore inspiring the feelings of rejection and not belonging. In an earlier scene, when Edmund returns from a foggy walk, he tells his father,

That’s what I wanted, to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.

Edmund faces many pressures in his life that he cannot control. The guilt he endures eventually breaks him down and ruins his potential. While talking to his father, Edmund realizes he will never become a commendable man.

Throughout “Long Day ’s Journey into Night,” Eugene O’Neill provides insight into the dismal worlds in which each character barely lives. James Sr. sacrifices his passion of acting for his obsession with money, only to find the money was not worth his dream. Jamie admits he drove his life straight into the ground and struggled to take Edmund with him. Mary realizes that by losing her faith, she lost her joy and self-control as well. Edmund acknowledges that the sea is the only place he ever feels welcome. When each character finally breaks through the barriers of denial and fallacy in their everyday lives, their revelations are anything but the “positive” enlightenment we normally associate with epiphany.

 

Land as a Central Symbol in Desire

One of the ways in which Eugene O’Neill made the land symbolic in Desire Under the Elms was through the use of stones. Throughout the play stones, and the walls they created, are mentioned by both Ephraim Cabot and others.

To Peter and Simon, the stone walls were symbolic in their own way. They represented a sense of confinement and imprisonment. Ephraim Cabot was a man of little or no real emotion. He was very hard on his children and his first wife. As a result Eben, Simon, and Peter hated their father. They felt trapped into doing his wishes, and they saw no real way out. To Peter and Simon, the stone walls built around the farm by their father symbolized their imprisonment for life. This point is clearly shown when Peter and Simon leave to go find gold in California. In their jubilation upon leaving they say,

The halter’s broke-the harness is busted-the fence bars is down-the stone walls air crumblin’ an’ tumblin’!

Eben makes an interesting reference to the stone walls as well. He believes that the stone walls caused the lack of caring and emotion towards their mother by Peter and Simon. He states,

An’ makin’ walls-stone atop o’ stone-makin’ walls till yer heart’s a stone ye heft up out o’ the way o’ growth onto a stone wall t’ wall in yer heart!

What he is really saying is the fact that the many years of hard work on the farm have made Simon, Peter, and of course their father Ephraim, immune to emotion or caring. All they knew was work, and it was work that had made them and their father not care about their first mother.

Ephraim also uses the land as a symbol to describe heaven. He describes it by stating,

The sky. Feels like a wa’m field up thar.

Here Ephraim is describing his old age and what he feels heaven would be like. Peter and Simon even imagine California as being not unlike their farm in New England. In the early part of the play they imagine California as “fields o’ gold!” and “Fortunes layin’ just atop o’ the ground waitin’ t’ be picked!” What is ironic here is that they imagine gold in California being just like the stones in the fields of their father’s farm. In California they would be picking up stones just as they had done in New England.

Another part of the landscape of the farm, and one of the most important, are the two elm trees on each side of the house. The elms represent the spirit of Eben’s mother. Ephraim gives a clue to this when he leaves his party and in the yard says,

Ye kin feel it droppin’ off the elums, climbin’ up the roof, sneakin’ down the chimney, pokin’ in the corners! They’s no peace in houses, they’s no rest livin’ with folks. Somethin’s always livin’ with ye. I’ll go t’ the barn an’ rest a spell.

This statement has two very important aspects. First, it shows that the spirit of his former wife is still in the house. Moreover, it shows Ephraim’s close ties to the land, and illuminates the fact that he cannot share his life with other people. He feels that the animals in the barn can understand him better than any human since both the animals and Ephraim are close to the land, and fail to show emotion.

The most important aspect of the land throughout the play in my opinion deals with greed. Ephraim Cabot is an extremely possessive man. He even states that he would rather burn the farm to the ground than give it away. Everyone in the play wants the farm, despite the fact that when Ephraim first bought it, many people considered it worthless. He removed all the stones from the fields, planted them, and raised his animals. It is as a result of these years of hard work that makes the farm so attractive to everyone, and is in fact the reason why everyone wants it. Ephraim felt that it was God’s will for him to have to go through hardships in working the land. God wanted him to be a hard man. And Ephraim felt that it was not right for anyone to have the luxury of receiving a farm when he had to build it with his own blood and sweat. This was not what God wanted. And in the end of the play, God did in fact win.

Eben feels that he is the rightful heir to the land. Abbie, through lies and chicanery, feels that she is the rightful owner of the farm. Ephraim feels that the land will always be his, and not belong to anyone else. Peter and Simon felt that they were entitled to the land due to the years of blood and sweat they had donated to the land and their father’s wishes. In fact, Simon, Peter and Eben hope that Ephraim is dead when he leaves to get married in the first scene of the play. And in the last line of the play, even the sheriff admits that he would like to have the farm as well. It is this greed over land that effects every major character in the play.

The true importance of the land becomes very clear by the end of the play . It is what drives all of the characters. It affects their feelings, emotions, and outlook on life. It is all that they know and care for. Being farmers, it is their livelihood and a source of pride, at least for Ephraim. It can also be used to show beauty, as well as loneliness. The land is life, and the land is death. To the farmers, the land is tangible, while emotions and personal relationships may seem immaterial.

Escaping Reality

“The Glass Menagerie” is set in the apartment of the Wingfield family. By description, it is a cramped, dinghy place, not unlike a jail cell. It is one of many such apartments in the neighborhood. Of the Wingfield family members, none of them want to live there. Poverty is what traps them in their humble abode. The escape from this lifestyle, this apartment and these relationships is a significant theme throughout the play. These escapes may be related to the fire escape, the dance hall, the absent Mr. Wingfield and Tom’s inevitable departure.

The play opens with Tom addressing the audience from the fire escape. This entrance into the apartment provides a different purpose for each of the characters. Overall, it is a symbol of the passage from freedom to being trapped in a life of desperation. The fire escape allows Tom the opportunity to get out of the apartment and away from his nagging mother. Amanda sees the fire escape as an opportunity for gentleman callers to enter their lives. Laura’s view is different from her mother and her brother. Her escape seems to be hiding inside the apartment, not out. The fire escape separates reality and the unknown.

Across the street from the Wingfield apartment is the Paradise Dance Hall. Just the name of the place is a total anomaly in the story. Life with the Wingfields is as far from paradise as it could possibly be. Laura appears to find solace in playing the same records over and over again, day after day. Perhaps the music floating up to the apartment from the dance hall is supposed to be her escape which she just can’t take. The music from the dance hall often provides the background music for certain scenes, The Glass Menagerie playing quite frequently. With war ever-present in the background, the dance hall is the last chance for paradise.

Mr. Wingfield, the absent father of Tom and Laura and husband to the shrewish Amanda, is referred to often throughout the story. He is the ultimate symbol of escape. This is because he has managed to remove himself from the desperate situation that the rest of his family are still living in. His picture is featured prominently on the wall as a constant reminder of better times and days gone by. Amanda always makes disparaging remarks about her missing husband, yet lets his picture remain. Tom always makes jokes about his dad, and how he “fell in love with long distances.” This is his attempt to ease the pain of abandonment by turning it into something humorous. It is inevitable that the thing which Tom resents most in his father is exactly what Tom himself will carry out in the end…escape! Through his father, Tom has seen that escape is possible, and though he ishesitant to leave his sister and even his mother behind, he is being driven to it.

Tom escapes reality in many different ways. The first and most obvious is the fire escape that leads him away from his desolate home. Another would be the movies that Amanda is always nagging him about. She thinks he spends too much time watching movies and that he should work harder and find a suitable companion for Laura. The more Amanda nags, the more Tom needs his movie escapes. They take him to another world for a while, where mothers and sisters and runaway fathers do not exist. As the strain gets worse, the movie watching becomes more frequent, as does Tom’s drinking. It is getting harder and harder for Tom to avoid real life. The time for a real departure is fast approaching. Amanda eventually pushes him over the edge, almost forcing him out, but not without laying overpowering guild trips on him. Tom leaves, but his going away is not the escape that he craved for so long. The guilt of abandoning Laura is overwhelming. He cannot seem to get over it. Everything he sees is a reminder of her.

Tom is now truly following in the footsteps of his father. Too late, he is realizing that leaving is not an escape at all, but a path of even more powerful desperation.  Williams uses the theme of escape throughout “The Glass Menagerie” to demonstrate the hopelessness and futility of each character’s dreams. Tom, Laura and Amanda all seem to think, incorrectly I might add, that escape is possible. In the end, no character makes a clean break from the situation at hand. The escape theme demonstrated in the fire escape, the dance hall, Mr. Wingfield and Tom’s departure prove to be a dead end in many ways.

Reality in Streetcar

Although Williams’s protagonist in “A Streetcar Named Desire” is the romantic Blanche DuBois, the play is a work of social realism. Blanche explains to Mitch that she fibs because she refuses to accept the hand fate has dealt her. Lying to herself and to others allows her to make life appear as it should be rather than as it is. Stanley, a practical man firmly grounded in the physical world, disdains Blanche’s fabrications and does everything he can to unravel them. The antagonistic relationship between Blanche and Stanley is a struggle between appearances and reality. It propels the play’s plot and creates an overarching tension. Ultimately, Blanche’s attempts to remake her own and Stella’s existences—to rejuvenate her life and to save Stella from a life with Stanley—fail.

A recurring theme found in A Streetcar Named Desire is a constant conflict between reality and fantasy, actual and ideal. Blanche says

I don’t want realism, I want magic.

This recurring theme is read most strongly in Williams’ characterization of Blanche DuBois and the physical tropes that she employs in her pursuit of what is magical and idealized: the paper lampshade she employs to cover the harsh white light bulb in the living room, her chronically deceptive recounting of her last years in Belle Reve, the misleading letters she presumes to write to Shep Huntleigh, and a pronounced tendency toward excess consumption of alcohol.  Blanche creates her own fantasy world through the characters she plays, such as the damsel, southern belle or school teacher. She wears her costumes creating a façade to hide behind, concealing her secrets and attempting to reach her former glory, and illustrating her narcissism and inability to relate to others in a “normal” sense.

Notably, Blanche’s deception of others and herself is not characterized by malicious intent, but rather a heart-broken and saddened retreat to a romantic time and happier moments before disaster struck her life (her previous loved one, the refined Allan Gray, committed suicide during a Varsouviana Polka, as a reaction to Blanche’s revulsion when she discovered he was bisexual, after she accidentally encountered him having sex with an older man).

Then I found out. In the worst of all possible ways. By coming suddenly into a room that I thought was empty- but it wasn’t empty, it had two people in it… the boy I’d married and an older manwho had been his friend for years…

In many ways, Blanche is understood to be a sympathetic and tragic figure in the play despite her deep character flaws.

In an effort to escape the misery of her life in Laurel, Blanche drinks heavily and has meaningless affairs. She needs alcohol to stop the polka music, symbolic of Allan’s death, from running on in her head and to avoid the truth of her life. She surrenders her body to various strangers in an attempt to lose herself. She seduces young boys in memory of Allan. But her empty heart finds no peace, and her bad reputation ends her teaching career.

Though reality triumphs over fantasy in A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams suggests that fantasy is an important and useful tool. At the end of the play, Blanche’s retreat into her own private fantasies enables her to partially shield herself from reality’s harsh blows. Blanche’s insanity emerges as she retreats fully into herself, leaving the objective world behind in order to avoid accepting reality. In order to escape fully, however, Blanche must come to perceive the exterior world as that which she imagines in her head. Thus, objective reality is not an antidote to Blanche’s fantasy world; rather, Blanche adapts the exterior world to fit her delusions. In both the physical and the psychological realms, the boundary between fantasy and reality is permeable. Blanche’s final, deluded happiness suggests that, to some extent, fantasy is a vital force at play in every individual’s experience, despite reality’s inevitable triumph.

The Wasteland

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Once again, we see and individual terribly unable to communicate with those around them. One difference here is the use of line breaks to again make the flow of the lines be broken and awkward, almost allowing the reader to hear the stuttering narrator stumble through his words. Also strange is that the silence is perceived by the narrator as the “heart of the light.” Normally, we would liken silence to darkness, but here, paradoxically, it is actually viewed as the heart of the light. In the middle of the light there is said to be a dark loneliness.

Random Musings

OK, so I’m really beginning to see a tie in some of this whole modernism movement.  It really seems like it conveys a sense of being your  own person, much like we saw in the likes of Whitman.  Yeah, I said his name.  But now, we’re starting to see this whole scene of being so much your own person that you actually become locked in isolation, that doesn’t get anywhere good fast.  I believe that that isolationism is based on an awkward inability to communicate, and a feeling of paranoia as to what would happen if the individual were to put themselves out there and present themselves in an almost overly intimate way with society.  It’s almost like a warning of allowing yourself to be trapped in your own mind.  And I think that that theme translates very easily into the lifestyles of the present day.

The Hollow Men

In “The Hollow Men” we see once again a major gap in the individual’s ability to communicate.  In this poem, however, we do see a more tangible boundary between the individual and society. 

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

In this poem, this shadow is like a curtain dropped down that literally seperates these hollow men from the rest of society.

I also think that the inability to communicate has a certain sense of reality to it. I think that beginning when the modernist movement was going on, people were beginning th lose the ability to affectively communicate with the people around them. I think that this has only become more of a problem as we reach the present day as there are so many things that seclude the individual (tv, internet, video games) I mean, just look at the typical work place. In one office, how many human resource people are needed to sit around and make sure that the employees are able to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively. I sense almost the presentation of reality through the individuals’ seclusion and inarticulateness.

Eliot addresses the unknown in “The Hollow Men”. It is often when one reaches an extreme in life (near death, “rock bottom”) that a person has a heightened sensitivity to the universal questions, the unanswerable concerns.  What Eliot is ruminating about is the “shadows”, the in-between; otherwise known as the journey. There is the cliché saying referencing the fact that journey is more important than the final desitination. Can one ever really capture, recall, picture, that process? Within these “shadows” in our life lie our fears, our naked emotions, human kind’s essence. In the end noone can really depict these internal, possibly universal human qualities; such as a true definition of love, fear, or the soul. And so our lives seem hollow to the spectator looking at us from the outside perspective and while we may harbor deep rooted, unspoken tenants of life within ourselves, concepts we couldn’t even imagine explaining to ourselves, nevermind a fellow human being, these thoughts, beliefs, and aspects of our internal character die with us. While one may remember a war hero for his valor and in our modern world an expose may appear on the news about his efforts and his connection to his home townor family, his true “self” ends with him on the battlefield. It is not glorius and it is not a spectacle to behold. The “whimper” is indicative of every human’s plight of being misunderstood. Misunderstood by society as well as an idividual’s confusion over his/her own concept of self.

Although the narrator appears to yearn for a sort of peaceful decease where there is,

sunlight on a broken column

and

voices are
In the wind’s singing,

in actuality he dreads death because he is afraid that it will be a “twilight kingdom.” The narrator begins to recognize that if the world he is living in currently is a wasteland, a desert marked by stone imagines, he fears that the afterworld will have further abstinence than the present. He will awaken amid lips praying to “broken stone.” This awakening is in a neglected cemetery besieged with broken tombstones.

Communication and Prufrock

“The Love-song of J. Alfred Prufrock”  is the inner monologue of one man, Prufrock as he debates how he will act at the implied social event he is planning.  Throughout the poem, there are two major symbols of types of people who find themselves lost without a real ability to effectively, or more to the point, with any purpose communicate with the party-goers around them.  First is Prufrock with his literal inability to say anything at all.  He is completely and utterly unable to communicate with the world around him. Absolutely anything he says will result in the woman saying

That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all

The reader also gets the sense that Prufrock simply believes that he does not at all belong in the place where he is.  We see again a sense of the individual feeling that they are the disturbance of the world around them.

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

The next piece that we see is the women. 

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

I think it would be extremely interesting to get into the minds of the jabbering women. I have a hunch that they would be wishing that they could say something of purpose, seeing no reason to their lives other that to speak of nothing.

These characters are a much more realistic presentation of a character, and encompass the piece of modernism of presenting and inner psychological reality, here, the reality of a lack of communicating ability.

Add on…

I’ve also decided to extend my studies into modernist poetry because it’s insane and thus fun.

The Thing I’m Doing

My attribute is not one that is found on the fancy shmancy website, at least that I remember. I am investigating the trapping of the self in the mind of the individual. That is to say that the people in modernist literature find themselves trapped and secluded in their own minds, and unable to communicate with the world or society that surrounds them.

By the way, this is a blog for my high school English class. We have decided that the internet makes for better communication than multible essays would.

Shallogre 34/2

Uh……… yeah.