They should be tearing off at top speed now, tires screeching, with the insolent insouciance of a pair of gangsters, their every move precisely choreographed. But no. Wanda, who is going to follow in the Buick, runs awkwardly over to the car where Mr. Dennis is already seated alongside Anderson at the wheel. She leans toward him and quietly asks him for the keys that he’s forgotten to give her (keys: not on the List). And suddenly, right in the middle of everything, when the most important thing is to be swift and ruthless, when fear and risk, the risk of dying, and the fear of doing something irrevocable, take over, everything stops; we see only their faces—the self-important cigar (we know what that means) in Mr. Dennis’s mouth, backlit, Wanda leaning toward him, her expression luminous, abandoned. Mr. Dennis chomps on his cigar with a whispered you did good. They exchange an almost wanton look as if they were in private, and, softly, you really are something, a wave of gratitude, a beat of complicity, passes between them.
There will be one or two more signs of appreciation, or confirmation; Wanda, alone in the car, follows him, smiling and relaxed; he turns and waves in her direction, and this gesture, the hand lifted quickly in the light, that one and only gesture, doubtless meant as a distraction, is for her—we see it in her expression—a sign of absolution.
“I was just walking diagonally across a big field. My sun-bonnet obstructed the view. I could see only the stretch of green before me, and I felt as if I must walk on forever, without coming to the end of it. I don’t remember whether I was frightened or pleased.” For years, during the entire period that she was trying to raise the money to make Wanda, Barbara Loden was working on another project. She wanted to adapt Kate Chopin’s great novel The Awakening, the Madame Bovary of American literature, whose original title was A Solitary Soul. The story takes place in Louisiana at the end of the 19th century. The heroine, Edna, has “let the family go to the devil,” abandoning her husband and children to go “tramping about by herself, moping in the streetcars.” She leaves behind her idle, easy life of chiffon dresses and parasols and languid, interminable summers in search of something that is hers alone, something difficult and confusing: “Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth.” A truth that is discovered through love, through an encounter with the other and through the loss of love, a truth that touches the unbearable ordeal of existence—without irony, without sneering, without condescension. Barbara Loden worked on the screenplay over many weeks but she never managed to secure funding for the project. I find it hard to picture the film that she must have wanted to make. But why not? The costumes, the atmosphere of the bayou and of New Orleans, the stifled turbulence of a finde-siècle socialite summer. She would have played Edna (“I was the best for it”). She would have captured the tension, the thrill of anticipation, the birth of emotion, detachment in the face of beauty; she would have captured that beauty, its awestruck, impassive resolve, the gentle rush of water while swimming, the barking of an old dog chained to the sycamore tree. “But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!”
Then everything happens very fast: Wanda, like Alma, loses her way in the streets of Scranton (“I goofed,” as Alma told the judge); she takes a wrong turn and when she gets to the bank it’s too late: Mr. Dennis has already been shot and killed by the cops. There was no 11b on the List. Deactivate the alarm.
Reporting the story in 1960, the Sunday Daily News recounts that officers James Gatter and Thomas McNamara were on patrol in the area when they got a call to go to a crime scene. There they ordered the armed robber to give himself up: “Drop it, drop the gun.” That’s what I read in the newspaper. There was an exchange of gunfire. When police reinforcements turned up, the chief of police Frank W. Storey solemnly shouted through a megaphone, “Come out in 10 minutes or we’re coming in—it’s your funeral.” Gatter and McNamara said that from then on it was “just like a movie thriller.”
There’s a woman in the crowd. She is on her own, jostled by strangers who have been drawn there for entertainment, curious to find out what was going on. She would like to go through, she should be up there, but she is held back by the police cordon. The sirens die down, the noise around her falls away—scattered, distant voices, the daily flow of life, just an ordinary crowd on a summer’s day in 1970 in a small American town. She took a wrong turn. She got there too late. She had never once called him by his first name. The story could have ended there.
You have to meet Mickey Mantle, Fred Wiseman had said to me at the beginning of my research—he knew Barbara Loden when she was a dancer at the Copacabana, you should meet him, you never know. I do some digging around: in the 1950s Mickey Mantle was the most famous baseball player on the New York Yankees after Joe DiMaggio, considered to be the greatest switch hitter of all time, a true icon of working-class America. I went to Scranton where he was staying for a few days and we met at the entrance to the Houdini Museum, where he is a regular visitor. He explains to me that in this rather pathetic pantheon devoted to the king of escapology the sense of chaos is structured around a rather comforting idea. He takes a deep breath: “Down here things vanish.” He breathes out noisily: “But they all end up here again.” He lowers the peak of his cap and sits down on one of the benches in the lobby of the museum, which is situated inside a tiny, rickety old building at 1433 N. Main Avenue, Scranton. Behind us, beyond the table that serves as a ticket desk, the Houdini Tour is exhibited in a series of dim, untidy rooms with blacked-out windows and walls lined with old documents, posters, portraits, and prints. There are a few small mementoes, counterfeit relics, a stage, a lamé curtain, pompoms, festoons, folding chairs for the show. “Do Spirits Return? Will the spirit of Barbara Loden return?” Mickey Mantle asks me, blinking. He is old. Once upon a time he had red hair. He used to be a serial womanizer. Getting up to go to the drinks machine he rises too quickly and loses his balance. Now, standing there talking to me, small and compact, a can of Sprite in one hand, while he steadies himself against the drinks machine with the other, he appears to be concentrating on some longstanding pain. He says, “We always forget that even though he had fought against it all his life, Harry Houdini became an adept of spiritualism toward the end of his life—he became passionate about it in the crazy hope of making contact with his mother who died in 1913—around the same time, I think, that your Proust was doing the same thing with writing, isn’t that right?” I mentally go through my notes again: Mickey Mantle, hero of the New York Yankees, a typical American hunk, with regular features, a slightly vacant expression in his eyes, a dimpled smile, an impoverished childhood, sent down the mines at the age of twelve, an astonishing batsman, famous for hitting 530 home runs—his body swinging backward then throwing itself forward in a devastating swing—a hard drinker, a skirt-chaser, a clapped-out liver, a real American tough guy—Mickey Mantle is talking to me about Proust. He comes back and sits down next to me, stretches his leg with a grimace, then sighs as if under duress and tells me that he only became interested in all this when a publisher suggested that he write a memoir. He refused any kind of help, that would be like letting someone else take my bat, and sat down on his own to write. The hardest thing is the words, how long it takes, he says, taking a sip of his drink, the concentration you need to work out what goes with what, how to put together a single sentence. I had no idea that shaping a sentence was so difficult, all the possible ways there are to do it, even the simplest sentence, as soon as it’s written down, all the hesitations, all the problems. How to describe the trajectory of a baseball? I spent hours on it. My friends told me to chill, just talk about the tours, the trophies, the club gossip, the alliances, the rivalries, the crazy atmosphere in town on the day of a game, all the girls you had, your house, your love for your wife and kids. But I wanted to describe the trajectory of a baseba
ll, the air, the rustling air, the space—the hole the ball makes against the background, its shape and how it has warped by the time it reaches me, its exact line when it takes off again, that I conceive in my mind a millisecond before I hit it, afterward I don’t look at it any longer, I’ve already gone, I’m not looking at it but I keep an eye on it, that’s something else—that’s what I wanted to tell. The crowd, that great mass holding its collective breath, I wanted to talk about the surfeit, and I wanted to talk about what was missing. I read other writers to see how they did it, I read Melville and Hemingway, that was all I thought about, and that’s when the girlfriend of one of my sons, a student in the French department at New York University, gave me a translation of a sentence by a writer she was studying, something like: “The mind’s eye is turned inwards, one must strive to render inner form as faithfully as possible.” That’s how I came to read a bit of Proust, just a bit—but I still couldn’t describe the trajectory of a baseball, no more than I could describe Barbara Loden, I wouldn’t be able to make her spirit come back. Besides, I didn’t know her, her spirit I mean—maybe I glimpsed it through her body, or maybe I’m confusing it with someone else’s; air, the rustling air, the warped shape, the disappearing and reappearing of some sensation against a dark backdrop, that’s what I was looking for. I wanted to be able to do with words what I had no trouble doing with a ball, to let go at the crucial moment, to hold on and let go at the same time; Hemingway does it very well, but I couldn’t seem to manage that hair trigger movement. He drains his drink in a single gulp. Proust, fancy that. He says he would have been better off taking inspiration from Kepler’s empirical laws. I ask him if he saw Wanda when it came out. Of course not, no one saw the film in America when it came out, it was an art house movie; I only saw it much later when she had already been dead a long time and I was trying to write my life by imitating Proust and Melville. Anyway, I can barely remember her or any other girl, my memory’s shot to pieces. He raises the peak of his cap and coolly tosses the empty can into the bin behind me, in a suspended hyperbola; we hear the noise of metal sinking with a gasp into a mass of empty cups. Our conversation is over. Shaking my hand, he says: You know, Wanda and Mr. Dennis, they’re a couple of goofballs, Ahab and Bartleby travelling together—one bears a terrible grudge and the other would prefer not to; now that’s what I call real love, and I wouldn’t go beating yourself up over it. A line of people is forming for the Harry Houdini Tour. A few of them recognize Mickey Mantle—some elderly tourists approach him shyly, they would like an autograph. Another woman, who doesn’t dare speak to him, asks me with tears in her eyes if I am his daughter. The visit begins. Welcome to the Psychic Theater murmurs a gravelly voice into a microphone. The group disappears into the darkness.
What my mother experienced in the brief, almost trivial interlude of her escape was the feeling of wanting to die. But that’s too big a word. I really feel, listening to her, that what she felt was a stubborn pain rather than a wave of melancholy; it was a blow, a gap—worse, a chasm—the size of a too-narrow tomb. I see that she is careful in her description—these are my words that follow in the wake of her silence. In her suffering there was no longer even any sense of bafflement at having been abandoned, nor the recurring pain of being discarded and humiliated— all that was nothing more than an old archaeology of sorrows, dated Romanesque agitation. One thing remains: the fact of still being there in spite of everything, denuded of power, with no idea of how to describe the thing that is dying, the thing that has already died.
Her head in her hands, Wanda sits motionless as the local TV station broadcasts over and over the details of the events and the journalists’ reports. We see a shot of Mr. Dennis lying on the floor, the shallow puddle of his broken body. We see commentators in rectangular, horn-rimmed spectacles addressing the camera as they describe the failed hold-up. A man sits opposite Wanda. He orders more beers; there are already six empty bottles on the table between them. He has military stripes on his jacket. He might be one of the officers who have been mobilized for the arrest. The drama over, he’s gone for a beer. He finds Wanda there, sitting stock-still, in shock. He’s pleasant-looking, with a friendly kind of face, gentle, a bit shy. He says to her, you’re not saying a word, I talk, I talk, I talk and you just sit there lost in thought. He orders a couple more beers. A sweet guy. Probably not too confident, obviously very happy to have found a girl who’s so easy, even if she does look perfectly dead.
As though the film were being rewound: a bar, her head in her hands, a man buying her a drink. Then we press play and we think we are retracing our steps: a gaunt landscape, quarries, white this time, the middle of nowhere. A bright red convertible is gliding toward us, we hear the sound of tires on gravel and occasional birdsong, everything seems calm and quiet, the radiator grille is gleaming in the sunlight, the car is fiery red inside and out, we can see Wanda’s blonde chignon as the car comes nearer, turns slightly and stops by a pile of stones—the ominous sound of something landing softly at the bottom of the quarry. The pleasant-looking guy revs the engine, it might be a boast or a threat, then he slides his arm along the red leather, moves toward her and in the same movement, smooth operator that he is, takes Wanda’s handbag that she has been holding in her lap and sets it down by her feet, all the while talking to her in a low, gentle voice, as if to a child, and in the same movement—this sweet man knows what he’s doing—he draws her toward him.
It’s never comfortable in a car, so with his other hand he shoves some things out of the way, ordinary life is always full of obstacles, then he draws her to him, in the same movement he presses her body against him, busy with one hand all the while, whispering in her ear, making gentle, caressing little noises, he wraps his other arm around her, slides her beneath him, makes her disappear into this non-consensual conclusion, the silence that we call consent. We can’t see her any more, there’s no sound now, no words, just birdsong, she is buried beneath this dark, shapeless body, out of sight under his bulk, he’s heavy, I’m fighting for breath, he’s crushing me, no more words as the sweet guy rapes her.
When Wanda came out in 1970 feminists hated it. Barbara Loden came in for a great deal of severe criticism. Many clearly reviled her. What is this? A passive woman, submissive to male desire, who seems to take pleasure in her enslavement! “How can you show women in such a bad light?” They saw in Wanda an indecisive woman, subjugated, incapable of affirming her own desire, who made no demands, who didn’t even create a militant counter-model; no self-awareness, no pioneering mythology of the free woman. Nothing.
Madison Women’s Media Collective, 1973: “Do you think of Wanda as a means of raising awareness among working-class women?” “When I wrote Wanda, I knew nothing of the women’s liberation movement, which came later. The film has nothing to do with women’s liberation.”
Talking about Elia Kazan, Barbara told FILM magazine in July 1971: “He taught me that what mattered most was not to remain silent. Before I never said a word, I was always silent. And now, what’s left for me to do? He told me you’ve got to be heard. Everything that you do must be heard. That’s why I made Wanda. As a way of confirming my own existence.”
And suddenly, from the depths, she cries out, it sounds at first like a distant murmur, then it’s a cry, a shout of refusal, an explosion of rage and distress, she’s kicking the man to get him away from her, she’s screaming and hitting, she won’t give in to him, she finds the strength and finally she manages to escape. Her bag, she doesn’t forget her bag. She escapes, running, she stumbles and falls, gets up, runs into the nearby bushes, keeps going, loses her way. It might only be a little patch of municipal woodland but it might as well be a mythical forest; she has entered the circle of forgotten antiquities and of fairy-tale coincidences, the site of indecipherable truths, all preserved there between two parking lots. Running, frantic, she vanishes, as into sleep.
“She seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself … She remembe
red the night she swam far out, and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of being unable to regain the shore. She did not look back now, but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no beginning and no end … She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.”
Night has fallen. It’s quiet. Wanda, walking slowly, emerges from the forest. The camera follows her from behind. In the distance, large, brightly lit windows, a wall of light, a world of welcoming rooms, appears from the shadows. Suddenly someone’s voice, a woman, honey, you waiting for someone? No, she’s not waiting for anyone, she’s not waiting for anything. The final location is enclosed; there’s music, chatter, someone hands her a drink, food, cigarettes, they shuffle up to make room for her, they show her just the right balance of attention and indifference. She is a little squashed on a bench, with these people who are relaxed, absorbed in the pleasure and the tedium of togetherness. We don’t know what she will lose, or what she is going to find. She is coming back to herself. Perhaps she would prefer to disappear into a life of solitude—exhausting, but her own. At this point Barbara decides to let Wanda take control of her life, desperate and senseless as it is. Marguerite Duras spoke of glory. Talking about Barbara and the last scene in the film, she said, “It’s as if at this point in the film she’s found a way of making holy the very thing that she has tried to show as a kind of degradation. I see a kind of glory there, a very powerful glory, very violent, very profound.” An urge for victory, the desire to achieve something spectacular in defeat. I prefer what Louis-Ferdinand Céline says: when you’ve reached the very end of all things, and sorrow itself no longer offers an answer, then you must return to the company of others, no matter who they are. Wanda, at the end of her journey, is sitting with other people, a little squashed, on a bench. The image freezes, grainy and flawed. Wanda. Just one among others. Just as she is, in the world as it is. Fade to black.
Suite for Barbara Loden Page 7
