by Sid Holt
As Juana draws her white in-laws into a series of charged battles, the film marks the shift from widely tolerated segregation and discrimination to a nascent civil-rights era. First she’s turned away from a new hotel, where the hairdressers refuse to style her, then from the diner where she stops with her son, her husband, and her in-laws on their way home. An ostentatiously humble Latino trio (the actors look as though they rode with Pancho Villa) is ejected from the establishment. Hudson, decades into the story line (hours into the movie), finally rises to the occasion and punches the diner’s huge chef, who punches him back more effectually. Hudson loses the fight but wins Taylor’s admiration for slugging his way into civil-rights activism, a rebel with a cause.
Hopper’s character refuses to contemplate taking over the ranch, and though one of his two sisters is a born rancher, she breaks her father’s heart by telling him that she wants a small place where she and her cowhand husband can try out new scientific methods. In the scene where Hudson’s character realizes that he has begotten children but no dynasty or heirs, Mineo’s Ángel Obregón, acknowledged a few scenes earlier as the best man in the place, lingers in the background.
The film seems to suggest that if only Hudson’s character could overcome his racism, a true heir is at hand, the man his wife had saved from death years before. Instead, Ángel goes unrecognized and unacknowledged and comes home from the Second World War in a coffin.
This time around I realized that gently, slowly, the movie has denied the patriarch every form of patriarchal power; his wife does not obey and often does not respect him, his children refuse his plans for them. Ranching itself ceases to be the great pivotal industry that defines Texas; oil has changed everything, and Jett Rink, the surly ranch hand he despised, has become a tycoon. Jordan Benedict II, one of the biggest ranchers in Texas, has been denied all the forms of power that matter to him, the film tells us, and that’s just fine, for him as much as anyone, once he gets over it. The shift is not just from cows to crude but from patriarchy to some kind of negotiated reshuffling of everything, the beginning of our contested contemporary era. The film also points to the rise of Latinos from a small minority to a powerful force in the United States—nearly 20 percent of the population, and twice that in Texas.
Part of the astonishment, I realized as I watched Giant this year, is that this is a film about a man who finds he can’t control anything at all, and yet he’s not Job and this is not a jeremiad. That would presume that he should control things and that it’s sad when he doesn’t. It would propose that kings should not be deposed. This film postulates the opposite: the king has fallen—as he does, literally, in the diner—and everything is fine. That’s what makes it radical. I’ve always seen the film as being about Taylor’s outsized character, but maybe it’s an anti-bildungsroman about the coming of middle age and the surrendering of illusions, including the illusion of control. The disobedient son, Jordan Benedict III, presents his father with a grandson to carry on the family name, Jordan Benedict IV, a brown child whose big brown eyes, I finally noticed, are the closing shot of the film. This, says Giant, is the future; get used to it.
The Hedgehog Review
FINALIST—ESSAYS AND CRITICISM
In an essay described by the Ellies judges as “carefully argued yet emotionally raw,” Becca Rothfeld delivers an unexpected answer to the universal question, “What is love?” Love, Rothfeld tell us, is waiting. Rothfeld graduated from Dartmouth in 2014 and received her master’s degree from Cambridge in 2016. She is now a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Harvard. Founded in 1999, The Hedgehog Review is published thrice annually by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Borrowing its name from Archilocus’ aphorism “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” the publication says its mission is to achieve “the breadth of the fox and the depth of the hedgehog.”
Becca Rothfeld
Ladies in Waiting
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—W. S. Merwin1
In the most memorable scene of the 2002 film Secretary, nothing happens. The protagonist, Lee, sits as still as possible, her hands planted firmly on the desk in front of her. She has been instructed by her lover, who is also her sexually sadistic employer, to hold this position until he returns. For over ten minutes, a period that represents entire days in the movie’s internal timeline, Lee remains faithfully immobile, wetting herself in the process.
Lee offers up her violent passivity as proof of her love, and her physical humiliations are like religious devotions. Hoping to gratify her lover by depriving herself of food, she declines into hunger-induced delirium in which she experiences a hallucinatory vision of her therapist. He explains, “There’s a long history of this in Catholicism. The monks used to wear thorns on their temples, and the nuns wore them sewn inside their clothing.”2 Like centuries of monks, nuns, and mystics before her, Lee transforms her inertia and hunger into an active occupation through the performance of sacrificial pain.
Hunger is a particularly intensified iteration of waiting: acute wanting directed toward a palpably absent object. The literal hunger of mystics like Catherine of Siena, who famously fasted for much of her life, corresponds to a greater hunger, necessarily insatiable, for communion with God. When Lee’s lover comes to her rescue, he resuscitates her with a protein shake, and their relationship adopts the familiar, flagellatory rhythm of feeding and hungering, deprivation and indulgence. Lee’s grand gesture, the gift of her famished waiting, is its origin and its core.
Waiting seems central to the experience and practice of masochistic piety’s messianic successor, romantic love, the force that is supposed to redeem twenty-first-century women as religious salvation once redeemed their forebears. But how exactly does waiting figure into contemporary romance? In his 1977 treatise A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes argues that waiting is constitutive of love:
“Am I in love?—Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.3
In Barthes’s view, love is centrally defined by the transfiguration of neutral lack into conspicuous vacancy, of emptiness into absence: Love is waiting, and waiting is love. For Catherine of Siena, perennially ravenous, the absence is God’s. For Lee, delectably paralyzed with submission, it is her boss’s. For the lover, the beloved’s absence is always acute. Distance is not a redistribution of presence but an evasion or a thwarted expectation, like a phantom limb.
In Secretary, Lee has fled the premise of what would have been her wedding to a banal boyfriend, and as she awaits her boss’s return she wears a crumpled wedding dress. This image might seem to undermine the usual marital tropes: A sort of inverse Miss Havisham, Lee deserts her conventional lover at the altar in favor of a sexually deviant relationship. She is the abandoning, not the abandoned, party, and her passivity is chosen, not imposed.
But despite this, she represents yet another variation on the familiar figure of the woman waiting. Initially, this woman wove while her husband went off to war; later, she donned a wedding dress and waited at the altar for a man who would never come; finally, she settled behind her telephone or her mailbox, first analog, then digital, to wait for men who would probably never call or write. As Barthes elaborates,
Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman.… It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so.… It follows that in any man who utters the other’s absence something feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized. A man is not feminized because he is inverted but because he is in love
.4
Barthes suggests that waiting is constitutive of love—the lover is “the one who waits.” If waiting, even for men, is an essentially female posture, then love proves to be a fundamentally feminine exercise. The figure at the desk, with her tattered wedding dress, her throbbing hunger, her clenched hands, could only have been a woman.
The Day-After Text
At first, everything was good, as it tends to be in the early stages, after the first bouts of effortless intimacy, when your body fits so neatly into a foreign body that it seems to have returned to a familiar place. I received his day-after text promptly, approximately seven hours after I left his bed. The text was a ritual gesture, and its content mattered less than its arrival within the allotted twenty-four hours, before the possibility of future interaction expired. In its immediate aftermath I did not wait. But as our conversation acquired momentum and settled into a comfortable cadence, I found the distribution of my attention shifting. Some part of it was withheld, repurposed, devoted to measuring the increasing lengths of his silences. He was beginning to recede, and I was beginning to wait.
As long as he was the unanswered party and I could imagine him in a state of painful expectation, I felt invulnerable. I fantasized about never replying, about savoring my silence and his presumed anxiety for the rest of my life, but I never managed to go very long without answering and reverting to my habitual state of waiting. (“I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game …”)
Before I met him, I spent most of my time at the British university where I was studying “abroad” taking prolonged showers, checking Facebook in the library, and thinking haltingly about the essays I was writing for my master’s program. In the library, I sat next to a young man with preternaturally red cheeks—they looked painful, scraped—who seemed to be conducting a survey of eighteenth-century botanical atlases. For hours, he sat hunched over his laptop, scrutinizing archival documents that somebody, perhaps he, had laboriously scanned. Sometimes he took notes by hand. Not once did I ever see him check his e-mail or Facebook, as I often did, only to find that no one had contacted me since the last time I checked, five minutes before.
At the pub, where the beleaguered members of my course congregated once a week to “talk about their ‘work,’ ” no one talked about their work. The botany boy, to whom I had never spoken, was never in attendance. Maybe these sessions occurred when he did his laborious scanning. I lamely sipped sparkling water while my peers, who drank beer, speculated endlessly about the weather, which was so stubbornly noncommittal (never torrential but never fully sunny) that it left little to the predictive faculties.
After I met him, however, I spent much of my time waiting for him. This was more engaging than one might imagine. Immediately after receiving messages from him, I felt a sense of amazed, vertiginous relief that he had answered—yes, he had answered—and this lasted for several seconds at a time before it reverted to muted panic that soon he would answer at greater and greater intervals and then would cease to answer at all. I experienced a cumulative total of maybe five minutes of joy during the week before I saw him again, not counting sleeping hours.
There is an eroticism to waiting: Sexual fulfillment requires that one urgently desire what is necessarily, torturously delayed. Romantic waiting is, like certain shades of pain, delicate enough to hint teasingly at future gratification but never disagreeable enough to preclude it. But at a certain point, gratification has been so thoroughly warded off that waiting becomes unendurable, and it wasn’t long after our second meeting that I began to wait in earnest. What had at first been surprised delight that he existed was transformed, without my noticing it, into fear that his privacy would close back over him. His silences began to stretch longer and longer, often for days. I wondered, relentlessly and futilely, what this portended. When I confronted him about what I could only describe as a “tonal shift”—what seemed to me to be a cruel infliction of waiting—he purported to have no idea what I was talking about.
This shift (tonal or otherwise) in patterns of waiting represented a shift in power: Expectation is a form of subjugation. What is the opposite of waiting: the imposition of waiting on someone else? I wished it on him, ineffectually, like a curse. As his communications petered out, I felt increasingly powerless, besieged. I recalled the medieval conception of God as sustaining us, actively willing us into existence second by second, and I felt that his silence was at every moment draining me of myself.
Depression, Too, Is a Form of Waiting
In Iris, the literary critic John Bayley’s tragic account of his brilliant wife, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, and her descent into the fog of Alzheimer’s, he quotes clergyman Sydney Smith’s advice to a depressive: “Take short views of the human life—never further than dinner or tea.”5 Depression, too, is a form of waiting, for deliverance or vindication or a sudden onslaught of meaning that fails, devastatingly, to arrive. Waiting is a manipulation of time—it is “enchantment,” as Barthes writes, a spell that stills and silences its victims—and its antidote is to make time pass at the usual rate once again. (In Great Expectations, Miss Havisham’s abandonment and subsequent waiting arrest time completely: She stops the clocks at 8:40, the moment at which she received the letter breaking off her engagement.)
Smith exhorts the depressive to throw herself entirely into some proximate thing, to repopulate the vast stretches of undifferentiated blankness with something like events. One tries to foist sequences back onto a slop of time that has come to consist in the recurring, harping note of absence. So one lives, one tries to inhabit the minutiae of the activities one performs, one tries to externalize oneself and ultimately to lose one’s sense of one’s selfhood altogether, so that one can become the objects one rearranges on the dresser and forget that one is waiting, that none of one’s activities are complete without some additional element that is wretchedly, unforgettably elsewhere.
Why did I obey the unspoken imperative to wait? Was I trying, like Lee, to prove my affection through my mute endurance? Was my inability to revert my experience of duration to its former state, when his silence was not perceived as a continual laceration, indeed was not perceived at all, somehow masochistic? Or perhaps I felt waiting was better than mourning.
“The woman was then lied to, cheated on, tormented, and often not called. She was intentionally left up in the air about his intentions. One or two letters went unanswered. The woman waited and waited, in vain. And she did not ask why she was waiting, because she feared the answer more than the waiting,” writes Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek in The Piano Teacher.6 To be “not called,” this phrasing intimates, is to be actively wounded: “Not calling” is a transitive offense, like “tormenting.” But Jelinek’s conclusion seems wrong: Waiting, which renders everything provisional, which suspends progress or conclusion of any kind, is worse than clarity. It is waiting that keeps one captive at the desk, determined to see things through until he returns or one starves, whichever comes first.
Waiting Is the Rule
There is, of course, a simpler answer to the question of the role waiting plays in contemporary courtship than Barthes’s convoluted philosophical one. It is that women wait for men: They wait for their Tinder matches to initiate contact, for men to propose to them after years of dating or to ask them on dates at all, for the decisive day-after text (a custom that I realized with some surprise has antecedents in classical Japan; in The Tale of Genji, noblewomen anxiously await morning-after haikus in the wake of their nocturnal exploits).
The messages that I answer immediately, without inserting a buffer of delay calculated to give the (erroneous) impression that I’m busy or unavailable, come from my female friends, and they often constitute an agonized refrain: How soon should I reply? Can I say something yet? Should I call? I know I shouldn’t text him, but.… My advice, ingrained in me by years of comparable counsel from comparably responsive female friends, is always to wait. Waiting is the ru
le, the convention, tacitly enforced by men who retreat from female aggression and actively perpetuated by women who self-police. This is the agreement we opt into when we receive the first day-after texts with such awed gratitude, as if we didn’t deserve them.
Literature bears out Barthes’s claim and my experience: In books, it is always women who wait. In the Odyssey, Penelope awaits the return of her husband for twenty years, weaving a funeral shroud for her father during the day and unraveling it during the night to put off intermediary suitors, one of whom she will wed when the interminable tapestry is finally complete. Penelope is the product of an oral lyrical tradition that excluded women, and it is only fitting that a male authorship relegated her to the sort of maddening inactivity that waiting so often entails. Like Miss Havisham, condemned to tread the same obsessive mental routes over and over again, Penelope is doomed to weave and unweave the same tired designs to no discernable end.
Centuries later, Walt Whitman would open his 1856 poem “A Woman Waits for Me” with a succinct expression of breathtaking entitlement: “A woman waits for me” as if it were simply and irrefutably so. Later still, in Raymond Carver’s poem “Waiting,” a male speaker makes his way to
the house where the woman
stands in the doorway
wearing the sun in her hair. The one
who’s been waiting
all this time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,
“What’s kept you?”7
There is a fond condescension to this poem: It is tender, but it takes the woman’s love and patience—her presence in the door, her mounting fear—for granted. To the male narrator, the waiting woman is a comforting inevitability. The woman’s anxious and vaguely accusatory question does not come from a comparable place of security—not that Carver bothers to investigate.
