What Hurts

Mr. Muscle, gazing boredly /And he checking time did punch me /

And I sighed and bleeded like a windfall / Happy bleedy, happy bruisy

- “Cripple and the Starfish,” Antony & the Johnsons

I was taken by a question posed by a friend: what films do you like, and do you allow, to hurt you? And furthermore, this made me think, what are the pleasures of being hurt by cinema, what are the allowances of that hurt? Whether it resides in a masochistic form of dis/identification or a perverse aesthetic relationality, of subjecting oneself to the rigors of the image, what constitutes this plaintive impulse for immolation? This is less a variation on the piercing of the Barthesian punctum, and more a questioning of the terms of one’s tacit subjection to the painfully beautiful image and to the twistings and woundings of narrative. Perhaps these are the terms of a brazen openness to feeling, to feeling bad.

Melodrama, for me, is one province of such willful, wistful desire for ruination. Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) represents the apotheosis of emotional besmirchment. It also gains an affective value in its repetition, and in its indulgence in tropes of repetition - one need only think of Ophuls’ La Ronde (1950) and the circular logic of the carousel to be reminded of his predilection for the iterative, cyclical, recursive form. Watching Letter over and over again only fuels the film’s power to bruise me. And I like to be bruised by it. The rhetorical perfection of the opening line of the letter, “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead,” sets the temporal conditions of a cresting horizon of feeling, with and through the disembodied voice of the eponymous unknown woman (Joan Fontaine). This is a line that often haunts me in its repeatability, and which I tend to utter to myself over and over again after I watch this film. What sheer narrational audacity, to begin with this gesture of promised obliteration! It is a beginning as ending, which on the level of diegesis portends to be an ending as beginning.

In this opening line of the letter, the moment of reading, the duration of reading, and the time of impending death are brought together in a complex affective formation. Through flashback narration the unknown woman's voice, her words, relay the process of her becoming dead. But she is also reanimated by her words, as read by her unrequited love, only to be pronounced dead definitively by the film once the time of the letter catches up with the story told. The woman, whose name we later discover to be Lisa, is beholden to an amorous object, Stefan (Louis Jourdan) who is emotionally insensate, deadened in his own way. Stefan is a lothario who cannot recognize or remember she - nor any other lover - with whom he has been intimate. The non-synchronicity of melodramatic desire is instantiated by a belated transmutation, a transmission of affect. Desire, its expression, moves from one time to another, from one body to another, precisely “too late.” Much has been written of melodramatic temporality (notably Mary Ann Doane & Linda Williams), in which the structural principles of “too late-ness” organize both the mode’s glimmers of utopian aspiration and simultaneously its inevitable groundings in the romance of impossibility and the impossibility of romance. The happenstances of chance yield to the workings of an indissoluble, unflinching fate - destiny as destination - in the form of a fatality manifested in plot. In Ophuls’ film, the unknown woman dies doubly through the very operation of the narrational process, through the act of storytelling itself.

It is not just that narrative closure itself models a form of mortal ending, but that particular films work this structure through in the most “perfect” ways. Both aesthetic and narrative precision become something that cuts into the fleshy body of our feeling. The beauty of a film’s formal perfection pains us. We see this in the excruciating symmetries, the ironies of parallelism in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000). The spatial, situational proximity of Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow also wedges a temporal gap, a stalling and arrest of the image, so many frozen moments that defy romantic causality, but give us instead the searing sensation of “perfect” images, “too much” composed stillness and effulgent detail to bear.

It is perhaps this experience, the pleasurable burden of bearing a distressed temporality - and the trouble of and with futurity - in melodramatic forms that spurs the most havoc. The “too muchness” of melodrama is in its twinning of romantic aspirations with its halting, lurching “too late” temporal schemes. Melodrama presents us with the manifestation of the impossibilities of reciprocity, of mutuality. Instead of a shared space of synchronicity we are given only the fugitive moments of a chanced pleasure, often in form of the arrested relational fragment. We may not have enough time, or we may not occupy the right time in relation to the other, but we have the sensual plenitude of all those images, unmoored and set adrift from the teleology of togetherness.

Thus, I am less concerned or compelled by the reasons for Lisa’s silence and inexpression, than in the fact that her silence – her refusal to identify herself or profess her excessive affection to Stefan – creates the structure of the narrative’s romance of pained impossibility. Lisa’s fantasy exists in the purest crystalline form: it does not require the participation of the other to make it meaningful, but only demands the idea of him. Thus, Lisa’s confession that “I wanted to be the one woman you had known who asked you for nothing,” also heralds Stefan’s de-realization in the work of her fantasy. Tania Modleski further suggests that Lisa “refuses to hold him to an obligation…she takes up the challenge of loss and lives it.” (“Time & Desire in the Woman’s Film,” in Home is Where the Heart Is, Gledhill, ed. 335) Lisa knows and intuits what we only come to know in the details of her letter: Stefan can never be a ‘real’ lover, he can only be an image, an apparition, a vitalizing illusive phantom. In the final sequence, Lisa herself emerges as an extrusion of Stefan’s renewed and clarified subjectivity. She appears as a reconstituted recollection, a diaphanous vision, as the young girl who first spied him through the frame of the door in their shared apartment building. We see this point of view shot, a repetition of an early image of Lisa in the film, after Stefan has read the letter, and is about to go off to fight a duel with Lisa’s husband. This is an agon which we are certain will kill him. Stefan “sees” Lisa as a reconstructed memory, through her words, too late, in a here-now-then-gone superimposed image, flickering and fading.

In watching the film again, I was struck by, most pleasurably hurt by another form of superimposition and imaging of disappearance, that of the dissolve. The dissolve (a fade out superimposed over a fade in) is an artifact of classical Hollywood scene transitions and a shorthand for smoothing over the shocks of temporal ellipsis. In Letter the dissolve wields an ineffable charge of melancholy, of dissolute bruising, a mournful maceration of the image. The evanescent beauty of these melting, overlapping images made me pause, even as they worked to cohere the spaces of telling and reading, to facilitate narrative propulsion, and to bridge the discreet subjective temporalities, in order for Lisa’s desire to finally, tardily, be told.

What hits me in these transitional moments? Tentatively approaching their fullness is also confronting their partiality. Here are the places where the temporalities of Stefan and Lisa touch and intermingle at the level of the imagistic, where the visual becomes liquid, languorous, indistinct, but nevertheless yields to the tragedy of a passing, irrecoverable time. In the first dissolve, Stefan’s reading of Lisa’s letter facilitates the blurring of his sharp profiled visage, a recession, a pull into the past of her recounting, an absorption into a part of his life that he is incapable of fully seeing. The images seem to bleed into each other, their bleeding a form of opening between bodies of time and between untimely bodies.

But the dissolves that do the most bruising work on me are ones that come at key moments of melodramatic revelation. In another dissolve, Stefan’s departure on the train after their consummated encounter yields an image of Lisa’s bereft walk away from the camera, as her darkened figure fades into an inky oblivion. This shot overlaps with another of a nun walking down an austere darkened hallway towards the camera, signaling Lisa’s impending pregnancy. The “two weeks” of Stefan’s trip edges into the rest of Lisa’s life with her secreted child, a child that dies when placed on another (contaminated, we learn) departing train as Lisa goes to profess her love and give her life to Stefan.

However, the transition that truly does me in, that subjects me to the most rending pain-pleasure, is the final image of Lisa as she writes the closing remarks of her letter. Here the time of reading, of writing, of watching, of hearing and of Lisa’s death approach a climactic convergence – the inexpressible expressed, yet again “too late.” The camera tracks from the crucifix on the convent wall and the perfectly made white bed, seemingly preternaturally prepared for a dying body, then settling on Lisa writing at a desk. Camera movement effects a fluid continuity as Lisa writes (and her voice from beyond the grave recites) these last words.

She is figured, yet obstructed, leaning over the letter – a text which so animates and defines this film’s structure, in a scene which finally fuses the textual artifact and the subject who narrates it. We see Lisa behind a lamp, its iron base mirroring the crucifix on the wall. The light of the bulb obscures as much as it brightens, hurting our eyes. In the profilmic space, it works less to shed light on Lisa, but rather produces a blocking blindness, illuminating the tortured crescendo of conclusion, the limits of what we can see - and Lisa's face marks that limit. The ill fated narrative train reaches its final destination in this melodramatic universe, and the shot begins to fall away, to liquefy with her final words: “If only you could have shared those moments. If only you could have recognized what was always yours, you would have found what was never lost. If only…” Her voice trails off. Lisa puts her hand to her forehead, fully covering her face and her pen drops, rolling on the paper. The image grows blurry, as the shot transitions, blurring into the last page of the letter itself, and the inkblot left by her pen. The blot of the pen, the bleeding of ecriture, matches the liquid dissolution of her life rendered as a receding image, a transfiguration of a last breath visualized as a formless mark, a trailing ellipsis.

The camera’s gaze decisively scans and caresses the letter, closing in on the finality of a message from the convent: Lisa spoke Stefan’s name as she died. Presented from Stefan’s point of view, the letter itself provides the material for a now immaterial, expired body, her voice muted into the inky mark of a bleeding contingency. This conjunction of temporalities, of time catching up with itself in the space of writing, reading, and in the blinding nature of seeing (Stefan’s overdue recognition) depends on a visual logic of disappearance, the straining of separation. The dissolve becomes a device that can never fully smooth over the rift between, but nevertheless aspires to put in haptic contact or even fusion, asynchronous times and bodies. Time catches up to us, always somehow too late. Our inability to see, and to recognize, eventuates a bleeding, bruising image, one that fades out too soon and too much. “If only…”, an echoing refrain, embodies the wrenching contingency at the heart of melodramatic (and, implicitly cinematic) time, joining the utopian possibility of another horizon of amorous experience that never appears (the “if”) and the intrinsic solitude of the “lover’s discourse” (the “only”).

What films, what images, have you let hurt you, perhaps too much?