Martin Arnold | Passage à l’acte / 1993

“i am”: reading from a language that no one heard in the original to kill a mockingbird

by Douglas Messerli

Martin Arnold (director) Passage à l’acte / 1993

 

Almost 33 minutes into Robert Mulligan’s film To Kill a Mockingbird, after a great many important events in the movie, there is a small scene at the breakfast table as Scout (Mary Badham) and Jem (Phillip Alford) are about to end their summer and return to school. It is a particularly important day for six-year-old Scout since it represents her first day of school to which, for the first time in the film, the tomboy is required to wear a dress.

     Evidently, the event is so important that the friendly neighbor, with an eye on Atticus Finch, Miss Maudie Atkinson (Rosemary Murphy) decides the share their breakfast. The central characters in the original film in this very short scene at the breakfast table are actually the family maid, Calpurnia (Estelle Evans), who has been responsible for the children all summer, and Scout whose important costume change—and alteration supposedly from a tomboy to a genteel young lady—is the focus of the scene. 

    In the original, Calpurnia, who has probably created and certainly had freshly ironed Scout’s dress and Scout herself are the center of attention, with Atticus looking kindly on over the occasion while Jem expresses is his adolescence impatience to hurry off to school, at one point bolting out the door only to be ordered back to the table by his father who declares it’s still a half-hour before school begins. Jem demonstrates his impatience with Scout, who hovers over her eggs, bacon, and milk, all the while pouting for having been forced into the dress in which she is not at all comfortable.

     Jem keeps attempting to hurry her throughout this breakfast scene as she testily tries to eat some food before, suddenly, she too bolts through the door with Jem, she returning briefly to kiss Atticus goodbye while Maudie and Atticus, playing the parental figures, inwardly giggle to themselves over the behavior of the children.

      Presumably nothing of great importance—particularly given the major tensions of the film that include rape, attempted murder, racial injustice, intellectual inability, a rabid dog, and one of the best courtroom scenes ever portrayed on film—really happens in this little interlude.

      However, since the narrator of this work is presumably Scout grown into the lesbian adult similar to the author herself, this scene, in fact, is terribly important since it represents one of the first of many times when males will attempt to take away the power she has held as a tomboy child, able to run and play with the boys, her beloved brother and the visiting Dill, while standing up to their worst possible bogeymen such as Mrs. Dubose (a neighbor who daily verbally abuses the children), Boo Radley (the next door adult who in those days was described as “mentally retarded” but whom the children perceive more as a terrifying idiot), Walter Cunningham (a nearby farmer who appears with the gang of men determined to hang the black rape suspect Tom Robinson, and who has been given special favors by the Finch family), and even the evil Lee “Bob” Ewell (the racist father of the girl Robinson is falsely accused of having raped). On this particular morning the focus is upon her transformation into a female who will no longer be permitted to accomplish any of these acts, and will eventually be assigned to marriage or maidenhood like Maudie herself.

 

      In Passage à l’acte Austrian-born film maker Martin Arnold has taken this scene and heavily manipulated it by speeding up events, slowing them down, and mostly repeating the tinniest of movements along with radically distorting the sound and language of the original. The title of his work refers to the French clinical psychiatric phrase that designates impulsive acts of a violent or criminal nature that often indicate an acute psychotic episode. Particularly in the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan, the “passage to the act” represents not just an “acting out” of such behavior, but an acting out that ends in the exit from the scene, which on a far more benign level is what happens in the original.

       David Herbert, writing in the Millenium Film Journal, argues for the necessity of intertextual readings with regard to Arnold’s Passage à l’acte, suggesting that Arnold’s “repetitions and reversals in the flow of images emphasize certain actions and gestures in such a way as to implicate and disrupt otherwise invisible formal strategies, products of the Hollywood cultural apparatus. Suspending the metonymic chain established in To Kill a Mockingbird, these repetitions reveal the alterity within the frames and defer their sequentially constructed meanings.” In other words, Arnold’s cinematic distortion of the original reveals previously imperceptible patterns in the narrative action of Mulligan’s otherwise traditionally-constructed movie.

     Herbert continues: “The disruption of the soundtrack also radically alters the functions of the original film. Similar to a hip-hop DJ, Arnold samples the original audio and creates a new orchestration through minute segmentation and repetition. Beats, such as a door slamming or the dropping of a fork, take on a new aesthetic prominence. At times, the audio composition takes precedence over the images altogether, as the film plays upon syllables and incidental noises as independent elements.”

     But while Herbert argues that these audible transformations “eliminate the power of language,” I would argue that they merely increase it, forcing us to seek to comprehend not only the images, which themselves are totally altered, but to attend to the new language, “the unintelligible barks and yelps” as Herbert describes them, of Arnold’s deconstruction in order to make new meaning of the linguistic component of the film. My ears may not hear the same words that yours do, but anyone who has the patience to listen will have to concur that something else than what the film’s original overriding narrative expressed is being strongly portrayed in this small scene.

 

    Arnold’s work begins after Miss Maudie has arrived, Calpurnia has already served up the breakfast plates and poured out the coffee, and Scout has shyly and uncomfortably entered the room in her new dress. It begins, in fact, with what might be described as the male reaction to Scout’s behavior, Jem’s complete dismissal and rejection of her discomfort as he suddenly determines to leave for school without her, racing out the door when spotting, evidently, one of his male companions.

     That action is played out in a series of loud slams and noises, a seemingly nervous breakdown of Atticus, in this case an authoritarian, as he shouts out Jem’s name while pounding the table over and over in repetition. In that act he repeats his son’s name, gradually transforming it into “Jim,” “jess,” “jest” “dare,” “ass,” “fff” (sounding the f-word), “fmf” (female-male-female), “em,” “bam,” “damn,” and “jam,” and others before returning to “Jem.” He appears to be having muscular aberrations with regard to both his hands and his face, pounding the table as he hisses out the words, Maudie shaking her head nervously as if in shock.

 

   When Jem attempts to return, it appears that door is now locked and that he has to knock in order to get back in. 

    Now looking down sternly, Atticus begins repeating words that sound like “apple,” “half full,” “flub,” “affela” (a fellow?), “hello,” “sort,” “m’scoot,” “scoot,” etc. returning, so it seems, ultimately to the unconscious subject on both their minds, Scout.

     Eventually, Jem reenters, moving forward in a manner in which he now seems to be shaking, Atticus pointing and tapping the table with his hands as if to recreate order.

 

    As Maudie seems to shake her head from side to side in the negative, Atticus points back to the chair in which Jem previously sat, now mouthing a series of “s” words “myself, myself,” “sell it and sell it,” “sit one,” “sit on,” “so on,” and eventually moving back to the word “son.”

      As he finally settles his hands back down on the table, Atticus begins to stutter out words that sound like “wait,” “wait you,” “but wait,” “weight,” and “wake.” Then turning to Scout, he begins to stutter out a series of “sister,” “sister,” “sister,” “sister.” If anything, his endless repetitions of “sister” are even more unbearable than his shifts of language with regard to Jem, and soon with Arnold apparently using an echo device, the words clearly reverberate through that small kitchen as a negative assignment of her role, the female designation of a young woman who cannot but be compared with the more inclusive “brother.”

       So far Scout, hovering the foreground with her back to the camera, has does nothing but attempt to eat her breakfast. Yet clearly in the series of “sister” declarations, she is being scolded, it appears, for some unknown offense.

       Jem returns quite literally on edge to his chair, his emotions reiterated in Arnold’s version by the fluttering of his hands, as Scout reacts with a slight scrunching forward, itself hinting at a kind of impatience obviously to leave the “family” circle. Shaking his head nervously up and down, Jem now turns his criticism upon his sister, repeating over and over again with the application of the echo mechanism: “Well then hurry up, hurry, up, hurry up,” etc. After saying this four times, the repetitions are speeded up yet further so that the “hurry up” is spoken in jack-hammer manner for a long period.

      In this scene we finally catch our one and only glimpse of Calpurnia at the stove, a half body image from the back with her left hand beating in rhythm to the insistent orders of Jem, almost as in a part of a dance or nervous tic. And at the same moment, Scout, saying her first words, begins to interject a series of “am” after each demand to “hurry up.”

 

     The patter between them becomes almost comic, as if the scene proves that you can only state your point so often before it becomes mere patter and meaninglessness. The battle of “hurry up” and “am” is a standstill that might never end, one demanding movement, the other insisting upon the current stasis of existence in the firm placement of “I am,” surely the understandable reaction of the young Scout being told to grow up and become something other than the tomboy she recognizes herself as being. If nothing else, Scout is not at all interested in hurrying up into the female world into which she is expected to suddenly enter.

      This is made even more apparent as the “am” comments begun to be followed with a word that at first sounds like “Francis” before turning into “Frank,” a shifting of a female name (Scout’s real name is Jean Louise) to a male surname. It is a similar relationship between Jean and John, the French François becoming the English Frank. She’s as insistent about the name “Frank” as is her brother demanding she “hurry up” or as she previously was with “am,” and it’s even more interesting when she begins to combine the words, “am Frank,” suggesting that she not only identifies with the male surname but that she is being “frank” or honest in her declarations, as the word “frank” gradually comes to sound like “grand.” Indeed, this is the longest dialogical moment in the entire 11-minute film.

      Slowly the repetitions, sped up even faster, become an interchange of “am for” and “hurt for,” which ultimately turn Jem’s words into a repetition of the demand to “stop,” while she insists now on “Frankie” and eventually even a word sounding like “Dave.”

 

     For a moment, it appears as if the adults, particularly Maudie, might enter into the conversation as they rhythmically lift their coffee cups to the patter of “Come on, come on, come on, come on” and to her chants of “Francis, Frank, and Dave.” The two women, in fact, Scout and Maudie each try to engage in drinking milk and coffee, stopped by the repetitious responses of Jem and by association, Atticus.

     Finally, Scout’s language turns into a series of single words, “Sis” transforming increasingly into a linguistic sound that reverberates with a sense of accusation like a “tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk.”

     After another long series of “come on’s,” the camera is focused on Atticus, as he also appears to judging the actions of the coffee-drinking Maudie.

     Finally, Scout gives up, tossing down her fork over and over, repeating words that begin to truly sound like “fuck-em up, fuck-em up!” that turns into simple “fucks” before transforming into a word that sounds like “fart,” that just as quickly alternates with the word “what,” as if she were exasperatedly questioning the entire transaction between herself and her family members: “what do you want of me?” or “what’s going on here?”

     “The words “slam, slam, slam” become transmogrified as “with lamb, with lamb,” that shifts finally into the word “family,” just as the two children began standing to move towards the door, singing out “some ways.”

    As Scout seems to actually touch her brother Jem on the run, the word “touch” quickly turns into the word “potty” and “comedy,” as both children, seemingly undergoing a physical breakdown, struggle to reach the door and run, Atticus and Maudie shaking their heads in negative horror at what they are witnessing.

       The terrible banging of the door puts a pasted, clown-like smile of terror on Maudie’s face, as Scout struggles through the open doorway, Maudie’s hands shaking with the tension of the entire encounter, alternating with what appears as applause for Scout’s actions. The sped-up sound track makes it sound like the bent over Scout is singing out “Cindy, Cindy, Cindy, Tootie, Tootie, Tootie,” as he returns to quickly kiss her father with several sloppy kisses before rushing off.

      If the above sounds like a kind of coded reading of my own creation, I openly admit it is. The sounds and images of Arnold’s manipulated version of the original short scene are electronically or digitally created in a manner that they can be interpreted differently by any viewer, and the above “reading” of the text consists simply of how my now very seasoned and unreliable auditory system has interpreted them, albeit after many careful listening sessions. How one interprets this text is obviously also a matter of how each individual perceives the language around them and interpolates them within the normative language of the film itself. As the children’s game of “telephone” makes apparent, we all hear what we want to.

      It might help to note, however, that in the original movie, soon after this breakfast event, on her first day of school Scout gets into a terrible knock-‘em-down fight with her male peers, she obviously not at all happy with her new role of supposedly having to behave like a young lady, actions which surely support much of my Steinian-like approach to language as I have interrupted it.

 

      I fully agree, furthermore, with what Herbert and other critics suggest Arnold’s reexamination of the original text more generally reveals, nicely summarized in Herbert’s comments:

     “The framing strategically circumscribes a portrait of a nuclear family eating a morning meal. The woman on the right of the screen, a neighbor in the original film, is now easily viewed as the wife and mother in this familial unit. Her immobility and silence testify to the passivity of female characters within traditional Hollywood narratives. Gregory Peck becomes a demonic father, whose verbal and gestural commands speak to a greater masculine authority. In this register, the scenario describes the indoctrination of the young male and female into the traditional gender roles assumed by the parents. Peck orders the young boy to obey, the young boy in turn commands the young girl, who in turn supplicates to the masculine authority and inherits her mother's passivity. Thus the film delineates a certain chain of command within the nuclear family, as an otherwise unremarkable product of the post-classical Hollywood representational paradigm.”

      Similarly, Herbert is quite correct I believe in arguing that Arnold's film “relegates Calpurnia, the Finch family's African American nanny, to a mere half-shape on the right-hand side of the screen. Indeed, her role as moral authority in the original novel, already diminished in the film adaptation, is now fully negated. The moment from To Kill a Mockingbird which comprises Passage à l'Acte has no bearing on the previous film's major narrative conflict, the accusation and trial of Tom Robinson, which functions to singularly articulate the original film's liberal ideology and message of tolerance. Although the film analyzes and critiques the politics of representation within To Kill a Mockingbird, this critique is entirely manifested in gender and generational constructions within a White social frame. In this way, Passage à l'Acte may implicate the racial hierarchy within the liberal ideology of the former film, by construing the racial issues as a ‘backdrop’ to its real motivation, the indoctrination of the young female into a strict gender hierarchy. Passage à l'Acte reveals the extent to which the young girl, Scout, finds herself at the mercy of the male figures in her life. Just as Scout learns, from her father, invaluable lessons about the injustices of racial bigotry, so too must she conform to sexist social norms.”

      I’ve argued for precisely this viewpoint in my previous essay on the original movie.

      Except here, we perceive it at an almost subconscious and highly personal level, rather than through the larger narrative plot. Both linguistically and visually, we realize through Arnold’s version that Scout does not at all agree with the new role placed upon her, and that although she finally gives into her brother’s demands to “Come on,” she enters the new school world as a young woman who very much knows that she is not a Francis, a Cindy, or even a “Tootie” (the youngest wild child, one must recall, of Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis).

       Like Harper Lee, herself, the lesbian friend of Truman Capote, Scout begins on her long voyage—at least as I read the new uncoded film—as a “Frank, a Dave” or perhaps even a symbolic Boo, as the kind of scary figure who returns to her Alabama hometown in her original version of the story, Go Set a Watchman, a monster who returns home to discover the truth of Atticus having joined the KKK while showing herself to be a woman who hates the gatherings of small-town women whose lives are occupied in dressing up to visit one another in afternoons of meaningless gossip, drinks, and hors d'oeuvres.

    As I have long argued, To Kill a Mockingbird is not truly a film of racial revolution, of white embracement of blacks, or even radical change in racial relationships, but is a pat on the liberal white back for even caring enough to read a book about such issues. In her original fiction, Lee cut much closer to the bone, and showed us that Atticus Finch, her own symbolic father, was very much like the “demonic father” Arnold explores through his coded revelation in Passage à l'Acte.

    The real subject of that supposed racially advanced look into small town Southern life remains the young girl Scout, so terrorized that day back in 1932 when she was expected to be something other than she knew she was, reiterating it again and again in the stubbornly emphatic recognition of “I am.”  

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).