the other side of the self
by Douglas Messerli
Jean Cocteau (screenwriter and
director) Orphée (Orpheus) 1950
“Every schoolchild knows the story
of Orpheus and Eurydice,” begins Jean Cocteau’s film, repeating the ancient
myth before rolling off into its own hardly recognizable version. For Cocteau,
it appears, is far less interested in the love between the original couple than
he is in Orpheus himself. Indeed, the director is portrayed as Orpheus (as
Cocteau wrote during the film’s making, “It is much less a film than it is
myself.”), a highly successful poet who, we discover in the first scene, is
scorned by his own poetry community. All the general criticisms of Cocteau—that
his writing was basically unoriginal, that he stole from numerous other
writers, and that his works were lacking real experimentalism—are called up in
Orpheus’ discussion with an older poet, before the young rival, Cégeste,
appears on the scene, calling up Cocteau’s own affair with the young poet
Raymond Radiguet, whose death decades before, as Mark Polizzotti writes in the
notes to the Criterion edition, “still haunted him.” The fact that Orpheus was
performed by Cocteau’s former long-time lover, the handsome matinee idol Jean
Marais, and Cégeste was acted by Cocteau’s current bedmate, Edouard Dermithe,
further creates tensions between the artist in
the film and the creator of the
work of art.
If I were to recount the plot of the rest of this film, for those who
have never seen it, I might be perceived as ridiculous and possibly not to be
believed, so I’ll forego the storytelling. It hardly matters, in any event, for
as those who have watched this “incredible” piece of cinema, the landscape is a
mix of a dream world and the personal that hardly ever comes up for breath into
solid ground. In Cocteau’s telling the somewhat plain but pleasant Marie Déa is
less a lover than she is a slightly pampered, mostly ignored wife. For Orpheus’
true love is on the other side of the mirror, where death waits, performed
brilliantly in Cocteau’s fable by great dramatic actress, María Casares. As the
dead chauffeur, Heutebise (François Périer), tells Orpheus:
I am letting
you into the secret of all secrets, mirrors
are gates
through which death comes and goes. Moreover
if you see
your whole life in a mirror you will see death
at work as you
see bees behind the glass in a hive.
If that weren’t enough, Cocteau creates
a strange bond between the dead chauffeur, Heurtebise, and Orpheus, who brings
both the car and the driver into his house. Heurtebise, in turn, falls in love
with the now neglected Eurydice, and it is his love for her, not Orpheus’, that
sends the poet into the land of the dead to retrieve her.
Even here, moreover, Cocteau creates another kind of homoerotic bond, as
Heurtebise takes Orpheus’ hand and shoulder, leading him through the Zone into
death’s realm. In short, Orpheus is in love with himself, first, with Death,
and, indirectly with Cégeste and even Heurtebise, as opposed to Eurydice. Is it
any wonder that, in order for her to return to life, the husband is commanded
not to set eyes upon her again—a problem which further frustrates and infuriates
him. Both Orpheus and Eurydice are trapped through the command to live with one
another without the ability to express love or hate: you can neither love nor
argue with someone you cannot see. Both husband and wife, at moments, become
determined to break the rules, destroying each other in the process. Orpheus’
look into the car mirror to glimpse his wife seems almost like a determined
attempt to rid himself of her—allowing him, since it will also mean his own death,
to be enveloped in the arms of the Princess.
Indeed, as in the original myth, the angered mob of young poets and
determined “Bacchantes,” feminist writers in Cocteau’s witty telling, kill him,
and, once more, with Heurtebise (the Charon of this tale) he is transported
into death’s realm, Death, in her impatience waiting for him to arrive,
momentarily experiencing human time.
The strange twist at the end of this
tale is more explicable if we comprehend that all three of his lovers—The
Princess, Heurtebise, and Cégeste—perhaps perceiving that each is secondary to
Orpheus’ central love, himself, erase him from their thinking, allowing him to
go back in time, and to return to his loving Eurydice, as if she has just
awakened from a nightmare nap.
If we find Orpheus’ sudden caring for
and embracing his previously neglected wife a bit unbelievable, we must
nonetheless recognize that through death—and by extension through immersion in
the self—the artist is redeemed so that he might, through his creation,
continue to survive in the everyday world of “baby clothes and bills,” at which
Orpheus had earlier chaffed. So has the self-pitying poet surprisingly (he has
been told by the older poet to “surprise them”) discovered another concept of
“the other side of the self,” a self that lives in the mundane world of
everyday being.
Los Angeles, August 4, 2013
Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (September
2013).
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