Paul Thomas Anderson | Phantom Thread / 2017

slowing him down

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (screenwriter and director) Phantom Thread / 2017

 

The “Phantom Thread” of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film does not refer, as some have asserted, to the secret messages the movie’s hero, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) sews into the women’s gowns he creates, but rather to the almost incomprehensible “thread of love” between Reynolds and the young German-born waitress, Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps) whom he meets in a provincial British restaurant and, much-like Shaw’s Pygmalion, he takes home, dresses up, and puts to work in his fashion-house. We never do fully discover what these two see in one another: Alma is a vaguely beautiful, but a somewhat clumsy and outspoken woman; while Reynolds is a man dedicated to himself and his routine, unable to even tolerate any interruption, and set-on-edge by even the sound of Alma buttering her morning toast. Both are somewhat selfish and set in their ways, yet their ways go in very different directions.

      What’s even worse is that Reynolds is a kind of mamma’s boy, his life now run by his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), a more complex Mrs. Danvers (from Hitchcock’s Rebecca), who, at first, is dreadfully jealous of her brother’s new discovery, but gradually begins to appreciate Alma’s ability to learn quickly and her proficiency at fitting. Modeling, and helping with the sewing, as well as taking some of the load of caring for Reynolds temperamental fits, Alma’s very quietude seems, at times, the perfect antidote for Reynolds’ tirades.

      Of course, this is hardly the first time that Anderson has focused on inexplicable relationships and their personal obsessions: one need only remember the homoerotic connections between Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman in the same director’s The Master, or the similarly strange homoerotic interconnections between Joaquin Phoenix and the Josh Brolin character in Inherent Vice.   One may describe Anderson’s films as focusing on queer relationships that have as much to do with obsession as with love.

     If Alma enters the Woodcock mansion, however, much like the disoriented Rebecca as a spirited proto-feminist, she soon begins to take over, responding to Reynolds’ sexual lack of attention quite differently from the designer’s previous mistress, even arranging, against Cyril’s advice, a surprise private dinner with him that she has cooked. True to form, Reynolds explodes in anger, simply over the fact that she has cooked asparagus and served it with butter; he prefers oil. It soon appears that she will also be asked by Cyril to leave the relationship, just like Alma’s predecessor.

     The film begins with Alma recounting her experiences with Reynolds to an unknown individual, and within that context we hear her describing that it had become necessary to “slow him down,” to help him to realize that he, in fact, was truly dependent upon her, not the other way around.

     Her solution, hinted at very early in the narrative, is to feed him a ground-up mixture of poisonous mushrooms, which makes him terribly ill, while she watches over him, gently ministering to a temporarily helpless tyrant. Although Cyril demands a doctor, even the sick patient eventually tells the doctor to “fuck off.” Mother’s boy that he is, Reynolds, quite obviously, prefers the care of a woman who almost selflessly watches over him, a chair pulled up to his bed, while on the floor below his own, an army of seamstresses seek to correct the damage, through his illness, he has done to a princesses’ wedding gown.  

     He recovers, suddenly realizing that he wants to marry Alma, or, at least, have her care for him for the rest of his life. The two marry, but almost immediately begin to fight again, as what we might perceive as an almost gay-man realizes he has made a terrible mistake much like Henry Higgins has in inviting Eliza Higgins into his world in Pygmalion. And as the failures of their relationship escalate, Reynolds turns to Cyril to plead that she help him “get rid” of his mistake, again reminding us of another intense mother-son relationship, that of Alex Sebastian and his dominating mother in Hitchcock’s Notorious.

     By this time, however, Cyril has grown quite fond of her Rebecca, and refuses to dismiss Alma or to help her tortured brother. And overhearing this discussion, Alma determines it is again time to “slow him down,” to control his near hysterical* behavior by mixing up an even more potent mixture of the dangerous mushrooms in an omelet. Calmly she places the plate before him; but we realize that Reynolds has observed her actions and knows precisely what she is up to.

      Nonetheless, he bites into the egg dish, carefully chewing up the mixture, as, finally, Alma admits to what she desires: for him to need her caring for him once again. This “outsider” has most definitely become the “insider” in this house. As she tartly tells the legendary Belgian princess, who has previously shunned her: “I live in this house.”

     He too, finally, recognizes his child-like needs, kissing her before he falls deeply ill, insisting she call the same doctor, just in case he is more poisoned that she imagines; she agrees, and by film’s end we discover that the story she has been telling throughout the work is a kind of confession to the young doctor, himself a man who has been highly attracted to her.

     The final scene of the film, right out of Gigi, shows the happy couple strolling down the avenue with a baby carriage, which they briefly pass off to Cyril, while they joyfully walk off for a stroll, the previously “confirmed” bachelor having now been trapped into a heterosexual paradise. Surely they will live as happily together as Albee’s George and Martha.

     I will grant that this particular dress designer is primarily a heterosexual, or at least imagines himself to be one. Occasionally that happens. But in this narrative Reynolds is basically portrayed as a gay man whom the clever Alma, somewhat like a spider, has threaded into marriage by providing with him the non-negotiable mother’s love which he so desperately needs. Alma has become the “earth-mother” (a role claimed also by Albee’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) necessary for Reynolds to remain in the shell of heteronormativity.

   David Ehrenstein, writing in Gay City News, notes that when the movie first came out many immediately presumed that this film was based on the life of Charles James, the British-born designer regarded as a mentor to Halston, Karl Lagerfeld, and other fashionistas of note. James married Nancy Lee Gregory and had two children before their marriage was dissolved.

    But, in fact, as Ehrenstein observes, Anderson “immediately shot down” that notion, asserting instead that “his film’s anti-hero Reynolds Woodcock was drawn from the lives of Cristóbal Balenciaga, Hardy Amies, Norman Hartnell, Michael Sherard, Digby Morton, Edward Molyneux, Victor Stiebel, and John Cavanagh…each and every one of these designers [being] gay. Reynolds Woodcock, while acting like a younger and ever-so-slightly less imperious version of Clifton Webb’s “Waldo Lydecker in Laura (one of the greatest “coded gay' characters of the pre-Stonewall era), is seen (in long shot) taking the hand of the film’s heroine Alma (Vicky Krieps), a café waitress Woodcock makes his model and muse, and pulling her into his bedroom. What goes on inside that bedroom Anderson doesn’t show. And that’s because he has no idea what gay men think of straight women or how we interact with those whose beauty inspires us despite a complete lack of sexual desire.”

      Ehrenstein, finally, argues that Anderson’s male character is perhaps most clearly modelled after Norman Hartwell, a designer, whose Wikipedia page reports, “never married, but enjoyed a discreet and quiet life at a time when homosexual relations between men were illegal. In many ways, the consummate Edwardian in attitudes and life-style, he considered himself a confirmed bachelor, and his close friends were almost never in the public eye, nor did he ever do anything to compromise his position and business as a leading designer to both ladies of the British Royal Family and his aristocratic or ‘society’ clients upon whom his success was founded.”

      Reynolds also describes himself, as I mention above with Reynolds' Henry Higgins proclamation, as being a “confirmed bachelor,” which generally meant in all cultures the same thing as not “being the marrying kind,” phrases that spelled out one’s homosexual inclinations.

    When speaking of Sir Norman, fellow dressmaker to the Queen cattily commented: “It’s quite simple. He was a silly old queen and I’m a clever old queen.”

      Whether Anderson knew the kind of being he had created or not is basically beside the point. He clearly had been interested in just such figures in the past.  

       

*Although today “homohysteria” is associated with severe homophobia, the deep fear of men behaving in a manner that represents stereotypes of gay behavior, we must remember that in the late 19th century, gay men themselves were often described as being hysterics, responding abnormally, as it appeared, to the touch or even gaze of another male being. Reynolds’ temperamental fits are certainly akin to this notion of male hysteria, a manner of behaving that gays themselves have long described as “hissy fits” or gay tantrums.

 

Los Angeles, January 28, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2018).