“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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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