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).
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