Henry James Goes to the Movies by Susan M. Griffin

Author:Susan M. Griffin [M. Griffin Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism, Literary Criticism, Modern, 20th Century, American, General
ISBN: 9780813185415
Google: zUYoEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-10-21T00:10:57.574523+00:00

The Wings of the Dove

If the elsewhere under scrutiny in Campion’s Portrait ultimately turns out to be the college dorm, in Iain Softley’s The Wings of the Dove, it is the twenty-first century, that is, the perspective from which the contraptions of modem living and the pragmatic materialism that goes with them, in short, the values of the American century, will quaintly dissolve into a form of sentimentality, like the American heiress, Milly Theale (Allison Elliott). The decision, therefore, to remove the film from the cusp of the nineteenth century by setting it in 1910 makes the moment of the film’s action a book-end to the moment of its production. Sandwiched between is all the technological, political, and moral “progress” that characterizes the century from which we now depart. If it could be called, in addition to the “American” century, the century of working-class vulgarity, mass culture, kitsch, it could also be called the “cinematic” century (to the extent that all those terms are not redundant).

The doomed love affair of Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter) and Merton Densher (Linus Roache)—manifest in such post-Jamesian courtship rituals as making out in elevators and fornicating in shadowy Venetian alleyways—requires, both as its necessary middle term and unremovable obstacle, a self-deluding enchantment with the representative of everything America has to offer. Exactly what America does have to offer remains unsaid, but it is certainly much more or much less than money, although without its wealth it might well have gone unnoticed. In any case, whatever “it” may be, it is already becoming a memory. If much of James’s exploration of human psychology is about not getting it, to ask what “it” is would surely miss the point and, in any case, be unpardonably vulgar. Is Milly Theale’s unfathomable disease the result of a minute vulnerability in the recesses of her DNA, or is it the condition of perception that allows one’s own best qualities to be reflected in the fragile and ephemeral cognizance of the other? Is it something to be captured through a more perfect system of biomedical pathology, or is it the trace of uncapturable otherness and unattainable desire?

The film hints its answer to these questions by showing Lionel Croy in an opium den to signify his serpentine depravity, as if to update Marx by indicating that in the twentieth century the opiate of the people is opium. In other words, instead of exploiting the play of absence endemic to film narrative, this film opts to stabilize and literalize. Hence we see Sir Luke examining (or is he treating?) Milly with the aid of carbon arcs, circular tubes, green glows, and sound effects, so simultaneously antiquated and bizarre as to evoke, not without some nostalgia, connotations of a mad scientist—that gentleman whose primary residence is the “B” movie, even if he sometimes leases a London flat. The tragedy of Milly’s circumstance, in this context, results from antiquated knowledge, in other words, from specific historical conditions under which an unwarranted and naive faith in wealth and science seemed appropriate, just as it did for the designers of the Titanic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.