78. Increments: ABT, “Nope” and “Louisa Pallant” reviewed by Master Raro
You have doubtless heard classic stories about I.W. (incremental workload) in the careers of typical New York laborers. I generally enjoy being fully employed, and usually I am not one to complain, but I think that my current work situation at Ebersdorf Tower may be an illustration of the creeping nature of I.W. The process is a natural one, and no one is necessarily to be accused of economic exploitation per se. (Otherwise known as “slave labor”.) Here is how it works. You are hired for a job with certain duties and responsibilities, and as time goes by, more and more tasks are added until the workload becomes onerous – i.e., the laborer is so distracted by multiple areas of focus, the work suffers from insufficient attention, physical exhaustion sets in and, equally important, quality of performance bottoms out. The process can be so slow and steady that no one notices the incremental pressures until too late. (As you can imagine, there have been cognitive studies on the physiological effects of I.W.) It is often a “silent” enemy of adequate performance in the workplace. And, sometimes, the worker’s solution is to resign from the overloaded position and move on. Of course, frequently I.W. repeats itself in the new employment situation. Since Covid has reduced the workforce in our country, remaining personnel find themselves doing double shifts, double time.
As my reader may know, my own duties at the Tower currently involve tending to Louise Ebersdorf’s immediate physical needs, chiefly mobility and access to communication, both incoming and outgoing. As time has passed, I am also responsible for the maintenance and operation of the new dance and video studio on the Thirty-third Floor. And I am a performer in new works choreographed for the revived Ebersdorf company, The Ballet. (This latter project is our labor of love and much anticipated in its debut.) Now, on top of these efforts my boss wants to become involved in national politics. This new area of exploration comes at a time when we are all still reacting to the general Covid threat. Protecting Louise from infection may become more challenging. I fear that I may have to draw a line (or lines) in order to remain efficient. To that end, I have been consulting with my Tower co-workers to see what their views are of a situation that doubtless impacts on us all. We have recently been exploring dance, film, and literature together – and discussing Louise Ebersdorf’s new challenges to herself and to us.
Cheryl and I took ourselves to the Met for evenings of American Ballet Theatre. She, inevitably, emphasized the need for more rehearsal for our Nekomata pas de deux, despite the fact that we have no real date as yet when it may be premiered. Cheryl claims she has no time for politics – making good dances is challenging enough. And she fears for Louise’s safety if she tries to enter “public life”. These are important points, and I certainly want to get into the studio with Cheryl. At the Met, she and I agreed that ABT needs a new production of Swan Lake, and, please, we don’t mean a “humanizing” Ratmansky deconstruction. (Revisionist Ratmansky’s Odette is very Edward Gorey-esque.) In the current ABT Lake, the attempt by Kevin McKenzie to beef up the Prince’s role is utterly beside the point. I’m referring to all that campy byplay between the Prince and the female celebrants in Act One. The whole subject of the ballet is the education of Siegfried in the tragic dilemma of his Odette. Her fate unifies the ballet. And that, of course, means that you must have a ballerina who can suggest the full substance of that vision.
We were both impressed with Catherine Hurlin’s Odile. I will not soon forget those bourrées in the grand pas de deux in which Hurlin’s steely points and the basilisk stare of her Black Swan sent shivers down the spine. Hurlin is technically fleet, musically clear, and dramatically vivid. I look forward to her developing her Odette as well as her Odile in seasons to come.
Cheryl and I agreed that the company generally looked weak in the use of classical turnout throughout the season. It is as though the varied dance impulse which governs the use of the turnout of the legs has degenerated among the ABT dancers, especially in works like Balanchine’s Theme and Variations. The ABT extremities are stolid rather than galvanized. The ensemble’s leg action possesses insufficient rhythmic articulation or stylistic clarity to communicate across the vast distances of the Metropolitan Opera House. In a sense, the version of ABT that appeared there this summer was a theater ensemble more than a ballet company in any traditional sense. It is on its way to a future in a predominately demi-caractère mode, especially thanks to the Ratmansky revivals and novelties. ABT’s new artistic director, Susan Jaffe, has much to address in her new home. Perhaps the current board of directors could redefine the company’s identity with the help of Jaffe.
A concerned Pippa took me to see the new Jordan Peele film, Nope. Pippa has had no experience in U.S. politics, and yet Louise is suggesting she run for office on the national level. As Pippa puts it, “I can’t see myself toe-to-toe with Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney!” Are voters really ready for a transpolitico? At least Pippa is now of the female persuasion and has Hawaiian ancestry, which should go down well with progressives. She is completely on my side in finding Louise’s plans and pressures to be outside her comfort zone.
So was the movie. Peele aims at an assemblage, “the complete movie” – adventure, comedy, horror, science-fiction, spectacle, political relevance – and so he delivers a film with tonal problems, just as his Us had difficulty exploiting a raging doppelgänger motif. (I was unable to make the transition to that movie’s underground world of doubles and the Hands Across America finale.). I believe the moment I gave up on the new film was the brief scene of screaming children being devoured by a monster UFO. The moment reminded me of the 2006 South Korean film The Host (directed by Bong Joon Ho of Parasite fame), which treated its two child leads roughly. Of course, Peele could point to the head-spinning scene in The Exorcist for precedent. That movie was willing to employ major indelicacy in pursuit of a mega-earning opening weekend.
There are two other problems with Nope. One is the design of the UFO monster itself, which has a deflating resemblance to an animated Rorschach test inkblot. How lame. Not since the design for the little alien in Spielberg’s E.T. has there been such a disappointing reveal. Add to this fail the difficulty of understanding dialogue when delivered by Peele’s two leads – Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer. Whatever happened to enunciation? All that expensive and elaborate Dolby sound recording and reproduction, and yet you miss plot points and character detail through indistinct line readings.
The director has now made two films which have not fulfilled the promise of his first movie, Get Out (2017). But this last weekend its box office intake crossed $100 million. Huh? (The title of Peele’s next movie?)
Sandy has been after me to rehearse our Oestrus solo, and he informed me that he is totally against anything that might interrupt our collaboration, including Louise’s political ambitions. He took me to see a screening at Lincoln Center of the 1962-63 Jack Smith film Flaming Creatures because he felt I needed to see a “camp” version of gravid activities, and then he gave me a copy of an 1888 Henry James short story, “Louisa Pallant”, which he claims has a camp aspect in its melodrama. I enjoyed the Smith fantasy, especially the finale with its hot Latino dance rhythms and seriously primitif cinematography.
“Louisa Pallant” is the story of an unnamed narrator who, in early middle age, meets a one-time youthful flame, the widowed fellow American Louisa Pallant, at a spa in Homburg in the late nineteenth century. This heroine is accompanied by Linda, her pretty daughter of marriageable age, and our narrator is soon joined by Archie, his twenty-year-old nephew from America who is visiting Europe for the first time and will enter his majority with a generous family subvention. The narrator holds a deep grudge against his former love for having rejected him in his earlier courtship of her. During the course of the quartet’s leisure days, it becomes clear that the nephew is drawn to the daughter, and Louisa confides to the narrator that love might lead to an offer of marriage, something that the boy’s mother might object to, given his youth. Suddenly, the two women depart Homburg, leaving the men to wonder about their retreat. Its motivation becomes clearer later in the Italian lake country, where the narrator and Archie catch up with Louisa and Linda. Louisa informs the narrator that her daughter is a monster of calculation, has set her sights on the soon-to-be monied Archie, and Louisa plans to “save” him from her own rapacious flesh and blood. The narrator is appalled by this judgment of mother against daughter, and eventually the two women escape once again, Louisa having had an interview with the young man that scotches any possibility of a union. What the woman’s admonition to Archie consisted of is something of a mystery at the end of the story, and the narrator is left to wonder at the difficulties of understanding the human heart.
Sandy feels that Louisa’s melodramatic maternal warnings are exaggerated enough by James to give the narrative a tone which he calls “camp” – and of course this would connect with the current suspicion that James was homosexual in his very private life and perhaps in one area of his literary sensibility. When I suggested that James loved the theater and may have wanted to add to his narrative’s tensions a heroine who is self-dramatizing, Sandy marshalled his evidence. First, there’s the way James builds his portrait of Louisa in steady increments of vituperation. Linda is described as not only “bad”; she would drown her mother in a local lake if it meant social advancement. Louisa Pallant is not only self-dramatizing, she’s a potboiling playwright, allowing her actress-self summarizing arias. “You make my reparation – my expiation – difficult,” Louisa protests at one point. (Our narrator, of course, assumes she is referring to the way she “threw him over” when young.) James allows Louisa a wink at the reader when she says the narrator must think that “I am acting a part.” Sandy claims that this comment reveals that Louisa is aware how hyperbolic her claims may sound. And the most calculated progression in the narrator’s education by his arch-manipulator comes when her former paramour wonders if Louisa is attempting to scare Archie and himself away so that Linda can find a more lucrative match, perhaps even a prince. James has led the reader by the hand toward full confession of his authorial device. We are in the grip of a process: a trial. The question is, of course, who is the true accused and what is the real crime?
Henry James sometimes signals the unreliability of his narrators by characterizing them in their need for absolutes. Think of the way The Turn of the Screw depends on the narrator’s – the governess’s – suspicion of demonic influences upon the two children, Flora and Miles. In his novel The Sacred Fount, the question is: who is “in” and who is “out” socially? In “Louisa Pallant” the narrator is eventually convinced by the monstrous maternal confession because he hopes she is now contrite in regard to her former rejection of him. But just as he characterizes his nephew as intellectually incurious and bland, so Louisa may have found the narrator himself to have been thoughtless toward her younger self. For Sandy, this justifies her sly condemnations of her daughter and leads to what Sandy characterizes as a camp sensibility in the maternal threnody. The story’s author assembles his disparate facts, and we must render the interpretation. (Camp is nothing if not an underlining of disparities.) Sandy would have the narrative as a showcase for the outrageous double rejection of the narrator, both when young and eventually when mature.
Now comes the part of my essay that must confront the reader with a spoiler alert. You may want to read the James story, come to your own conclusions, and then return here for my closing thoughts.
Despite Sandy’s best efforts, I came up with the following interpretation. I think that James signals that Linda is Louisa’s child by our narrator, a man who has never recognized his role in the girl’s parentage. (Archie is therefore not the only dim American male touring Europe.) The narrator says that he knew Linda when she was a child, so this must mean that after Louisa married to “cover” her pregnancy (and secure a fortune and “father” from her now departed husband), she must have encountered the narrator, showed him his child without revealing his role in her birthing, and now in their later encounter the narrator has once again failed to see himself in Linda. When Louisa warns Archie away from any plan to marry Linda, she is evoking the nineteenth century’s fear of cousin-marriages, especially first-cousin pairings. (The folk belief held that such close ties could lead to idiocy in offspring.) And, of course, Louisa swears Archie to secrecy after their final encounter: our narrator must never know of the result of his youthful indiscretion and irresponsibility.
I presented this interpretation to Sandy, and he promises to re-read the story. I think the idea presents a wonderful example of Jamesian irony, something for which this author is famous, especially when he surrounds such a revelation with a degree of ambiguity and mystery. It also means that Louisa Pallant’s diva-like enjoyment of her eventual control over the narrator is composed of hope, rue, retribution, and a kind of creative joy in rescuing herself and her daughter from marital fatuity, then and now. I would agree that there is a kind of pleasure that this mother takes in her control of the situation, a tone which might be called “camp”, but it is a highly sophisticated version, an assemblage of subtle and volatile values. What is wonderful is to watch the slow, incremental survey the author makes of his case against simplistic moral judgment. When Louisa characterizes herself and her daughter as dishonorable “people like us”, she echoes what she assumes is the low opinion the narrator renders initially upon mother and child. The human heart is a mystery, indeed.
Linda gets a husband (untitled) in the end, and both the narrator and Archie are still unmarried when they return home to America. We learn that the young Louisa had earlier explained the break with her suitor as caused by the narrator’s jealousy. But I wonder if his real flaw isn’t his moralism, his readiness to fall for a story like the one Louisa confects to scare him and Archie away? Louisa at one point calls their situation a “comedy”. We are forced to reevaluate her use of such terms as “reparation” and “expiation”. She is confessing her own youthful mistake in her estimation of his character. James keeps all these implied suggestions alive throughout his narrative.
Now, back to work. (I.W., here I come, semi-alive or dead-tired.) I must busy myself on yet another local front. Albertine has asked Louise and myself to send a digital copy of her cat ballet to MoMA’s performance art curators. Louise must decide if she wants to preview the “animal act” before the tourist trade on Fifty-third Street or save it for the opening night connoisseurs of The Ballet. Perhaps this kind of decision-making will put political ambition in perspective for Louise, at least for a time. Our Louise loves her cats above all.
M.R.
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