On Duff Anderson

Mais Jean Coste est dans sa misère. Il n’est pas seulement au centre de sa misère pour la connaissance qu’il a de sa vie; Jean Coste est au centre de sa misère pour la connaissance qu’il a du monde.¹
[But Jean Coste is within his misery. He isn’t only at the center of his misery for the understanding he has of his life; Jean Coste is at the center of his misery for the understanding he has of the world.]

The last time I watched Nothing But a Man I was left with a problem. Should I tell you what it is? No, I probably shouldn’t. Let’s go about it a different way. The last time you watched Nothing But a Man, you came out of the theater with a problem. It was before Roemer’s death, he was in attendance, and he explained that, in his opinion, the main character, Duff Anderson, had turned out too righteous. And you said afterwards: I don’t understand where he’s coming from. You said: Duff does abandon his wife, if only for a while; Duff does hit her, even if he regrets it afterwards; Duff is nothing but a man, imperfect like any human being! This you said to yourself and to your friends, trying to make sense of the fact that this old man, on the brink of death, should be saying that a man who hits his wife is purer than a real one. And I come to you now to say that Roemer was right. In this beautiful movie, he did let reality slip for a moment, he didn’t have the strength to take it wholly in his hands and show it as it was: ugly, perverse, unforgivable; he couldn’t help but look for a way out, and he found it. Yes, in this most beautiful of movies, where injustice and oppression are portrayed so matter-of-factly, there’s a little fault that risks bringing the whole edifice down, and with it all the beauty. Because when we are dealing with what, for lack of a better word, is vulgarly known as “form”, little mistakes are not only allowed, they are necessary: a perfect movie wouldn’t be a human creation, therefore wouldn’t be art, it would be cold logic and I would hate it. And it would be my duty to. But when we are dealing with this infinitely more dangerous, more unforgivable lady called “reality”, every little fault counts, every little fault hurts, and hurts nothing but load-bearing walls, in such a way that even the smallest fault could mean a disaster. How not to flake in front of reality? How to remain steady in front of such risk, of such exigence? And yet, what other choice has the artist? That is the danger they must face, and that is their justification: if art was easy, comfortable, it wouldn’t be of much value; if art was nothing but a means towards aesthetic pleasure, it would indeed be morally bankrupt and we would all be better off casting it out of the polis. Maybe art isn’t there to teach us anything, but it should certainly offer us (let’s be Proustian for a moment) a new vision of the world — instead of a mere imagination —, and to do so it must be faithful to this shrew, reality. It cannot tame her; it can betray her all it wants, but every betrayal will take its toll afterwards.

But Roemer didn’t betray. He slipped. You will ask me, as is your right, How come? You will ask me to please elaborate. What can I say? When Duff Anderson, who had already spent the whole movie so far away from any sort of mud we eventually get to asking ourselves if he wasn’t by any chance floating at all times, just enough so that his shoes should never touch the dirty, dirty ground — going to church and marrying a church girl while his colleagues go out drinking and enjoy the free life, being nice to a prostitute while they mock her — when this man, after a whole lot of trouble and danger and standing up, uselessly, for himself, hits his wife near the end of the movie, we maybe get a wake-up call and remember that the movie is, after all, called nothing but a man for a reason; but when he, only a couple of days later, enlightened, picks up his own son and goes back to her — in what certainly must be one of the ten most beautiful endings in all of cinema — we realize we were right all along, and he is no regular man whatsoever. A man who is able to look at reality — his drunken father, his abandoned child — and derive, so quickly, a lesson from it, is no regular man. A man who is able to look outside and compare it to his own interior, and question his own conduct, and make a real, undisputable change in his life, is closer to a saint than to a regular man. To look at your own father and see the mistakes he’s made and is making, is easy; everybody does it; but to look at your father, recognize his mistakes, then look back at yourself — which is already difficult — and recognize in yourself these same mistakes and act upon them in real time, is not only difficult, is probably the most difficult thing there is in life. This spark of lucidity, this ray of light that falls from the heavens above upon Duff Anderson’s very human, very mortal body, is so irregular, so unexpected, that it is more akin to a miracle than to any human decision. Real people, immersed in their real backgrounds, aren’t usually able to make sense of themselves and their lives; aren’t usually able to distinguish outside and inside; aren’t usually able to parse what it is that they are unconsciously repeating, as if in a curse, aren’t able to recognize the ideological limits dictating where their lives are or aren’t going, and, in the off chance that they do, aren’t usually able to break away from these limits and re-invent themselves and their lives. Real life is muddy, continuous, opaque, and there aren’t enough rays of light in the entire sun to illuminate it, even if only for a short moment. Real life carries you around like a current; it doesn’t offer you the time to stop and reconsider — reconsider not only the way you acted towards your wife, but your whole education, your whole lived experience. And so we understand why a victim of abuse like Duff could go on to inflict abuse upon others: when you are in real life and, therefore, have to make decisions on the go, in real time, there’s always the very real danger that you simply end up reproducing whatever it is you spent most of your life living; that’s because we live our lives not by way of decisions, but by way of reflexes, and that means doing the right thing is much more a matter of continual, renewed work, than of character or intentions.

And you will answer me: Though all this is indeed very rare, there have been cases of it; people have turned their lives around; besides, the movie leaves it all open, Duff could very well, like any other human being, fall back on many of these inherited behaviors of which he found himself free for a moment. The movie, you would say, is not saying that his life is permanently solved, and that he won’t hereon have any more problems. And I would answer: Yes, you are right, but the one who called it Nothing but a Man was Roemer, not me. This is a story of resistance and resilience much closer to Gertrud than to Roemer’s own later movies — in which characters are, indeed, if not regular (damn me if I ever call Brooke Adams in Vengeance is Mine regular; or, for that matter, the reverend in Dying), at least regularly flawed. Isn’t it telling that Roemer was so close to changing the title to Duff Anderson? Already at that point, the movie still fresh in his mind, he must have felt the failure of his project: and Duff Anderson would have surely been the more honest title, it is nonetheless commendable that Roemer should have chosen not to back down from his initial ambitions however failed the results.

What had happened? Inexperience? With this first movie Roemer felt he had made a mistake, and he spent the rest of his career working to correct it. It’s not a coincidence that in his very next work, The Plot Against Harry, he has a crook, a mobster, for a protagonist; it is not a coincidence that this mobster should have mistreated his wife to such a degree that she won’t even consider taking him back. In Roemer, as in Godard, or Hugo, or Hong Sang-soo, every new work is a direct response to the previous one; that’s because he was, more than a simple, miserable director, more than a miserable aesthete, a thinker: and real thinkers aren’t the ones who arrive at conclusions so solid that they can rest on them for the rest of their lives, unbothered by the world and time, real thinkers are those who never settle and, having reached a summit of some sort — a great movie, for example —, quickly get down and make for another one. From film to film the progression (not the progress!) is clear: it isn’t hard to see how much Dying informed Pilgrim, Farewell, and how much both of them informed Vengeance is Mine; just as it isn’t hard, simply by considering his filmography, to see that when he said Duff Anderson was a little too righteous for his taste, he meant it: never would we get a similar character in any of his other movies. So what had happened this time, exactly? What were the concrete reverberations of this inexperience? If it is true that right from the beginning, from this first feature, we can recognize Roemer’s whole program — which I would sum up like this: I will love everything I film and I will film only that which I love — it's also true that here he chose the easy path to fulfilling it. Loving Duff Anderson, especially from the comfortable position of the spectator, is too easy; so easy it’s hard not to. Likewise, loving Gertrud is easy, when you have your behind in permanent contact with the cushioned seat of the movie theater: from afar, who doesn’t love a person of conviction? From afar, Joan of Arc is a saint and a hero; from up close she’s insane and heretical. From the writer’s desk, too, it is easy to love Duff Anderson; and to have him, at that point of the story, after so much hardship, lose his temper and push his wife, is such a matter of logic, of narrative necessity, that the writer surely felt he was more responsible for the aggression than his own character, and therefore was quick to forgive him. No, what’s difficult, Roemer learned from this experience, is loving that which does not tend itself so readily to love. What is difficult is making a movie like The Plot Against Harry, in which no one is even close to being righteous, and still managing to love all the characters, and portray them faithfully and respectfully. Loving someone is not finding excuses for whatever they do, nor defending all their actions, however bad they are; it is seeing them in all their faults and still standing by their side. There can only be real love when you can look at someone without having, even once, to close your eyes; that’s why real love is so difficult, and perhaps impossible. But the fact something might be impossible is no reason to give up on it. That was the challenge Roemer set for himself, and, in this reduced and sharpened reality we call art, time and again succeeded in meeting. Not only with saintly Duff, whom he didn’t have the guts to make into a real nothing-but-a-man, but also with Kate in Pilgrim, Farewell and Jo in Vengeance is Mine; not only with touched-by-miracle Duff, but with all these other people who go their entire lives verging on a breakthrough and never, ever reach it. And the light that finds Jo at the end of her movie is not one of salvation, but of indifferent and endless reality. Once we reach the end, everything is only starting.