SOURCE: “The Culture Critics: Diana Trilling, Simone de Beauvoir, Joan Didion, and Nora Sayre,” in Women on Film: The Critical Eye, Praeger, 1983, pp. 103-12.

[In the following essay, McCreadie identifies traits specific to women film critics, including Trilling.]

If one thinks it is still to be proven that women film critics generally react more directly, more intimately—and in some cases more imaginatively—to the performer in films under their scrutiny than male critics, the responses of women writers as intellectually formidable as Simone de Beauvoir and Diana Trilling should settle the question. In fact, no one seems as surprised to encounter such subjective and intense reactions as Trilling herself, in partial apology for her “late” appreciation of the star, in the 1963 essay “The Death of Marilyn Monroe.” While the essay surely can be seen in the light of the women's movement's posthumous canonization of Monroe, it is more than latter-day feminist guilt purgation. Trilling's article is an extraordinary example of the free interplay of autobiographical intrusions from the writer, nearly “cinematic” projections onto/into the actor's psyche, and cultural generalizations. The writer's reaction to, sometimes fantasized interaction with, the actor-actress is often taken to be paradigmatic of the culture, and for these purposes, biographical details, even gossip, about the personal life of the star are freely mixed in. At first, easy, glance it would seem as if the work of Norman Mailer on Marilyn Monroe would perfectly fit this description. But his 1973 biography, Marilyn, is a clear demonstration of an only superficial attempt—though of course not necessarily a conscious one—at this method. He may buy, he reports to us, in the true vicarious modus operandi of the new journalist, a bottle of Chanel No. 5 (Monroe was “famous for having worn it”), but he would never “have a real clue to how it smelled on her skin.” The biographical details are meticulously recorded, as are show biz minutiae about each of her films, but nowhere does there emerge the creative conjunction one might expect from the chief autobiographical and impressionistic journalist of our age. The portrait's ultimate flatness makes a telling comparison with Trilling's essay, or with a piece like Simone de Beauvoir's brilliant if sporadically connective essay on Brigitte Bardot, “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome.”

For in these pieces—as in others by culture critics Joan Didion and Nora Sayre that also consider the cumulative work of an actor, or of the ellision between actor and role—the distance, in the words of Beauvoir, between “Mr. Chaplin and Charlie is entirely done away with”; it is an “ambiguous presence—that both of the actor and of the character he is playing.” (These remarks are preparatory to her discussion of Modern Times, and also to her comments on more contemporary films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Five Easy Pieces, and the films of James Bond and Clint Eastwood [Beauvoir assiduously avoids the French farce, she reports]. These observations are found in the fourth volume of her autobiography, All Said and Done.) Even the fact that Beauvoir knows “Yves Montand's face too well” doesn't prevent her from seeing him as Lambrakis in Z; “soon the actor and the character merged into one.”

This acceptance of the amalgam is put into automatic practice in the work of Trilling on Marilyn Monroe. Trilling has been the fiction critic of The Nation; essayist and reviewer in the New York Times, and Partisan Review, among other places; and author of Claremont Essays, We Must March My Darlings, Reviewing the Forties, and the recent reportorial Mrs. Harris. Born in New York City in 1905, daughter of a successful businessman, she married renowned literary critic and Columbia University professor Lionel Trilling, and they had one child, a son. Diana Trilling—a momentous figure herself—determined never to teach, she is reported to have said in conversation, after having once taken over a class of her husband's and deciding that it jangled her nerves too much.

Trilling's essay on Monroe is, quite simply, a surprise. For one thing, the combination of psychobiography and high-level movie magazine reportage is a new one for this kind of writer, and for criticism in general. By brilliant conjecture, Trilling makes the kind of intuitive leap Mailer's piece tries for but fails at; her “feeling about Marilyn Monroe” is that “even when she had spoken of ‘wanting to die’ she really meant she wanted to end her suffering, not her life.” Or, in noting Monroe's incredibly upbeat qualities, “when there is this much need for optimism surely there is great peril, and the public got the message.”

Coming from another type of writer some of these insights might be regarded as platitudinous; as we also might dismiss as gossipy a report that a few of the men Trilling knew who had had “romantic” involvements with Monroe found her sweet and lovable, though not particularly sexual. But when it is Trilling who concludes that “Monroe's perception of herself came from others' reactions to her,” that her biological “gift” did not arise from any sure self-knowledge, we are more inclined to accept the summation. Trilling has earlier on put herself in a “special” category vis a vis Monroe criticism: there is “always this shield of irony some of us raise between ourselves and any object of popular adulation, and I had made my dull point of snubbing her pictures.”

But she's changed her mind after watching a “television trailer of Bus Stop.” The junction of high and low culture (and our disinclination to question the hybrid) is—since the advent of new journalism—a hallmark of the confident intellect. But where Mailer, especially in Marilyn, fails to come up with the flashy insight that should result from the unexpected juxtaposition, both Trilling and Beauvoir have startling success. When Trilling has her conversion about Monroe, it's because “an illumination, a glow of something beyond the ordinarily human” had gone on in the room. Illumination is a cleverly used television adjective that moves rapidly into a psychoanalytic interpretation probably borrowed from literary criticism. It is a natural for psychobiographical cinema criticism that might be seen to have taken its most primitive form in early issues of Photoplay and Modern Screen. For Trilling, Monroe's luminosity comes from her innocence, from being untouched by life (a quality shared, according to Trilling, with Hemingway). And finally—here is the tie-in with her suicide—from being able to “suffer one's experience without being able to learn self-protection.”

It is as disarming, as refreshing, to find Beauvoir starting her long separately published essay on Bardot, “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome,” also in reaction to a television appearance—Bardot's on New Year's Eve. “Once again,” Beauvoir says, “I could observe that Brigitte Bardot was disliked in her own country.” If Beauvoir's style here seems more fluid, more natural, than in some of her other work, it's perhaps because a historical or critical apparatus has been dropped, for the subject apparently demands less of a pronouncement, less of a commitment to posterity. Daughter—like Trilling—of a bourgeois family (her father was an advocate in the Court of Appeals in Paris), Beauvoir was born in 1908. University professor, essayist, social historian, and novelist, her work includes the novels The Mandarins and L'Invitée, her multivolumed autobiography, All Said and Done, and the monumental The Second Sex, the last inspired by the suggestion of her life-time inamorato and intellectual companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, that she “look into” the fact that she wasn't “brought up the same way a boy would have been.” This model for the twentieth-century intellectual woman has no difficulty seeing the cinema as important material for analysis (even including the textually integrated reviews in All Said and Done).

As a member of the TV audience, Beauvoir dissents from her countrymen's antipathy toward Bardot, which tells the observing critic that the bohemian star appeals more to freedom-loving Americans than to the middle-class French, who feel threatened by her. For Bardot—a Lolita-like, youthful sex-object who makes use of the fact that “distancing creates erotic desire”—undermines a bourgeois structure (according to Beauvoir, the feminist historian, when one myth is threatened, so are all others).

In this regard and others, Beauvoir's version of Bardot is that she takes an active part in the construction of her persona. This has been a conscious, shared effort by both Bardot and (then) director-husband-mentor Roger Vadim. Not just actor-as-auteur, or merge of person and part, but conscious manipulator of the media, and of the national psyche. It is an intriguing cross-fertilization, as Beauvoir sees it. “In so far as she [Bardot] is exposed to the public gaze, her legend has been fed by her private life no less than by her film roles.” (If so, it is a more sophisticated manipulation of 1950s mores than Monroe's.) While Monroe, according to Trilling, liberated Americans by making sexuality seem not so threatening (her childish “innocence” is the vehicle), Beauvoir decides that French men find Bardot particularly threatening because her “eroticism is not magical, but aggressive. The male is an object to her, just as she is to him. And that is precisely what wounds masculine pride.”

Besides, like Lolita, Bardot has “not been marked by experience.” Her hairdo is that of a waif; seen from behind she is “almost androgynous.” She goes about “barefooted, she turns up her nose at elegant clothes, jewels, girdles, perfumes, make-up, at all artifice.” “Radical innocence” here is not the star's undoing as it is for an American critic like Trilling. Perhaps only Americans see the tragic potentiality in innocence, lost or otherwise. (That they are untouched, however, is an almost common observation about women stars; a May 3, 1981 New York Times essay on Elizabeth Taylor's first stage appearance, in The Little Foxes, for instance, notes her curiously innocent and untouched quality even after six marriages, various and numerous tribulations, and so forth.)

The attention to physical detail, followed by social or psychocultural generalizations, seems an irresistible venue for women writers. This is not simply an example of woman's proverbial obsession with physical assets, as a quick sidelook at Alexander Walker's otherwise quite effective description of Elizabeth Taylor in The Celluloid Sacrifice shows: Her “large eyes, delicate nose and dark hair that always looks more effective when let down” is the kind that an “Elizabethan poet would have called ‘gipsy.’” But—unlike Beauvoir or others such as Sayre who move these descriptions into other realms—Walker simply cites the cultural stereotype and lets it go at that; Taylor's looks hold “sexual tension,” and “generate expectancy among filmgoers that her actions will be impulsive, high-tempered, possibly destructive.” As far as Mailer gets with this sort of thing is to say that Monroe seems to take on the characteristics of the man she is involved with (viz her physical agility in the dance sequences of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes when she is married to Joe DiMaggio), but he generally limits the attention to physical details to the usual reportage. He notes that before it was snipped, Monroe's formerly overlong nose appeared “snout-like,” her teeth before correction were too protruding, causing her to tremulously quiver her upper lip, a retained habit.

Most telling, after reading Beauvoir's treatment of Bardot, is Parker Tyler's vision of the same star in Sex, Psyche, Etcetera in the Film. For Tyler, Bardot, with “canonic plenitude up front, facile nudity and long, tumbling blonde hair, was an impressive paradox; a cheerful Magdalene. Repentance and guilt were alien to her if only because her assets (like Jane Russell's before her) were so unmistakably God-given.” Of the physicality of Bardot, Beauvoir can make so much more: “nothing can be read into Bardot's face. It is what it is. It has the forthright presence of reality. It is a stumbling-block to lewd fantasies and ethereal dreams alike. Most Frenchmen like to indulge in mystic flights as a change from ribaldry, and vice-versa. With BB they get nowhere.” It is easy of course, and often unfair, to juxtapose quotes to advantage or disadvantage. But it is an undeniable truth that these major women writers and intellectuals here evoke their material almost “from within,” as may be possible with no other subject matter. Lest this sound antifeminist in suggesting “woman's intuition,” let Beauvoir's explanation stand: “Sometimes, when I discuss a film with friends—friends whose tastes are the same as mine in other fields—I find that my opinion is quite unlike theirs: the film has certainly touched them or me or all of us in some intimate, entirely personal area.” And then she starts to analyze the aesthetic qualities of actors' faces (in All Said and Done).

Tracing through the cultural implications of an actor is a specialty of writer Joan Didion, as her essay “John Wayne: A Love Song,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, demonstrates. Didion's discovery that Wayne has cancer sends her, and by extension, her generation, into a kind of existential panic: “It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases. The rumor struck some obscure anxiety, threw our very childhoods into question.” Like Beauvoir and Trilling, Didion sees her reaction as nationally paradigmatic: by riding through her childhood, and “perhaps through yours” Wayne altered forever the shape of “our dreams.” The occasion of the essay in which Didion makes these comments is an assignment that takes her in 1965 to the set of the most “recent” Wayne film where she has dinner with the man whose “face across the table was in certain ways more familiar than my husband's.” Not because she's ever met Wayne before, but because of the intensity of her dream or fantasy life about him. For, less prosaically, “Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls” there is still a line she is waiting to hear from John Wayne.

The presence of the star—real or imagined—seems more acute in essays written by women critics, as does their own presence in the midst of these celebrities. The writer is a cultural conductor, a seismograph of the most significant proportions, who determines—by virtue of her own response—the star's possible impact on society. In Joan Didion's review-essay about Woody Allen's Manhattan, Interiors, and Annie Hall, for instance, her reactions to the films' characters are so extreme as to be in the realm of interaction or reminiscence: “The characters in these pictures are, at best trying,” Didion observes in an August 17, 1979 piece in the New York Review of Books. “They are morose. They have bad manners. They seem to take long walks and go to smart restaurants only to ask one another hard questions.” The more banal dialogue is quoted, ending with “finally, inevitably, ‘what does your analyst say.’” Didion doesn't like these characters, for any number of reasons. They are New Yorkers, they are self-conscious, they are intellectual and introspective in a way that Didion—a Californian whose own elitism does not include the Upper West Side leftist-intellectual value system of Allen and his characters—clearly despises.

The interesting point here is that she is reacting to them as if they were real. And as if Allen-as-director were himself in the film (an easy trick, admittedly, with this film maker). Within the NYRB piece, Didion's focus shifts to an interview with Woody Allen, printed elsewhere, in which he talks about his own analysis, and then to Didion's declaration that such introspection, such “working on” oneself, is adolescent and self-indulgent.

An easy slide, since the essay, called of course “Letter from ‘Manhattan,’” begins with assertions that self-absorption is endemic to the summer of 1979, a summer loaded with affectations and vanities. In the “large coastal cities of the United States this summer,” Didion observes, “many people wanted to be dressed in ‘real linen,’ as well as wanting to be served the ‘perfect vegetable terrine,’” and—but of course—bothered to stand in line to see Woody Allen's Manhattan. Didion's rhetorical habit of the clever listing and the startling juxtaposition has already been smartly satirized in Barbara Grizutti Harrison's piece on Didion, “Only Disconnect,” which caused quite a stir when it was first published in The Nation (October 1979, collected in Off Center, New York: Dial Press, 1980). One needs only to read a Burpee catalogue, Harrison says, or to put some disparate “items” like Al Capone and sweet Williams in the same sentence. But Didion also uses—particularly in this NYRB essay—the downwardly spiraling listing, with the deflationary detail at the end (a technique not unfamiliar to readers of eighteenth-century satirical poetry). Manhattan's Tracy, for instance, is characterized as having “perfect skin, perfect wisdom, perfect sex, and no visible family.”

Here the culture critic as social chronicler can be seen in perfect operation. The telling, damning detail is discerned. In Didion's case, however, her moralizing is a surprise, even though the subject about which she most moralizes is life in New York City. So many of Didion's essays call up the fact that not only is she a “California girl,” but that she's from an old Valley family (see especially “On Going Home” and “Notes From a Native Daughter” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem). “Hollywood the Destroyer” lurks somewhere “in the wilds between the Thalia and the Museum of Modern Art” Didion observes ironically in her essay that defends that fabled West Coast corrupter, “I Can't Get That Monster Out of My Mind.”

Didion, born in 1935 and praised by the New York Times as the best prose writer of her generation, is novelist, Run River, Play It As It Lays, and A Book of Common Prayer; screenwriter, of A Star is Born and True Confessions, with her husband John Gregory Dunne; and essayist. The pieces in Slouching Towards Bethlehem—by now a classic collection—were originally written for magazines such as Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post. For a time in the mid-1970s, Didion wrote a column about Hollywood, “The Coast,” for Esquire. And in 1979, another collection of essays, The White Album, was published to reviews not quite as glowing as those received by Slouching Towards Bethlehem. To say her work is autobiographical is in some ways to miss the point, to undershoot the mark, since she has nearly made a literary cult of neurasthenic projection. And while it comes as no surprise to read her adoring portrait of John Wayne, or her condemnation of Woody Allen and his works, which is in many ways a profile, it's a bit odder to see intensely personal reactions to even standard directors. But it may be that a kind of California chauvinism has turned Didion into a nostalgic harkener back to defense of the studio days (in fact, much of her essay “In Hollywood” in The White Album is devoted to proving, or at least asserting, that the old Hollywood system still exists. Its demise, she says, is just a cliché—really a fantasy—of East Coast liberal reviewers who don't understand how the movie industry works.)

Didion is called a surf fascist by some residents of northern California because of her preference for old-time California values. In the essay on Hollywood, “I Can't Get That Monster Out of My Mind” (1964), her rancor is reserved not just for European directors, but also for the more au courant “modern” American film makers who insist on directing with a didactic purpose. About Dr. Strangelove, Didion decides that “rarely has so much been made over so little.” Stanley Kramer, Carl Forman, and John Frankenheimer are also directors attacked because of their involvement with “issues” and “problems.” It is clearly no accident that each of the films featured in the essay has a leftist-liberal tenor. Of all the movies in the creative and fertile cinematic field of the mid-1960s, it is not surprising that Didion discusses Judgment at Nuremberg, The Victors (a left-field choice, as is its director, Carl Forman) and Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May.

What these films have in common, according to Didion, is an “apparent calculation about what ‘issues’ are not safe—an absence of imagination, a sloppiness of mind in some ways encouraged by a comfortable feedback from the audience, from the bulk of reviewers, and from some people who ought to know better.” The Europeans, Antonioni, Visconti, Fellini, Bergman, and Resnais, are demolished in toto in one paragraph, though each for a different reason.

What these films have in common, according to this reading, is that they stand for the kind of vaguely libertarian stuff that Didion is out gunning for. She shows her true colors at the end of the essay, in a paragraph that is separated from the rest of the piece and that relies on some not-so-clever non sequiturs: “We are no longer in the grip of a monster; Harry Cohn no longer runs Columbia like, as the saying went, a concentration camp. Whether or not a picture receives a Code seal no longer matters much at the box office. No more curfew, no more Daddy, anything goes. Some of us do not quite like this permissiveness; some of us would like to find ‘reasons’ why our pictures are not as good as we know in our hearts they might be.”

The obvious sentimentalism of this statement aside for the moment, the startling thing here is the polarity of “us” and “them.” “They” are even more in evidence in her White Album piece, “In Hollywood.” Although various Hollywood or industry-related scenarios are ironically presented, it is with the loving eye of the insider who knows the most revealing feature. The anger is kept for those who write about film, for the Kaels, the Kauffmanns, the Simons. In their insistence upon seeing corruption in Hollywood, and in not understanding the “circus” aspect—the collaborative quality of film making—they miss the boat entirely. But the entire matter is dismissed anyway in a clever hand-wave by Didion; reviewing films has a kind of “petit- point-on-Kleenex” effect that “rarely stands much scrutiny.”

It's getting easier to see Didion's pieces as increasingly reactionary: Her tendency to refer to “my husband” throughout, as well as her distaste for anything smacking of liberal, or “east coast radical chic,” values, are making her preferences predictable. Praising or dismissing movies according to one's political bent is not a trait peculiar to women writers (who would want to claim it?) as even a nodding acquaintance with the consistently liberal views of Stanley Kauffmann makes clear.

But for a writer with political proclivities and background, political and cultural connections can prove irresistible, almost obvious, as in the essays and reviews of Nora Sayre. Daughter of political reporter and screenwriter Joel Sayre, she grew up in Hollywood and around New Yorker writers, for which her father wrote. Blacklisted writers were “around the house” at a time when Sayre was coming to maturity, in the 1950s. After attending Radcliffe, Sayre became a political writer and columnist. She was a New York correspondent for awhile for The New Statesman, and while working on her 1973 collection of essays, Sixties Going On Seventies, was reviewing films for the New York Times. As of this writing Sayre occasionally reviews films for The Nation, and her second book, Running Time: Films of the Cold War, was recently published.

Perhaps because of an awareness of her political “heritage,” Sayre makes political and cultural references a bit more ironically and less connectively. An excerpt from Running Time, which appeared in Sayre's film column in The Nation, notes the figure called the Bad Blonde. “In the 1950's,” Sayre decides, “you knew that there was something terribly wrong with a woman if her slip straps showed through her blouse; in this context, it meant treason.” As slyly, Sayre decides that communists have larger and blacker shadows, and walk with a forward slant that reveals their “dedication to their cause.”

The ironic distance is retained even when Sayre uses a first-person intrusion, as we can see in her clever piece “Two New Films Focus on California and Californians” (a September 1, 1974 Times piece on California Split and Chinatown). “As a New Yorker,” Sayre declares straightforwardly, “I return from every visit to California convinced that Manhattan is the most peaceful and rational of communities.” Of course Sayre was reviewing for the Times from 1972-75, years when the impact of the earlier new journalism was beginning to make some inroads into mainstream periodicals; therefore, the autobiographical reference is not unexpected.

Sayre displays the same predilection for the most telling detail, to capture a particular culture: “Segal and Gould [in California Split are comic versions of the wanderers—often failures—whom you constantly meet in California, the stragglers who swarm through motels and drive-ins and Pizzaburgers.” As might be expected, films that Sayre either chose to review or was assigned to by the Times were frequently susceptible to political analysis, or background fill-in, like her 1975 review of Les Violins du Bal (this much-praised film, according to Sayre, “glamorized the persecution of the Jews”) or of Charlie Chaplin's A King in New York, which explains the background of the film's suppression (it was released in Europe in 1957 but the American release was put off until 1973). Chaplin's politically allegorical comedy makes full and free use of the composite portrait of actor and part that is the recurrent thread in the writing of women film critics: it's OK, Sayre's review decides, for A King in New York to have a bitter ending, since Chaplin himself had such a hard time in America. And the even more personal detail that “Clearly, Chaplin loved playing King. Here, as in some of his other pictures, he seems to be in awe of the rich and the class system, though he has often derided both” (New York Times, October 22, 1973). A comparison with James Agee's review of Chaplin's 1947 Monsieur Verdoux makes the point, as the distinction between actor and part simply does not coalesce: we may “wonder why Chaplin's only direct statements, most of which are made through Verdoux, are so remarkably inadequate” (The Nation, June 21, 1947).

Seeing the actor's combined roles as ouevre and deciding that these parts affect the national psyche is a trait peculiar to women writers about film, as Sayre's piece, “Did Cooper and Stewart Have to Be So Stupid?” shows, for it rests on that premise. Male naifs who are not frontiersmen or woodsmen (in contradistinction to Perkins in the 1950s and Hoffman in the 1960s; also naifs, but intelligent ones), “proudly proclaim their stupidity. … Quite often reading seems difficult for them. … But the back of their necks tingle when they hear the national anthem” (New York Times, August 7, 1977).

A talent for revealing the telling detail, the assumption of the cumulative effect of the actor's role on a nation, are characteristics of the woman film critic, but are particularly so for women culture critics. But it is Beauvoir, with typical comprehensiveness, who touches on the reasons that so many of the other properties of film criticism are attractive to women. Her criticism is extremely personal; it makes use of the amalgam of actor and role, as the quotes above show. But film's “potency of images” also overwhelms her, an illusion “I accept in a state of near-passivity.” It provides Beauvoir with an occasion for vicarious experience, for power, and for omnipotence: “I slip silently into houses; I am present at events that cannot be seen. I sit by the bed upon which lovers make their love.” And, too, “I pass through walls, I hover in the sky; I am endowed with supernatural powers” (All Said and Done).