Must We Live for the Great,
Dead Garbo?

During July 1990, the Victorian Arts Centre in Melbourne (Australia) staged a grand tribute to Greta Garbo (born September 1905, died April 1990) – a highbrow occasion for popular cinema, drawing an audience rather different to the usual cinémathèque crowd.

It opened with a double-bill of top-notch 35mm prints projected onto an enormous, shimmering screen, complete with grand organ accompaniment by Bruce Ardley [1935-2020] – which gave us all some idea of that aura often nostalgically imputed to a supposedly lost art of movies, especially silent movies.

One of many great moments in Queen Christina (1933) occurs when a rather dour old advisor tries to impress upon this Queen her obligation to continue the legacy of her late father, the King. “But must we live for the dead?”, she wearily asks. “The great dead, yes”, he intones.

This exchange reminds me irresistibly of the way many fans worship film stars – a style of worship that often carries a pronounced necrophiliac aspect. (Just think of the cults around Great Dead like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.) In her special case, Garbo did not even need to die in order to elicit this type of adoration. From the moment of her withdrawal into self-imposed exile in the 1940s, commentators from Kenneth Tynan to Roland Barthes waxed lyrical over the purity of her face, the ghostly radiance of her soul and spirit, the ineffability of her beauty …

Such starstruck fans invariably choose to recall the famous final shot of Queen Christina, where Garbo stands – with a perfectly blank expression on her face – on the bow of a ship that carries her dead lover. British film critic Tom Milne [1926-2005] even called this “the quintessential Garbo moment”.

But hang on, old chap – isn’t that moment a quite abrupt and disturbing ending, one which, in draining Garbo of all her vitality, forces her, at the last, precisely to “live for the dead”?

The fact is that this screen moment is pure myth (in the) making, already a canny anticipation of the Garbo Cult. It removes the actress from the scene of lived history, and turns her into a transcendent icon, a near-dead fetish, a rarefied star in every sense.

Is the quintessence of Garbo really just her luminous face? What if, rather, that essence lay in a certain kind of a drama, a favoured scenario that she played out time and time again on screen?

The principle narrative vehicle associated with Garbo has been rightly described by Andrew Britton [1952-1994] as an “Anna Karenina structure”. Meaning, Garbo is regularly positioned as a passionately romantic young wife between an elderly, post-sexual husband and a dashing, forbidden lover.

Britton hit the nail right on the head in his remark that the archetypal Karenina tale “channels transgressive female desire into adultery and then leaves it with a ‘choice’ between renunciation and death”. Which is not much of a choice at all for poor Greta. She must ultimately die under the ice in Flesh and the Devil (1927), or renounce everything in Queen Christina.

All the great film stars exist to embody a certain, deathlessly fascinating tension, some central life-and-death contradiction that shapes our world. For Garbo, this tension runs between, on the one hand, a woman’s self-assertion and, on the other, total oppression by patriarchy (to put it baldly).

It is the dramatisation of this very conflict that makes Queen Christina (directed by the largely unsung Rouben Mamoulian) such a remarkable, still today modern film. It offers an extremely intelligent probe of what it might mean for a woman to take political power within a world that is hellbent on denying it to her.

Was Garbo a great screen actor? She sure was – and her immense talent extended far beyond that iconic Queeny moment of emptying her mind and looking blank before the camera. (I saw this gesture/posture quoted and re-performed many times by Diane Emry in Slow Love, Richard Murphet’s 1983 contribution to Jean-Pierre Mignon’s avant-garde Anthill theatre project in Melbourne.)

Besides paying homage to her extraordinary, soulful presence, we would do well to let Garbo’s films remind us of some pertinent and very modern questions.

Further reflection on the Garbo Myth: Fedora

© Adrian Martin 12 July 1990