The Belly of an Architect

(Peter Greenaway, UK/Italy, 1987)

This is one of Peter Greenaway’s better films – mainly because it is such a brutally frank and self-critical account of the masculine mindset.

Its thesis goes something like this: when the architect Kracklite (a mighty Brian Dennehy, which is an inspired casting gesture) sets out to create, he erects bloated, massive monuments to his own ego. Phallic Projection of Man into Public Space, and all that – hardly a new or revelatory idea.

Yet what really drives Kracklite, secretly, is not penile pride but womb envy: mad jealousy over the natural procreative powers of Woman. Unable to face this torment, he begins to paranoically fantasise that all women – in fact, the entire world – are involved in a conspiracy to kill him and defile his divine Vision … in an uncanny but grandiose repetition of ancient historical events, of course. (Shades, here, of the classic parable of wounded and monomaniacal architectural pride: Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead, especially as filmed by King Vidor in 1949. And an anticipation of Francis Ford Coppola’s long nurtured Megalopolis project.)

Ultimately, Kracklite finds himself exquisitely pinched between the two great psychic drives (as per Freud). On the one hand, Kracklite (and, on this point, he is a rather typical Greenaway anti-hero) is so obsessed with the prospect of death that he brings down upon himself a terrible, self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, womb envy travels like a boomerang back into his own belly – making him, as it seems, pregnant (couvade syndrome with a literal vengeance). But there’s going to be a nasty twist hidden in that particular growth.

So, the agony of a fat, sick guy (Dennehy gives it his full, bullish histrionics) is rendered, simultaneously, as weirdly poignant and absurdly grotesque – another fine Greenaway sensibility-combo. The plot weaves its usual Greenawayian tangle of infidelities, betrayals, suspicions and coincidences – the Human Comedy stuff that he tends to play affectlessly, even wearily. It’s all happened so many times before, back to Time Immemorial …

But there’s something more specific going on here. The body as a merely material object to be studied, amidst all the world’s materialities (hence the architecture premise); versus the body as the unstable house of feeling, perception, thought, human identity. A Body/Mind Split! Greenaway usually leans more to the former side, but he manages to pull himself back in the latter direction enough to make this film work.

It’s a touch schematic and arch – conceptual art, like everything Greenaway has done, sometimes to the detriment of cinematic élan – but, for once, the insight generated is truthful and illuminating.

MORE Greenaway: Death in the Seine, The Pillow Book, A Zed and Two Noughts

© Adrian Martin 20 July 1990