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Whirlpool
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A Beautiful Invention
It
is almost 35 minutes into Whirlpool before recognisable film noir elements appear in force: the classic sequence in which a sleepwalking Ann
Sutton (Gene Tierney), dressed in black, walks calmly through surreally open
doors and, acting on hypnotic suggestion, goes to an apartment to hide
incriminating evidence.
Until
then, and indeed for much of the rest of the movie, director Otto Preminger
prefers the disquieting, frequently public spaces of Los Angeles in daylight
(as caught by cinematographer Arthur Miller): outdoor lunches, well-lit
department stores. It is a mode – film
blanc? – to which Preminger will return in the immortal Angel Face (1953).
This
personal adaptation of noir style and
iconography by Preminger goes hand in glove with a very particular presentation
of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy (kudos to scriptwriters Ben Hecht and
Andrew Solt, adapting the 1945 novel Methinks
the Lady … by Guy Endore, which reportedly served up a left-leaning parody
of psychiatry).
The
narrative premise is rich, and could have gone in various directions. Ann is an
unwitting, compulsive kleptomaniac – as well as being wife of a psychoanalyst, William
Sutton (Richard Conte). When Ann is caught shoplifting in a department store,
she swiftly comes under the ambiguous care and supervision of “the mysterious
Dr Korvo” (as the film’s French release title has it), a suave astrologer and
hypnotist. Korvo is played, indelibly, by José Ferrer – and is it possible,
today, to watch his son, Miguel Ferrer, in Twin
Peaks without imagining that David Lynch must have imbibed (possibly more
than once) Whirlpool?
Although
clearly in the tradition of Spellbound (1945) and many other Freudian-Gothic tales of repressed memory, Preminger
offers a startlingly prescient depiction of the rise of pop psychology in
everyday American life. For Preminger (unlike Fritz Lang in Secret Beyond
the Door [1948] or Jean Renoir in The Woman on the Beach [1947]) is not terribly interested in dreams
or the deep, liberating interpretation of unconscious traces.
Rather,
the diagnosis of symptoms becomes a daily power game – Ann is constantly
labelled and defined, by all characters, as one kind of person or another (to
the extent of having her name labelled on her clothes!) – and, on this level,
there is scarcely any difference between the officially certified practice of
William and the more vulgar, showbiz techniques used by Korvo.
Preminger
views the social world (and this is enduring throughout his career) as a
constant courtroom trial: what matters is what you can make someone believe or
accept, what you can render manifest (even via sleight-of-hand) – not what is
necessarily real or true. And, in this light, what could be a better instance
of Michel Foucault’s influential notion that social rituals rest upon a “work
on the self” than Korvo’s self-hypnosis, so crazy and yet so undeniably
effective?
That
sequence – in which our dark anti-hero not only hypnotises but also “operates” on
himself (via a small mirror) in order to cancel his physical pain – is
deserving of anthology status. It is a prime instance of involuntarily
surrealist poetry – and the card-carrying Surrealists of the time were very
partial to the visions Preminger afforded them. It is also an almost shocking
scene of “living psychoanalysis”: Korvo becomes his own Other in the mirror,
complete with a visage and a voice to command and guide him. It is – if
anything is – pure cinema. So is it any wonder that the suave Cahiers du cinéma critic Jacques
Doniol-Valcroze once testified, before the marvellous, central apparition in
another Preminger movie, the better-known classic Laura (1944): “We exclaim to ourselves: the cinema, truly, is a beautiful invention”?
Whirlpool, which is
in many respects the companion piece to Laura (even David Raksin returns as composer), is based on a delicious, even perverse
irony. As Jacques Lourcelles suggested in his 1992 cinema Dictionnaire, whereas William’s “blind love” misrecognises his wife’s
situation, it is the sinister manipulator Korvo who, in fact, sees the absolute
truth of Ann’s place in the world: being a privileged wife has transformed her
into a neurotic mess (a condition indelibly captured in Tierney’s performance).
The
powerful and masterfully controlled mise
en scène of Preminger reaches a zenith here: his camera movements and fluid
staging are not conventionally lyrical, but instead trace the fundamental
tension between an open world in which surprises and chance encounters lurk
everywhere (sudden entries into the frame frequently change the course of the
plot), and a more Langian vision in which a cruel destiny is exposed, lying in
wait at the end of every trajectory (as in the revelation of the dead body of
Theresa [Barbara O’Neil] that concludes Ann’s hypnotised stroll).
Ultimately,
as Preminger specialist Gérard Legrand remarked when he revisited the film in
the pages of Positif, the fascination
of this director’s work – and especially Whirlpool – derives from the dialectic at its heart: on the one hand, the brittle world
of social games and, on the other hand, a dark, subterranean unconscious that
forbids facile “decipherment”, but drives people mysteriously – as if through
“still but dangerous waters” that are presented with the “hard clarity of an
aquarium” (Lourcelles).
For
extensive development of these ideas, consult my feature-length audio
commentary on the British Film Institute (2015) or Madman (Australia, 2009)
DVD/Blu-ray releases of Whirlpool.
MORE Preminger: Anatomy of a Murder © Adrian Martin January 2008 |
