Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue. Murray Pomerance
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mean that political formulas are mere quackeries aptly invented to trick the masses into obedience. Anyone who viewed them in that light would fall into grave error. The truth is that they answer a real need in man’s social nature; and this need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing that one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but on the basis of a moral principle, has beyond any doubt a practical and a real importance. (207–208)
No chance here of satisfying that need. Mavi and Niccolò have invaded a den of lotos-eaters. In their presence it is difficult if not utterly impossible to discern value, truth, or loyalty to an idea. The “idea,” as it were, is the momentary self and nothing more.
As the bourgeois revolution continues, writes Marx, the distinctions between people are diminished and also exaggerated, so that only two great classes—“two great hostile camps” (103)—remain. Among the slaving workers, “machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor” (110), a phenomenon illustrated again and again, to be sure, in the factory scenes of The Red Desert, but we can also understand this obliteration as an enhancement and reflection of a greater and more diffuse social change, in which distinction itself loses importance. As the bourgeoisie retreats further and further from the proletariat—“escaping already”—contrasting lifestyle and value are nowhere to be detected. The principle social value is selling and buying, a value broadly diffused through the population, coming to define freedom itself (as Marx writes), and supplanting a central feudal value, “the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism” (105). What eventuates is a condition in which people progressively lack the ability to gain true purchase on experience, because experience has been degraded into an exchangeable commodity that merely fluctuates around and shuttles between those who pay for and those who profit by it (see Pomerance, “Gesture”). Every experience is a quick fix, a snatch, a detachable, accountable, and expendable waste. Baudelaire describes modern bourgeois life as a “moving chaos where death strikes from every side at once” (Spleen 94), and Marshall Berman suggests that
the man in the modern street, thrown into this maelstrom, is driven back on his own resources—often on resources he never knew he had—and forced to stretch them desperately in order to survive. In order to cross the moving chaos, he must attune and adapt himself to its moves, must learn to not merely keep up with it but to stay at least a step ahead. He must become adept at soubresauts and mouvements brusques, at sudden, abrupt, jagged twists and shifts—and not only with his legs and his body, but with his mind and his sensibility as well. (159)
In experience—which is the zone of interest for an artist, or at least for an artist such as Niccolò—the somersaults and brusque movements required in the modern flux are vague and insensible to the degree that no solid world resists them, no fixed forms or established values, even revolutionary values, linger and persist as frictionable surfaces against which one can sense, thus find, oneself in motion. One is continually twisting and turning in modern life—just as Antonioni’s camera twists and turns in its Brownian motion through this soirée—without particularly feeling the stress of motion. “All that is solid,” says Marx, “melts into air” (106).
Corresponding to the loss of material stability implied by the relentless motion of bourgeois life under capitalism, is a sharp discontinuity with classical visual forms, in which the “proximate vision” that Ortega places at the center of optical experience in the Quattrocento finally submits to revolution, as it were. Whereas in Giotto, for example, we had seen “‘in bulk,’ convexly,” by the time of the Impressionists an object “placed farther away, for distant vision, loses this corporeality, this solidity and plenitude. Now it is no longer a compact mass, clearly rotund, with its protuberance and curving flanks; it has lost ‘bulk,’ and become, rather, an insubstantial surface, an unbodied spectre composed only of light …. In passing from proximate to distant vision an object becomes illusory” (Point of View 111). Thus, by the time he had come to a thorough repudiation of classical techniques through which space and material bodies were rendered with discreteness and depth, the painter of “Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte” (1884) found himself giving “an illusion of deep space” by placing the spectator “in a foreground of deep shadow” and by drawing the eye into the picture “stage by stage, in a dark-light progression that gradually leads into a light, bright distance” (Thomson 108); all this using his pixillating brushstrokes that laid upon the canvas not the lines and planes that were elements of a classical form but a vast field of explosive luminous punctuations, an atomic theory of vision. Nor did Georges Seurat stand alone in his fascination with light, its play, its changes, and the way it affected color and surface when examined for itself. Louis Émile Edmond Duranty remarks with delight on a sort of social abrasiveness the impressionists manifested as, following the likes of Whistler, they began to use a “highly personal palette,” and to produce “the most daring innovations” as they worked “with color variations of infinite delicacy—dusky, diffused, and vaporous tints that belong to neither night nor day” (42). Indeed, Duranty reveals that for the impressionists, who were at the center of modern life, a particular use of paint could have one particularly astonishing effect on our observation of the world as objective and corporeal, namely to fragment and dissipate it: “They are not merely preoccupied by the refined and supple play of color that emerges when they observe the way the most delicate ranges of tone either contrast or intermingle with each other. Rather, the real discovery of these painters lies in their realization that strong light mitigates color, and that sunlight reflected by objects tends, by its very brightness, to restore that luminous unity that merges all seven prismatic rays into one single colorless beam—light itself” (42, italics mine). “La grande lumière décolore les tons.” Invoked in impressionism, then, is the potentiality for a disintegration of objective reality, for that limiting condition in which bourgeois existence, riddled with motion and substantiated by glancing visions—Ortega notes that in impressionism one sees out of the corner of the eye, as though seizing a vision while moving through space—comes to make the world of experience an ultimate challenge for the now outdated sensibility that wishes to seize and fix objects, find a center, penetrate an interest, develop for things and places a history and biography that is unique.
THE MODERN SELF
Mirrors are subject to the defects of the individual substances of which they are made and react the way they really and truly want to.
—Julio Cortázar, “The Behavior of Mirrors on Easter Island”
Much of the relatively meager critical appreciation of Identification of a Woman concentrates seriously on Mavi and Ida, even debunking Niccolò as merely an “absent-minded fellow” (Chatman, Surface 216), as a “zombie-like” male who must constitute “a critique of the modern world” (Sarris), or as “the most ethically disoriented of the film’s major characters” (Kelly 38). Andrew Sarris finds the film revolting if not nonsensical: “Antonioni has always been up there on the screen, but we tended to mistake his reflection for a portrait of Modern Man with all his wires disconnected. Yet now that the director stands at last nakedly before us, the absence of a plausibly compelling narrative drains his confessional film of the necessary tension to sustain our interest. And the cryptic intimations of rampant feminism, lesbianism, and even masturbatory solipsism seem overly tentative and dilettantish.” Narrational penis too small, in other words: doesn’t “sustain our interest.” A serious viewer of the film might well disagree, since serious viewing recapitulates that “naked” director as a field in which multiple engagements and intentionalities intersect and work to blossom. As to the solipsism of masturbation: the young woman at the swimming pool who discusses her fondness for self-manipulation doesn’t strike the eye or the intelligence as solipsistic at all, especially given her extremely civil, even modest, reactions to Niccolò; nor, in her desperate self-reflections alternated with pregnant philosophical comments, does Mavi. In Sarris’s rejection, we can see a persistence of Enlightenment assumptions about the masturbatory act, as summarized by Thomas Laqueur:
Three things made solitary sex unnatural. First, it was motivated not by a real object of desire but by a phantasm; masturbation threatened to overwhelm the most protean and potentially creative of the mind’s faculties—the imagination—and