Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, and the Loneliness of Disordered Desire

Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere, and the Loneliness of Disordered Desire

"I left a woman waiting:
I met her sometime later.
She said: 'I see your eyes are dead.
What happened to you, lover?'"

"I'm fucking nothing. I'm not even a person."

The above quotes come from two extraordinarily different works of art, created by two extraordinarily different artists more than thirty years apart. They are, nonetheless, about precisely the same thing.

Let me start over. One of the primary purposes of art is to aid in the extraordinarily important process of reflection and processing of our lives and selves and experiences. We all live out of and based on what we receive of the world; yet before we can act truthfully, we must first understand truthfully what we have received. And this is by no means easy.

One of the greatest problems with the contemporary regime of mass-media in American life is that it renders this process all but impossible. It does so in the first place by simply deafening and overwhelming people with narratives and experiences that are totally foreign to their own lives, which they have no ability even to begin to process, and which thus leave them no space and time to process their own lives and selves and the world itself. It does so in the second place by giving them narratives of the world that falsify their own experiences, causing them to understand their own lives in ways that are false and harmful, and hence, inevitably, to act in ways that are false and harmful.

One of the primary realms where this is true is, of course, the domain of human relationships and desire, insofar as, as I have argued in this space, the primary form of artistic production of our civilization consists of the manipulation of human desires for the purposes of pornography and advertising. For this to be effective, people have to absorb and internalize a sense of their own persons and identities and desires that is maximally manipulable by media. This, while existing in different ways in different areas, is fundamentally a mode that is de-personalized, de-relationalized, momentary, intense, atomized, repeatable, interchangeable, quantifiable, and totally separated from any sense of truth or reality. The ideal subject of this type of desire is someone who responds with maximal intensity to any given stimulus, at whatever time, whoever it involves, whether it is in reality or only via media, does whatever that stimuli tells him or her to do (such as buy a product), and then is ready to respond in the same way a moment later to a totally unrelated stimulus.

A great deal of American mass-media, consequently, is dedicated to portraying this type of desire as supremely positive and affirmed and fulfilling, and the type of person who is defined by such desires as supremely affirmed and fulfilled and happy. 

And yet the reality, which we have all at some point in our lives seen plainly either in others or in ourselves or both, is that this person is definitionally and maximally unfulfilled and lonely and miserable and unhappy. Since most people in America process their own experiences of themselves and others largely or entirely through mass media, though, many people are entirely unable to grasp this obvious reality or acknowledge it or process it or derive any conclusions from it or take any actions based on it. Indeed, even people who are obviously and enormously unhappy for precisely this reason are, in my experience, almost totally incapable of actually seeing themselves as unhappy and hence of taking any steps, large or small, to remedy their situation.

The first step to ceasing to be unhappy is to recognize that one is in fact unhappy. This is trivially true, but in fact, in practical terms, is one of the most common obstacles to personal happiness in many contemporary American's lives. People are frequently driven to go very far into the depths of personal dysfunction and the Internet alike before they can find media that allows them to reflect on themselves to even this very minimal degree--and then frequently the sectarian or conspiracist or victimizing or pseudo-psychologizing Internet narratives they end up consuming about their own unhappiness are just as false and destructive and conducive to further unhappiness. 

Even more cruelly, perhaps, the reality of contemporary American life is that many, many, many people do in fact have the materials of fulfilling, meaningful, even happy lives, but live their entire lives in the shadows, ashamed, and made unhappy precisely because their lives do not measure up to mass-media fantasies of people who are in fact profoundly, deeply miserable themselves.

It is precisely because of that that there is an enormous need for works of art that clearly and effectively and truthfully portray the unhappiness of people who are in fact unhappy, in such a way that people who are not like these people can recognize them as unhappy and not try to emulate them or be ashamed they are not like them, and so people who are in fact like these people can come to see their own unhappiness and act on it.

This is yet another unnecessarily long-winded and philosophical proem to two works of art that I like very much, both of which center on the utter misery and loneliness of famous, attractive, successful, promiscuous men. So here goes.

Leonard Cohen, Death of a Ladies' Man

Sometime late at night in January or February 1977, somewhere in the basement of a recording studio in Hollywood, California, not too far from the bungalow where George Lucas was editing Star Wars, famed musical auteur-composer-producer Phil Spector, drunk on Manischewitz-brand sweetened, fortified wine, descended from the console, a loaded gun in hand, and pressed it to the throat of exhausted, dispirited musician-poet Leonard Cohen. 

"I love you, Leonard," Phil Spector said. 

"I hope you do, Phil," Leonard Cohen replied.

On some other night in that same two-month period, the clock struck 4 in the morning, and the same auteur clapped his hands, and the same exhausted musician-poet, surrounded by an orchestral bevy of session musicians, female back-up singers, and loose bullets, intoned the following words: 

So the great affair is over; and whoever would have guessed
It would leave us all so vacant, and so deeply unimpressed.

Music criticism is, in my humble opinion, the most difficult form of art criticism. This is because music is so difficult to describe in itself, and so directly and deeply evocative of emotion and atmosphere and personality. Music, as Augustine long ago pointed out, is one of the only forms of art that is intrinsically tied to time; and like all things belonging to time it cannot be taken in as a whole, as a timeless, static structure, but can only be actualized across a succession of particular moments. Hence, it is above all particular and actual, with an extraordinary ability to absorb and take on the texture of emotion, the human experience of being moved by something actual and particular and real, a particular time, place, or person.

Unfortunately, this has as a side effect the unfortunate fact that most music criticism, especially journalistic art criticism, more or less gives up the difficult task of trying to describe the evocative particularity of a work of music and instead engages in gossip, fashion, trend-setting, and/or discussion of technicalities. RIP Pitchfork Magazine, you bastard.

In approaching the criticism of Leonard Cohen's Death of a Ladies' Man, then, I believe the only way to proceed is to strive with all my might to be as muddied and nonsensical and unhinged as the work of art itself.

The basic experience contained in Death of a Ladies' Man is best described by the phrase "drowning in dishwater." 

Imagine, if you will, your panic as you struggle to shout and scream through a mouthful of water, arms and legs beating helplessly, falling and rising, sinking ever lower--and all the while, the stench of dirtied, lukewarm dishwater fills your nostrils and mouth and lungs, surrounding you, absorbing into your skin and hair, soaked softened spaghetti and decayed bread and loose dirt and filth and, among the filth, the shredded, pulped pages of pornographic magazines. Your hearing is muffled, your ears filled: but, intermittently, brazen, dramatic sounds penetrate your darkening consciousness. Yes, you realize through the panic, an entire '60s-style Big Band, female vocalists and trumpets and drums and Hammond organs and guitars, is positioned precariously on the edge of the sink, watching you drown and playing triumphantly at the top of their register to accompany your dying screams. You beg them for help, but they only play louder. One of them has a gun, and he points it at you with a smile: "I love you, Leonard."

Leonard Cohen began his musical career in 1967, at the age of 33, after a middling career as a poet, with the release of his enormously successful album Songs of Leonard Cohen. After a few warm-up shows in insane asylums, he began a series of highly profitable tours, a task he undertook despite his crippling anxiety and fear of performing, a condition he treated with various proprietary blends of amphetamines and muscle relaxers. Internally preoccupied throughout these years with guilt, shame, self-loathing, and a self-expressed desire to see God, Leonard Cohen found himself dragged down by an overwhelming, numbing depression, which he in turn treated with sexual relationships with the infinitely many willing women he encountered at the peak of the Sexual Revolution.

A more-or-less committed relationship with Marianne, the ex-wife of a Norwegian artist he had met while living among artistic expatriates on Hydra Island in Greece, gradually gave way to a series of more or less random affairs--and then, finally, and rather unexpectedly, to a more or less permanent relationship with Suzanne Elrod, who solved the problem of commitment by the simple expedient of getting pregnant. While neither party to this arrangement expected or would have tolerated fidelity or exclusivity, Leonard Cohen did his best to be a father to their two children, meanwhile writing an album, New Skin for the Old Ceremony, about his desire to leave their mother, as expressed in such works as the song "I Tried to Leave You." Nonetheless, he did not leave her. Meanwhile, his mother was slowly dying in New York, and Suzanne was working on a pornographic novel.

In 1977, then, after ten years of fame, having enjoyed enormous financial success, critical laudation, and an even more enormous amount of strings-free sex, and now with an unfaithful common-law wife and two-children in tow, Leonard Cohen was nearing the end of his rope. 

Among his many immediate frustrations during this time was his consistent inability to achieve mainstream commercial success. (In the end, he would achieve this success with the help of a cheap Cassio keyboard in the '80s with I'm Your Man). Thus, he jumped at the chance to work with Phil Spector, the brilliant auteur responsible for defining the "wall of sound" approach of '50s and '60s girlband music and thus helping give birth to mainstream rock and roll. Phil Spector was certainly a musical genius by any standards; he was also, unfortunately, an utterly deranged alcoholic sexually-abusive obsessive who ultimately died in prison after his penchant for threatening people with loaded firearms led to a fatality. 

Well past the part of his career when he himself particularly cared about popular appeal or commercial success, Phil Spector took Leonard Cohen on his own personal journey into the underworld, pushing him to more and more extreme lyrical and musical stylings, holding him virtually hostage, threatening him with firearms, and deliberately recording most of his vocals in the small hours of the morning after wearing him down for five or six hours of rehearsals. After months of this torture, Spector abruptly broke off the sessions and absconded with the recorded material, shutting Cohen entirely out of the post-production process. When the album released, Cohen heard with utter horror what sounded like the deranged, obscene ravings of a dead man singing from the bottom of a well--and promptly disavowed the album, never to perform any of its songs on tour save one. Somewhere around this time, Suzanne finally left him, taking the children with her. Then his mother died.

It is precisely the characteristics that made the album such a profound source of shame for Leonard Cohen himself, however, that makes it so so successful in its own, utterly unique way. What makes Cohen such an interesting artist, generally speaking, is his combination of interior intensity with more polished, worked-over presentation. Put simply, Leonard Cohen was an intensely private, well-spoken Jewish man who dressed exclusively in suits and who spent years working over his songs until they achieved a sufficient degree of quality and polish--even though these songs were, for the most part, about his own religious and sexual and interpersonal failure and depression and dysfunction and despair and desire and hope. 

What Spector did, put simply, was to force a vulnerable Leonard Cohen, through a mix of creative dominance, sympathy, sleep-deprivation, and fear, to dredge up from his depths his most incoherent, bizarre, and obscene mess of desires and obsessions and lack of control and misery and ennui and loneliness and self-hatred--and then he took that regurgitated mess, and scored it with as much overwhelming bombast as he possibly could, and released it unpolished to the world.

The result is perhaps the least attractive presentation of disordered desire and sexual obsession ever portrayed in art. This is an album that is frequently obscene, but is never for a single moment erotic. In this, it functions among other things as a helpful moral and spiritual diagnostic tool: here is what your sins are really like. This is a rare thing in the world of art.

Taken as a whole, then, the album portrays an effective journey into the "heart of the drain," so to speak, chronicling one man's (and, I dare say, the human race bound by sin's) descent into madness and misery. 

The album starts out with the relatively restrained "True Love Leaves no Traces." In principle, the song's sentiment of the impermanence of love could be read in a "romantic" light--but with Phil Spector's eerie, chime-like backing, the lyrics take on a much darker valence. This is emphatically not the classical romantic account of "true lovers separated"--the story of a love aiming wholeheartedly at permanency that is tragically thwarted by events, or which ultimate achieves a more transcendent finality in legend or song or God. It is, rather, the description of a "love" that is impermanent precisely because it demands to be impermanent. This love is, as they say, intrinsically disordered, in the very straightforward sense that it takes a human faculty aimed at intimacy, union, and permanency, and uses it in such a way as to deliberately thwart these ends. This is a love that is hidden, secretive, shameful, which "leaves no traces" not like Christ transcending the physical world, but like a criminal desperate to leave no footprints as he flees the scene.

As the mist leaves no scar on the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar on you, and never will.
Through windows in the dark, the children come, the children go,
Like arrows with no target, like shackles made of snow.

"Like arrows with no target," it may be pointed out, makes for an appropriate Aristotelean summation of the concept of disordered desire in general. Yet by immersing himself in such disordered passion, it is not merely the narrator's love that becomes "untraceable"--it is his whole person. Sexuality, as a fundamentally interior, personal reality, naturally comes to encompass and define the whole person, body and soul. What haunts this song and lends it its eerie power, then, is precisely Cohen's fear that he himself has become a kind of ghost, an invisible being leaving no traces on anyone he encounters, however intense his effects may appear in the moment.

And many nights endure, without a moon, without a star;
So will we endure, when one is gone and far.

The next song, "Iodine," provides a more specific and tangible instantiation of this broader concept. The basic image of love or sex as "iodine"--a common first-aid antiseptic at the time--portrays, in appropriately bitter terms, the deeper reality of this disorder, which is ultimately centered, not on desire or longing or the good, but on pain and its escape.

You let me love you, til I was a failure;
You let me love you, til I was a failure:
Your beauty on my bruise like iodine.

By his later admission as an old man, Cohen found himself confronted with a profound, internal sense of disorder, darkness, guilt, and shame in relation to God and other people--and used the women that surrounded him more or less as temporary salves or distractions from this state affairs. Yet this use of intimate relations for temporary reprieves from pain cannot help but render them as bitter and ultimately unpleasant as the smell and sting of iodine.

Your saintly kisses reeked of iodine;
Your fragrance with a fume of iodine;
And pity in the room like iodine;
Your sister fingers burned like iodine;
And all my wanton lust was iodine;
My masquerade of trust was iodine:
And everywhere the flare of iodine.

Of course, Cohen's activities were in fact not just an insufficient salve, but the source of much additional pain of their own. The climax of this theme comes in one of the most painful listening experiences I have encountered in music, the twisted, torturous "Paper Thin Hotel." As Leonard Cohen drawls out his words with laconic bitterness, like a lost soul singing from the bottom of the grave, accompanied by a slow, spectral, almost Christmas-like backing of choir voices, piano, and guitar, we follow our hero as, alone in.a hotel whose walls are "paper thin," he listens to his lover have a romantic encounter with someone else in the next room. Awash with pain, loneliness, and self-disgust, utterly helpless and compulsive in his actions and desires alike, he achieves a bitter resignation of sorts:

I stood there with my ear against the wall;
I was not seized by jealousy at all.
In fact, a burden lifted from my soul:
I learned that love was out of my control.

Where no will remains to receive and moderate and direct desire, little of either pleasure or pain survives. In the end, though, the song ends on a note of hope that is either transcendent or nothing:

It's written on the walls of this hotel:
You go to Heaven once you've been to Hell.

How, our helpless hero might ask proverbially, did I get here? To supply that answer comes the transcendentally bizarre "Memories," presenting the mundane perversity of adolescent lust with the maximum amount of Big-Band bombast conceivable, cemented by an utterly unhinged vocal performance from Cohen, who, sleep-deprived and quite possibly with a gun to his head, screams the words "naked body" over and over again with demented abandon until the trumpets fade out.

Next up is the short tone poem "I Left a Woman Waiting," whose gist is more or less given in the quote at the top of this essay. Cohen fully acknowledges that his "eyes are dead," that by his ceaseless, ephemeral promiscuity he has lost whatever spark once made him desirable to others. He merely wishes to tell the full truth about his condition and its endemicity: 

So since she spoke the truth to me,
I tried to answer truthfully:
'Whatever happened to my eyes
Happened to your beauty.
What happened to your beauty
Happened to me.'

The peak of derangement on the album, however, comes with the questionably-named "Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On," which, as the liner notes proudly declare, features backing vocals from the even more questionable duo of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg. While the ostensible content of this song is sexual frustration, it quickly becomes clear that the frustration involved is much more intrinsic than circumstantial, yet another expression of a desire that is frustrated precisely because it is exercised in such a way as to actively contradict its essential nature. Cohen's sexual proclivities are not a matter of desire finding its realization in action; they are, rather, the result of shame and self-hatred finding its realization in compulsion.

So I work in that same beauty salon;
I'm chained to the old masquerade;
The lipstick, the shadow, and the silicone:
I follow my father's trade. 

At the heart of this condition, again, is a profound internal sense of shame, a suffering that cannot be disclosed to or shared with any other because it is essentially a sense of one's own worthlessness. Even to imagine doing so is an exercise in self-hatred:

Here comes your bride with her veil on;
Approach her, you wretch, if you dare.
Approach her, you ape, with your tail on:
Once you have her, she'll always be there.

This essential shame, this self-hatred issuing in an absolute fear of self-disclosure and intimacy, especially the intimacy contained in sexuality and romance, is echoed in the next song, "Fingerprints," which Spector chooses, off-puttingly, to score as an exaggerated, parodic Country-Western song. By the image of fingerprints, indelible markers of identity left unthinkingly on the world and other people, Cohen expresses both the infidelity of his romantic partner ("You don't even seem to care/Whose fingerprints are whose") and his own profound fear of being identified, of being known:

Well sure I'd like to marry you,
But I can't face the dawn
With any girl who knew me
When my fingerprints were on.

The climax of the album as a whole, though, comes in its last track, the epic, nine-minute "Death of a Ladies' Man," where Cohen, perhaps more honestly than at any other point in the album, chronicles the lasting destruction and effacement of identity found, not merely in fleeting or promiscuous sexual activity, but even more so in a single overpowering, overwhelming, but fundamentally selfish and disordered relationship. 

Here, the autobiographical valences are clear and straightforward, especially as Cohen was soon to publish the same words as a poem under the subtly different title "Death of a Lady's Man." Either way, to be a possessed in this sense, even to be desired in this sense, is emphatically not to be known, and emphatically not to be loved:

Oh, the man she wanted all her life was hanging by a thread;
'I never even knew how much I wanted you,' she said.

This is a kind of possessiveness, rather, lacking either fidelity or reverence, and so climaxing inevitably in the destruction of the beloved, the effacement of everything in them that cannot be made one's own. This type of relationship culminates in the negation of relation itself, the annihilation of the very otherness of the other at which desire essentially aims. Hence, the core of the song comes in a litany of theft and destruction:

She took his much-admired Oriental frame of mind,
And the heart of darkness alibi his money hides behind:
She took his blonde Madonna and his monastery wine:
'This mental state is occupied, and everything is mine.'

He tried to make a final stand beside the railway tracks:
She said, 'The art of longing's over, and it's never coming back.'
She took his tavern parliament, his cap, his cocky dance:
She mocked his female fashions and his working-class mustache.

Yet the inevitable result of this spree of violent robbery, this overpowering need to possess everything, is, paradoxically, to leave both parties equally "vacant and unimpressed," with each other and themselves. In conclusion, Cohen drawls sleeplessly over fading, spectral backing the immortal words:

It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star:
I guess you go for nothing, if you really wanna go that far.

By exceeding its bounds, desire has in fact "gone for nothing," and made both itself and those who participate it utterly vain. Disordered desire has resulted, inevitably, in the destruction of desire.

Sofia Coppola, Somewhere

Sofia Coppola is a filmmaker who I value enormously, and indeed whom I have recently discussed in this space in regards to her typical focuses on female perspective and desire. It may seem odd, then, to bring her into dialogue with so profoundly masculine and un-aesthetic a portrayal of misery as Death of a Ladies' Man. Yet the portrayal of loneliness and of frustrated or disordered desire is as fundamental to Sofia Coppola's work as Cohen's.

Somewhere, though, one of her earlier films from 2010, which I recently watched for the first time, is in fact a very precise parallel in theme and even content to Death of a Ladies' Man. A famous actor, Johnny Marco, lives alone in the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, California, indifferently partying and sleeping with starlets and watching pole-dancing routines and passively attending junkets and press conferences and sitting alone in his room drinking beer and staring at a wall. Here, again, is a portrait of a man apparently "successful" according to the pornographic values of American mass-media society--wealthy, famous, surrounded by beautiful, available women. Yet here, again, self-evidently, is someone made miserable precisely by the ephemerality and compulsiveness and lack of intimacy of precisely this life and the relationships that make it up. 

While Death of a Ladies' Man portrays this misery mostly in terms of intense, chaotic interior pain and self-loathing, Somewhere treats it more in terms of loneliness, emptiness, sadness, and ennui. Johnny spends much of his time vacantly staring off into space--even when watching the pole-dancers he has hired go through their routines. The contrast between the grotesque, artificial pseudo-sexuality of these routines and Marco's glazed, catatonic stare makes the point about as eloquently as it could be made: since the content and end of sexuality is personality and intimacy, sexuality without these things may be accidentally shameful or painful or productive of guilt or fear or self-hatred--but most fundamentally, it is simply boring. 

The power of Somewhere, though, comes not just in its portrayal of misery in apparent success, but in its profound and poignant contrasting of this misery with the joy found in genuine relationship. While staying at the Chateau, Johnny finds himself abruptly given charge of his eleven-year-old daughter Cleo after his ex-wife has a breakdown and feels the need to "go away for a while." In this relationship with his daughter, Johnny finds precisely what is lacking in every other aspect of his life: genuinely personal interactions, love, and joy. 

Practically all of the film's impact comes in the direct contrast between the joy and life the film and character alike takes on whenever his daughter is present, compared with the crushing ennui and loneliness and misery whenever his daughter is absent. This state of affairs can naturally be philosophically and morally justified--but it is rare to find a film or work of art that portrays the contrast so starkly and so truthfully. 

As persons, we exist only in and through direct, interior relationships with other persons. Because both parties in such a relationship impact each other not merely exteriorly, but interiorly, through the particularity of emotion and desire and thought and will and atmosphere, both are in principle irreplaceable to the other. It is always persons in this sense that are the final and actual ends of our own interior desires and passions--since what is interior can only be fulfilled, finally, in what is interior, and that which knows can only be fulfilled in knowing and being known. 

It is also such relationships that give meaning and color and significance to our lives and surroundings, places and times and objects, precisely by imbuing them their actuality and particularity with personal significance. This room is not merely a room, but my father's room; this food is not merely macaroni and cheese, but macaroni and cheese made for me by my daughter. 

Seen in relationship with abstraction, image, and ideality, the actuality and particularity of objects and persons always represent limitation, falling-short, imperfections; seen as personal, though, they take on literally infinite significance and value. A drawn triangle is imperfect relative to the ideal abstraction of triangularity; a single pen is inferior to a dozen pens; but a single pen used by your daughter to draw a triangle for you is literally irreplaceable in all of time and space. 

Art by its very nature typically participates to a large degree in the realm of abstraction, of image, of replaceable and repeatable and quantifiable artificiality--and this is especially true for what I have spoken of as the "simulated" nature of American mass-media. The unique power of Somewhere as a work of art, though, is its ability to convey the utter emptiness and worthlessness of places and times and objects and even people considered merely as quantifiable, replaceable simulations or abstractions, directly contrasted with the infinite value and meaning and significance and joy of all these things when received in the light of a personal relationship.

Johnny is bored, and indeed falls asleep, watching a pole-dancing routine in his bedroom; a little later, though, he watches his daughter ice-skate, much more clumsily, and is unexpectedly moved and transfixed. He goes to a press junket alone, and is utterly out of sorts being asked questions about who he is; he attends a movie premiere and event with his daughter, and all the mundane details of travel and their hotel and the event itself take on a sense of adventure and wonder. His meals alone are indistinguishable events, pleasures received from room service and then thrown on a pile; his meals with her, whether eaten with her or cooked by her, are communions, where the quality of the food and the work that went into it are signs of love and even mass-produced french fries can be used in impromptu games. Floating on the pool by himself, he is utterly miserable and checked out; going to the pool with her results in the film's most famous scene, a panorama of simple joys. 

It is worth noting that the directness of both of these works of art, Somewhere and Death of a Ladies' Man, comes in large part from their refraction of personal experience through the lens of another person. People are very rarely as direct and emphatic in portraying themselves as they are in treating other people--for the simple reason that our interior lives are typically too muddled with self-justifications and self-narratives and the fogs of ideology and abstraction to be able to be seen clearly. 

In Death of a Ladies' Man, this 'other' is the looming, threatening specter of Phil Spector, pushing Cohen very far outside his comfort zone and magnifying his most trivial obscenity to the world. Upon reflection, Cohen considered Spector to be "the worst human being I have ever known"; and to his lasting shame and horror, Spector thought he was cool. Cohen as seen through Spector is thus a far more unflinching vision of misery than Cohen worked over by himself through the romanticized, beautified medium of song. 

In Somewhere, however, this trick of perspective is worked in a far more positive way. Here, an important clarification is in order: while the film is in basic technical terms from the perspective of Johnny Marco, its presentation of his life naturally reflects the more feminine perspective of the film's director, Sofia Coppola. Coppola by her own admission does not like to think of herself as a "feminist" director; but she does like to make films from a female perspective. Somewhere is in theory an exception to this rule, as a film from the filmic perspective of a man, who indeed spends a great part of the film looking at women with a very classical "male gaze." 

On a deeper level, though, the film shows everywhere the indelible marks of not only female perspective in general artistic terms, but of one, overriding female perspective in particular: that of Johnny's daughter, Cleo. Cleo is certainly a better person than Phil Spector--indeed, she is a much better person even than her father--and the film is hence far more positive and ultimately redemptive than Spector's masterpiece. 

The most fundamental error of many discussions of perspective and identity is their failure to take into account the relational nature of the person. Our perspectives on the world are never merely our own, a camera looking out from our faces at those of others and abstractly interpreting what we find there. They are always defined by interior relations, by interior knowledge, and hence by our sense precisely of the perspective of others as others. We see ourselves mostly by our reflections and impact on others; and we see other people in and through our sense of their perspectives, their interiorities and intentions, and the worlds in which they live. Our consciousnesses are often defined, if not dominated, by our own empathetic sense of other people's emotions and perspectives; and without taking this into account, human perspective is fundamentally falsified.

This is especially true, naturally, of the division of the sexes, where a preoccupation with the emotions and perspective of the opposite sex is quite simply one of the most common and characteristic qualities of sex as a phenomenon and each sex taken separately. Sofia Coppola is a filmmaker with an overwhelmingly, indelibly female perspective on the world: but a part of this female perspective, indeed an essential part, is precisely her interest in male perspective and emotion and suffering. 

Somewhere is technically and filmically from the perspective of Johnny Marco; yet it is nonetheless fundamentally a view of his life as seen by his daughter Cleo. Coppola admitted that aspects of the film reflected her own childhood as the daughter of the famed director Francis Ford Coppola, as well another daughter of a famous person she had known: and when the film is seen as fundamentally a daughter's eye view of a man's life, the film begins to coalesce. Much about the film that may be otherwise strange or fantastical or 'unrealistic' makes perfect sense as the somewhat simplified, somewhat moralized viewpoint of a young daughter.

Yet it would be a profound mistake to see this reflected perspective as primary a cause of inaccuracy; for very often in life, another person's perspective is in fact the irreplaceable means of finding the truth about ourselves. We do not see ourselves clearly, usually, except by our reflections and effects on others. 

In this instance, like many depressed and lonely and miserable men, Johnny is for most of Somewhere not consciously aware of his own misery. This is in part because he is depressed and isolated and so lacking the relationships that would reveal himself to himself; but it is also, presumably, the lingering effects of the conscious choices that brought him to this state in the first place. We do not know how Johnny ended up divorced from his wife and uninvolved in his daughter's life for a matter of years; but we know that these things are the result, not just of mass-media or fame or money, but of his own choices. People, as rational beings, always act out of some reason or reasons, some implicit or explicit vision of the good: and these reasons endure, typically, long after they have been totally disproved by reality. A presentation of Johnny Marco and his life merely from his own perspective, as he would have created it for himself or to show to others, would be a highly falsified and narrativized and even ideologized vision, eliding the emptiness and presenting his outward fame and success and sexual conquests as justifications for everything else. 

A purely Johnny Marco treatment of Johnny Marco's life, then, would be at best muddled, and at worst totally falsified. Cleo, though, is naturally totally uninterested in her father's justifications and the ideologies and mass-media narratives and pleasures that had brought him to this place in his life. She merely sees that her father is miserable and lonely. And she is right.

I can well remember my encounters as a child with the lives and perspectives of adults, and the profoundly intense sense I would get of the worlds in which they lived, the visions of the good out of which they made their choices. In particular, my four (divorced) grandparents each seemed to me to live in entirely different universes, colored by their own contexts and justifications and beliefs and proclivities and senses of the desirable. Some of these worlds struck me as fundamentally joyful, if tragic places; others struck me as basically hell. The worlds of my grandparents seen from their "perspective" would no doubt have looked very different--and indeed I have since gotten much better senses of my grandparents as people, their lives and selves, in richer detail, as I have grown older myself. Yet in every case, this additional information has not changed, but only deepened and confirmed, the fundamental sense of them that I received as a small child.

The most important aspect of this portrayal of Johnny's life is merely the sympathy, and indeed the love, with which both his daughter and the film itself looks on this dysfunctional, suffering man. Most people in Johnny's life do not love him: a few, perhaps, genuinely like him; a few, too, genuinely hate him, and sincerely believe he deserves to suffer; most, though, merely indifferently use him for sex or money or momentary media thrills. It is very unlikely that any of these people would notice that Johnny is miserable, let alone care. Cleo, though, does notice--not because she is more intelligent or perceptive than the other people in his life, not because she spends more time with him (she does not), but simply and solely because she loves him.

It is too often forgotten that children are dependent on their parents not merely or primarily for food or shelter or protection, but above all for love; and it is even more often forgotten that children do not merely need to be loved by their parents: they need to love them. Cleo does not really know Johnny very well--but for all that, as his daughter, she naturally needs and wants not only to be loved by him, but to love him, which is to say to understand him and his life, to sympathize with him, and above all to see his good and will it. It is this basic good will above all else which allows her to see his life, in a real sense, from his perspective and in his interests, and so in a far more fundamentally truthful sense than any other.

A smaller aspect of the film that shows this reflected perspective is its treatment of the women, starlets and pole dancers and random strangers, that cross paths with Johnny Marco. These women are, to put it mildly, not portrayed positively--they merely exist to shallowly and at times aggressively use Johnny and then disappear. This may appear surprising at first, particularly for Sofia Coppola, who in her other films is famous for her ability and desire to portray female perspective and agency, and indeed to portray the perspective and agency of precisely this kind of woman, the young, naive, desirous starlets of Marie Antoinette or Priscilla. Why, then, do we see nothing of their reasons for being drawn to Johnny, nothing of their perspective on him, nothing even of their no-doubt romanticized delusions of their lives and positions and relationships with him?

One answer might be that we see them from Johnny's perspective--but in fact, even the most perverted, ennui-laden man would see more of women's subjectivities than this. When we realize, though, that the film's perspective on these women is precisely that of Johnny's daughter, things begin to make more sense. Every time Cleo encounters the women in Johnny's life, she reacts with annoyance, disdain, and dismissal, and openly or clandestinely asks Johnny to get rid of them.

In refusing to portray these women positively, then, the film not only follows Cleo's perspective, but again straightforwardly validates it. Johnny may be drawn to these women for any number of reasons, ranging from the romantic to the straightforwardly lustful to the compulsive to the egotistical--the woman may be drawn to Johnny for any number of reasons also. Yet Cleo, like many a child, sees simply that these women are using her father, and hurting him, that none of them care about him, and none of them love him. And she is right.

In short, then, what Cleo sees about her father is simply the most immediate and most important truths about his life--truths that are to a large extent hidden from him. The story of Somewhere is thus primarily the story of Johnny's coming to realize what is blindingly obvious to us from the filmic viewpoint of Somewhere almost from the first frame: he is miserable, lonely, and bored in his stardom and his disordered relationships with women, and his relationship with his daughter is the only true and meaningful and joyful thing in his life. Somewhere is in the end the story of an unhappy man coming to realize that he is unhappy, precisely through the unmerited reception of small glimpses or tastes of what happiness is, in personality and commitment and love.

In the end, though, Johnny does come to understand, as he gradually shuts all the contrary elements out of his life in order to live more fully with and for his daughter. He returns home to find a naked woman in his bed; and after a reiterated "this isn't a good time," ignores her and takes his daughter out for hamburgers. In his last moments with his daughter, he expresses, finally, a kind of remorse, offering her an apology, inaudibly, under the noise of a helicopter: "I'm sorry I haven't been around." 

Then his daughter leaves him, and he returns to his lonely life: and finally, and mercifully, has a breakdown. Calling his ex-wife, he confesses to her the underlying secret of his unhappiness, as quoted above:

"I'm fucking nothing. I'm not even a person." 

To be a person is to be a relational being, existing in and through particular relationships with other people. To his daughter, he is a person, seen and valued and irreplaceable in his humanity and all his innumerable particularities--but now his daughter is gone, and to everyone else in the world he is nothing more than one interchangeable cog in a machine, a replaceable image on a screen, an abstraction of an abstraction: in short, nothing. 

With this confession, Johnny achieves, at least, a basic awareness of his situation; and with this awareness comes the possibility and hope of salvation.

It is by no means easy to exit the systematic, pervasive, integral loneliness and misery produced by disordered desire. Leonard Cohen, abandoned by his ex-wife and children, would ultimately stumble his way through decades more of touring and ephemeral relationships, climaxing in a glamorous tabloid relationship with an actress twenty-five years his junior, before having a breakdown and entering a Buddhist monastery for ten years, before having another breakdown and fleeing to Mumbai to drink tea alone and meet God--where, by his own confession, the crushing shame and darkness that had haunted him his whole life abruptly left him, never to return. As he said simply in his last year of life, the main thing in his life had always been his relationship with God; for much of his life he had felt that relationship as an accusing presence, highlighting his own misery and mistakes; but that was no longer the case; and for that he was grateful.

No more than Leonard Cohen does Johnny Marco in Somewhere have a simple, straightforward path to happiness. After his apology to his daughter and breakdown and confession to his ex-wife, Johnny Marco makes himself some spaghetti, as his daughter might have done, calls down to the front desk, and checks out of the hotel. 

Where will he go and what will he do? He has, at least, one genuine relationship to build on--and, hopefully, a clear sense of what to avoid. He can stop living in a hotel surrounded by starlets; he can be a more regular, affirming presence in his daughter's life. Even these things are perhaps more easily said than done; everything else is uncertain. But as he leaves the hotel behind, he smiles.