What Went Wrong? Hitchcock's Vertigo, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, and Gene Wolfe's Peace

What Went Wrong?

Hitchcock's Vertigo, Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides, and Gene Wolfe's Peace

"What went wrong? That is the question, and not 'To be or not to be.'"

-Gene Wolfe, Peace (1975)

These are times when nearly everyone in America is engaged, it seems to me, in asking one question: what went wrong? 

This is not, I should say, a question confined to either Right or Left on our soi-disant political spectrum.  Trumpists think about nearly nothing about went wrong under Biden, and Obama, and since Harry Truman; and, increasingly, about what has gone wrong and is going wrong under Trump. Progressives, looking at their electoral defeats, looking at Trump's America, ask themselves virtually the same question. Leftists, social conservatives, Distributists, Communists, Integralists--even the tiniest sub-factions of American politics seem to spend more time analyzing how things have gone wrong than how they might possibly go right. 

Yet for all that, virtually no one, it seems to me, actually tries to answer the question in any comprehensive or philosophical or even historically satisfactory way. People produce, say, accounts of ways in which government has gotten less efficient; or how regulations have impeded economic growth; or, at best, how cultural movements or technological developments have caused kids to be less happy or art to be less good. These are all, though, from my perspective, so many discussions of symptoms rather than diseases, of effects rather than causes. 

To understand any human phenomenon, no matter how technical, one must understand human motivation and action. And considered in that light, apparent oppositions frequently conceal unities, and apparent triumphs already hold the seeds of their own downfalls. Most fundamentally of all, one cannot solve a problem until one has recognized what the problem is; nor can one undo a mistake until one understands what the mistake actually was. 

In my next post (probably), I will write about the more political and social side of this question. Today, though, I want to write about three works of art that are, in my mind, at least, connected by precisely their attention to more hidden and human seeds of harm and destruction, the ways in which these seeds grow and unfold, and the destruction they wreak when full-grown. All three films are in at least some sense tragedies; and hence all pose the same basic question of their characters' downfalls: what went wrong? 

Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1968)

This post was most immediately inspired by a recent rewatch of Alfred Hitchcock's classic film Vertigo; a classic of American cinema, but for all that an oddity among Hitchcock's filmography. During Hitchcock's lifetime, it received little attention from critics, with Hitchcock himself reportedly bitterly disappointed with its box office performance, for which he blamed Jimmy Stewart's age. 

In the decades after his death, though, it has slowly ascended to being one of his acknowledged masterpieces, often ranking first in critics' and filmmakers own lists of Hitchcock's best films and even of the best films of all time. In recent decades, it has seemed, at times, a film almost more studied and written about than watched; there are reams of research papers and theses on the film, but relatively few people I have met under the age of 40 appear to have seen it. 

I have, usually, little interest in critical canons of classics; and I am grateful that my love for Vertigo originates, not in any film studies class or best of all times list, but from my early childhood, when I first watched it with my family. It has stayed with me ever since; I cannot say really, even, how many times I have watched it. It does not really matter; for almost as long as I can remember, it has been etched into my brain as a whole, a complete thing unlike any other. I could, sitting here, run through the whole film in my brain; scenes and dialogue would be missing, but everything would be there regardless. 

[Warning: obviously, SPOILERS follow].

What I like about Vertigo, then, is first and foremost that it is a film with character; almost as striking and singular and analyzable a character as a human person. There are particular scenes, images, from the film that simply live in my mind, and always will. With it comes a particular, indelible feeling: a dreamlike helplessness in observing and being drawn in to an image or a scene, a feeling of acting somehow at the same time both within and at a great distance from oneself, and, above all, a sense of nightmarish malevolence hidden just off-screen, invisible and undetectable, and a sorrow at a loss both in the future and somehow already accomplished.

I have watched a large number of Hitchcock's films over the years; and I can certainly appreciate the things that make him a great filmmaker. Yet, for whatever reason, Vertigo strikes me as standing very much apart from his filmography as a whole, and the typical things that might draw me to watch it. Hitchcock was a great plotter of mysteries and murders; Vertigo barely has a plot, and most of it happens offscreen. Hitchcock was a great crafter of style, of glamor: the characters in Vertigo are, to a man and woman, schlubs. Hitchcock was a great horror director, a great maker of thrillers; there are no thrills in Vertigo, and the horror, while deep, is muted and utterly strange. Hitchcock was a great action director, a great chase director, a great portrayer of violence; there is no action in Vertigo, and the chases and violence are either off-screen or intimate and personal.

When I watched the film this most recent time, I was struck most of all by the reflective, almost meditative cast of the film. This is above all a distanced film. Scotty, the lead character, is barely a character. Jimmy Stewart, America's greatest masculine lead, the perfect embodiment of boyish passion and devotion and idealism, seems strung out, exhausted, avoidant. There is, by conventional standards, very little dialogue in the film, and most of it is evasive at best; characters not telling us what they are thinking and feeling. Jimmy Stewart made the lead in It's a Wonderful Life, one of the great American films of all time, virtually an open book of emotion and desperation; Scotty, though, is always avoiding our eyes. He is always looking away.

What is he looking at? That is one question the film poses. Another, deeper one, might be: what has gone wrong with him?

There have been reams of critical writing about Vertigo; and, while I have not even read a tiny fraction of it, I think it is reasonably safe to say that a great deal of it dwells on two themes: (1) the nature of the film as a reflection on cinema in general and Hitchcock's cinema in particular, and (2) the way the film reflects on gender relations, femininity, and masculinity. Those are both, such as it is, entirely valid analyses, and clearly central to the film.

For me, though, it is in the atmosphere, the details, that virtually all of the film's content is found. The film, like the characters, is evasive, and avoids our eyes. And the two critical topics I have mentioned are themselves merely instances of a much more fundamental topic: the ways in which the past comes to dominate the present, and the way in which human malice destroys human minds and human lives.

Put most simply, Vertigo is a human tragedy in which two women die, and one man commits murder, and another man loses his mind. Why does this happen? To understand that, as Aristotle might have it, one must pay close attention to the seeds, present from the very beginning, in our characters.

Scotty, our alleged lead, is an aging man haunted by the past; a police detective forcibly retired after an accident and a psychological break. Hitchcock blamed Stewart's age for making the film less popular; but Stewart's age is in truth crucial to the character. Scotty is a fifty-year old man living alone in a small apartment after being forcibly retired from his job. Something, clearly, has gone wrong in his life: many things. 

Scotty does not go out or spend time with friends or even read. He paces frustrated about his apartment, talking either to himself or to his one and only interlocutor: a friend and sometime girlfriend from college. That was a long time ago, though; and while in other films, Scotty and Midge might have been played as budding romance, with Midge the beautiful, intelligent, glamorous (she is a fashion designer who works on lingerie) Girl Friday, in this film, their relationship seems more a ghost of the past than a present reality. They are both of them, clearly, lonely people. They make jokes at each other--the same jokes, likely, they have made for many years. They discuss their brief college relationship--from thirty years ago!--flirt half-heartedly, alternately express and hide affection, most likely in precisely the same ways they have done for decades. Then they both go home. Neither appears to have other friends.

Before the film even starts in earnest, then, something has gone wrong: perhaps everything has gone wrong. Scotty is not merely a passive victim of a plot or a tragedy: he is already a man out of sorts, in deep trouble, expressed most immediately in his overpowering, debilitating vertigo. 

It is in this state, then, that he is hired by another old college friend, a wealthy industrialist married to a much younger woman, in the capacity of a private detective. Scotty takes on the job of following Gavin Elster's young wife eagerly, desperate to get out of the house and act and live, not in himself and his actual life, but in the more exciting "work life" he has lost, and above all in the vivid, meaningful scenario his friend offers him.

Scotty's old friend, too, seems haunted; he stares out the window and talks about his boredom with his life as a wealthy businessmen, and about the "disappearing past" of San Francisco. "I would have liked to have lived here then," he says. "The color and excitement...the power...the freedom." He, too, avoids our eyes.

The story the friend tells to Scotty and the audience, is, on the surface, an exciting, creepy Hitchcockian special: his wife is being haunted, perhaps even possessed, by her ancestor, a beautiful orphan-girl taken as a mistress by a wealthy industrialist, then tossed aside, and finally driven to suicide. So Scotty begins to follow her, in the film's best scenes, wordless, timeless interchanges of two of the most striking sights in cinema: the streets and buildings of San Francisco, and Jimmy Stewart's face. 

The woman, allegedly Madeline Elster, does act haunted; she is abstracted, distracted, driving and walking about in a seeming trance, visiting various odd places throughout San Francisco including places. She goes to museums and sits silently looking at a portrait of her ancestress; she goes to stores, and buys similar flowers. 

But then, if the woman he is watching is haunted, so, too, is Scotty. He is alternately frightened, irritated, concerned, but all the time fascinated. With his employer, with Midge, he is even more evasive than before. We watch him watching her; and even when he is not watching her, he is thinking of her.

But of course, as the film's central twist tells us, she, too, is watching him all the time: watching him watch her. And what she is haunted by--what both of them are haunted by--is something far more frightening than a ghost. It is what I have called elsewhere the true preternatural: the hidden will and interiority and malice of man.

The twist of Vertigo is one of the greatest of Hitchockian twists precisely because of how subtle it is, and how much it hinges on perspective. In this, it is one of the rare twists in all of art that actually improves the experience of rewatching. Rewatching Vergigo knowing what is actually happening adds to the film's power, its creepiness, nearly a hundredfold. 

In details, though, the twist is as over-the-top as any pulp detective story, where the Duchess is revealed as a trained monkey treated with lye. The wife Scotty thinks he is seeing is not the wife at all, but an actress, the husband's mistress, dressed as her. But then, Scotty never sees the real wife at all; except once she is already dead, when she is called upon to play the role of corpse, of prop, for a woman that never existed. He believes he has fallen in love with this woman, Madeline, who never existed; and the real woman, Judy, believes she has fallen in love with him. 

Yet, of course, neither has ever really seen the other; and when they do see each other, they do not really like each other very much. One of the paradoxical truths about Vertigo, which has nonetheless been repeated so often it has become a kind of conventional wisdom, is that Scotty is in a real sense the film's villain; that he is unpleasant, all but insane, obsessed with an image rather than a person, never loving or even really seeing the real women around him, alternately parasitic and cruel and demanding towards them, taking Midge's affections and kindness ungratefully and almost unconsciously, consciously forcing Judy to adopt the role and characteristics of a dead woman, and finally vengefully driving her to her death. Jimmy Stewart is, as always, the ideal actor to play this kind of role, precisely because he is so naturally and natively sympathetic.

Yet, in a level light, the female victim Judy is nearly as much or more of a villain, and for nearly the same reasons. She is a poor, working-class woman, who by her own admission has turned to prostitution in the past. More than this, she is the mistress and willing accomplice of a wealthy man in the murder of his wife. And, worst of all, in all of this she is an actor, a deceiver, as fascinated by her power over others, her power as watched, as they.

The most controversial aspect of the film, both for Hitchcock and for critics, is the sudden reveal of the film's twist before the climax, by way of a letter written by Judy to Scotty, and then destroyed. Hitchcock was himself deeply ambivalent; he added the scene, then took it out after screenings, then was prevailed upon by the studio to put it back in again, where it has stayed. But while the scene is odd from a structural point of view, for the characters, it is essential: for it gives us, for the only time in the film, Judy's unfiltered perspective, making her as much a character as Scotty.

And what is Judy's perspective? She has, all the time, watched Scotty watching her, or rather, not watching her, but watching her lie, watching her project the image of a woman who never existed. She has watched herself deceiving another; and in so doing, has come to believe that she loves the man she is deceiving. When Scotty meets her as herself, she continues to lie to him; but despite the danger of discovery, despite the increasing threat he poses to her, she will not tell him to go away, but continues to work to draw him in.

In her letter, she explains her own purported motivations: she wants to "stay and lie," hoping to "make you love me again, as I am for myself." As I am for myself. This is the key, the crux to the whole film. 

By one interpretation, it is this motivation that raises Judy above Scotty, makes her in the end a sympathetic victim, and he in the final balance a villain. She wants him to love her for herself; but he, believing full well that the woman he loves is dead, wants to love another, a stranger, only as a false image of this dead woman. He all but forces herself to dress herself, make up herself, exactly like this dead woman: and in the film's most famous, ineffable scene, she appears in full costume, amid eerie green light, a ghost of what never was.

Yet upon consideration, what Judy wants from Scotty is hardly, in the final balance, much less twisted, or even much less strange. Even the "real" Judy, when we see her, is evasive at best, a scared-looking shopgirl with her face caked in make-up so that only her eyes appear. And what she wants from Scotty is hardly love in any truthful sense: for what she wants is precisely, as she herself puts it, to go on lying to him. 

The lie she inflicted on him, earlier in the film, has all but destroyed Scotty's mind; and she knows very well that his interest in her has come only via that lie, that even his interest in her as Judy is only because she reminds him of an apparent dead woman. And while Scotty is nearly an old man, having recently passed through two successive psychological breaks, and by the end of the film genuinely mad, she is young, and knows what she is doing.

I do not, though, want to paint Judy as the villain of the film; nor do I even want to portray the film's genuine villain as such. Scotty's old friend Gavin is without a doubt one of the best and most memorable villains in any Hitchcock film, or indeed any film period: precisely because we never actually see him as a villain, except fleetingly and wordlessly in Judy's memories. He speaks in only a few scenes, and always in the assumed character of the kindly, concerned husband; yet it is precisely this that makes him so overwhelmingly, almost supernaturally powerful a figure for Scotty, Judy, and viewers alike.

As I have argued elsewhere, the preternatural in art and life alike is largely a mode for reflecting on the hiddenness and power of the human will; and the power and hiddenness alike of Gavin's will are both unmatched in cinema. Seen, he would be a footnote: yet another Hitchcockian husband driven by lust or boredom to murder his wife. Unseen, though, his malice festers hidden behind every scene, every line of dialogue, until it takes on nearly Satanic proportions.

 The scenes where Scotty watches Judy as Madeline are creepy and powerful, even more so when we know what is actually happening. Yet they all pale in comparison, at least for me, to the scenes between Scotty and Gavin, once we know what Gavin is, what he is plotting, what he has done. These scenes--like all scenes that portray the hiddenness and power of human malice--are practically bottomless in their terror. Gavin is not just another bored husband; he is Satan. And like Satan, his true power comes, not from any ability to kill or destroy, but from the ability to fascinate, which is precisely the power to tell stories, to convey narratives that deceive, that entrap. A narrative, as I have argued elsewhere, is first and foremost a construction of value: where one event does not merely follow another, but acts as its end, its telos, drawing it to itself. This is as true for the false narrative of Vertigo as for any other truthful story. 

What both Judy and Scotty are, in the final balance, fascinated by, is not merely a woman, even a fake woman, or a man, even a deceived man: it is the power of narrative, of value, and of their own parts in it. Scotty does not "fall in love" with Madeline despite the fact that she is, in narrative terms, a passive, doomed victim destined to soon die: he falls in love with her because of this, because the role she plays, the danger she is in, is so much more suffused with value, with meaning, than the largely narrativeless events of his own middle-aged life, where he has, as they say, lost the thread, lost the plot, lost any overriding sense of purpose, any overriding goal, and now merely hangs around his apartment with his college girlfriend, desperate for something to happen. Similarly, Judy does not "fall in love" with Scotty despite the fact that he is playing the role of the passive witness, set up to watch her play a false role and to become invested in it as true, even swear to it before the courts of law as true; she does so because of this, because in the story (which she, unlike Scotty, knows all the time to be false) she is a powerful, fascinating figure deceiving another and causing him to act, while, outside of the story, she is only another poor young girl in a shop.

To say this, of course, is not to take away from the underlying truth of which narrative itself is only a representation and instantiation: namely, that human beings are driven, first and foremost, by desire, and that desire is always and only desire for the objective good, for truth, for beauty, for love. Both Scotty and Madeline, we may presume, do truly desire to love and to be loved. Both, though, are trapped inside narratives, inside deceptions, such that the only way they can perceive themselves or another as loved, as loving, as good, is through the terms and details and teloses of the plot. And the plot, alas, is false: as false as that of the Serpent in the Garden. 

Gavin, then, is the Serpent; a Serpent all the more effective for his elusiveness, his hiddenness, his ability to get others to take his parts and play his story for him. All the false plot of Vertigo is, in truth, his story, his work of art: and in the final balance, both Scotty and Judy are victims of that plot, of that false story, acting out their respective roles and unable to escape. 

It is important, though, to note that we do get one fleeting glimpse into what is presumably Gavin's true, human psychology: the fleeting comment, quoted above, about his fascination with the past of San Francisco, its color and wealth and power. It is surely no accident that the story he tells Scotty is precisely a story about that past of San Francisco, about that wealth and power and freedom and violence. The story of a young, beautiful orphan girl, taken as a mistress by a powerful businessmen, then abandoned, and finally driven to suicide: this is, in fact, the true story of Judy, a story that not even she is aware she is playing. When Judy sits in front of a painting, pretending to be another woman haunted by a dead woman, she is in fact being haunted by this same dead woman. Yet it is not the ghost of the dead woman herself who is haunting her, and involving her in this narrative; it is the will and malice of a living man. 

But why, after all, is this man doing all this? It is, after all, only because he is yet another haunted human being, obsessed with the past, with stories and narratives and meaning. He is, as he admits to Scotty, bored with his life; and in this boredom, he, like Scotty, has become obsessed with stories. In the stories of the past he has encountered, businessmen like him had reveled in deception, in mistresses, in murder; or, as he sees it, in color and life and excitement and meaning and value and the good itself. However he encountered these stories--whether in books, in films, in fiction or nonfiction, or by the voice of Satan himself--he, like Scotty, like Judy, has become ensnared in a false story, and has decided to play his part.

This, then, is Vertigo's true, final terror: a terror that is nearly bottomless. In the film's last scene, Scotty, vengeful and crazed and obviously insane, tells Judy he has discovered the truth, and drives her to reenact her own false death, his own false failure in the false story told by Gavin. He, at last, knows he has been deceived; and by this truth, overcomes his fear, his vertigo. 

Yet if Scotty has discovered the truth, the truth about all the stories in which he has played a part, that truth emphatically does not set him free or save him. After all, Judy knew the truth all along, and still chose to deceive; and Gavin had known even more of it; and Satan alone had known all. The malice and guilt of sin, after all, is not decreased by knowledge, but increased by it. In the same way, Scotty's knowledge of the truth, or rather his knowledge of deception, only increases his malice, turning it into a frightening, nearly bottomless malevolence towards the woman he believed he had loved, who now he knows deceived him. False love has turned into hatred. Knowing the truth, he forces Judy, dressed as Madeline, to reenact her deception as deception, as known falsehood--an act that is at once cruel vengeance and personal fantasy. 

But then, of course, comes the film's final twist: an act of God that is at once mercy and judgment. Judy is frightened by a terrifying, looming figure; a figure that is preternaturally terrifying, terrifying to Judy and to viewers alike in a way that is entirely beyond reason, in a way that few things in all of cinema are terrifying. I can still recall, vividly, the moment I first saw it as a kid, and the bottomless terror it inspired in me. This figure might be Gavin, or Satan, or God himself, come to judge; but for Judy, it is death. She flees, and falls, and dies a second time. And then the figure becomes only that of an elderly nun, a human representative of the divine; and she crosses herself, and says "God have mercy." And the film ends.

There is, I think, nothing I could possibly add to that ending. And so I will merely repeat: God have mercy.

Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999)

Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides is a very different type of film in most ways: yet it is also, at its heart of hearts, a reflection on reality and deception, on tragedy and truth. 

The Virgin Suicides presents a much more positive, romantic vision of life than Vertigo-an odd thing to say about a film whose central plot involves a family of teenaged girls killing themselves. What makes Sofia Coppola one of my favorite filmmakers, though, is always and above all else her vision: which is essentially a vision of the good, true and real and objective. She makes films about very dark subjects; but is at heart a romantic, where Hitchcock is, at least partially, a cynic, or perhaps more precisely a thriller. Hitchcock was a man and a filmmaker adept at producing effects: effects which are based ultimately on the real good, but more immediately on style and artifice and and technique and even outright deception. Sofia Coppola, though, is preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with portraying something real, something that she can see, that she believes in, even if it is frequently elusive and deceptive and even destructive.

For the Virgin Suicides, as for nearly all her films in one way or another, the thing that Sofia Coppola can see and wishes to portray is romance: or rather, what she has referred to in interviews as "the male-female mystery," the desire of woman for man, and of man for woman. This thing is at the heart of Vertigo as well; but Hitchock does not in any of his films really approach it at all. He knows very well how Scotty and Judy and Gavin are deceiving each other; but for all that, he does not really know why. He does not know the real good at which they are aiming, or to which they are approximating. 

Why does Scotty fall in love with Madeline, or Judy, or anyone else? Why does he even believe he is falling in love with her? What does he see in her, or through her? Why does Judy believe she is falling in love with Scotty? Why does she watch him watch her, and enjoy it? She may enjoy her role in the narrative, she may even enjoy deceiving him; but why does she want him to love her as she is to herself? Why does she even think she wants this? What is it that gives Gavin's story its power over both? What is it, even, that gives the colorful life of San Francisco of the past its power over Gavin? Even if we are all victims of Satan's lies, trapped in his webs and false narratives, what is it, in us or in each other or in the world, that gives these lies their power?

I do not think, really, that Hitchcock knows; or even that, in his heart of hearts, he thinks he knows. But I do think that Sofia Coppola knows; or at least, sees. 

Of all her films, though, none is so apophatic, as it were, in its treatment of this vision as The Virgin Suicides. This, the very first of her films, is to a very large degree a kind of mission statement, even a research proposal, for her art as a whole. It presents the vision: but only in her later films is this vision analyzed and worked out in detail. In The Virgin Suicides, it is merely shown in its power, its inexplicableness, its mystery.

The film has even less of a plot than Vertigo, and nearly as much atmosphere. There is a family of teenaged girls, Catholics, of immigrant background. They are beautiful, but in some way different from the other girls, the Protestant WASP girls, present in the town and the school. The boys--the Protestant, WASP boys--who live in the town with them, are utterly fascinated, even obsessed with them. To them, they live in a higher realm, almost a higher world, filled with mysterious meaning and wonder and intense emotion and sensitivity and tenderness and everlasting glory. And so the two groups, the boys and the girls, try to find each other, on the basis of that vision: and it all, somehow, goes wrong. And the girls all, at first one by one and then all together, kill themselves.

Why does it go wrong? In this, certainly, different interpretations are possible. On paper, one could make this a film against religion, even against Catholicism: since the parents restrict the girls, prevent them from meeting boys, finally lock them all in the house and stop them from going out. Stuck in their house alone, the girls languish and finally die.

Yet this is emphatically not the film's message. The local Catholic priest, after all, is a kindly, if not all that helpful, figure; and he tries to prevent the parents from locking up the girls, as the result of which they stop attending Church themselves, and quit their jobs, and lock themselves in the house also. 

More fundamentally, though, what has gone wrong cannot just be the parents' locking up the girls; for when the parents do let the girls go out, let them interact with the boys, let them out into the Protestant WASP world of America, things always go horribly wrong. The youngest girl attempts suicide, in response to what she is experiencing at school, and in response her parents host a party of boys at their house; the boys, though, are indifferent and casually cruel, and in response the girl kills herself. 

Likewise, in the film's central sequence, the oldest girl is courted by the school's resident stud, and finally succeeds in taking her and all her sisters, with dates, to the prom. This prom sequence is the film's highpoint, a mysterious, almost heavenly vision of excitement and romance and incipient supernatural joy--"This is the best time," one of the sisters declares--marred, once again, by malice. The oldest girl has sex with her date, who promptly abandons her; and thereafter, she turns to misery and rage and casual promiscuity, even locked in her house, having sex with strange Protestant boys on her roof every night. And none of the girls are allowed out with girls again.

For a moment, in the film, the boys appeared as the girls' liberation, almost as their salvation; and the girls appeared as the boys' ennoblement, uplifting, even salvation. In the end, though, it does not happen. The boys hatch a plan to liberate the girls from their house, to take them away, to live together forever in happiness. The girls agree to the plan; but when the boys arrive at the appointed time, the girls instead kill themselves. The problem, then, is not merely that they were trapped in the house by their parents, away from the boys; it was their relationship with the boys, as much or more than anything, that led to their deaths. 

This, though, must be stated clearly, though it is a point that is expressed almost entirely via Sofia Coppola's filmmaking style, her dreamlike and heavenly and romantic visuals. Unlike in Vertigo, the visions in the film, the visions of both the boys and the girls, are not false, are not deceptions. Both are true visions: visions of some real, transcendent good. The girls are in some real sense higher, more intense, more sensitive, almost mystical beings, as they appear in the vision of the boys: romance with the boys is in some real sense a truer, more beautiful experience, an awakening to the glories of the world and of heaven, as it appears to the girls. More than this, in Sofia Coppola's vision, the girls do need the boys, need to be loved and valued and to be taken into the great world outside; without them, they languish and die. And the boys need the girls, need to be drawn up and ennobled and taken into a higher world of meaning and value and intense emotion and truth and beauty. 

Yet, in America, in the 20th century, it is not working; it is not working at all. 

One of the film's most potent and powerful touches is the way in which it is told in retrospect by the boys themselves, now older men, American Protestant WASP men, businessmen with wives and children and money and power. Everything we see of them, of the lives they lived without these immigrant Catholic girls, is wasted, washed-out, utterly without this higher meaning and value and beauty. After the girls' death, the boys attend an American Protestant WASP party, with drunken American Protestant WASP girls who make out with them and get drunk and fall into fountains; and it is utterly without meaning. Decades later, they visit the highschool stud, a wreckage of a man, alone and washed up and strung out and still looking wistfully back at the one girl from highschool. The boys, as much as the girls, have died. Or rather: they have never come to life. They have lived a waking life, without meaning and beauty.

The thesis of the film, then, is at best a question. What is it that the boys saw in the girls, wanted or needed from them? What is it that the girls saw in the boys, wanted or needed from them? What was this mysterious salvation they offered each other? And what went wrong? 

It is a question that might be asked about much more than the (admittedly fantastical) events of the film. Anyone who has lived in America will recognize, in one form or fashion, what it presents: the passionate goodness and potential of young people giving way to harm and disappointment, the eternal dialectic between subcultures that constrain and stifle and a mainstream culture that asphyxiates and kills, the endless ways in which boys and girls, men and women, miss each other and hurt each other as our gender relations bottom out in a perpetual nadir. We have all known people who fled from the controlling, overprotective embrace of parents or religion into things, mainstream things, American things, that hurt and killed them. We have all known people who languished and died, literally and spiritually, because they were never awakened, because they were never loved, because of their own or others' fear. We have all known people who killed themselves. So what went wrong?

In the film, the answer, such as it is, is merely suggested, hinted at in stories and signs and symbols. In every interaction between boys and girls that we see, something is wrong; something beneath the surface, expressed at times in petty malice and cruelty and promiscuity, but clearly much deeper. They are missing each other; they are mistreating each other; they are not, really, seeing or finding each other at all.

The answer is expressed most vividly, perhaps, in metaphors drawn from nature, as in the elm disease spreading mysteriously throughout America, killing every elm tree, leading the girls to defiantly ring their one dying, rotting, diseased elm tree to protect it from the axe. The girls are like the elm trees; stricken by some disease which can only destroy them. But what is the disease? 

Then, too, after their death, the town is struck by an outbreak of algae on the lake, caused by an industrial spill, that fills the town with a terrible, rotting stench: because of which, in a terrifying and powerful visual, the guests at the WASP party discussed above all wear gas masks, and the party theme is "asphyxiation." Something is asphyxiating the boys, depriving them of life and oxygen, making them pale and wan and lifeless. But what is it? 

To the degree the film has an answer, it is perhaps only "society": or, more precisely, "America." But those are only verbal masks for a much greater mystery.

Gene Wolfe's Peace (1975)

I have been meaning to write about Gene Wolfe's Peace for a very long time; and even now, I am not really going to do it. 

It is easiest, I think, generally speaking, to write about works of art that one merely likes; more difficult to write about works that one hates and despises; more difficult to write about works that one mildly dislikes; and most difficult of all to write about works of art that one truly, deeply loves and admires.

To say I love and admire Peace, though, is emphatically an understatement. I am in awe of it; I cannot really critique it, but only accept it as a fundamental, objective thing, beyond analysis, a thing that haunts my waking and dreaming life.

In this, I should say, my love for Peace stands well apart from my general enjoyment of Gene Wolfe. It is trivially true to say that Peace is his best novel. After many years of mature consideration, though, I have come to recognize that it is in fact his only good novel. For Gene Wolfe, for all his artistic greatness, is not really a great novelist, or even, I think, a very good one. 

This, though, is a somewhat unfair statement. The generic term "novel," as Chesterton long ago pointed out, it itself a vague term for a kind of art that is itself vague by design. Like most of the forms of art invented in the Early Modern period, "novels," unlike, say, tragedies or comedies or epics, have no set structure or form or content at all. Most "great novels" of the peak of the novelistic period are, considered in the abstract, giant, sloppy, formless messes barely tied together by a set of common (frequently shifting) characters, a set of common (frequently simplistic and didactic) themes, or even, at times, merely by a (semi-)consistent writing style. 

Considered in this light, Gene Wolfe's novels are merely one instantiation of the general formlessness of the novelistic style as such. Gene Wolfe is a genius at the pointed format of a short story, where a single idea or scenario can predominate; because he is a genius at coming up with strange, complex scenarios and ideas. His novels, though, are much too large and sprawling to be anchored in a single idea, and so are all pretty much variants on the same sequential, serialized form popularized by mass-market magazines and newspapers, where one breathless incident follows another breathless incident, gradually filling out a larger sense of a world. Within these frameworks, any number of bizarre and fascinating incidents may take place, including time travel, bodily death and resurrection, the transmigration of souls, characters discovering they are in fact siblings and/or grandchildren and/or alternate versions of each other, political revolution, religious conversion, and/or the revival of the Sun and the flooding of the surface of the earth. The best example of this kind of novel, of course, is that gigantic, transcendent, breathtaking, frustrating, stultifying monstrosity known as the Book of the New Sun. It is nearly impossible for me, though, to think of a Gene Wolfe novel that has a clear beginning or ending, or structured, unified plot in the sense Aristotle speaks about in his Poetics. 

Peace, though, is different; Peace is unique. I have never read anything like Peace, and I can't imagine I ever will. It is more or less Gene Wolfe's first published novel; and it is not really a novel at all. It is, as much as any work Aristotle ever talked about, a short and pointed and complete account of something: a human life, a confession of sins, a small town, the 20th century, America. I do not think I believe in the Great American Novel; but if it exists, it is Peace.

This makes it very difficult for me to write about; and when I finally finish thinking through the book, I will probably have written an entire academic dissertation and/or monograph on the subject. What I want to write about here, though, is the way in which Peace seems to me to be, to a great extent, the answer to the riddle posed in both Vertigo and Virgin Suicides. One may well object that the answer is much more confusing and mysterious than the riddle; yet it is for all that an answer.

By an odd but appropriate coincidence, Peace begins with the fall of an elm tree; an endangered species planted on a grave, dead and rotted and finally brought down in a storm. This "novel" on the face of it, the memoirs of an American man, Alden Dennis Weer, looking back on his life; or, rather, reliving that life. Weer lived his entire life in the small town of Cassionville, which is somewhere in the Midwest; and as he lives, he watches, and indeed participates in, the downfall and decay of that town, and with it the entire American culture once centered in such small towns.

As I suggested above, Peace is the only Gene Wolfe book with a clear and complete structure; and the structure is a thing of beauty, complete yet multi-faceted, existing on many levels at once, present and past and future, memory and art and story and folklore and stories within stories. It is more or less impossible to summarize.

Here, though, is one, central story, at least, told within this broader nexus. As a small child, Weer is sent to live with his aunt, a beautiful, brilliant, independent young woman living by herself and interested in all academic subjects, especially all things Chinese. She is courted by four men, each of whom could be said (if one were an unfortunate literary critic) to represent a certain facet of American society. 

The first is Professor Peacock, a poor archeologist at a local university, who takes Olivia on expeditions into the woods to find caves and dead bodies, who shares with her both a love of knowledge and a competitive, murderous hatred; the second is Jimmy Macafee, the wealthy owner of the local department store, who plies her with gifts and gives her space to practice her Chinese crafts publicly, but ultimately clashes with her over a single, particularly valuable gift; the third is Stewart Blaine, the lazy scion of the wealthiest family in town, who owns the town bank but does not work in it, and who offers Olivia wealth and a high-status life but ultimately cares only for money; and the fourth, Julius Smart, who is a magician, and marries her.

Julius Smart, of course, is not literally a magician; he is a pharmacist and scientist, who eventually founds a factory that produces artificial orange juice from potatoes. In the book, though, he is a magician, a dark magician, nonetheless. While he wins wealth and power over Cassionville with the magic of science and money, he wins the heart and hand of Olivia with a story.

This is the real brilliance of Peace, and one way in which it seems to me to answer the riddle of America, of what has gone wrong with economics and politics and family and narrative and story and power and even sex. The book effortlessly blends history and folklore, in a way that is genuinely insightful: recognizing that, beneath the story of the downfall of a single woman, a single child, a single small American town, there is in reality the fairy tale of a woman and a land blighted by a dark magician. 

The folkloric aspects of the novel, though, are not its deepest level of explanation; that deepest level comes in its insightful, terrifying, truly preternatural treatment of the human motivations and deeds of its characters. The folklore and magic and ghosts in the story are expositions of these true causes, causes that operate within and through individual people, their memories and desires, and both backwards and forwards through time. Ghosts, as the novel tells us, are in essence people out of time, lost in a barren future they cannot live in, haunting their own memories, their own experiences, unable to repent of their sins and let go of the past and move on. Magicians are people who use others, body and soul, for their own purposes, deceiving their minds, manipulating their desires and causing them to forget their own natures, turning potatoes into false oranges, ultimately drying up the very sources of life and  turning them (literally or spiritually) to stone.

These descriptions apply to multiple characters and situations in the book, as well as to the setting as a whole, American society as a whole. Weer is born a child with enormous potential; he ends as a lonely old man in an enormous house. Cassionville, when he was a child, is a thriving small American town with a robust local culture; when he is an old man, it is a desiccated husk, the streams dried up, the industry declining, the farms returning to the wilderness. The question of the book, then, which Weer himself poses in the quote with which I began this essay, is once again: what went wrong? 

There was a woman Weer loved passionately as a young man, and who by all rights he should have married; but he never married her. Why? His parents abandoned him for years as a small child to live with his Aunt Olivia while they toured Europe, and never again were close to him. Why? His aunt Olivia married Julius Smart, grew fat and unhappy and promiscuous, and was murdered. Why? Weer should have inherited a great deal of money from his parents, but instead became a poor engineer in Julius Smart's company. Why? There was a woman, a librarian, he loved as a middle-aged man; but she vanished from his life, never to return. Why?  Weer ultimately became the CEO of Smart's company after him, and grew enormously rich. Why? Cassionville went from a farming town to an industrial town, spurred by Smart's factory, then economically declined. Why? 

As with Gene Wolfe in general, each question has a specific answer: one, though, often hidden rather than openly stated. It is not really a spoiler to say that Julius Smart, scientist, magician, and CEO, plays a large role in the answers to all of these questions; for as Weer himself tells us, it is Julius Smart, and not he, who is the main character of his memoirs. The fact that Weer is not even the main character of his own story is deeply emblematic of what the book has to say about modern America; the degree to which the fortunes of his life are determined by forces greater and stronger and more hidden than he has the will or character to resist.

Yet for all that, Weer has a role to play in his own story; and sins and crimes to confess. He, like Scotty, is evasive; but in his case, the evasions constitute to a large extent the confessions. Even when he does not tell us, directly and precisely, what he has done, he tells us something much more important: why he has done what he has done. 

Peace is the only one of these works that I will not spoil for you, dear reader. I will not even spoil the central conceit which Wolfe has himself, in numerous interviews, confirmed: because, as with all Wolfe's works, I think the book is best read, and then reread, on its own terms, and both questions and answers puzzled out for oneself. As with all of Wolfe's works, though, rest assured that the answers are there. 

As with the best of Gene Wolfe's works, however, the power of the book does not come from, or depend on, literal answers to factual questions. Every time I have reread the book, I have discovered something more; and every time I have been more haunted by the vision of what has really gone wrong in American society, what has really blighted our land and destroyed our livelihoods and poisoned our very souls.

Neither the characters in Vertigo, lonely middle-aged professionals and working-class shopgirls and bored businessmen, or the characters in Virgin Suicides, Catholic immigrant schoolgirls and WASP schoolboys, are in a position to understand what has poisoned their lives, draining them of meaning and life, and subjecting them ever crueler and more violent deceptions. Dennis Weer, though, is in a position to understand what has gone wrong with his life; and so, too, is Gene Wolfe. 

The answer to that question is not one that can be simply given; but nor is it in any sense a spoiler. Wolfe has a very realistic sense of the factors that destroyed the culture and economy of small American towns; including such straightforward and seemingly prosaic forms of magic as synthetic chemistry, farm foreclosure, and crop monocultures. He also has a very realistic sense of what destroys human relationships; including such straightforward things as intellectual competition, blackmail, and murder. 

Yet what Wolfe realizes very potently is this: that behind all these factors in all these domains is the same thing, the same poison. Something comes between Olivia and every one of her suitors; that same something causes Julius Smart to scheme and plot to win her over his competitors; that same something causes an old man to forge books and sell them; that same something causes Weer and his librarian to come into conflict with each other. One name for this thing might be malice; another might be deception; the most philosophical would be pride. In the actual book, though, this thing is most often associated with the smell of apples. 

What makes Peace a kind of answer to a riddle, though, is not just its (Catholic-inflected) understanding of the ultimate pride and malice of the heart of man; it is the understanding of how that malice spreads, how even when it is found in just a single person, it spreads through relationships, through love affairs and deceptions and rivalries and competitions and books and stories and sciences and industries until it poisons the very air and water, the very substance of a society. 

There is something that each of us wants, passionately; that thing is good in itself. Yet because we want it, and because we obsess over that desire within our own hearts and minds, we come to want to possess it not merely in itself and for itself, with and for the good of others, but to possess it for ourselves alone. We treat ourselves, in other words, as the highest good, and what we desire merely as a means, and not as the true and objective good which will unite us to others. Because of this pride, we begin to see others as rivals, as enemies; we begin to deceive each other, harm each other, kill each other. And we begin quite naturally, to hate what we desire, and hate even our desire, since it above all else shows us that we are not complete in ourselves, that we are not ends in ourselves, to which all goods are directed. Because of this, we frequently lose the thing we have desired, or even the desire for it itself. And when we do triumph, when we alone take possession of what we have wanted, whether person or town or porcelain egg, we corrupt and blight and destroy what we have possessed, poisoning both it and the very wellsprings of the desire for it within us. And this we have done, all of us, again and again, as individuals and through relationships and through media and as a society and as a nation.

This malice, of course, did not start with Julius Smart; it extends in some form back to the very foundation of Cassionville, the very foundation of America, as the book's treatment of the relationship between the town and local Indians indicates. Nor is it confined to Smart, or even to Weer; it is present, in some at least incipient form, in every character in the book. Yet this infection spreads and grows, as the central ghost story told by the magician Smart tells us, never merely by nature, let alone by mere passivity or ignorance or weakness or innocence; it grows by the active malice of ghosts, unrepentant men trapped in memories of malice, who walk our houses, after dark, and day by day poison the innocent.

This is not a complete description of our plight in America in 2025, let alone of the plight of the human condition as a whole. Yet it is, I think, so far as it goes, true; and it is visible and recognizable far more vividly in these three works of art than in many political and cultural thinkpieces, and many tomes of philosophy and ethics.