Metaphor in Orphée: Chapter 3 Part 3 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
ORPHÉE (1949)
During opium intoxication early in 1925, twenty-five years before his film Orphée,
Jean Cocteau fell asleep on his feet and hallucinated one of its characters: “In
the elevator I imagined that I was growing larger alongside something terrible—I
don’t know what—that was going to last forever. A voice was calling to me: ‘My name
is on the plate!’ A jolt woke me, and I read on the brass door-plate: HEURTEBISE
ELEVATOR” (Steegmuller 350). A depressing feeling of being possessed led to thoughts
of suicide and to composition against his will of the poem “The Angel Heurtebise”
(L’Ange Heurtebise), about his homosexuality. So far, the metaphoric structure
falls within stage five. What at stage four would be an angel transporting the soul
down to Hell or up to Heaven has become an elevator—a stage-five articializing of
the world. As to associating this with homosexuality, Oscar Wilde justified his own
orientation by prioritizing the artificial over the natural. Even the intoxication
inspiring Cocteau’s state fits the stage-five assumption that the mind must be influenced
through material means.
With a glimpse into chaos (by which stage five sometimes partly anticipates stage seven), Cocteau, though, was not content to categorize his depression as Freudian homosexual panic or some other equally simple symptom. Rather, he insisted that his situation was intricate, describable only in paradoxes. He termed the poem “at once inspired and formal as a chess game” (Steegmuller 352). This notion that the same thing can be orderly and beyond human control (“formal” and “inspired”) anticipates the most recent understanding of chaos, i.e., it anticipates the lowest phase of stage seven. About the same period he published a talk with the title “Order Considered as Anarchy” (D’un Ordre Considéré comme une Anarchie). To Cocteau, life, art, and religion are “chaoses,” like the mirrors in Orphée which simultaneously reflect the order of this world and open into the Beyond. The same mysterious presence called “Heurtebise” occurs in all strata of Orphée’s development, despite Cocteau’s radically changing attitudes toward angels.
In the poem, L’Ange Heurtebise, Cocteau develops an extended metaphor equating the following with one another: (1) his opium experience with an invisible being that seemed to him terrifyingly angelic; (2) the painful inspiration of art; and (3) a brutal homosexual affair (“d’une brutalité/Incroyable saute sur moi,” (Steegmuller 352). These metaphors vacillate between affirming his unconventional life as the source of art and condemning it as font of the terrifying, painful, and brutal. That summer, he inclined toward the latter choice, trying to end his opium addiction, and, after an illness, trying to reform through re-conversion to Roman Catholicism. Although Cocteau apparently had experienced a foreshadowing of stage seven, he was emotionally in the cusp between a stage-four version of Roman Catholicism and a life lived largely at stage five, devoted to the artifices of self-expression.
If the origins of Orphée already sound confused and ominous, they become even more so. Filled with Christian fervor, Cocteau planned a play about the Virgin. Parthenogenetic birth pangs eventually seemed to him analogous to artistic creation. This, in turn, reminded him of his recent poem about inspiration, L’Ange Heurtebise and of Orpheus from the ancient Greek Orphic mysteries.
The staged version ends with a prayer of thanksgiving that tries to bring the action to a pious conclusion. Orpheus thanks God for delivering him from the “devil”-spawned surrealist movement. Hence, Cocteau repeats the attitude of his Christian friends to a surrealism with which he had previously flirted. (He also had grudges against it, since Catholic reaction against the surrealist L’Age D’Or (1930) delayed licensing of his own first film and almost caused those who backed both movies to be excommunicated (Steegmuller 410). Even at this pious period, artistic creation was for Cocteau a gate to the transcendent, as it was for William Blake, who devised a stage-seven version of Christianity.
Instead of continuing to develop anything comparable, Cocteau’s
religious enthusiasm cooled, perhaps compromised by continuing opium addiction and
homoeroticism. A quarter of a century later when he turned the play into a movie,
the metaphors became more elaborate and even less obviously Christian. Reveling in
his own psychological incongruity, he was well aware that the result was inconsistent
allegory—that it violated its own laws and thus seems strikingly impossible even
for fantasy: “Realism in the unreal is a trap set from minute to minute. One is constantly
told ‘This is possible,’ or ‘That is impossible,’ but how much do we understand of
the mechanism of fate? It is this mysterious mechanism that I try to render plastic....
[W]hy[, for example,] does Heurtebise appear and disappear at will in certain circumstances,
while in others he abides by human rules? It is the eternal ‘why’...” (Steegmuller
482).
The Center of the World
Ostensibly, the film’s prologue (a narrator telling the tale of Orpheus) provides the audience with a classic myth. Actually, it substitutes a significantly new version. It adds Orpheus’s Narcissistic fascination with his own poetry and subsequent neglect of his wife. It omits that, in some ancient versions (e.g., those of Ovid, Conon, and Plutarch), a period elapses between failure to revive his wife and his own death. In between, he renounces women. Having no interest in celibacy, however, the original Orpheus entertains young men. Missing these (or at the instigation of Aphrodite or Dionysus), a band of Bacchae tear him apart. Cocteau’s changes condense the myth to a few images elliptically related to one another like metaphors. (This is to say metaphors themselves are associations of ideas, which, through repetition, become joined as deeply and unthinkingly as in Pavlovian conditioning.)
Although Cocteau emphasizes this cluster of metaphors by repeating them most conspicuously throughout the film, he embroiders them with others. Some additions are primarily inside jokes for viewers with a classical education, his way of defining his role as poet in terms of a literary elite, even while making movies. Of even more personal concern for him is the homosexuality with which Orpheus’s creativity counters heterosexual, Christian images of creation/procreation. Excluded from the summary, it covertly manifests in Orpheus’s failed marriage. Unlike the summary, which suggests smoother relations between Orpheus and his wife, in the film, he risks his life to revive her only because of his guilt at having neglected her. The condition for their continuing marriage is that he never looks at her. He breaks the taboo because of her amorousness, not his, and, significantly by seeing her in a mirror—for Cocteau the emblem of homoerotic Narcissism and of creation as self-exploration.
Orphée numbers among films where imaginative analogies between past and present create anachronistic and incongruent associations, ultimately disorienting in every way including the sexual. Comparably, Felini’s Satyricon (1969) blends ancient and modern images as a setting for wandering bisexuals. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead mingles homosexual flesh peddling and a postmodern, fractured Hamlet. My Own Private Idaho (1991) has a narcoleptic, gay prostitute caught in the plot of Henry IV, Part II, with dialogue vertiginously oscillating between echoes of Shakespearean English and modern slang. Since each period has its own mores, de-centering temporality through anachronism also blurs the culturally constructed aspects of gender.
After the summarized myth, Cocteau’s Orpheus visits a café, which he describes ironically as the “center of the world.” The irony cuts more than one way. The avant-garde youths of that place overestimate their own importance, but Orpheus is stung by their neglect of him. His fans include the wife of a police officer—at that period, almost worse than having no followers at all. Momentarily, the darling of the young is Jacques Cégestes, a drunken, eighteen-year old poet.
Ironically, when the film was released it won at Cannes and received a Prix International de la Critique at the Venice Film Festival. It brought general recognition of Cocteau as a great filmmaker, yet it may have been an autobiographical lament for his loss of vogue. Thus, the juvenile existentialists who have abandoned Orpheus/Cocteau seem to occupy a place equivalent to the diabolical surrealists in the stageplay. Or do they? Steegmuller notes: “In connection with the film, it has been pointed out that the vogue for the younger poet Cégestes (played by Edouard Dermit) and the decline of Orphée (Jean Marais) is analogous to the roles of the two men in Cocteau’s intimate life: since the ‘adoption’ of Dermit, Marais had been gradually withdrawing” Steegmuller 480). Although stung by the contempt of the young, Cocteau was more interested in gaining them back than in denouncing them. He used the movie to court the new fashion setters, particularly the singer Juliette Greco, a leader of the St. Germain-des-Prés set. He cast her as the head of the Bacchantes, and found roles for some of her followers—which, of course, allowed him to deride them and win them over simultaneously (Steegmuller 480).
Although the existentialists’ hero Cègistes begins to lose audience sympathy through his intoxicated attack on anyone near him, he regains it when two matching motorcyclists ride him down, killing him. They are minions of Death, their identical appearance an allegory of the way she levels individuality. Sometimes movies show such metaphors of the supernatural, but pretend that most of the characters cannot see them. Thus, the images seem to have only subjective existence. Willing to throw objective and subjective together chaotically, Orphée, makes the personifications a concrete part of the modern action. Hence, in a later scene, the police even try to shoot the extra-mundane motorcyclists.
In a chauffeured limousine, Orpheus accompanies Death with Cégistes’s body. A passing train shrieks with the sound of a screaming woman. The car radio proclaims nonsense, e.g., “Silence goes faster backwards—three times.” He becomes fascinated with these absurdities. Should he? In the play, his addiction to automatic writing is clearly diabolical, the pointless abandonment of his celebrated poetry, occasioning his leaving Paris and neglecting his wife. In the movie, his reputation has already begun to slip before he begins imitating this radio voice. One of its bizarre metaphors (“L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts”) comes from a letter to Cocteau by his close friend Apollinaire. Thus, the words may be genuine poetry. Furthermore, according to Jacques Maritain, “Reverdy was present [during the process of Cocteau’s conversion], and vigorously urged Cocteau, “How can you understand anything without the sacraments? They are the earphones! Take the earphones!” (Steegmuller 345). Consequently, the messages are analogous both with the “devil”-inspired metaphors in the play, but also with God’s sacraments. Orpheus, poetry personified, cannot distinguish them from a stockmarket report.
This incertitude breeds helplessness. If one could be certain that
poetry were all nonsense, one could tear oneself away from it and accept prosaic
normality. Instead, some of the radio’s messages seem random, but their origin is
the world of the dead, which may be heaven, hell, or neither. Perhaps thinking more
of the play than the movie, Cocteau contrasts them with inspiration: “It is when
Orphée renounces his own themes, and accepts messages from the outside, that
everything is spoiled” (Quoted in Durgnat, Films and Feelings, 244). In the
film, however, they could as well represent inspiration and salvation if the latter
depends on communicating with the Beyond.
Embracing the Mirror
Chief of Cocteau’s cinematic metaphors are mirrors. They form gates to the world
of the dead, the source of the radio poetry, apparently, a kind of collective unconscious.
Death takes Cégestes there, and he becomes the voice on the radio. Orpheus
tries to follow but cannot. The mirror is solid. He embraces it, whether in despair
or narcissism. Seemingly waking, he finds himself by a mirrorlike pool out of doors
in a sandy wasteland, but it is still in our world. Nearby, Death’s chauffeur sleeps
in her car. Imagery ambiguously interrelating death, sleep, dream, and unconscious
inspiration runs throughout the film, with Orpheus repeatedly saying that he is asleep.
In a PMLA article, Mark Franko generalizes: “Cocteau’s amplification of that
inbetween [state found in all his works] is invariably a purgatory or semiconsciousness
between an imagined male pole (life, activity, and creation) and a female pole (death,
inspiration, and immortality).... Thus, Cocteau emphasizes Orpheus as a Sleepwalker
in both a 1926 play and a 1950 film of that name and makes sleepwalking a frequent
theme in his work” (Franko 598).
Franko’s description is hardly simple; and the actual situation may be even more complex. The mirror is another in-between, yet its connection with sleep, somnambulism, or hypnosis is obscure. Death says she dislikes somnolence, yet never verbally objects to mirrors. In an angry moment, however, she breaks one, then heals it.
Orpheus violates her command not to turn on the magic radio, a third mediation between life and death. When he disobeys, it proclaims “the mirrors would do well to reflect further.” Then her mirror breaks. Apparently, her power and the mirrors themselves are limited and flawed. Although the various in-between states are not absolutely equivalent, they are all imperfect gates to a deadly realm, perhaps not worth visiting in the first place.
Death says that her orders come from an infinite, bureaucratic hierarchy; nonetheless, she admits that she does not understand it and that “some” believe there is an Ultimate Origin to the orders (i.e., God). Neither world can decipher the strange metaphors that come from the one to the other (as Jung believed that the unconscious is simply difficult to understand, not necessarily disguised). A mirror-world tribunal asks Cégestes where they come from and he can only say that he makes them up—though, whether that reveals them to be random or inspired is left unanswered.
Significantly, Death tells Orpheus, “It is not necessary to understand. It is necessary to believe.” (The words echo or satirize a classic Catholic position.) The incomprehensible personified, Death fascinates Orpheus. Heurtebise asks, “Whom do you want? Eurydice or Death?” Heurtebise tries to warn Orpheus away from the latter and her radio messages, but Orpheus must seek inspiration from somewhere. Heurtebise himself is one of death’s minions, a suicide—recalling Cocteau’s depressive first contact with that mysterious character. In one production of the drama, Cocteau played Heurtebise.
How or why the movie ends as it does also transcends logic. Heurtebise takes Orpheus to mirror world. Instead of any conventional image of heaven or hell, it is a ruin, reflecting (and shot in) the streets of bomb-ravaged Europe. Both Freud and Jung thought of the unconscious as a place of ancient relics. Cocteau presents his mirror world as monuments, but shattered to rubble, and with an anomalous gravity system. Orpheus fights his way through it, first to recover Eurydice, then to undo time, so that despite their both having died, they are again alive.
On the surface, the ending is happy, but not so below it. Death and Heurtebise are arrested. “It [the fate awaiting the arrested] is not amusing, here less than elsewhere,” says Death. Recall that Cocteau played Heurtebise, who was a voice within his head. Representing Cocteau’s unconscious, Heurtebise goes to something very unamusing, i.e., depression.
Cocteau’s first movie on artistic creation, Blood of a Poet (1930) expressed it “as the product of real or metaphorical wounds in the body of the artist” (Tyler 60). In Orphée, painful inspiration comes from the endless hierarchy of the Beyond—a fractal (i.e., self-reflexive, self-divided) configuration, implying no human or other control.
How does one photograph this anarchy? For his first film, Cocteau decided to hire whoever was the first cameraman to arrive for an interview—thus leaving selection to chance or fate, like Orpheus accepting seemingly random words from the chaotic Beyond (Steegmuller 406). Concerning Blood of a Poet, he said: “I repeat that while I was working I thought of nothing, and this is why you must expose yourself to the film just as you do .... to any music” (Steegmuller 408). A random art certainly coheres with the metaphor life = chaos and to a desire for the unconscious to run wild, but it lacks the meaningful patterns that stage seven finds in chaos. Struggling between a stage-four Christianity and his artistic profession (stage five) , Cocteau could not really reach that high.
Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 3 Part 4
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