'BEAU TRAVAIL", A Film by Claire Denis

Puer and Senex

There is plenty of Internet comment on Claire Denis’ film “Beau Travail,” with its ambiguous title, maybe better translated as “nice work” with its possible sarcasm than as “beautiful work” -- though the film itself is just that: arduous, male, and about what is meant to be men’s work, though it is really road-building through desolation.  For the existential post-colonial and slightly wicked context of this version of “Billy Budd,” that’s entirely the point.  Claire Denis, a woman directing a film about men in a foreign legion, confronts the strict, honor-bound, and ultimately tragic love/hate between what Jungians call the Senex (old man) and the Puer (young man).  It is tragic when unacknowledged and unexpressed, therefore becomes destructive in the Senex’ cruel attempt to destroy the Puer, the youth he most wishes to possess, and the Puer’s innocent exposure to it.

The Senex has the backing of the Empire  (yes, as in “Star Wars”) which tries to prevent the future, interpreting it as a loss of power.  And there is the Abrahamic dilemma of whether to obey one’s ancient and all-powerful God (loyalty to the Legion) by murdering one’s son.  Denis, the director, was born just as WWII ended, but she grew up in Africa, racially inclusive when it comes to skin, but acutely aware of male musculature, movement, and force.  The series of military drills are very much dance-like, but never cross over until the final dance by the Senex, Galoup, a cabaret sort of dance like sophisticated old black tap dancers making it look so easy, a matter of skill and timing, until it builds to climax.

The whole film is on YouTube (also streams on Netflix) but an edited fan tribute is a bit shorter and includes women dancing -- dignified, simply moving shoulders while staying in place.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xET7QpKRmR8  I don’t know why, except to establish that these are men who desire women.

Here’s a trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u65lNJP5yik

Here’s some astute commentary:  https://melvillian.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/beau-travails-dance-dance-revolution/   from the blog called “Existentialism is a Film.”  In the background of the film sound-track are “bits” from the Benjamin Britten opera based on “Billy Budd.”

Benjamin Britten 

I take a specific point of view:  Senex v. Puer as laid out in Jungian terms by James Hillman.  There are many YouTube episodes about this but this one linked below is only three minutes and is sharply relevant. In this approach it is NOT the Oedipal rivalry that counts nor even the ownership of the son by the father that’s at the heart of Christianity, but simply the tragic fact that the human trajectory turns towards death at the end.  Then the young can become a joy and a fulfillment, or they can become a taunt, a torture, by constantly pushing the old against their ending -- as judgment.  

As Hillman says, in this specific snippet from a long series of lectures (all valuable)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Zo2PxPXx4  the young man has a freedom and range that the old man has lost, unless he can go to a different level -- the imagination.  IF he has been “working his gift”, it is a beau travail.  Then he is free to truly dance.  What wounds him, names him.

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), the composer of the opera based on “Billy Budd”, was a product of the SM British hierarchical and hegemaniacal education system.  Whatever that did or didn’t have to do with it, he was always hounded by people ever-so-curious about whether he was gay or not.  That was a time when same sex acts were criminal, so there was a maliciousness in the curiosity.  Later in Britten’s life he had friendships with young men, early adolescent boys, which to the modern fucking-obsessed mind means he was a pedophile.  Hillman would say he was a Senex interacting with the Puer Aeternus, and the boys themselves -- when grilled as though they were kindergarteners proving they knew their crayon colors -- said he was simply an excellent and kind friend.  Some of them were singers in his works.

Denis Lavant

Denis Lavant who plays Galoup, has a ruined, scarred face and a rawhide body, both suggesting intense experience, now with no use.   Grégoire Colin who plays Gilles Sentain, the Puer, appears in this bit of interview video with hair https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAMHVN-jRZE  The contrast reveals how much he was truly acting in the film, which calls for him to be almost featureless (head shaved) except for his body.  

Here are some other comments by critics:

“The majority of Denis' oeuvre uses location work over studio work. She sometimes places her actors as if they were positioned for still photography. She uses longer takes with a stationary camera and frames things in long shot, resulting in fewer close ups. However, Denis' cinematic and topical focus always remains relentlessly on the faces and bodies of her protagonists. The subject's body in space, and how the particular terrain, weather, and color of the landscape influences and interacts with the human subjects of her films maintains cinematic dominance.

"Tim Palmer explores Denis' work as a self-declared formalist and brilliant film stylist per se; an approach the filmmaker herself has declared many times in interview to be as much about sounds, textures, colors and compositions as broader thematic concerns or social commitments.”  (wikipedia)

“Denis is especially receptive to three things: human bodies (especially when they are semi-nude, and especially black touching white skin); bodies of water; and transit. Several of her films open with shots of bodies of water and end with close-ups of human figures. The most remarkable of her last shots comes without question in “Beau Travail.” Dennis Levant’s sadistic, repressed, rageful legionnaire Galoup, clad all in black in an empty black room, disco dancing alone to the ‘90s dance hit “Rhythm of the Night.” People talk about this ending like it’s a climax—in the New York Times, Stephen Holden described it as a “frenzied Dionysian release.” It is, sort of. Galoup is exploding. But it’s not disco heaven; it’s disco limbo. Levant’s frenzy has the feeling of being suspended out of time, somewhere beyond the laws of cause and effect.”  (I’ve lost the source of this quote so I’ll let you have the fun of looking for it.)  Some say he is dancing dead.

The dance at the end: fence or mirrors?

Don’t forget that Melville was the author of “Moby Dick” about that obsessed Senex pursuing a white whale to his own destruction.  Melville didn’t finish writing “Billy Budd”, his last book, and his wife found she couldn’t either.  There were unresolvable elements.  Since the first published version, many changes have been made to achieve a coherent whole.  I doubt any of the participants in this effort were fans of James Hillman.  He comes from a different discipline than literary people.  But Hillman is broadly useful in the humanities and his ideas ought to be more conscious for us all, if only because he is so funny in a happy appreciative way.

Repressed homosexuality as a motor for story has been done now with varying success and has become a catch-all like narcissism or bi-polar.   Everyone thinks they know all about it and they keep the rubber stamp handy.  Whap!  Done! 

The Puer/Senex dialogue is universal and complex enough to go beyond the little snap judgments of mean cocktail party jokers.  It is cross-racial, cross-media, international, spiritual.   Even ecological.  Therefore, it is a force for understanding.  When someone like Claire Denis gets hold of it, the beauty is transcendent. 

THE DARKENED THEATRE

Oedipus

A dark, painful stream of thought comes down from the past, responding to the suffering of life.  Arts, including ceremony, help us to withstand the poisonous chaos.  I’m going to quote a bit, since this is dangerous ground.

The following comes from Thomas Moore’s “Dark Eros” (1990) a book the readers loved but the publishers feared.  This is from the “Afterword” written in 1994.  “The fundamental paradox, forced upon us in daily tragedies, is the bitter reality that we maintain a world of atrocity by refusing to acknowledge the role of dark desires in our own communities and individual lives.  We live in a divided life: us versus them, good versus evil.  The shadow in human life cannot be brought home as long as we concretize it in some objectionable others.”

Thomas Moore

I first met Moore at a workshop in Bozeman, some years before this book was written. I audited the workshop with permission, but two young men gate-crashed and interrupted the proceedings with their urgent need for dream interpretation about a snake run-over on a highway and dying.  The content wasn’t as important as the way Moore went about coaxing out the dream and its meaning as constructed between these two young men, possibly lovers.  Today we might easily accept their homosexual and intimate fusion.  In 1983 or so, with rural college-aged people, it was more shocking.  I don’t think I realized the gay element and most of us weren’t yet aware of the genocide imposed by HIV.  Yet Moore gently worked out the puzzle, barely before the registrar arrived and threw the young men out.  

James Hillman

Backtracking from Moore, I found Hillman, the Jungian, and his remarkable body of work.  He was fearless and yet nowhere near as historical and analytical as Jung or Freud.  This is from  Moore’s “The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology.”  Even this short passage addresses Barrus’ complaint about my theories, which is the same complaint Bob had -- that I go off into the intellectual clouds and lose the focus of reality.

Very recent neural discoveries reinforce the work of Hillman and Moore:  the basis of thought and analysis is ALWAYS sensory.  Everything else is metaphor.  In fact, the XO of the senses, eros, is signaling in code.  But our brains are censors -- we may not perceive what is there.

“Hillman (1983a) discusses a patient's dream about a huge black snake. The dream work would include "keeping the snake" and describing it rather than making it something other than a snake. Hillman notes that "the moment you've defined the snake, interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've stopped it and the person leaves the hour with a concept about my repressed sexuality or my cold black passions ... and you've lost the snake. The task of analysis is to keep the snake there, the black snake...see, the black snake's no longer necessary the moment it's been interpreted, and you don't need your dreams any more because they've been interpreted"  (p. 54). One would inquire more about the snake as it is presented in the dream by the psyche so to draw it forth from its lair in the unconscious. The snake is huge and black, but what else? Is it molting or shedding its skin? Is it sunning itself on a rock? Is it digesting its prey? This descriptive strategy keeps the image alive, in Hillman's opinion, and offers the possibility for understanding the psyche.”

Barrus has a refrain he repeats, a key to his world-view that had its origin in the times he has lived in the American South, once in a tree house full of rats and snakes.  They are very real to him.

“The attic rats have their pink little babies up there in the insulation nests the rats have made. Mama licks her young. The rats are safe until the bullsnake comes, and the bullsnake always comes.”  -- Tim Barrus

James Hillman, who belongs to a Jungian context, and his compatriot Thomas Moore, are metaphor-friendly, non-Freudian, and fearless.  They accept all manifestations of flesh, but insist there is more, whether one calls it soul, psyche, or metaphorical felt meaning.    “Dark Eros” is one of Moore’s strongest books, in my opinion, but probably least read.  People who look for “spirituality” will veer off from the dark, revealing that they are really looking for safety and pleasure.  They are the pink little rat babies.  That leaves some of we bolder explorers with materials people are afraid to read for fear of pain, embarrassment, or dirt. 

And yet the darkness of eros, even without the element of violence, is a body of thought, always in process through time.  It will probably NOT be explored in schools, not even seminaries.  And that’s just the thoughts ABOUT dark eros.  Here is John Hawken, a respectable source, proving that you can find anything on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_wfXsftLG0

John Hawken Tantra

Hawken makes the transition from the Dark Eros trope to the traditional Tantric sex system.  He’s relatively non-threatening in this vid, a sort of Ollie Sacks with a missing tooth.  He doesn’t quite make up for the loss of Satan when the liberals took over God and made him into Santa Claus, easy to dispense with if you don’t respond to bribes.  There is no lascivious exploitation.

Now that Ollie Sacks comes closer to stepping into Charon’s boat, he reveals his own struggle with the dark side, almost completely repressed in his lifetime. He’s a man who values control and may try to swim the River Styx by himself.   (He probably could do it.)  We are now willing enough to face these terrors that excerpts from biographical notes written by an old friend, Lawrence Weschler, are in this month’s “Vanity Fair.”  http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/04/oliver-sacks-autobiography-before-cancer

I reviewed “Dark Eros” by Thomas Moore on Jan 31, 2010 (“The Dark Eros of the Big Backside”) and Oct 5, 2011(“More Intense than Lyric Poetry”).  Even since then there has been much increased tolerance and frankness about sex, torture, dismemberment -- most of it shallow and mostly uninformed.  Movies keep pushing the limits:  “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Game of Thrones,” are not Doris Day movies.  It would be more interesting and useful to look at the real life dark side of Doris Day or her acting partner, Rock Hudson, who died of AIDS.

Early in the long conversation between Barrus and myself, which I hope will continue for a long time, I proposed a Gestalt “dream interpretation” of an empty theatre between performances with only a single charwoman present.  I made it as concrete as I could, the smell of hot stage lights, the dust of paint flaked off of flats, lingering hints of greasepaint, and then the rustling scurry of rats under the ranks of red plush seats out there in the dark.  Tim’s response was a series of images of empty raked seats in a theatre somewhere.  More eloquent than words.

The imagery is seductive, more subtext than script, most powerful to the initiated who have been on that stage.  He tells me that instead of the “light cage” I knew, where the crew sat inside a real cage to keep people away from huge rheostats that controlled the lights, now the light crew manages the shifting patterns of color and movement from a tablet, maybe in the front row, using Blue Tooth so there is no trailing power cable.

The arts should stop short of acting out in real life, which is too dangerous, but can be managed this side of madness by admitting in image and word, framed on the stage, that dark desire exists.  Moore:  “By treating sex as a biological instinct and strong, persistent desire as addiction, we lose touch with the soul of sex and desire -- with their depths, their poetic resonance, and the meaningfulness they carry.” 

But the young, the unprotected, the vulnerable, will need shelter, both emotional and physical, to withstand what may be loaded onto them, whether it is the cartoon death of the mother (“Bambi”) or being sexually abused by their own family members.  They shouldn’t have to crash a workshop or pay a registrar in order to get the key.