What Are those Three Little Pigs Really Afraid Of?

 

Odd that I had forgotten about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” An eccentric friend just posted a belated review on his website; I’m grateful for the reminder of something that was once very important to me. When I applied to take a film course back at Queen’s, I cited it as one of my three favourite movies; the other two were “Bonnie and Clyde” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

The best thing about it was of course the dialogue. I love me that snappy dialogue. I also find the classical unities compelling, here as in “High Noon,” or “Culloden.” That is, events in the movie take place in real time, centre around the same action, and do not jump (rather than move) to another place. This gives an immediacy, like watching news live as it happens. 

I also think the acting was a tour de force, by Burton, Taylor, and Dennis. Especially Dennis.

I have actually met the stage manager for the original run of the play on Broadway. He scoffed at the movie, on the grounds that Taylor was miscast and just did not have the talent to hold up her end as Martha. A cheeky claim, considering that she won a Best Actress Oscar for the role. I think she went all out to prove she was more than just a pretty face, and she succeeded. I suspect my acquaintance just resented the greater fame of the movie version, with which he had no association. “You haven’t really seen it done right if you haven’t seen my version.” Burton is always compelling to watch, and is ideally cast as a history professor.

Although it was Mike Nichols’ directorial debut, I am amazed by his framing. Especially when George goes for the gun; that plays a lot like Hitchcock, the way Nichols uses depth of field to show different things happening in the foreground and background, the swinging light, the gun as it is revealed from under an old carpet, the living room seen from George’s perspective returning, the reaction shots, Martha’s face in closeup. And I think Nichols uses this to make us think we are about to see a Hitchcockian turn, an actual murder. Damn fine.

Watching it all again now, the one thing that doesn’t work for me—is really the most important thing of all. The ending.  The problem is, you cannot kill an imaginary character. George and Martha are not facing the cold light of dawn; mourning someone who never really existed is just continuing the fantasy. And logically, since it is a story, and utter improbabilities have already been allowed, and breaking of all conceivable rules, it would be perfectly easy for either George or Martha to declare that the report of Sonny Jim’s death was, after all, mistaken. 

Perhaps that was supposed to be the point, that there is no way out for them or for us, that there is no reality, only stories, that Godot does not come.

But if so, if everything is fantasy, why get so worked up in the first place? Why all the drama? Why not Buddhist detachment? One is left feeling cheated. It seems to me there really has to be a hard reality, something worth concealing. But in the movie or the play, we do not get to see what it is. It cannot be the death of an imaginary son, and it cannot be something so pedestrian as not having been able to have children.

I think Martha and Honey are very powerful portraits of two types of narcissism. George and Nick act out two roles family members take to try to cope with narcissism. This is, I think, what really most hooked me on the movie back in the day. I remember having seen it at least three times by second-year Queen’s; no small thing back before VHS or the Internet. Having grown up in a dysfunctional family, I recognized these people, knew them well, and the chaos they brought with them. It felt liberating to see it all portrayed on a big screen for the world to see. 

And yet, in the end, we do not see where this all comes from, or how it ends.