"A Working Class Hero(ine) IsSomething to Be": Affliction,The Dreamlife of Angels, andthe NaturaUst Tradition

Christopher Orr

Paul Schrader's Affliction {\99^), adapted from a 1989 RussellBanks novel, is about Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), a policeman ina small New Hampshire town whose life unravels before us. The Noltecharacter appears to be the victim of a tradition of male violence thathas been passed on for generations. Erick Zonca's The Dreamlife ofAngels (1998) chronicles the experience of two women in their early2O's, Isa (Elodie Bouchez) and Marie (Natacha Regnier). who live fromhand to mouth in the city of Lille in northeastern France. Both filmsexhibit a class consciousness that is absent from much of mainstreamcontemporary American and French cinema. Affliction harkens backto the social problem films of the 193O's and l940's, while Dreamliferecalls the French poetic realist movement.

As such, both films carry on the naturalist tradition as theyemphasize how their characters' lives are circumscribed by instinctand environment. Because of this emphasis on biological andenvironmental determinism, the naturalist movement, originating withEmile Zola and represented in the United States by such writers as

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Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Johndos Passos and the proletarian novelists of the 193O's, offers an ideologythat is at least in theory inherently critical of the existing social order.Not surprisingly, naturalism, according to many literary historicalaccounts, reached its moment of greatest influence during the GreatDepression—also known as the red decade—and went into declineduring the 195O's.

Thus the emphasis that both films place on the plight of themarginalized worker in late, multinational capitalism amounts to a kindof retum of the repressed. While Zonca's Dreamlife of Angels lacksthe beady optimism of such poetic realist films as Renoir's Le Crimede Monsieur Lange (1936) or Grand Illusion (1937) made during theera of the Popular Front, the film nevertheless gestures toward theUtopian values of that distant past. Affliction, on the other hand, presentsus with a naturalism that has been twisted and distorted by our dominantneo-conservative ideology.

Alienated labor in The Dreamlife of Angels

Schrader's Affliction, according to the opening voice-over spokenby the protagonist's younger brother Rolfe (Willem Dafoe), is arecounting of the "strange criminal behavior and disappearance" ofWade Whitehouse, the sole police officer in a dying New Hampshiretown who also works as a crossing guard , snowplow driver, and welldigger Wade is embroiled in a futile custody battle with his ex-wifefor his daughter, Jill, and is planning to marry his waitress-girl friend,Margie (Sissy Spacek), to improve his chances in court. Meanwhile a

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visiting union official, Evan Twombley, is killed in a hunting accident.The Nolte character suspects that Jack Hewitt, the hunter's guide, andGordon LaRiviere, Wade's employer and a local real estate entrepreneur,are involved in a murder conspiracy. Haunted by images of the abusehe suffered as a child at the hands of his alcoholic father (played byJames Cobum), Wade's investigation of this apparent conspiracy leadsto the loss of his job and his involvement in further deaths; he bashesin his father's skull with a rifle butt and later shoots Hewitt.

Schrader's film ends with a shot of the desolate snow-coveredwilderness into which the hero has disappeared. We are told in thevoice-over spoken by the Dafoe character that accompanies this shotthat Hewitt's truck was found abandoned in a shopping mall outsideToronto. Curiously, Wade's younger brother Rolfe appears to haveescaped the family curse. He left Lawford, the town of his birth, directlyafter completing high school and teaches history at Boston University.In Banks's novel, he is a high school teacher in a Boston suburb.Nevertheless, as Schrader points out, it is Rolfe who has "spiraled hisbrother into self-destructive insanity, if not death" (Quart 3).Specifically, Rolfe encouraged Wade to pursue his investigation of thepossible murder conspiracy.

In his column in The National Review, John Simon objects tothe ending of Schrader's film: "Great tragedies, however inexorable,are cathartic for both protagonists and audiences. Here, however, weare sucked into the thrashings of a trapped animal, unrelieved by somuch as blank verse" (2). Simon's response may in one sense reflectan elitist interpretation of Aristotelian theory that denies tragic statureto the common man. An alternative explanation for Simon's discomfortwith Affliction can be found in Brecht's critique of Aristotelian drama:namely, that the successful catharsis of the emotions of pity and feareffects an affirmation of the existing social order. The problem thenwith Schrader's film from Simon's perspective is that it fails to affirmthe notion that all's right with the world.

Yet ironically, Affliction offers a version of naturalism that appearsto support neo-conservative values. Eirst of all, Schrader's film raisesthe issue of political corruption. Wade suspects that Twombley's deathis part of a scheme to divert union funds to the development of a skiresort. The film then dismisses this suspicion as an expression of theNolte character's paranoia. Or, as Schrader puts it, the social issues in

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the film are "displacements of family dramas" (Quart 3).However, the key way in which the film exploits naturalism for

reactionary purposes is in its treatment of the nature/nurture conundjoim,and in the relationship it presents between nurture and the socio-economic conditions of our existence. Within the naturalist tradition,how one understands nature and biology, and the importance oneattaches to them, can have significant ideological implications. Forexample, in Zola's 1889 novel. La Bete humaine, the affliction of Zola'sprotagonist, Jacques Lantier—his predisposition to murder the womento whom he is attracted—is presented as a genetic defect, allegedlythe result of the alcoholism of his male ancestors. In Zola's defense,this presentation of Lantier as genetically flawed was a reflection ofthe beliefs of his times: Zola accepted a body of scientific opinionsexemplified by the theories of the Italian criminologist CesareLombroso that were heavily weighted in favor of nature and weremoreover designed to justify racism, colonialism, and the exploitationof the poor. Nevertheless, Zola's belief that heredity is fate does notsignificantly interfere with his critique of Second Empire French societyin La Bete humaine.

Even a critic as hostile to naturalism as Georg Lukacs admitsthat Zoia "fought a courageous hattle against the reactionary evolutionof French capitalism" (85). In Zola's novel, Lantier's struggle with his"biological" affliction is a source of tension, suspense and even terror.The hero's problem, however, does not serve to exonerate those guiltyof exploitation and political corruption. In other words, while La Betehumaine reflects and incorporates the popular science of Zola'shistorical moment, Zola's primary concern is to demonstrate how thesocial mechanism exploits and circumscribes the lives of his characters.

The tradition of male violence that afflicts the hero of Schrader'sfilm—a violence described by the narrator of Banks's novel as a "barelycontrolled hysteria" (108)—is uncannily reminiscent of the "savagebeast" that Zola's Jacques Lantier "could feel inside him" (69). Yet incontrast to Zola, neither Banks's novel nor Schrader's film suggestthat the protagonist's violent tendencies have been encoded into hisgenetic makeup. Wade's affliction is something he has learned throughthe nightmare of the family experience and, in this respect, the filmdoes address a genuine social issue. The problem, however, is that theNolte character's affliction, while technically an effect of nurture, takeson the character of a natural trait. In the film's concluding voice-over.

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which is quoted more or less verbatim from the Banks novel, the Dafoecharacter tells the audience that the individual can make an effort toovercome this tradition of male violence presumably with the help ofthe mental health industry. Yet this diegetic narrator also tells us thatWade's story "describe[s] the lives of the boys and men for thousandsof years; boys who were beaten by their fathers, whose capacity forlove and trust was crippled almost at birth." While it is obvious thatmale abuse of women and children has occurred for thousands of years,this in itself does not justify the position implicit in Schrader's filmthat this abuse is simply an inevitable fact of nature. In other words,what is objectionable about the film's treatment of this theme is thatthe very real problem of abuse within the family is effectively divorcedfrom any larger social context. In this respect, the strategy of raisingthe issue of a corrupt society—Wade's investigation of the death ofEvan Twombley—and then dismissing it as a paranoid delusion,dissuades us from thinking about how, for example, the Coburncharacter's abuse of his wife and children was a product of the realconditions of his existence. Schrader's Affliction can thus be seen aspart of a reactionary attempt to naturalize naturalism.

Wade, frozen in time, directs traffic in Affliction

In order to think about the film politically, we are forced to readagainst the grain. In his review, Stanley Kaufmann argues that the filmis not ultimately about a "father passing on to a son a tradition of wifeabuse" as Rolfe's concluding voice-over would have us believe. Rather,Affliction " is about a stratum of society trapped in a societal jet lag, a

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frontier ethos marooned in a more complex world" (2). Wade's father,while brutal and despicable, is also to be pitied. In the novel, he isdescribed as a "workingman who hated his job and whose cross,impoverished family only served to remind him of his failings" (97).He had been employed for much of his life as a mill worker in aneighboring town until the mill closed down and he was forced toretire. Thus his economic plight is not a result of his lack of ability ordedication but of market forces beyond his control. This is not to excuseeither his alcoholism or hrutishness. Rather it is simply to point outthat this behavior does not occur within a vacuum. Moreover, the samemarket forces that have destroyed the economic base of the town ofLawford have turned it into an asset as a site for leisure activities toaccommodate a growing number of affluent tourists. The murderinvestigation that leads to Wade's undoing can thus be seen as a failedprotest against a form of progress exemplified by the impendinginvasion of Yuppies driving BMW's that has left him and the othermembers of his social class behind. In the concluding voice-over, Rolfetells us that Lawford has ceased to exist as a community but has insteadbecome an economic development between two neighboring NewHampshire towns. In this respect, Affliction is not, as Schrader claims,a film where social issues are displacements of family dramas, butrather a film in which family dramas are both a displacement and adisavowal of social issues.

Affliction then can be thought of as an attempt to create whatmight be termed "neo-con-naturalism," an appropriation of thenaturalist tradition in the service of neo-conservative ideology.Fortunately, this effort to disavow the social and political dimensionof the lives of the characters in the film is flawed and ultimatelyunsuccessful. On the other hand. The Dreamlife of Angels does attemptto resurrect the spirit of Zola-esque naturalism and the poetic realismof the Popular Front era. Although none of the film reviews I surveyedmention poetic realism, let alone naturalism, I would like to begin mydiscussion of Zonca's film by placing it within the context of a body ofcontemporary French films that have been explicitly linked to poeticrealism, the genre of quality costume/historical dramas of the 198O'sand 199O's funded and/or promoted by Mitterand's socialistgovernment, the heritage film. Jack Lang, the socialist Minister ofCulture, conceived of film as "high culture for the masses" andpromoted "the filming of France's historical and cultural past as a formof national education" (Austin 144). As Michael DeAngelis suggests

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in the previous essay, the primary motivation behind the heritage filmis the need to maintain a sense of French cultural identity in the face ofa "consistent and powerful American influence." Nevertheless, Lang'spromotion of this cinematic movement was, according to Guy Austin,inspired by a nostalgia for the poetic realist cinema of the PopularFront era. Further, Jean Renoir, the exemplary director in the poeticrealist movement, became "an important touchstone for the heritagefilm" (Austin 143).

Yet while Lang may have believed that his support of the heritagefilm embodied the spirit of poetic realism, the connection betweenthese two movements is suspect. Granted, one can perceive similaritiesbetween the visual style of heritage films with their reliance on longtakes, deep focus and long shots, and the style of Renoir and the otherpoetic realist directors. Nevertheless, the historical costume drama is ararity within the poetic realist canon. La Marseillaise (\93S),'mtQndedas a view of the French Revolution from a Popular Front perspective,was the only historical drama that Renoir made during the 193O's.Moreover. La Marseillaise was a commercial failure because Renoirchose to present "an anonymous history with anonymous players"instead of using "the movie stars of the day to play the heroes ofyesteryear" (Andrew 294). In contrast, heritage films on the FrenchRevolution such as Wajda's Danton and Scola's La Nuit de Varennes(both 1982) do use international stars to play the heroes of yesteryear.

Arguably, the defining trait of poetic realism—a trait inheritedfrom literary naturalism—is its insistence on exploring the depths ofthe everyday lives of ordinary people existing on the margins of society.What Dudley Andrew calls poetic realism's "peculiar conjunction ofethnographic curiosity and intimate subjectivity" can be traced backto Zola, which is why Zola was considered indispensable to theFrench cinema of the 193O's. Andrew goes on to claim that Renoir'sadaptation of Zola's La Bete humaine was "arguably the best poeticrealist film" (162).

In 1993 during the era of the heritage film, Claude Berri adaptedGerminal., Zola's most politically overt novel. Berri's adaptation iscompetent in the sense that it provides its audience with the contentsof a literary classic: it describes conditions within the coal miningindustry in France during the nineteenth century; it evokes Zola'spolitical message, and it appeals to popular taste through the use ofrecognizable movie stars, including the ubiquitous Gerard Depardieu.

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Germinal was perceived by most reviewers in tbe U. S. as a didacticand hence disappointing example of the European art cinema that noteven the presence of Depardieu could save. Nevertheless, the film didsucceed in presenting France's "historical and cultural past as a formof national education" as it became a cause celebre among Frenchworkers and leftists protesting the 1993 GATT conference in Paris.Even so, Berri's Germinal lacks the "intimate subjectivity" or poeticdepth one finds in Renoir's La Bete humaine or Zonca's The Dreamlifeof Angels.

Zonca's Dreamlife opens by introducing us to Isa, an optimistictomboy with short cropped hair who has wandered into Lille with herbackpack. Discovering that the friend she had hoped to stay with hasmoved on, Isa takes a sewing job in a small garment factory. Eventhough she loses this job within 24 hours, during this work experience,Isa befriends one of her co-workers, Marie, who is taking care of anapartment for a mother and teenage daughter who have been in a caraccident. Later we learn tfiat the mother has died and that Sandrine,the daughter, is comatose. Marie becomes involved with Chriss, aspoiled rich kid who owns the club that the girls visit occasionally.Marie sees Chriss as her escape from the poverty she has come todespise. As expected, the affair ends disastrously. Isa in the meantimebegins making daily visits to the comatose teenage girl whose apartmentshe occupies. In the hospital, Isa reads to Sandrine from Sandrine'sdiary in what seems a futile effort to help her regain consciousness.Then, upon learning of the girl's miraculous recovery, Isa ceases hervisits.

In contrast to Isa, Marie is the more typical naturalist heroine. Insome respects, her story resembles Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets(1893). Crane's Maggie is a victim of what might be termed theCinderella myth: tbe culturally imposed fantasy of escaping one's sordidenvironment through love. Blinded by her "self-destructive romanticillusions" (Pizer 128), Crane's heroine misrecognizes a young man ofher own class as the proverbial knight in shining armor. Seduced andabandoned by her lover, she finds herself forced into prostitution, afterwhich she commits suicide. In contrast to the innocent Maggie, Marieis cynical and sophisticated. Early in the film, she and Isa stalk andharass young businessmen in the city's shopping center, an act thatseems both a leftist, feminist statement and a parody of the Cinderellamyth. In addition. Marie appears to possess a healthy sense of class

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anger; one of her favorite recreations is busting the taillights ofoverpriced SUV's. In this respect, Zonca's Dreamlife offers a moredisturbing analysis of environmental determinism than does Crane'sMaggie. Marie recognizes the Cinderella myth as false consciousnessbut is controlled by this myth just as effectively as Crane's naiveheroine.

Having grown up in one of Lille's working class suburbs, Marieleft home at the age of 16 because she could not stand her father andhas been surviving in the city ever since through a series of menialjobs. Marie, like Wade Whitehouse, has apparently grown up in anabusive family environment. Yet Zonca's film suggests that the maleviolence his heroine experienced was primarily the result of economicdeprivation and not, as in Schrader's Affliction, a product of someinevitable fact of nature. Withdrawn and narcissistic, Marie hates beingpoor, and because of her family background, she is more susceptibleto the cultural message that if one has nothing, then one is nothing.Consequently, Marie is obsessed with attracting a rich suitor such asthe nightclub owner Chriss, while recognizing at some level that anaffair with the spoiled playboy would simply duplicate the exploitationshe has experienced in the workplace. This ambivalence is moreoverreflected in the way she dresses. Her shabby clothes are both anaffirmation of her class status and a source of constant humiliation.Isa, on the other hand, is indifferent to her equally shabby appearance.

At the beginning of the affair, Chriss takes Marie to an expensivehotel. In the following scene, we recognize that for Marie, sex withChriss is a masochistic experience that gives her no pleasure. Yet it isMarie's indifference that goads the spoiled playboy into continuingthe relationship. His goal is to wear down her resistance and in effectmake her a willing and grateful accomplice in her own exploitation.Once Marie has deluded herself to the point where she believes shehas found someone who will make her happy, Chriss drops her. (Nothaving the courage to confront Marie, he relays his decision throughIsa). Before her disastrous affair with the spoiled playboy, Marie hadstarted a relationship with a member of her own class, a bouncer namedCharley who coincidently is employed by Chriss. While Charley isnot physically attractive (when they first meet, Marie calls him fat), heis a perceptive and decent human being who gives money to Marie notin exchange for sex but out of a genuine concern for her welfare.Charley is something of an idealized proletarian figure reminiscent of

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Charles, the long suffering sweetheart of Estelle in Le Crime deMonsieur Lange (1936). After being seduced by the capitalistentrepreneur Batala, Estelle is reunited with Charles and the couplelooks forward to a happy life within the collective the workers form inRenoir's film. This type of resolution is, of course, impossible for Marie.No longer able to relate to members of her own class and seeing noescape from her poverty, she jumps to her death out of the apartmentwindow.

Isa, on the other hand, is comfortable with members of her ownsocial class as we often see her participating in various instances ofclass solidarity or mutual respect among the film's characters who existon the economic margins. Isa is constantly pressing Marie to abandonher obsession with Chriss and spend more time with their bouncerfriends, Charley and Fredo. However, Isa's daily visits to the comatosegirl mirror Marie's behavior. As Stuart Klawans puts it, she is"disappearing into the imagined life of someone with property" (2).Marie's behavior, however, is motivated by a futile dream of socialmobility and a self-loathing that expresses itself through a hatred ofher class origins. Isa's immersion in Sanddne's Ufe, on the other hand,is a gesture toward a utopianism in which class differences are dissolvedthrough recognition of a common humanity. Her behavior is whollyaltruistic. She acts virtuously with no expectation of reward or, as IrisMurdoch would say, Isa is good for nothing. Thus when Isa hears ofSandrine's miraculous recovery, she simply leaves the hospital. In thisrespect, Zonca's Dreamlife recalls however faintly such Popular Frontfilms as Grand Illusion and Le Crime de Monsieur Lange in whichthis Utopian ideal is imaginatively realized within the world of Renoir'sfilms.

In describing the style of The Dreamlife of Angels, Amy Taubinwrites that the film "is both an unusually well-observed piece of realismand a subjective vision that's filtered through the fantasies, desires,and adrenaline rushes of two young women The fluidity of [AgnesGodard's] framing and her ability to capture urban landscapes meldwith [Zonca's] understanding that people, no matter how alienated theyare, never exist in isolation" (2). What is striking about Taubin'simpression of Dreamlife is the extent to which it echoes scholarlyassessments of poetic realism. Recall, for example, Andrew'sdescription of the genre as a "peculiar conjunction of ethnographiccuriosity and intimate subjectivity." Nevertheless, one would be hard

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pressed to demonstrate that the visual style of Dreamlife actuallyimitates that of the poetic realists. As stated earlier, the poetic realiststyle is associated with long takes often involving a mobile camera,deep focus photography, and an extensive reliance on establishing andlong shots. Eor Andre Bazin, the films of this genre are key examplesof the cinema of realism, a cinema that calls upon the spectator toobserve and understand. Bazin opposes this type of cinema tomainstream or Hollywood films based on dramatic montage, wherebyemotion and meaning are controlled by the filmmaker through theediting or arrangement of images. The Dreamlife of Angels does relyextensively on long takes. Yet in these long takes, Agnes Godard, thefilm's cinematographer, maintains the characters in tight compositionas she follows them with a hand-held camera. In other words, there arefar more close-ups and medium shots in Dreamlife than in the typicalfilm, let alone the kind of films that Renoir made during the 193O's.

The fragile solidarity of Isa and Marie in The Dreamlife of Angels

The problem then is that if we accept the validity of Taubin'simpression of the film, we need to explain how Zonca is able to createwhat amounts to poetic realist effects while using very different formaltechniques. In mainstream cinema, the close-up is often used to developemotional intensity, thereby encouraging the spectator to lose him orherself in the dramatic moment. It would follow that an indiscriminate(i.e., non-dramatic) and excessive use of close-ups and medium shots

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would have the opposite effect. It would encourage the spectator to bementally acdve rather than passive. Instead of immersing ourselvesinto the figures on the screen, Zonca's close shots prompt us to observehow his characters are contained or circumscribed by their environment.To her credit, Godard avoids the contemporary fashion of using softfocus backgrounds. In this respect, the style of The Dreamlife of Angelscommunicates the same kind of message as the establishing and longshots of the poetic realist cinema. Another factor that is relevant hereis that the actors in Zonca's film were anonymous or relatively unknown,which would influence the audience to perceive them as ordinary peopleliving through a documentary situation.

In the final scene of Zonca's film, we observe Isa beginning anew job in a factory manufacturing computer cables. This scene mirrorsthe sequence at the beginning of the film when Isa begins work sewingthe sleeves of blouses in the garment factory. The condidons in thecomputer plant are better, and Isa demonstrates a natural ability in hernew job, in contrast to her incompetence as a seamstress. Yet the jobshe has taken—she will be spending her time inserting 78 color codedwires into their appropriate slots—gives new meaning to the conceptof alienated labor. As Isa begins her job, the camera tracks right toshow us the faces of her co-workers, a camera movement that definesher as part of a group of women condemned to meaningless work.Surprisingly, the young woman who appears at the end of the shotturns out to be Sandrine, the now recovered comatose teenager whomIsa had visited in hospital. What can one make of this? Why is someoneof her background working at this job? Does her presence signify aninstance of solidarity between the working and middle classes? Or,does it emphasize the precariousness of anyone's place in the classstructure of contemporary capitalism? Through no fault of her own—her mother was killed in an auto accident—she has been banished fromher comfortable pedt bourgeois existence and become part of themarginalized proletariat.

The remarkable thing about the ending of Zonca's film is that itis able to convey both of these meanings. On the one hand, Dreamlifepresents a realisdc assessment of the insecurity that both the middleand working classes face under the new world order of muldnationalcapitalism. On the other hand, it offers a glimmer of hope in the struggleagainst this threat through solidarity among the classes. While thissense of possibility that Zonca's film holds out to us is a far cry from

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the optimism of the Popular Front era, it is certainly preferable to themessage of resignation one finds in Affliction.

Hyperalienated labor in The Dreamlife of Angels

The cable assembly

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Works CitedAndrew, Dudley. Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic

French Film. Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1995.Austin, Guy. Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction.

Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1996.Banks, Russell. Affliction. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.Kaufmann, Stanley. "Accepted Fates. ''New Republic 1 Feb. 1999: 24

(3). EBSCOhost.Klawans, Stuart. "Touched by an Angel." The Nation 22 March 1999:

34 (3). EBSCOhost.Lukacs, Geog. Studies in European Realism. New York: Gossett &

Dunlap, 1964.Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century

American Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press,1966.

Quart, Leonard. "These Are very Uncertain Times: An Interview withPaul Schrader." Cineaste 24A (1998): 12 (6). EBSCOhost.

Simon, John. "Small People, Great Pain." National Review 8 March1999:55 (2). EBSCOhost.

Taubin, Amy. "Opposing Forces." Village Voice 6 April 1999: 126 (3).EBSCOhost.

Zola, Emile. La Bete humaine. New York: Viking Penguin, 1977.

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