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CHAPTER IX

TRUTH VERSUS ILLUSION: THE FILM

The question of truth versus illusion was found, in Chapter IV, to be rooted in language that leads one up blind alleys of contradictory facts Of direct statements that either raise ambiguity or point directly to the illusory son, only two noted in Chapter IV are absent from Cinewoolf, Honey's calling her false pregnancy a false appendicitis(119) and George's interruption of Martha's recitation about their son's Saturday banana boat whose oar is a carrot, "Or a swizzle stick, whatever was easier."(220) When Honey contradicts the story earlier told by Nick, one cannot be sure who is right, but the circumstances under which Nick revealed his story do not put it into question while the circumstances under which Honey contradicts it are questionable; she is trying, clumsily, to dispel any worries over her throwing up. Elimination of her questionable statement removes this element of ambiguity from Cinewoolf. George's comment interrupts a serious, anguished story by Martha about their son. That such an interruption would be made throws doubt on the credulity of the whole situation, suggesting that this may be but another game after all. The seriousness of it all, however, involves Nick so completely that at the end of the story, he actually believes a real son was really killed. By eliminating this quip by George, and much other extension of the story and tangential dialogue, Cinewoolf drives directly to the end of the story and the revelation of the son's "death," which in the context quite reasonably appears real to Nick. The truth of the child's illusionary existence is then more ironically revealed in George's

<Martha . . . (Long pause) . . . our son is . . . dead.

<(silence)

<(A tiny chuckle) on a country roads with his learner's permit in his pockets he swerved, to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a . . . .(232)>

not only because this refers back to the way the Bergin boy, when sixteen years old, killed his father, but also because the connection is made with their son's coming home for his sixteenth birthday. And this raises a contradiction, for just before Baby is brought up, it is learned that Martha washes the boy in the bathtub "when he's sixteen,"(215) an age he reaches only tomorrow. The point should now be clear. This establishes not only the child as non-existent, but raises a direct challenge to the truth of any of the Bergin story, which in turn reflects on the truth of George's ever having written a novel. By being more specific in this point of language, ambiguity is cast on a number of the "stories" and "games" in Cinewoolf.

These two dialogue excisions do not detract from either the total fabric of ambiguity or the focusing of the question of illusion on the son and his exorcism-death.

Cinewoolf therefore presents, on this level of verbal consideration, essentially the same case for truth versus illusion as does Stagwoolf. The case for language having created ambiguity and raised the truth versus illusion question, as developed in Chapter IV, applies equally to this discussion of Cinewoolf.

Cinewoolf also offers additional evidence in the matter of truth versus illusion. Visual factors suggest the element of ambiguity, and point up the "son" as a factor upon which we must concentrate our attention. Music and alterations in the obscene language focus attention towards the key moments in the story of the illusory son, his exorcism and death.

Several times the very specific nature of Cinewoolf forces the issue of ambiguity, particularly with respect to visual expectation. Ernest Callenbach notes how in the Bergin story we are made to "watch the man George (and/or the man Burton) who is telling a story that may or may not be true, and may or may not apply to himself."¹ Henry Hewes of Saturday Review did not like the film treatment, noting that

<. . . the same speech that onstage conjured up so rich and vivid a memory, now is synchronized with a full screen closeup of George's face, so that the personal sadness the words generate in him commands our major interest.>²

If a vivid memory is truly conjured up, then the revelation of George's novels and the death of the son may both gain dramatic impact in the contrast, yet I think this misses the point. By coming in close we see the man, not the memory. If the memory is so important, one is tempted to suggest that the film use a flashback, so that as George tells the story, the audience is allowed to see the boy in the gin mill ordering Bergin; the camera's ability to span both time and space would thereby be well-utilized and the film might even seem more of a film and less a filmed stage play. The camera's ability to make real whatever it shows would, however, be put to misuse in such a technique, either here or elsewhere where Martha, George, and Nick go into detailed accounts of their pasts. The camera would then be distorting the whole point of ambiguity by making real all those stories, one of which at least, Bringing Up Baby, must be questioned as to its truth or illusion. The absence of a ready-made cinematic device may, to those who expect such technique to be utilized at every possible opportunity, constitute a question of ambiguity itself. Thus, doubt about the truth of the Bergin story, or any other moment of Cinewoolf, can be raised by the film's avoidance of making as specific as the medium can something we expect to be made specific. Showing only the character who is recalling a memory, and by denying the visual possibility of making the memory more real; the situation is made ambiguous. Negation- of-utmost-clarity becomes a suggestion-of- ambiguity.

There are three other similar memory sections in Stagwoolf, Martha's revelation of her past,(77-81) which should appear in sequence seven, but has largely been cut, Nick's revelation of his and Honey's past,(103-111) which appears, heavily cut, in sequence nines and Martha's Bringing Up of Baby(218-227) which has also been heavily cut, in sequence twenty. Of these three, only Martha's Bringing Up Baby is unequivocally a lie, while her story of her childhood, though probably not correct in detail (e.g., there probably was a Miss Muff,(78) but that may not have been her real name), is never challenged by George. Nick's story of his and Honey's past, when George tells it as an allegory to Honey in Get the Guests, produces in her a reaction which comes from a knowledge that Nick has revealed these truths that, if false, could have been laughed off, or would not have been recognized in the first place. The generating of doubt about the Bergin story depends upon its being shown close-up, but not made specific, until Martha reveals that the story is part of George's own history, probably.(134-137) This same effect is used on Martha's Bringing Up Baby, where the cutting of dialogue allows the memory to take effect uninterrupted, and the hint of ambiguity to enter slowly as the camera repeats its Bergin-like close-up on Martha. Use of this technique over the true stories of Martha's, and Nick and Honey's, past, would have been difficult for those scenes are largely dialogue, not monologue as is the Bergin story and what is kept of Bringing Up Baby. By cutting these to the bare essentials, their truth is left unquestioned, exactly as it should be. This may create some loss in terms of apparent motivation for Martha in particular, but the choice is either that or an ambiguity that is false to Albee's creation.

The "son" is the central illusion, and attention is focused on him long before the revelation of his nonreality. The first time he is mentioned in the text,(18) there is little attention called to the fact except in the dialogue itself, which seems proper, for too much attention at this point would amount to a rather unsubtle presentation. The next mention appears in sequence five, when Honey asks about him.(44) The average shot length within this sequence is 0:14.4, but at Honey's "I didn't know that you had a son," the rate of inter-cutting increases to two seconds per shot for seven short speeches, then tapers back to normal. The next time the son enters the conversation, the effect of tempo change is even more pronounced. As Nick asks "Where's the john?"(60) a lengthy shot of the full room begins, running ninety seconds to Martha's "Are ya, swampy . . . are ya, hunh?"(64) The new shot includes this and George's rejoinder, lasting eight seconds. Then as Honey giggles "When is your son?"(69) the inter-cutting rises to a rate of nine shots in thirty seconds. The pace is not as fast as the previous segment in sequence four, but the extension of the increased pace from eight to thirty seconds is notable. By this third mention of the son, with the continual build-up of tempo through cutting, the idea that there is something more to be known about this son than we are being told any one time, should be implanted in our minds.

The only other time the son is mentioned before he is brought up to be exorcised is in sequence eleven. The average shot length in this sequence is already relatively short, 0:07.5. The situation is in the station wagon, and the cutting mixes one-shots, two-shots, shots of the four from the front, shots from the side with one, two or three characters viewed. What emphasis is achieved here depends on the effect of the close-up revealing George's reactions to Martha's mentioning of their "little boy."(120)

Two other factors focus attention in Cinewoolf towards the moment of revelation of the central illusion in Martha and George's lives. Both music and language point towards the exorcism and death of the son, as background music appears more often, and the obscenity grows stronger, towards sequence twenty.

An enumeration of the musical selections by number per sequence will demonstrate the cumulative effect of music in Cinewoolf: sequence one, one selection; sequence eight, one; sequence nine, one; sequence fourteen, one; sequence sixteen, two; sequence seventeen, one; sequence twenty, two; sequence twenty-one, one. In the first third of Cinewoolf there is one music selection, in the second third, two, and in the final third, seven. Sequence twenty features "Fleece" at 109:57,(216) underlying Martha's first part of the story of their son, and "The Party is Over" at 117:45,(233) emphasizing the completion of the exorcism. The two selections frame the revelation of the central illusion of Cinewoolf.

Another factor that helps focus attention towards this climax, if not in an obviously perceived manner but one that affects the audience nevertheless, is the effect of the language, particularly the obscenity that Albee seems to scatter like so much shrapnel throughout Stagwoolf. The obscenity of Cinewoolf prompted film critic Arlene Croce to title her generally negative review "Staying Up Late, Talking Dirty, and All That."³ Yet Cinewoolf has far less offensive obscenity, and less obscenity in toto, than Stagwoolf. The dialogue changes from Stagwoolf to Cinewoolf lessen the amount and intensity of obscenity in general in the early part of Cinewoolf, while allowing much of the obscenity of later sequences to remain unchanged. The language gets stronger as the play progresses.

A scanning of Appendix A will reveal much of this change. "Goddamn" and "goddam" are reduced to "damn" on pages 4, 7, 46, and 204, to "lousy" on page 4, and dropped altogether on pages 57, 124, and 135. "Mount her like a goddam dog" becomes "get her into the bushes" on pages 114 and 139. One "damn" is cut, on page 59. The "Screw you" that welcomes the guests is reduced to "Goddamn you," and the only time "Screw" is not cut is on page 197. "Jesus" becomes "Geeze" on pages 6 and 51, and "Good God" on page 210. "Jesus God" becomes "Oh for cry" on page 210, and "Jesus Christ" becomes "Oh my God" on page 236, while "Jesus H. Christ" becomes laughter on page 3. "His right ball" becomes "his right arm" on page 47, "prick" is changed to "miserable" on page 59, and five choice French obscenities are excised from page 101. "Ass" is changed to the equivalent, but less well-known to the general populace, "keister," on page 135. This amounts to a reduction of obscenity in twelve specific possibilities in Stagwoolf Act One, six (or ten if all five French words are counted separately, rather than as one general outburst) in Act Two, and five in Act Three, while one obscenity is added to Act Three.

These changes indicate a general reduction in obscenity, of some twenty-two items. The greatest number of reductions are early in the action, and there is an overall cumulative effect of increased obscenity as the action approaches the revelation of the illusion of the son.

The question of truth versus illusion is as present in Cinewoolf as it is in Stagwoolf. The ambiguity within the language structure is essentially the same in both media, yet the very ability of the camera to make reality specific, and the changing of one line to make more specific the irony of one speech has, both directly and through implication, made the ambiguity of Cinewoolf rather concrete. Visual emphasis aids in the establishment of the "son" as an object upon which our attention must be concentrated, and the cumulative effect of music and language reinforce this by focusing attention to the most significant moment with respect to that son, his exorcism and death as an illusion. When Martha begins to Bring Up Baby, the moment has been well-prepared. The exorcism itself is able to reveal Martha's anguish uninterrupted, and then explode the illusion in George's announcement that ". . . our son is . . . dead. He was . . . killed . . . late in the afternoon,"(231) as the camera reveals Martha's reaction to "dead. He was . . . killed" in one brief close-up, only to be followed by George's repetition of the Bergin story death. The son is destroyed, and Martha's anguish over an illusion that has been carefully preserved for many years begs the question of what else in Cinewoolf that we think to be true might also be false.

By the end of Cinewoolf

<. . . we have no reason to believe, for instance, that George is really in the history department of his college; it would be another interesting, mildly sadistic game if he and Martha pretended so, indulging in witticisms about "History and Biology," but he was actually in math or English. By the end of the play, when we see the tortuous extent to which their games can go--constituting to a clinical eye some weird paranoid folie à deux--we know, looking back, that nothing they have said can be taken for granted.>⁴

FOOTNOTES

1. Ernest Callenbach, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Film Quarterly, XX (Fall, 1966), p 46.

2. Henry Hewes, "At Home with the Burtons," The Saturday Review, XLIX (July 9, 1966), p. 40.

3. Arlene Croce "Staying Up Late, Talking Dirty and All That," National Review, XVIII (September 20, 1966), p. 943.

4. Callenback, loc. cit.