Copyright © 2012 by James Clark
At the outset of Kelly Reichardt’s film from 2008, Wendy is taking her dog, Lucy, for a walk in some wooded area near a railway freight yard where one of the boxcars announces, “Golden West Service.” She puts moderate body English into her tossing a stick for her golden girl to retrieve; and there’s a tone of curiously guarded warmth in her voice, “Drop it, Luce!” Coinciding with that attenuation unsuited to so young a woman with school girlish features, are her severe hair, faded complexion and boyish attire—a sweatshirt with a hoodie and tight basketball-length shorts (somehow redolent of the presence of Joan of Arc).
That overriding reserve in her presence here is set in much sharper relief by the subsequent stage of their walk. It leads them to a fire-lit encampment of late-adolescent drifters, waiting to hop a southbound freight in the morning. Lucy has discovered them first, in plunging ahead in what is now darkness, coming upon figures so raw and elemental as disclosed by the pulsing flames (bearded, dirty, with matted hair, missing teeth, a bandaged arm, head gear implicating the faces in medieval times)—who resemble a rag-tag army (say, from the early fifteenth century). They are quick and effusive to pay deference to the beast and the presence of a young, austere beauty. A shapeless girl, with studs in her nose and mouth, calls out, “Great dog! What’s her name?”/ “Lucy,” is Wendy’s quiet reply, with no eagerness to maintain the familiarity. (She had paused from the fringes of the woods to overlook the company, with far from enthusiasm on her face.) Instantly, as if she were a born leader, Wendy finds the way to glide by the little traffic jam they clearly represent to her. “I’m going to Alaska… to Ketchikan [Catch-as-catch-can], to work in a fish cannery…” That gambit elicits from the foot soldiers, firstly, a torrent of glib, callow, mildly irreverent encouragement. “… good for greenhorns… [free] housing’s awesome… Money’s better with them [that cannery]…” The head honcho of this group of routed irregulars (“Icky”) grabs from that reminiscence a take-off for cheap bravado, for instance, regarding what a person of interest he is up there. Seeing himself as a picaresque sweetheart, he first alludes to his being big-time notorious, in having, while drunk, wrecked a piece of heavy equipment, his playfulness behind the wheel resulting in rolling the big and somehow offensive (to him) instrument. “A hundred thousand dollars, gone in four seconds! … They couldn’t pin it on me… I was gone!”
Wendy isn’t paying any attention to this, fortuitously having Lucy to see to. And in seeing to things in this way she’s indirectly showing us that her bid toward the Golden West is a service palpably superseding anxieties about unemployment and any attractions the fishing industry might hold. If you were to ask her about this overtone, she wouldn’t be able (or willing) to explain it. (Later, when confronted in Portland, Oregon by the red tape of daily survival manoeuvres [a process that, at her starting point and home town of Muncie, Indiana, she would have endured to the extent of bankrolling her venture with about $500.], she short-circuits her actions to the tune of, “That’s why I’m going to Alaska.”) But nevertheless it permeates every step she takes, and so leads us to the heart of her misadventure.
Needing all the help we can get, in approaching that duality of intent, it is advisable to explore it in conjunction with another, more structurally elaborate film narrative, namely, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), which also features a woman on her own, willing to go a great and crushing distance to put things right. It is considerably more difficult to identify Selma as a solitary road warrior, than it was to understand Wendy along those lines. Let’s, however, consider the former in her own context of aliens bent on accommodating her supposedly readily understood labor of love, here an amateur production of The Sound of Music, with its trek amidst papier mâché mountains, and songs, like “My Favorite Things,” celebrating gratifications of appetites a bit too good to be true. (There was also the welling irony of “Getting to Know You.”) With Wendy there was so often that minor-key hum accompanying her meandering—an ancient hymn, actually—unheard by the world at large, but keeping us abreast of Wendy’s intimate and unfinished business. With Selma, it was, “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens”—presented in her execrable singing voice and delivered not merely awkwardly, but pathologically so, in view of her virtual blindness. The setting for this evensong is a perfunctory community centre in a Washington State tank town (as far removed from the world at large as Wendy’s backwoods) amidst a raft of earnest supporters and fellow-travellers who had missed the boat but continued to paddle. Selma’s presence here, thus afflicted, functions in two phases—that of the good sport; and that of the agenda no one would ever suspect.
Each of our films has to do with a woman answering to voices no one else she knows could hear. More specifically, each subtly and incisively discloses horrific samplings of the pitfalls which that responsivity entails. True to the template of Joan of Arc, the exposés involve arrest and a trial, a reckoning with the powers-that-be. Wendy’s mysteriously promising and delicate distancing shows its fulsome corruptibility, its being haunted by crudeness, in an episode where—her campaign bogged down in Portland due to car trouble (that would eventually necessitate car abandonment, the car being an Accord)—with $500. in her money belt and a ravenous loved one (Lucy) in her face, she attempts to shoplift some dog food, is apprehended in the act, taken to jail, booked for a misdemeanor and fined $50. In the process, Lucy goes missing, ultimately to be embraced by a solvent resident of the town, thus terminating whatever purchase Wendy had upon finding with Lucy treasures of loving interaction. In going that route, Wendy demonstrates that, without rigorous discernment and self-discipline, her position of precedence over the mawkish self-satisfaction on the part of the former Alaskan vandal can melt down to an Icky world. Not only does she slip up, but her well-honed debating points—“That isn’t true… I wasn’t done my shopping yet… I was going to check on my dog [tied outside the grocery store]…”—divulge an entrenched (even if tenuous) predatory violence toward those she would dismiss as inflexible bores. The crucifix-wearing schoolboy part-timer who ambushes her and who, being an anal crusader in the cause of simple pieties the rigidity of which smacks of shreds of sense but also emotional poverty and viciousness (“If a person can’t afford dog food they shouldn’t have a dog”), insists, to a more easy-going boss, that she be made an example of, and once again crosses paths with her after her release and in the course of her desperately calling out, “Lucy! … Come, Lu! …” As he scurries over to his mom’s car to go home for dinner, Wendy ties into him and her in a way that speaks volumes about her war against such a status quo. “I hope you’re real happy! Have a great night, OK? … Hey, your son’s a real hero!”
Whereas Wendy puts all her money on solitary frisson amidst the beautifully cool Pacific Coastal Range—we last see her, sullen, huddled in a box car en route to a supposed regrouping and counter-attack where a girl can march to the sound of her own hymn-like energies—Selma (far less mobile and perhaps less circumspective about the grounds of her sensuality) clambering to a positive but volatile vantage point by way of visitations by classical Hollywood (and other) movie musicals, takes her stand in the self-sacrificial melodramatics her biological condition exposes her to. In the process of going completely blind due to a genetic aberration, she develops (with an investment of energy both canny and uncanny) the gracious solicitude she finds and (being a true sweetheart) loves in her favorite films to the point of obsessively tending to overcoming her own fate repeating itself in her young son. This situation is given a special spicing by reason of, despite being attractively self-unsparing (and widely liked and [by fellow amateur thespian and colleague on the metal container assembly line, namely, Kathy] gently and considerately loved) in her lostness and persistence, her not being an impressively affectionate and attentive mom. Devoting nearly every cent she makes to a secret fund to pay for eye surgery for the boy, she flies into a rage when cajoled, by Kathy and the couple whose trailer she rents in their yard for a pittance, to buy a second-hand bike for him. “I haven’t got the money! I’m not that kind of mom!” For all her quite irresistible good-natured fortitude, that special agenda entangled in the optics of motherhood, which does not become fully apparent until nearly an hour into the narrative, emerges as a catalyst along the same lines as Wendy’s calling to become an Alaskan (a place we never see her expressing any warmth for, but instead see a curative component quite bewilderingly implicated in her pervasive anxiety and emptiness).
It takes quite a forcible investigation of Selma’s interpersonal rounds to realize the tenuousness of her unfailingly cordial affairs with friends and neighbors. As to the latter, her main neighbors—Bill, a local cop, and his wife, Linda, who provide her and Gene (her son) with a trailer home in their extensive yard (or domain)—prove to practise a form of generosity even more superficial than her own. Strapped for cash due to Linda’s extravagance (which has exhausted a rich inheritance—apropos of which Selma enthuses, along the sightlines of musical melodramas featuring heroes like Deanna Durban and Shirley Temple), Bill notices, on paying a neighborly visit, pretending to leave, and merely standing there quietly, completely beyond her capacity to register, that Selma’s nest egg ($2000 scraped together by way of gruelling double shifts on the production floor, supplemented by loading cards with bobby pins—all done with excruciating strain to eyes virtually dead)—which she had made to seem impossible by way of a public yarn, plausible in view of the optics of immigrant cash flow, about caring for a relative back home—for Gene’s (were he a she, he might have been named Shirley) operation resides in a rose-colored, tin container kept in a cupboard. He soon gets around to stealing it; Selma deduces that he’s the one, shoots him by accident with his own gun, during a struggle for the prize, devastatedly accedes to his request to kill him (bashing him bloodily with a metal safety deposit box), recovers her $2000 raison d’être, is arrested, tried and convicted, after which Kathy arranges for a stay and a new trial with a lawyer to be paid by the fund. After acquiescing briefly (as did Joan) to this life-saving move, she rallies her determination to be an angel to her boy, rescinds the escape and is sent to the gallows—resembling the stake where Joan died, inasmuch as she required trussing on a board due to melting with fear. (So galvanized by the errancy of Selma’s martyrdom is this molten narrative, that its sub-text as to King Bill Clinton [Bill the cop expertly produces that familiar aw shucks confessional whisper] gets swallowed up in the venality that was a given even in Joan’s time, her supposed king and protector proving to be little more than a heel.)
The awkward martyrdom shared by Selma and Wendy captures our imagination insofar as it signals a huge misstep by mainstream history, inducing, among a daring few, caution-to-the-winds risk-taking and resolve, however imperfect. But Selma and Wendy present, in the last analysis, something far removed from melodramatic Sirens giving off a screed against a cruel and stupid world. Their deadly twisting traces back to a flood of historical energy essentially in the throes of relentless dilemma. The films in question fully come into their own in putting into play their protagonist’s investment in that golden and radioactive vein. Both films linger tellingly upon a remarkable tension playing across their protagonist’s body. In this they embrace the evergreen powers of Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Whereas Wendy, breathing in the freebase contemptuous irony of American espionage (as brought to bear by the music, film, television and, ultimately, internet of a land still significantly about tearing it all down, to build it anew), bids for an indeterminately splendid isolation, Selma, an Eastern European and hence far from at ease with the new iconoclasm, lashes herself to a form of parenthood and concomitant pragmatic ingratiation with the mainstream, as taking an edge from its musical cinema—here in the form of small-town America, with its wonky goodwill as richly accounted for by David Lynch in his Straight Story (and pertinently inflected by his Elephant Man). As such, whereas Wendy comes to us as a bemusing Clint Eastwood, Selma reaches down for a reflexive, (painfully) grinning buffoon, along the hopeful lines of Jack Oakie. She hives to classic American musical comedy films, not out of connoisseurship for music and drama, but due to having stumbled upon its surreal profile of rhapsodic, loving excitement as offering an entryway to both a gratifyingly old-fashioned salvation, and a gratifyingly primordial sufficiency. Sufficiency for her as thus galvanized could also be termed “justice.”
Von Trier has gone to enormous lengths to convey Selma’s purchase upon a cultural payload the nuances of which are markedly more complex than those fuelling Wendy’s campaign. Whereas the latter largely confined her navigational equipment to a roadmap and a (rapidly disappearing) wad of greenbacks (we’ll leave aside for now her vague hymnal), Selma reaches us as far more real when moving to a powerfully wrought script, choreography, score or scenario as against going about her business along lines of impromptu communication with close acquaintances. The pinnacle of her canvassing an ecstatic heritage consists of hallucinatory song and dance numbers based upon sites where the flow of the narrative becomes strangled due to aberrations residing in her compromised sensibility. A most memorable and instructive instance occurs on a railway crossing over a waterway. Selma has just been fired (in an interview filled with heartfelt regret by the administrator of the plant, and politeness and gratitude on her part) due to obvious lostness as to work routine, self-endangerment and destruction of an expensive machine the operation of which her near-blindness could not begin to manage with any consistency. Jeff, a co-worker who’s nuts about her but unrequited, follows her from the plant to the nearby railway tracks Selma would negotiate to return home. They are together at the bridge when a freight comes along, and, on taking note of her confusion in keeping off the track, he says, “You can’t see, can you?” Selma begins her counter-attack with, “I’ve seen it all… I’ve seen what I want… To be honest, I really don’t care…” More to the point, however, is her suddenly finding herself on a slowly-moving flatcar—the waters below, the blue skies above—reaching strictly with her body for heights and digging for depths, with a crew of burly railway workers (gandy dancers, who join her in singing defiantly [and no longer execrably, “I do what I want, and I do very well…”), their progress taking her (and us) back to Jacques Demy’s musical, The Young Girls of Rochefort, more particularly its opening scene, where a group of devil-may-care carnies dance on the aerial transfer bridge ferrying their show onto the road into town, and sunshine fills their and our and Selma’s heart. At the destination point of Demy’s romance, there is a young girl, Delphine, who would proclaim, “I really don’t care” for Rochefort; “I’m bound for Paris, City of Light and glorious sufficiency.” Selma’s friend, Kathy, is played by actress Catherine Deneuve, who was Demy’s Delphine. But that is only the start of it. Kathy figures here as a handsome middle-aged shell of the girl who felt herself to be way too good for a small town, and had to take her chances as a dancer in Paris. In that light, Selma would indeed be a soul mate to Kathy. On the other hand, again and again—onstage, at work and at the jail where Selma’s blind spot takes her—Kathy spirits her away from embarrassment, injury and death. She has somehow to finesse her inept friend’s astonishing and dismaying stubbornness in shortcutting the advent of viability, which is in fact a truncating of following through to a cogent sense of justice; in fact, then, being “in the dark” as to the full range of loving endowment. As a no longer soaring avatar of mysterious love, Kathy’s turn as Fairy Godmother in a rough-and-tumble town extends to that of another Demy figure, the Lilac Fairy in Donkey Skin, who caters with affection and a range of smarts to an obtuse Princess (played, once again, by Deneuve), cursed with a kinky, randy King and Daddy (whereas Wendy has been cursed by a family consisting of a non-communicative, trailer trash sister and brother-in-law—“We can’t do anything. We’re strapped. Bye, Honey…”). Selma, the gentle and rude donkey with the secret soul of a graceful and powerful princess, goes through that hell reserved for bold but naive hearts. And the strange historical figures she attracts in the course of her mission (including Robert Bresson’s Balthazar, whose warped presence as “the Mathematical [Calculating] Donkey” did not derive from his own being in the dark) divulge to us the specific currents drawing her on toward powers the mismanagement of which can mean settling for a mundane life (Delphine), settling for a ridiculous life (the Princess) or settling for a horrible death. With Brenda, a caring prison guard on Death Row (bringing to mind similarly sensitive players in Wendy and Lucy [i.e., the lady managing the pound and the parking lot attendant], never given a chance to elicit from the protagonist loving initiatives that could temper the sterility of her heroics [draw her to something more mature than the fast food of motherhood as concealing an altogether different and rabid obsession]), Selma gushes, “In a musical, nothing dreadful ever happens!” She had stipulated that she always cuts out of the theatre before the ending, since the crescendoing happy denouement made her sad about the experience coming to an end. That formula might work for the inference about “nothing dreadful” in regard to Hollywood musicals. But it seems she had bought into that simplism even so far as Demy musicals, where “dreadful” would be the order of the day. Her Julie Andrews schtick of somewhat fiercely grinning, unflappable good cheer has been massively enabled by her Lilac Fairy, who countless times pulls her away at the last second from being crushed or shredded by the various machine-age systems at the plant (she having conned her way into staying on the job by memorizing the eye-test chart). Kathy, along with Jeff, thinks to get her out of her biggest jam by confirming the savings, made to seem a crock by a prosecuting attorney making a case for murder in the course of theft of same—as anal as the little twit who busts Wendy, where at least there was a crime. But, when presented with the prospect of Gene’s medical fund going to finance a new lawyer for her, she chooses to maintain her only grasp upon (sacrificial) rightness (justice), as against a range of life about which, from out of the dark that is her navigation, she could defiantly declare, “I really don’t care.” (“What good is a blind lady?”) Her Magoo-like skirting upon becoming road kill is given a final twist, flaring to life when Jeff approaches the snowy shoreline of a Northern lake while trying to get to the bottom of Selma’s imbroglio, by way of records kept at the eye-clinic he had driven her to just prior to her arrest. One of actor, Peter Stormare’s (Jeff’s) incarnations was that of a psychopath in the movie, Fargo. You’ll recall that in a setting very closely resembling that of the snowy lake, he jammed a colleague into a wood chipper—a residue strangely underlining the burning question of sensual balance.
The final passage, wherein Selma is executed in a manner recalling the fate of the more passionate than precise Saint Joan, solidifies the film’s objective of impressing upon its audience the punishing weight of seeking with all one’s might to attain to doing justice to the physical dynamic of one’s presence. (Rising, as it were, to the singularity of its thematic burden, the production of Dancer in the Dark was branded with the fortuitously [however painfully] unique endeavors of pop musical diva, Bjork, cast for the invention of her musical composition and performance as [hopefully] carrying over to dramatic integrity. Von Trier received from her even more verisimilitude than he bargained for—near nervous breakdown intensity and concomitant erratic, even mutinous involvement in completing the project. Many movies lurch to life leaving behind unhappy campers; but this one came close to Armageddon. [In the diary coverage of the shoot appearing in her biography, Catherine Deneuve wonders if the young millionaire has the line of credit to foot a thirteen million dollar breach of contract.] And yet, despite massive and permanent disaffection, and despite von Trier’s declarations [on the DVD’s Supplement] that his star messed up the thermal pitch of some important scenes, the outcome is riveting and unforgettable. Also on that Supplement, he and the film’s producer—perhaps by way of eluding having to say anything germane about the too-hot-to-handle logic of the drama—yammer at numbing lengths about the strategy of running “100 cameras,” upon every move, and the extent of fealty to “the Dogma” and its gritty outcomes. Truth to tell, this wild baby would have worked under any number of technical regimes, because its phenomenological groundwork—its scripting, design, musicianship, performance and direction—was masterfully locked onto the target.) There are two stages when, on Death Row, the horror of her fate extensively and cumulatively inundates Selma. Almost at a point of being unable to breathe due to fear, she is rallied by Brenda to see the strong chance she has for a stay of execution and a new trial. We see in close-up her face locked in an inconsolable, unearthly terror, only gradually relaxing slightly, as she consults a long-standing fascination in listening to hymns from an almost inaudible choir in the prison chapel, coming her way by an air vent (their sacred thrum coming into a correspondence, for us, with Wendy’s little hymn). From there she manages to reprise in a raspy voice her occupancy of “My Favorite Things,” its frail little beauties (“…whiskers on kittens…”) dovetailing with her own heartbreakingly kittenish bids for joy. After a bit she has a smile on her face, and sings with conviction, never mind skill. It’s hard to forget, though, the tension in her pressing against the vent, and the sharp crimp of her sneaker against the platform she uses to reach that vent. It’s even harder to forget the anguished twitching of her fingers as she lies folded up upon a cot awaiting, in the second station of her agony, just steps away from the gallows, the words, “It’s time.” (This Passional nightmare has been prefaced by a cold, hard look at the perversity of her martyrdom. On dumping Lawyer #2, she roars at Kathy [on the phone linking them at visiting hours, separated by a sound-proof and bullet-proof sheet of glass], “This [rescue of Gene, whose performance proves to be an exhibit of casting for maximal odiousness—“Why are you not in school? … Hanging out with those automobile thieves!”/ “So what?” Her refusing to so much as buy him a birthday present—obsessive thrift far outpacing motherly love—clearly keying his black-heartedness]] is the most import thing in my life! He needs his eyes!” Her guiding spirit (to little avail) comes back with the big picture—“He needs his mother!”/ “No!!” is Selma’s fully apparent infatuation with a little, but (vaguely) potent, picture. But it is during a visit by Jeff that the excruciating equilibrium factor reaches us most pointedly. He leads with, “Say something to him [Gene].” She quietly demurs, “No, that’s not a good idea.” Then he finds a way to reveal that sensual dimension of her energies having been paralyzed by a calculatively gunned half-measure, though induced into sporadic efficacy by the musical fantasies. “Why did you have him? You knew he would become blind.”/ “I wanted to hold a baby in my arms!”)
Following from that illuminative thrum, the almost unbearable execution scene—Selma going into hysterics about having a hood placed over her head (the Celtic snap of her vocalization no longer an accelerating asset, but instead a vehicle of prima despair), being unable to stand and thereby being bound to a stake-like board to facilitate the hanging, Brenda doing all she can to offset the cold insistence of the rest of the staff—must be embraced in its disinterested coverage of her falling away from the rigors of a primordial equilibrium. Kathy—one of the many attendees, as with the townsfolk and officials present at Joan’s immolation—rushes to Selma’s side and puts into her hand Gene’s glasses, now redundant due to the operation’s having been a success (an undertone of which heroics being, “After all, what good is a blind car thief?”). This steadies her somewhat, from her calling out, “Gene! Gene!” (a variant of “Andy!” [Delphine’s sister’s beloved, played by Gene Kelly; or, “Jesus!” beloved by Joan). Her Fairy Godmother, loyal and loving (but not impressively lucid) to the end, calls out to her, “You were right, Selma! Listen to your heart!” Selma thus braced, gets to occupy one more song before the trap-door opens. It’s on the order of, “This isn’t the last song/ There’s no violins. / It’s only the last song if we let it be…” Such apparent eschatology touches instead upon that creative electricity requiring heartfelt songs from finite hearts, in order to be at truly full strength.
At thirteen million dollars, Dancer in the Dark comes in at about sixty-five times the cost of Wendy and Lucy. But the latter has about it nothing shabby in aspiring to add a chapter to the permutations of justice delayed. As shattering for us as the graphic minutiae of Selma’s strangulation (including, with the drop and snap, her dropping Gene’s glasses), we have Wendy, finally catching up with her “Baby Girl” at the suburban Portland yard of the senior citizen who rescued her from abandonment by a cool Mom who, before attempting to beat the system, would shut the golden girl up in her hunger pangs, “Don’t be a nuisance. We don’t need that” (the “We” tilting toward a Royal We). (On scoping the store she happens by its magazine stand. One of the magazines is called “Auteur.” During a night in some parkland, she’s awakened by a terrifying [but surprisingly cogent] vagrant who observes [amidst a scatological tantrum], “This is a steep hill, eh?”—a turn of phrase linking to what the guy at the repair shop says: “Your alternator’s not right.” Her photocopied alert about Lucy’s disappearance bears the title, “I’m Lost.” The aggrieved night crawler states, “They can smell the weakness on you.”) For the one and only moment (a different method, then, from that of habitually beatific Selma), her face shows convincing joy. Through the wire mesh fence of this most tentative of prison scenes, Wendy, becoming distraught by virtue of exigencies she had refused to master, leads with, “Miss me, huh? … I’m sorry… C’mon… I know… Don’t be mad… Sorry, Lu… I’m sorry… Real nice here, Lu…” The tears come. The game of fetch a stick—as at the beginning, with its ominous command, “Drop it Lu!”—has ended, as has the prospect of continued love between them. (At the beginning of the scene, they had happily kissed each other.) Before turning away with sobs being met by an agency of questionable precedence, she leaves Lucy with a promise we see (and she knows) she’s not equipped to fulfil. “You be good. I’ll come back.”
