On the face of it, it is astounding that a silent film would win awards as best motion picture of the year; although, the anomaly may be a key to its success, as we may admire and enjoy something that is so different.
The film, The Artist, has a further burden. It centers around a silent film star, George Valentin, whose career plummets at the end of the silent era. It must elicit our sympathy for George, but he has many traits that are not sympathetic. At the outset, we see him as a self-indulgent narcissist, insensitive to the people around him. He particularly shows a careless negligence towards women. He struts on the stage after a debut of his newest film, showing off with his trained dog while the leading lady fumes, waiting for her chance to get on. He answers the rage on her face with coy smiles, completely ignoring her distress. A little later, he takes a similar attitude with his wife, playing with the dog and smiling cutely at her distress over a picture on the front page of the Hollywood Reporter of George being kissed on the cheek by a pretty young girl. He is full of himself, even stops to admire a larger than life portrait displaying him in top hat and tails as he walks down the steps of his lavish home.
This is carried over in his film persona, where he is a dashing hero, saving women and fighting for justice in Errol Flynn-type roles. He is the center of every scene, surrounded by supporting characters, including his leading ladies. If there is a rival for screen attention it may be his talented little dog, who is seen waking him and helping him escape from a foreign prison in his newest hit film.
George is an unlikely hero—stubborn, smug, entitled. With a slightly different presentation, we could easily imagine an audience gloating over his eventual downfall. But, we don’t see him in this way. Our sympathy for George, and for the film, is rescued by his relationship with a young woman, Peppy Miller.
George meets Peppy outside the theater where his film has just opened. She is one of many admirers in the crowd as he comes out. Peppy drops her purse and leans over to pick it up. As she is getting up she touches his behind, creating some embarrassment on her part as she is suddenly outside the throng, standing facing him. At first he gives her a stern look, then smiles to show he was only playing, relieving the tension. They both smile and laugh for the crowd as he casually puts an arm around her. Finally she reaches over and kisses him on the cheek. A cameraman snaps the picture, which appears on the front page of the Hollywood Reporter with the caption, “Who’s That Girl?”
The story evolves around a familiar theme. George gives Peppy her chance to be in movies. As her career soars, his plummets, so that Peppy becomes the glamorous star and George a shabby tramp. The theme is familiar because it is essentially the plot of A Star is Born, in which a legendary film actor, Norman Maine, supports the career of an unknown girl, Esther Blodgett, who achieves supreme success while his career disintegrates. There have been three versions of A Star is Born, but by far the best known is the 1950’s version with James Mason as Norman and Judy Garland as Esther.
The films have subtle similarities in their openings, suggesting that the director of the The Artist, Michael Hazanavicius, was aware of the comparison. Each begins with a major Hollywood event that focuses on the established male star; in each, he meets by accident a young woman with no claim to fame; and, in each case the start of the relationship involves an impromptu dance. Norman stumbles on stage, drunk, while Esther is performing with a group, and she salvages the situation by improvising a dance with him. George meets Peppy after the debut of his film, and in the next scene they end up doing an improvised exchange of dance steps that appears to solidify their relationship.
Norman Maine is a less likeable character than George Valentin—a womanizer who seems to specialize in taking advantage of young women, a superstar who cavalierly and recklessly ignores the people around him—yet each is far more likeable when seen with and through the eyes of his young protégée. In The Artist, perhaps even more than in A Star is Born, it is the love story that captures our enthusiasm.
It is a love story that develops in playfulness. There is the initial accidental encounter outside the theater, marked by embarrassment but ending with a kiss on the cheek. In the following meeting, they don’t see each other at first. Only their legs are visible to one another under some sort of canvas being held by stagehands. He spots her dancing and begins to mimic it and respond with his own improvised steps. She sees his legs moving and answers in kind. When the stage-hands move on with their barrier, they have established a rapport and suddenly recognize one another from the day before. It is here that he intervenes with the director to get her a place in his next film.
We next see a series of takes from George’s new film, in which he plays a spy meeting a contact at a party. In the first take, George glides across the room in which people are dancing. He bumps into Peppy and takes a turn with her on his way to his contact. But as we see successive takes, he becomes increasingly interested in Peppy, allowing the scene they are filming to disintegrate. The light humor gives the scene and the development of their relationship a touch of light innocence.
That innocence seems to fit the silent film mode that we are watching. It also lends itself to an underlying theme. As in A Star is Born, this is a story about an intergenerational romance, an older, well-established man and a young, unknown “innocent” woman. The playfulness resonates with the level of fantasy that the film evokes. That fantasy is brought to life in a scene that is as evocative as it is subtle.
Peppy sneaks into George’s dressing room. Seeing his top hat and jacket on a coat stand, she begins to feel the texture of the jacket, then puts her arm in one sleeve so that she can put her hand through the sleeve and embrace herself, with the illusion that she is being held by him. She does it well and we are caught up in the illusion and the fantasy as he walks in and sees her. George approaches her and beckons her closer with his finger. We think he may kiss her, but instead he tells her, “If you want to be an actress, you need to have something the others don’t,” and he puts a tiny beauty mark above her lip with makeup pencil. They look at it together in the mirror, then stare into each others eyes seemingly about to kiss (the dog hides his head under his paws in apparent embarrassment or shame) when the chauffeur enters the room. That kiss will never be consummated.
For me, the telling moment, the “give-away” if you will, is Peppy playing with George’s coat, putting her hand into the arm and embracing herself. It is endearing, as beautiful a characterization of daydreaming as I have seen in film. Without seeing the explicit daydream, we immediately sense it. We can empathize with this young person, only yesterday an outside admirer, as she indulges in a fantasy of love.
With little effort we can see that we are caught up in the imaginings of a child, the image reified and captured as we see Peppy play-acting, like a little girl, with George’s jacket and top hat, a young girl in barely disguised love for the man of her dreams, the hero of her world, the older married man whom she dreams of marrying.
George is, after all, a married man. We have just seen him telling his chauffeur to buy some jewelry for his wife. That kiss that almost happens would be the start of an adulterous affair; but, in the world of fantasy at which we are engaged just beneath the surface, it would more importantly be experienced as incestuous, the realization of a girl’s forbidden wish towards her father.
If we have any doubt, the film goes on to emphasize the generational difference as George falls from his pedestal and Peppy ascends. George is told by the director, “You and I belong to another era, George. The world is talking now. … People want new faces, talking faces. … I wish it wasn’t like this, but the public wants fresh meat and the public is never wrong.” George is confident that he can successfully make his own silent film, but as he is walking out, he sees a poster with the “new faces” and sees that Peppy is one of the featured “fresh meat.” He runs into her as he is leaving. She writes down her name, clearly wants to meet him again, and refers to the young men following her around as “toys.”
George attempts to finance his own silent movie, “Tears of Love,” while Peppy is featured in a new film that will come out the same night. He is having dinner with his chauffeur at a restaurant the night before the openings, when Peppy comes in with a coterie of reporters. When asked why she is Hollywood’s new sweetheart, she answers, not realizing that George is behind her,
“I don’t know. Maybe because I talk and the audience can hear me.” She goes on, “People are tired of old actors mugging at the camera to be understood.”
No clearer statement could be made to show that they are symbolic of an older and a younger generation. After her picture has come out as a hit and his as a total failure, she comes by to tell him she saw his film and apologize for what he overheard. She is accompanied by a young man who shakes George’s hand telling him he was his father’s favorite; but, it is clear that Peppy’s interest is in George, who is polite, but holds back out of pride.
George’s attachment to silence underlines his belonging to an older, surpassed generation. It was, of course, a reality that affected some silent film stars, but not others, and a film device that we can understand because of the dramatic change in culture. But the film-makers make it a point of stubborn principle. We see it in the opening scene, in a “film within a film,” George’s newest hit movie. He is being tortured, tied to a chair, with head-phones attached to his ears while his captors turn up the dial (presumably increasing the volume) trying to overcome his refusal to talk. He resists and ends up escaping, with the help of his little dog, saving his companion, a beautiful blonde, and riding off with her in a single prop plane evading gunshots, shouting “Free Georgia.” The emphasis on silence is added as we see George walking onstage behind the screen in front of a large sign that says “Silence, no talking while film is in progress.”
Later, in a tragi-comic dream sequence we see him as he is bombarded by noises that we hear with him, the phone ringing, the dog barking, people laughing, culminating in a feather falling to the ground with a loud boom as he wakens from his nightmare.
Silence is a vital part of George’s identity and the identity of his generation, a gripping on to the world he has known in the face of change. We can look back smugly at George denying the significance of talking films, but any of us beyond the age of something have to embrace or resist the changes that mark us as belonging to an “older generation.” Increasingly, we accept or reject and possibly mock the new forms of communication that abound and are taken up naturally and easily by younger people. Have none of us been caught short and left in our time by one or more of these new forms—texting, tweeting, all forms of social media? We are all too aware of generational differences in style and communication and few of us have not at some point dismissed it.
George’s stubbornness and pride provide a needed element of the love story. A good love story requires an obstacle, a tension that keeps the lovers apart so that we are pulled towards the ultimate resolution. George loses his work, his fame, his marriage, money and possessions. At the same time, Peppy is achieving everything he has lost. She wants to help him, secretly buying all his possessions that he sells at auction to support himself. After George almost dies in a fire started when he attempts to burn his old films (saved by the heroics of his dog, who brings a policeman to drag him out), Peppy arranges for him to be brought to her opulent mansion. She has learned that in the fire he was clinging to one piece of film, the scene with her in the spy movie.
She comes to his bedside in the morning and helps feed him, reversing the generational nurturance. She brings him a script to read. (In A Star is Born, Esther gets the studio director to offer Norman a part, but he rejects it because he has only a supporting role.) George’s pride and his unwillingness to act in a talking film cause him to reject it and to leave her home. As he is wandering in her mansion, he finds a room filled with all of his auctioned possessions, culminating in his finding the massive picture of himself in top hat and tails.
Finally, he is about to shoot himself, but Peppy drives to his rescue, arriving just in time to save him, reversing the “Perils of Pauline” theme. At the end of the film, she has found the solution. We see them doing an elaborate tap dance sequence together to the delight of the film director. Going back to their original bond in dancing, she finds a way for him to use his skills, skills that he brought from his era.
This is an Oedipal love story in which the tables are turned so that the admiring little girl achieves the status once held by her father, totally eclipsing her mother. (By this time, George’s wife has long ago left him.) But it goes a step further, becoming an Oedipal rescue fantasy, not just a fantasy of a girl who becomes a star as her admiring father looks on, but a fantasy of a girl who looks to rescue the man she admired, the man who had pulled her from obscurity, given life to the new person she has become.
When I began to think about writing about The Artist, I tried looking up female rescue fantasies in PEP. I found virtually nothing. Perhaps I didn’t search correctly, but I did try different approaches. Freud’s original concept of the “rescue fantasy” had to do with a male fantasy of rescuing a fallen, immoral woman. Over time, the term became more commonly used to refer to analysts’ fantasies of rescuing patients. Some of the literature refers to the maternal fantasy of the female analyst or therapist who indulges in a rescue fantasy directed at a patient. There are some references to a male fantasy of rescuing father which emphasize the unconscious aggressive component, but only two papers that directly addressed a girl’s rescue fantasy of her father.
Fenichel (1949), using a case and general references from literature and myth of girls who rescued and protected fathers and father figures, traced the meaning to a fantasy of the girl being the phallus. It seems reasonable to assume that a girl’s fantasy of rescuing her father contains some element of gratification at being or having the father’s phallus. Certainly, we can see possible elements of that in The Artist with the reversal of fortune, which could stand for a fantasy of reversal of anatomy. It rings particularly true as helping to explain George’s refusal to accept her help. He is portrayed as a phallic narcissist, his masculinity and self esteem all tied together. I think a much clearer case can be made for the role of the girl having or becoming the phallus in A Star is Born, but that’s for another time.
I also found one recent paper by Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau (2010) in which she speaks of female rescue fantasies directed towards the man based on a desexualized fantasy of being caretaker for the father rather than lover. In her abstract, she writes, “The Greek myth of Kore/Persephone captures a particular psychopathology of women who are torn between a deadened and often asexual husband (Hades) and an ongoing close relationship with a caretaking mother (Demeter). Psychoanalytic work often reveals that these women live in the shadow of their mothers’ failed oedipal complex. Their identificatory preoccupation with maternal object preservation disrupted or distorted their oedipal development, and ever since continues to serve as a defense against sexual strivings.” (p. 911)
I was thinking in terms of a much more common and not so pathological fantasy. We all know from observation that little girls often wish to take care of Daddy. It is a superficially desexualized fantasy that clearly defends against any incestuous underlying wishes.
The film maintains this defense. In the scene in the dressing room, early on, George first sublimates his attraction to Peppy, taking the appropriate role of mentor while provocatively putting an artificial birthmark above her upper lip. (The title of her hit movie that comes out when his flops makes reference to that “spot.”) But as they stare at one another and appear to be incrementally moving forward to a kiss, we are saved from this adulterous and unconsciously incestuous moment by the shame and embarrassment of the dog and the intrusion of the chauffeur. Sometimes the superego takes strange form in films.
They never consummate that kiss. Peppy saves George and even feeds him, but in the end, their sexual embrace is sublimated in an elaborate and beautiful dance number. At the end of it, as they present themselves in front of the director, he smiles and vocally expresses his pleasure. When he asks them if they can do it again for another shot, George says his two spoken words, “With Pleasure!” We leave with a good feeling at the ultimate success of the love story and of the rescue fantasy. The asexuality, or should I say understated, sublimated or represented sexuality, seems suitable for the “innocent” era that the story represents.
George’s pride is likely not the only barrier to the gratification of this love affair. We can now understand why the kiss was never consummated. At the point at which they are about to kiss, George is a married man. In the context of this film, that kiss would have been far too close to the realization of the incestuous fantasy. In A Star is Born, Norman is not married when he meets Esther, but he does eventually marry her, in effect consummating the relationship. Can it be that the violation of the incest taboo, the consummation of the little girl’s Oedipal fantasy necessitated the tragic ending to that film? In any case, in The Artist the kiss never happens and the consummation of the fantasy is expressed in sublimated form, allowing for the un-conflicted, “innocent” happy ending.
Fenichel, O. (1949) The Symbolic Equation: Girl = Phallus. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 18:303-324.
Schmidt-Hellerau, C. (2010) The Kore com- plex: on a woman’s inheritance of her mother’s failed Oedipus complex. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 79:911-933.
Herbert H. Stein
This is a modified version of an article published in the PANY Bulletin, Fall, 2012 edition