The opening scenes of The Bridges of Madison County remind us of our mortality.
A brother and sister meet at the Iowa farmhouse they grew up in to settle their mother’s estate. They are dismayed to discover that she had asked to be cremated and to have her ashes spread from one of the town’s old covered bridges. As they go through the papers she has left them, they find out about an important secret—a four day affair she had had with a freelance photographer years earlier. He had already arranged to have her spread his ashes at the same place. In her initial note of explanation, Francesca Johnson writes: “It’s hard to write this to my own children. I could let this die with the rest of me, I suppose, but as one gets older, one’s fears subside. What becomes more and more important is to be known, known for all that you were during this brief stay. How sad it seems to me to leave this Earth without those you love the most ever really knowing who you were.”
We are reminded that all stories end in death, but that it is not the destination that is important. As we look back on Francesca Johnson’s life, we will see that the affair has helped her escape from the humdrum, moralistic prison of her life and marriage and given her meaning and passion. Janet Maslin wrote in her review of the film (N.Y. Times, 6/2/95), “Eastwood instills this story with the same soulful, reflective tone that has elevated his last few films, and with the wistful notion that life’s great opportunities deserve to be taken.” In this sense, the film is particularly aimed at those of us who see the limitations of our lives and look back wistfully, as Maslin suggests, at missed opportunities. After seeing the film for the first time, I had my own melancholy moment over forgotten dreams of youth. I was not sad for who I am now, but for who I was then, as if I had betrayed the dreams of the young man that I used to be by leaving them unfulfilled.
Francesca’s story is told through three notebooks that she has left for the unsuspecting children. When her narrative begins, Francesca, who was born in Italy, is listening to Italian opera and making dinner for her husband and children who are about to leave to spend four days at the state fair. She admits that she was glad for the freedom. Her daughter walks in and turns the radio to a pop station. Although we are not yet prepared to fully understand, we have already been given hints that Francesca has some dissatisfaction with her life and that she is a long way from her home of origin and her native culture. The Italian opera seems incongruous in this setting. Although we hear them only faintly, the pop songs in the background suggest the affair that will help resolve this tension. The first is “Leader of the Pack,” a song that many viewers will recognize as being about a woman who gives her heart to a powerful, untamed man. The next song starts, “Baby I’m yours, and I’ll be yours till the stars . . .” and fades out.
Francesca describes herself as a hardworking housewife and mother who is caught up in a web of details as she devotes herself to her family. She grew up in Bari, Italy and came to America with the young American soldier who became her husband. Her husband is presented as a taciturn, plodding farmer. Asked to describe him, she says that he is “clean.” He is hardworking and faithful, but unimaginative and not very passionate. We sense that Francesca has been bored and dissatisfied with her life, perhaps without fully knowing it. She sees the family off on their way to the state fair, sits down for a moment of relaxation, and is then back at her chores, beating a rug, when a pick-up truck pulls up in front of the house.
A tall, ruggedly handsome, if aging Clint Eastwood steps out of the truck and announces that he is lost. Now relax your mind and imagine for a moment that you are a middle-aged housewife living in a small town or the suburbs. Your husband and children have just gone off on a four-day trip. You are all alone. A pick-up truck moves into the driveway, and Clint Eastwood gets out asking for directions. Does this sound like reality? It is the kind of good fortune that occurs only in our daydreams, erotic daydreams. This is the beginning of an erotic fantasy.
The fantasy begins gently, with little erotic touches that slowly escalate. Maslin writes, “As Francesca straightens her dress or touches her mouth or smoothes loose wisps of hair, Ms. Streep conveys a sexual tension that the film’s languid pace helps heighten.” The housewife has some difficulty telling him the way and agrees to go with him to the covered bridge he plans to photograph. His arm grazes her leg as he reaches for cigarettes from his glove compartment. He takes time from his work to gather some wild flowers for her. She is intrigued and stimulated, peeking at him through the slats in the bridge and later peeking again through her bedroom window as he takes off his shirt to wash by the outdoor pump. Francesca invites him in for a lemonade, and then for dinner. While he is helping her, he reaches around her waist and then across her breast to grab something. They talk, they laugh, they take a walk under the stars, drink some brandy and part with a little awkwardness. After he has left, she is clearly eroticized as she lets the wind rush past her naked body and later as she looks at the curve of her hip in the mirror. Reluctant to let him go, she drives to the bridge at night to leave a note inviting him again to dinner.
That evening, she lies in the bath, thinking erotically that he has just taken a shower there. “I realized that he had been here just a few minutes before. I was lying where the water had run down his body and I found that intensely erotic. Almost everything about Robert Kincaid had begun to seem erotic to me.” When she goes downstairs, Robert stares at her and tells her, “You look stunning, if you don’t mind me saying so. Like a run around the block howling in agony stunning.”
There is a particularly gratifying moment when a friend calls and begins to gossip about the stranger in town. As she talks about it —”Oh, yeh, I heard about him. I hear he’s some kind of photographer or something. Hmmhmm. Hippy, no is that what a hippy looks like?”— she puts her hand on his shoulder, caressing it with a possessiveness that appears to gratify both her sexual need and her narcissistic need to be in possession of the man whom the other women are talking about. They dance and kiss, and finally they go up to her bedroom. “I had thoughts about him I hardly knew what to do with, and he read every one. Whatever I wanted, he gave himself up to, and in that moment everything I knew to be true about myself was gone. I was acting like another woman, yet I was more myself than ever before.”
But the fantasy would be degraded if it represented only a sexual affair. As their last day together begins, Francesca becomes petulant at the thought that Robert will leave her. She confronts him with her fears that she will just be one of his many women, and challenges his claim to need “no one in particular.” He is forced to admit, “I don’t want to need you, because I can’t have you . . . If I’ve done anything that’s made you think that what we have between us is nothing new for me, it’s just some routine, then I do apologize . . . It’s when I’m thinking of why I make pictures, the reason that I come up with— it just seems that I’ve been making my way here. It seems right now that all I’ve ever done in my life is making my way here to you, and if I have to think about leaving here tomorrow without you.“ He proves his love by first pleading with her to go away with him, and finally by leaving her his ashes and his last earthly wishes. His parting words to her are, “This kind of certainty comes but just once in a lifetime.”
From the woman’s point of view, this is a well-choreographed fantasy that slowly approaches sexuality and culminates in a dramatic, tearful, romantic parting in which the handsome stranger is forced to leave with a broken heart because the housewife remains true to her family. The painful ending of the affair provides an intense gratification of the fantasy. Robert gives up his freedom of heart and pledges his undying love for Francesca. He stands broken-hearted, staring at her in the pouring rain. He suffers at not having her. She becomes the special beloved who has captured his heart. Her fantasies are realized in death. He gives himself to her by sending her his ashes, to be scattered over the bridge that was so important in their meeting along with his picture album from their days together, his camera, and her medallion.
Why can’t she go with him? She says, “No matter how many times I turn it over and over in my mind, it doesn’t seem like the right thing. [He asks, “For who?] For anyone. They’ll never be able to live through the talk. And Richard, Richard will never be able to get his arms around this. It will break him in half. He doesn’t deserve that, he’s never hurt anybody in his whole life . . . His family has had this farm for over a hundred years. Richard doesn’t know how to live anywhere else. And my kids. …. Caroline is only sixteen. She’s about to find out about all of this for herself. She’s going to fall in love and she’s going to try to build a life with someone. If I leave, what does that say to her? . . . You have to know, deep down, the minute we leave here everything will change . . . and no matter how much distance we put between ourselves and this house, I carry it with me. I feel it every minute we’re together and I will start to blame loving you for how much it hurts and then even these four beautiful days will seem just like something sordid and a mistake. [He argues, “We’re hardly two separate people, now. You know some people search all their life for this and never find it and others don’t even think it exists.”] “We are the choices that we have made, Robert. You don’t understand. Nobody understands when a woman makes a choice to marry and have children, in one way her love begins, but in another way it stops. You build a life of details and you just stop and stay steady so that your children can move and when they leave they take your life of details with them. You’re expected to move on again, but you don’t even remember what moved you . . . Oh, but you never think love like this is going to happen to you.” [Robert says, “But now that you have it.”] “Now I want to keep it forever. I want to love you the way I do now for the rest of my life. If we leave we lose it. I can’t make an entire life disappear to start a new one. All I can do is try to hold on to both of us somewhere inside me. You have to help me.”
She says that if she leaves, she loses what they have together. I think we know what she means. The fantasy will not go on. If Robert attached himself to her, he would no longer be the romantic man of her dreams. She is clear about this. She says that what she had with Robert would not exist if they were together and that what she had with her husband, Richard, would cease to exist if they were apart. One could interpret this as saying that Robert would not tolerate being tied down to a relationship in reality. I would take it a step further—Francesca’s fantasy of Robert is dependent upon his being a man who will not be tied down to a relationship. He is the elusive romantic figure whose romance is dependent upon his elusiveness. Francesca must live with Richard and dream of Robert.
We are made to feel that there is a subtle oppressiveness to Francesca’s life with its unending routine and responsibility. She calls it detail. Part of the difficulty is a need to adhere to convention and social morality. She is trapped in a moralistic, asexual world with an asexual husband. Her husband is portrayed as being unimaginative and tied to his family farm. The children are initially asexual and moralistic as well, and tied to marriages in which they have been unable to express their passion. The town and society are described as unforgivingly moralistic, a town without pity. We see them giving a cold shoulder to a young woman, Lucy Redfield, who has been having an affair with a married man. It is easy to assume that they are repudiating their own forbidden fantasies.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that the construction of a fantasy involves all the details, even those that may be borrowed from some reality. The town, the husband, the children, the prevailing morality, are all constructed to represent Francesca’s sexual frustration and to justify her fantasy. Even though they may represent a version of reality and an accurate portrayal of some aspects of life in “middle America” in the early sixties, they also represent an externalization of aspects of a conflict. The husband is unimaginative, asexual, and provincial because it suits the fantasy that he be so.
This is a female version of what has been called in men the “prostitute/madonna” split. The fantasy is that the woman’s needs can be met through two men: One is rooted, faithful, maternal, uncomplicated; the other is wild, fanciful, creative, passionate, sexual, and quixotic. In this fantasy, they cannot be combined in one man. Like the boy who creates prostitute and madonna images to preserve different aspects of his relationship with his mother and to deny his sexual wishes, the girl may create stranger and father images to preserve different aspects of her relationship with her father while denying her sexual wishes for him.
The husband who is available plays the role of the faithful, loving father who has no sexual interest in his little girl. As he is about to leave for four days, Richard asks Francesca to come with him because he can’t stand waking up and not having her next to him in bed. He needs her next to him for the comfort. This is not a predominantly sexual relationship. But when Francesca says that she cannot leave for fear of hurting Richard, that is only part of the truth. She needs him just as much as she needs Robert. Richard is the asexual, loving father that she allows herself to consciously remember. The lover, Robert, represents the father of her unconscious sexual fantasies. He is disguised as a stranger, but he has links with her home. I said earlier that Francesca wishes to be with Robert and to be home, in Bari. Robert takes her there with his description of his brief visit to Bari. She asks him where he sat, and responds dreamily that she had sat there once. Although disguised as a stranger, Robert is a link with her childhood, and with her unconscious childhood sexual fantasies. In the end, she has both their loves.
A girl’s sexual fantasy is sometimes shared with a girlfriend. We learn that long after the affair with Robert, Francesca shares the memory with her friend, Lucy. While Francesca is having her affair with Robert, Lucy is shunned by the town for having an affair with a married man (her future husband). Francesca does not really end up with either man, but with this woman with whom she can comfortably share her fantasies. Lucy, of course, is a woman who has violated the Oedipal taboo, symbolically, by winning another woman’s husband. Like many a young adolescent, Francesca turns to the relative safety of a close friendship with someone of the same sex and away from any further acting out of her Oedipal wishes.
On the surface, Francesca’s conflict is between her dreams and the unthinking constraints of a dulling, conformist morality. As Janet Maslin wrote, we are left feeling “that life’s great opportunities deserve to be taken.” These are noble sentiments. They make us feel good. They also disguise a more troubling conflict. When Robert tells Francesca that not everyone is meant to have a family, she asks, “How can you live for just what you want? What about other people?” This conflict is between her duty—the need to do for others to make life meaningful—and her sexual fantasies. Francesca has two self images to correspond with the two paternal images: one is passionate and sexual, but selfish, the other altruistic and caring, but passionless. Framed in these terms, the conflict is more troubling. It is no wonder the film disguises this troubling conflict behind a surface that appears to equate sexuality with liberation and attention to duty as submission to tyrannical external constraints. That is how a successful sexual daydream is constructed, incorporating defensive features that disguise the underlying purpose.
To this point, I have dealt with only one part of the film, the story of Francesca’s romance. In this case, we cannot examine the painting without the frame. Although it is meant to be experienced in the background, the story of Francesca’s grown children is integral to the film and its effect. Francesca’s romance is given added meaning through the liberating effect her story and her dying wishes have upon her children. Michael and Caroline are both perplexed by the request in her will that she be cremated. Michael is outraged and Caroline intrigued when they learn of their mother’s secret affair through the notebooks she has left them. Michael later confesses to Oedipal motives for his shock, admitting that he felt as if she had cheated him rather than his father. “You know, when you’re the only son you sort of feel like the prince of the kingdom; and, in the back of your mind, you think your mother shouldn’t want sex any more because she has you.” By the end of the film, they have both been liberated by Francesca’s story. Michael returns to his own marriage with the passion that his father had failed to give his mother. Caroline, in empathy with her mother’s needs, leaves a loveless, sexless marriage. We get the sense that her mother has given her permission to break the bonds of convention and marriage. In the dynamics of the film, Francesca’s message has not been lost, and the affair that gave her life meaning has not been in vain. The mother’s message frees the children from the morality that helped to limit her life.
They also free her. The film reminds us that children may become the parents’ moral arbiters. In raising children, we tend to make them the repository of our values, and when we come into conflict over those values, we may experience them as the projection of our morality. Robert Kincaid is aware of this when he says to Francesca as they begin to sip brandy, “We’re not doing anything wrong, you know, nothing that you can’t tell your children about.” Initially, Michael judges her harshly. Francesca has expected this, posthumously advising her daughter to do the reading. Ultimately, Francesca is forgiven by her children, who meaningfully spread her ashes by the bridge.
But something else is going on involving Michael and Caroline. The film opens with an odd parallel. We see a station wagon moving along a country road and arriving at the Johnson farmhouse. Caroline, Francesca’s daughter, is waiting at the house, in parallel to her mother waiting for the arrival of Kincaid. It is her brother she awaits. The parallel is made more explicit a little later with interlocking scenes. Michael discovers that Caroline is unhappy in her marriage. He asks her why she doesn’t leave her husband. The film then goes back to Robert and Francesca. Sensing her frustrations, Robert asks Francesca if she has wanted to leave her husband, obviously mirroring the brother/sister dialogue.
When they enter the house to discuss the will in the opening scene, Michael’s wife seems awkward and out of place. Her comments are somewhat coarse and clownish as when she speculates that Francesca’s wish to be cremated might be an “Italian thing.” Later, she asks if her mother-in-law has left her any money. Michael seems to be annoyed with her, and Caroline ignores her. When Caroline discovers her mother’s secret, she calls Michael in with her and brother and sister become evasive and conspiratorial. Michael’s wife, Betty, is clearly excluded and hurt by it.
As they begin to find out about the affair, Caroline is protective of Michael’s feelings, while prodding him with a gentle humor. When he hesitantly and disgustedly wonders if Francesca and Kincaid had had sex, she says with an affectionate smile, “My lord, it must be nice to be inside your head with the Easter Bunny and Peter Pan.”
Michael leaves Caroline and the notebooks when they near the point at which his mother is about to go to bed with her lover. He comes back from the local tavern with a big smile on his face. Caroline is sitting on the porch in silent contemplation. There is a brief warm exchange in which Michael reveals he is becoming more admiring of his mother’s sexual freedom. Caroline, smiling back, asks if he’s drunk. He says, “Not yet,” pulling a bottle of whiskey from his pocket. He asks, “Do you wanna get outa here for a while?” giving her a sideways glance. Caroline responds with equal warmth, “I think I’d better.” Their eyes smile at one another, and as they walk off, he momentarily puts his arm around her shoulders. They drive to an open spot to share the bottle and talk through the night. There is an obvious parallel with Francesca’s time alone with Robert. As they sit alone together in the early morning, they share their intimate thoughts.
Michael: I never cheated on Betty, not once we were married, I mean.
Caroline: Did you want to?
Michael: Only about a thousand times. What do I do now? What’s good enough for Mom is good enough for me?
Caroline: What gets me is I’m in my forties and in this crummy friggin’ marriage for over twenty years because that’s what I was taught. You stick things out. Normal people don’t get divorced. I can’t remember the last time my husband made love to me so intensely that he transported me to Africa. I don’t think he ever did. But now I find out that in between bake sales my mother was Anais Nin.
Michael: What about me? I feel really weird, like she cheated on me, not Dad. Isn’t that sick? You know when you’re the only son you feel like the prince of the kingdom and in the back of your mind you kinda think your mother shouldn’t want sex anymore because she has you.
Caroline (laughing): You’re right. That is sick.
Later, Michael and Caroline drink brandy together just as their mother did with Robert, while Francesca’s voice says, “When he said we were not two people, he was right. We were as bound together as two people can be.” With that, Michael and Caroline smile at one another, seemingly bound to each other as well as to their mother. When Michael returns to his wife and children, Betty is angry and suspicious about him being out all night. He holds her and pledges to devote himself to her happiness; but in the final scene, he is beside Caroline pouring his mother’s ashes off the bridge in what might be seen as an ejaculatory image.
The suggestion of an incestuous relationship is nothing more than that, but it is there. In fact, if we did not know that Michael and Caroline are brother and sister, we might think that in the context of the film they were meant for each other. Michael goes back to his wife, but there is nothing to suggest that he can share his feelings with her as he does with Caroline. Caroline leaves her husband and remains in the town. Like her mother, she spends a brief time with a man, her brother, then is forced by morality, responsibility and convention to give him up. In Caroline’s case, the “affair” is platonic and the romance is on an unconscious level. That is because while Francesca’s lover, Robert, represents an incestuous love object, her father, Caroline’s “lover,” her brother, Michael, is an incestuous love object.
Fantasy must protect us from wishes that are so forbidden they would distress us. The brother/sister incestuous fantasy cannot be allowed open expression. The affair between Francesca and Robert that would have been taboo in 1965 Iowa is relatively acceptable today (by today’s standards, their greatest sin is smoking cigarettes); but an incestuous affair between a brother and sister will not pass the psychological sensor of the viewers of this movie. It would be disturbing and would destroy the film’s positive tone.
Why was it included at all? I’m not sure. I doubt that it was put there with conscious intent. Brothers and sisters can draw closer after their mother’s death. Perhaps the film makers intuitively sensed that it would gently tickle the unconscious fantasy life of film-goers seeking to escape from the constraints of conventional morality and very secretly wishing to be able to gratify childhood’s incestuous wishes. We have Michael’s statement about being the prince of the kingdom. It is easy to imagine that in Caroline, Michael sees his mother and in Michael, Caroline sees both her father and her mother’s lover. The last scene, in which Michael and Caroline toss their mother’s ashes over the side of the bridge reunites brother, sister, and mother, gently hearkening to the ties of family life. We all harbor the remnants of the intense relationships of our first years. It affected one viewer. I can now see that my own melancholy after seeing the film was not just over forsaken dreams of adolescence and young adulthood, but for the buried incestuous wishes of early childhood. Ultimately, those are the wishes we must finally and forever give up as we approach the end of our lives.
Published in the PANY Bulletin and in Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert H. Stein, M.D. (EReads)