At some point I started noticing the predatory bird imagery associated with Mrs. Stone. And then I noticed that the cover of my book has a giant stylized bird on it. I'm kind of slow on the uptake! But once I noticed, I started circling all the bird references, and there are dozens. (I'd even argue that the imagery is heavy-handed, but maybe there's a reason for that treatment that I'm not seeing). Her apartment in Rome is compared to an "eyrie of a bird." Her eyes are thought of by Paolo as containing "a rapacious bird." She sometimes has a "hawklike expression." She behaves toward the young actor she seduced as "a great bird of plunder." Time is spoken of as arresting her in "mid-flight." There's a reference to the "birdlike opacity of her eyes." At the end, she sweeps by Paolo with "the rapidity of a great-winged bird." And so on. The suit she buys Paolo is "dove" (peaceful, not predatory) grey.
Any thoughts on that? Did you see her as a predatory bird? Is she in any sense more preying than preyed upon?
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Particularly after the references to the disastrous and foolhardy attempt to play the teenage Juliet far too late in life, I couldn’t shake the image of Norma Desmond.
ReplyDeleteI think the tragic irony is highlighted when Mrs. Stone tells Paolo, "When the time comes that nobody can desire me for myself, I think I would rather not be desired at all." For me, the story is about a woman, formerly the predatory bird, who wants so desperately to be loved "for herself" that she in fact becomes the bird of prey - vulnerable to the Contessa's schemes. And in doing so, she loses her dignity - "With Paolo Mrs. Stone had somehow permitted herself to enjoy the innocent notion that the fresher quality could mean a superior kind, one with whom an honest and dignified bond could be established. Well, now that extravagant myth no longer existed ... It was impossible, with dignity, to be anything but alone."
ReplyDeleteBut Mrs. Stone doesn’t fall for the Contessa’s scheme. She is quite aware of what the Contessa is doing and she brushes aside the gambit that Paolo offers that the Contessa had created. When she takes Paolo on without the extravagant payment, I’m not sure how thoroughly she manages to convince herself that she still isn’t buying his affections.
ReplyDeleteWhen she was able to dominate, she felt no need to be desired. I take her to be the predatory spirit that has lost its talons—she is at lost for what kind of relationship is even possible for her.
I don't know. I think Shanxi has a point that Mrs. Stone was vulnerable to the contessa. She didn't exactly fall for the contessa's schemes, as you note, DW, but I definitely had the sense that she was vulnerable to manipulation, even if she knew she was being manipulated.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think you both are saying something similar about her desperation and identity confusion in the end — the "drift" that dislocates her. (A realization, as Shanxi noted, that she's not going to be loved "for herself" the way she once was; that she's a bird without talons, as DW says). Once she dropped the key of surrender, the dislocating drift "stops." It's like she realized that it's better to be in the game, even if the game is sleazy and rigged, than to be alone on the sidelines, to be nothing. I don't have the book with me at the moment, but right before she drops the key she looks at the vast expanse of her empty bed and tells herself that anything is better than this Nothingness.
And, oh gosh, wasn't there something about how she didn't READ, that is, didn't stockpile some inner resources to help her cope with the inevitable day when she couldn't rely on her looks? When Nothingness would be staring her in the face and freshening her lipstick wouldn't make it go away? I'll have to check. We girls in glasses tend to enjoy that sort of comeuppance.
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ReplyDeleteHer life was very centered on her version of the King on the Hill game, and it was explicitly mentioned that she didn’t develop any internal resources for when she could no longer play that game. And of course she didn’t have any actual friends.
ReplyDeleteI suppose we need a separate post about the husband, but in this regard, it seems that she was far more dependant than she knew on her husband. After his death the tatters of her life were too few and scattered to be quite sewn back together.
So is she settling for a new role in the game of being used by the pretty young boys who just want her money? Is being back in SOME game what stops the drift?
She did actually read a bit. She read her reviews which, of course, were ephemeral if not mere flattery as result of her successful cultivation of the reviewers. But more importantly, she read all those plays that she acted in. This could have been substantive, but she read without reflection. The lines were merely instrumental to the furtherance of her ambition. I found it interesting that she was such a quick study that she decided it prudent to pretend to be slower at mastering her lines than she really was. And then these formidable powers of memory abandoned her when they could no longer serve her career. In Rome she comes to start doubting that she had had all that much talent as an actor, and that must no doubt be because she never occupied and understood the characters she played.
ReplyDeleteOh, that's a nice point about how she must have read a ton of Shakespeare and whatnot and never got anything out of it except her own vanity and fame. It's really kind of remarkable when you think of it! And yeah, as you noted, that would also explain, partially at least, the mediocrity of her acting.
ReplyDeleteWilliams must have encountered this sort of thing often as a playwright: actors who were magically beautiful and had a certain stage presence but who failed to understand and do justice to his work — who, like the gigolos, couldn't love it for itself but only what it could do for them.
Oh, that’s interesting to consider. I hadn’t thought about how his experiences as a playwright might influence this story. Maybe he had a bit of an axe to grind since I think he overdraws Mrs. Stone. Or maybe the diva personality really gets that bad.
ReplyDeleteWilliams certainly does hit us over the head with the bird imagery. Why do you think that is? Wouldn't it be more effective if it were more subtle?
ReplyDeleteAlso, in two instances dove references are used for Paolo: his dove-gray suit and the story he tells about the Doves flight squad. Doesn't this seem like a generous symbol for Paolo? Or is this just how he would like to see himself?
DW, I was thinking Norma Desmond, too. I thought it was interesting to see this "Sunset Boulevard" story told from the perspective of the aging woman rather than her young boy-toy.
Yeah, the bird imagery, mostly unflattering, is what made me question whether Williams himself had much liking or sympathy for his protagonist. I mean, in many respects she is sympathetically drawn, and the portrait of her evoked pity in me, but the bird imagery, in particular, seems to undercut all that. And I think you can argue that in the end he throws her to a wolf (although other readings are plausible).
ReplyDeleteAnd, yeah, great point about dove imagery being used with Paolo not once but twice. I think, as Erin mentioned, that that's just how Paolo sees himself, but I sort of wondered if maybe Williams himself had some sympathy for Paolo that tended to undercut his portrait as a villain. Did you have the sense that there was maybe an attitude of "Well, Paolo is just doing what he needs to do to survive and prosper in his vocation, just as Mrs. Stone did what she needed to do when she was young, and you could argue that Paolo's selfishness and manipulation are simply more honest whereas Mrs. Stone's was always sugar-coated but still every bit as lethal to its victims." Same villain, different wrapper?
Swaggering young fighter pilots off to war, and they choose for their emblem, a dove? I took the improbability of this as a sign that yes Paolo was making the story up on the spot and did not have time to consider what images fighter pilots typically would consider appealing. Perhaps this makes the dove even more directly a symbol for Paolo since if he is fabricating his history he can choose any motif that fits his self-image.
ReplyDeleteWilliams seems sympathetic to Paolo at least in the sense that Paolo is almost purely a sexual creature and that this is how such creatures survive—you must expect him to fulfill his nature just as you would expect a cat to hunt. Paolo never seems to be presented as even making any moral choices as if the idea just doesn’t apply to him.
ReplyDeleteWhy do you think Paolo would choose to think of himself as a dove? It's not a very "manly" image. It's not charged with sex and money and pleasure, which seem to be his main focus in life.
ReplyDeleteI think Paolo has a sense of himself as sensitive and deeply feeling, sort of dovelike. It's a ridiculously wrong self-image. But maybe it's fueled by his notion that he's of imperial Roman stock. He reminds Mrs. Stone about how ancient and indomitable Rome is. It's 3,000 years old, etc. And he seems to see Americans as marauding barbarians (the soldiers who he says raped his beloved, the rich Americans who think they can lord it over everyone — like vultures stupidly preying on his culture).
ReplyDeleteAnd isn't it World War II? Wouldn't Paolo's Italian Doves have been on the wrong side of the fighting? Mussolini was all about restoring the ancient splendor of Rome to modern Italy, the sense of race, the sense of how The Other/The Foreigner/The Jew/The Racially Impure had diminished the antique culture. Maybe Paolo's native fascism drives his sense that he is being preyed upon, that he is like a dove in the malevolent talons of an evil foreign bird, and can therefore justify any and all means of "self-preservation."
Post war Italy must have been a strange ideological mix. They had gone from being Fascist with dreams of ancient Roman glory to being another defeated country under Nazi occupation. The Americans fought a long destructive campaign to liberate Italy from this occupation. So would the post-war Italian chauvinist still be attracted to fascist ideals, or would that have been too sullied by Italy’s military failures and the Nazi occupation? The aristocrats—real, or self-imagined—might still have clinged to the dream of a purified and restored Rome and been particularly resentful of the arrival of these rich and dissipated Americans as well as just being more generally resentful that it took the Americans to evict the Germans in the first place.
ReplyDeleteSo maybe Paolo has a grand romantic vision of himself and Italy as tragic victims.