Diva – A French Film takes me back in time to 1981.

Psychoanalysis of Diva, Psychology of Diva, Diva Cinema Du Look 

The summer before I left home for college, I remember sitting in the locker room of the cafeteria where I worked after a long shift and trying to listen to my thoughts.  I was going to a college that promised to “teach students how to think” and I wanted to capture the experience of my mind before college to see if it would change after having had a college education.

I wasn’t successful at recording what my thought process was like.  In that moment, it seemed like there was a big empty space inside my head – not as if there were nothing there, but as if there was a potential space that could be filled with… I don’t know what.  I can still access that experience, but it really wasn’t what I wanted to register.  I wanted to register my mind in action – a much harder thing to do.  Writing is an approximation of that, and certainly I could compare my writing now with how I wrote then, and I could see a significant difference.  But what was I thinking?

Last night the reluctant wife indulged me and, through the wonders of streaming video, we watched the film that I dubbed “the best film ever” four years after that moment in the locker room.  I only vaguely recalled a few moments from it, but I sensed (especially since, though it was well reviewed, no one else that I know of ever put it on a best of all-time list) that my enjoyment of the film would have much more to do with the state of my psyche (not quite how I was thinking – but a good analogue) at the time that I was graduating from college.

Well, guilty as charged.  The film stands up pretty well to time.  It is still a thriller.  It is more violent than I remembered, and it is action and image rather than language based.  The linguistic component is primarily in the form of opera arias.  As I write this, I am aware that this probably describes my thinking – both before and after my college experience of reading my way through the great books.  I think that I was (and still largely am) a visual thinker – and someone who is action prone (not exactly the ideal psychoanalyst – yet another reason I am a little reluctant…).

But the movie taps into my psychic structure – especially at the time.  It is as if it were a direct copy of an undreamt but essential dream that described as much of my psychology as any dream could.  It is eerie to feel this closely connected to a director (Jean-Jacques Beineix) and his work.  Did he and I share the same family?  Is he my long lost twin who was invisible as I was growing up?

In the film, Jules (Frédéric Andréi) is a postal carrier.  He rides a motor scooter to deliver the mail.  He lives on the top floor of a garage behind swinging plastic doors.  He is a nobody.  But inside his apartment, which is filled with fantastic paintings on the walls, floors and ceilings, is a collection of music and the high tech stereo equipment to play it.  He is an opera aficionado.

In the first scene in the film, Jules is listening to, and surreptitiously recording a particular Diva’s public recital, Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelminia Wiggins Fernandez).  Behind him are two gangstery looking Asian men with really bad sunglasses on.  After the recital, he goes back stage to get his program signed, and steals the robe that she sang in.

Hawkins, despite being a world famous Diva, has never allowed her voice to be recorded.  In fact, she believes that if someone were to record her voice, especially against her will, this would be tantamount to rape. 

The recording of the Diva’s singing sets in motion one of two John Grisham-type plot devices that overlap.  In this device, an ordinary person (who usually has unknown incredible powers) falls into a web of mystery entirely innocently.  In this case, Jules, a true fan, is making the recording exclusively for his own use.  But the Taiwanese want the tape in order to blackmail Hawkins into signing a record contract. 

The second Grisham-like plot device also involves a tape.  In this case, a former prostitute in a drugs for prostitutes ring drops a cassette tape into Jules postal bag just before being murdered by the ring’s enforcers.  In addition to being a prostitute, she was the former lover of the ring leader, who just happens to be the chief of the homicide division of the Paris police.  In the tape, she implicates him and he is in charge of the investigation to find the tape.

Each of these incidents has an incredibly low likelihood of happening.  How did Jules get the machine to record into the concert and take it backstage afterwards without getting detected?  Why didn’t the Taiwanese guys record the concert themselves?  Why are the police chasing Jules as the same moment that the Taiwanese guys are?

And then it gets even more farfetched.  Jules sees a young Vietnamese woman, Alba (Thuy An Luu) steal a Jazz album at his favorite record shop.  He follows her to chat her up and find out about her techniques.  He thinks he is building the relationship with her and, when he asks her out on a date, assumes that he is in the lead.  In fact, she is “collecting” him for the man she lives with – a zen master Frenchman, Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) who lives with her in a cavernous loft that has a bathtub, a sleeping area, a kitchen area, and a great sound system – and enough floor space for her to roller skate on and for him to complete a 100,000 piece puzzle of a wave.

So, how did this film connect with my 21 or 22 year old psychic structure?  What can I see in it now that I didn’t see then?  First of all, I identified with Jules.  I, too, believed myself to have an untapped potential.  I believed myself to be an empathic and compassionate person who had deep interests – though they were not as narrowly defined as Jules’s.  I also naively believed that I could connect with women who had great talent, like Hawkins, and help them realize that in a way that they had not to this point.

I also admired Gorodish.  I wanted to be someone who was wise and a strategic thinker, but even more, I wanted someone who, like Gorodish, was a wise and strategic thinker on my side – a kind of guardian angel who would provide just enough savvy to grease the wheels so that my plans – and my goodness – could show itself and positively effect change in the world – without, by the way – and this is more than a little embarrassing – having to change myself; without, in a word, having to grow up.

I’m hoping that you can see that, despite the ways in which I am ill-suited to be an analyst, I am also keenly oriented towards such a profession, and this film helps articulate that these aspects of me, which I did not at the time appreciate as being uniquely mine (I really thought, at the time about the nature of being human; not about the natures of particular human beings), were in fact pushing me towards a profession like this one.  I resonated with this film because it presented a version of myself that I thought was attainable – and I didn’t pay attention to the complicated plot that was necessary to support such an identity.

This film is considered perhaps the best example of the “Cinema du Look”.  The director creates arresting visual images – the chase scenes are marvelous – the architecture is divine – and the dialogue is almost non-existent.  When Jules convinces Hawkins that he is her biggest fan, they spend an eternity together, but they don’t talk.  They simply exist together in a kind of weightless, tender, close but formal way that allows them to admire each other and their mutual love of opera.  They can just be together.  We can focus on the surface, and in doing that, sense the depths without plunging into them.

Gorodish knows the depths.  He, unlike Jules, is worldly wise and gets how people can be cruel because he is cruel.  But he is also a thinker.  In the only scene that I remembered, he is cutting onions for dinner.  And he is wearing a mask and snorkel.  Naturally.  He thinks things out and plans for them – and this means he doesn’t have to weep.  Jules, in our first meeting with him, as he listens to Hawkins sing, cries a tear.  We know that he can feel – and it is safe to do so because there is a masculine world that is protecting his ability to do that.

This film’s gender politics are very much frozen in the time.  Women are two dimensional objects – and even though there is some reference to this as problematic – the truth of the current state of affairs is all too visible all over the screen.  And so, of course, my 1981 objectification of women – intended as a veneration, but certainly something that RGB and others of that period would point out were shackles – is on display.

Happily I have worked on personal development.  There are certainly aspects of my 22 year old self that are still operative – I did, after all, follow the career path.  If my own analysis taught me nothing else, it clarified that I had more depth, and could put words to that depth, than my 22 year old self – that was focused on and concerned about “the Look” - could ever have imagined.  It also has helped me to look for that depth in others – though, to be fair, I was doing that then.

In the final scene in the film, Hawkins, who has never heard her own voice, is allowing Jules to play her singing for her.  Despite this being the one thing she did not want to have happen – as an artist and as a woman – the one thing we analysts would say she is most defended against – she is allowing Jules into this forbidden space.  Jules – and we – share with her the wonder of her hearing her own tremendous voice –the voice we have been admiring throughout the film – engulf them, together, in what has previously been Jules’s solo pleasure.  How did we get to be so lucky?

 

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