Mediocre essays on great film, part one

One of the great things about being a Com­par­a­tive His­tory of Ideas major at the UW is that I get to take classes with titles like, “On Beauty.” And since On Beauty is a CHID class, that means I get to read the­o­ries of art and aes­thet­ics by the greats (Plato, assorted Neo­pla­ton­ists, a grab bag of Ger­man ide­al­ists) and lit­er­a­ture that is influ­enced by those the­o­rists (Sopho­cles, Goethe, Rilke), and addi­tion­ally watch “beau­ti­ful” films to which those the­o­ries of aes­thet­ics apply.

So lately, I’ve taken to writ­ing mediocre essays on great film. The fol­low­ing essay is my On Beauty midterm, and was writ­ten as a Pla­tonic analy­sis of redemp­tive beauty as rep­re­sented by French New Wave film direc­tor Fran­cois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. My argu­ment is sim­ple and largely incor­rect. I will post a sim­i­lar essay (my On Beauty final), which will be writ­ten on fel­low FNW direc­tor Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chi­noise, on Thurs­day.
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Love in Vain

“Hearts that love in vain, my God, how they cause pain.”
– Cather­ine in Fran­cois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim

There is a scene in Fran­cois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim where the three pri­mary char­ac­ters — Jules, Jim, and Cather­ine — exit a play and walk together along the Seine while dis­cussing the main female char­ac­ter. After a lit­tle back and forth on the impor­tance of clar­ity regard­ing that character’s fidelity to her hus­band, Jules asks,

“Who wrote that woman is nat­ural, and there­fore abominable?”

Jim responds, “Baude­laire, on cer­tain women.”

Jules laughs, and replies, “Not at all! He meant women in gen­eral!” He con­tin­ues to pon­tif­i­cate on this point until Cather­ine remarks on the two men’s idiocy, con­demn­ing Jules for being so brazen and Jim for fail­ing to con­test his remarks. At that point, she stands on a short stone bar­rier next to the river and the cam­era frames a shot close on her face. She lifts her veil, reveal­ing the sim­ple, calm, con­fi­dent smile the viewer has come to know so well before she inex­plic­a­bly jumps into the river. The viewer is still bewil­dered when the nar­ra­tor says,

“Jim fixed Catherine’s leap in his mind and made a sketch of it although he’d never drawn before. He felt a burst of admi­ra­tion and in his thoughts sent her an invis­i­ble kiss. He men­tally swam with her and held his breath to scare Jules.”

This nar­ra­tion bears strik­ing resem­blance to the fol­low­ing pas­sage, taken from Plato’s Phaedrus:

“And thus he loves, but he knows not what; he does not under­stand and can­not explain his own state; he appears to have caught the infec­tion of blind­ness from another; the lover is his mir­ror in whom he is hold­ing him­self, but he is not aware of this. When he is with the lover, both cease from their pain, but when he is away then he longs as he is longed for, and has loves image, love for love (Anteros) lodg­ing in his breast, which he calls and believes to be not love but friend­ship only, and his desire of the other, but weaker; he wants to see him, touch him, kiss, embrace him, and prob­a­bly not long after­wards his desire is accom­plished” (Plato, 66).

In the Pla­tonic modes of inter­pret­ing real­ity, there is only one source of beauty: the One. There are, how­ever, two forms of redemp­tion. We should all be con­cerned with the purifi­ca­tion of our souls, write the the­o­rists, and the best way to take up that con­cern is to devote our­selves to the pur­suit of truth, which begins with the appre­ci­a­tion and clar­i­fi­ca­tion of beauty. This appre­ci­a­tion of beauty holds the sec­ond form of redemp­tion, which is to make copies of that beauty and achieve immor­tal­ity for the indi­vid­ual self. An imple­men­ta­tion of these forms of redemp­tion is seen in the pol­i­tics of love rep­re­sented through­out Truffaut’s film.

In Jules et Jim, Jules and Jim have taken up that pur­suit with Cather­ine as their divine form. We can see in the scene recounted above that Cather­ine is a muse and source of inspi­ra­tion for the two men (par­tic­u­larly, in that case, for Jim, though else­where there are sim­i­lar instances with Jules). The film is essen­tially the story of the two great friends and their encounter with a beau­ti­ful, enig­matic woman. Jules and Jim are com­pared to San­cho Panza and Don Quixote, and share a per­fectly har­mo­nious friend­ship aside from Jim attract­ing many women and Jules attract­ing nearly none. The film begins when the two men are view­ing slides of art­work they might pur­chase, and they come across one par­tic­u­lar sculp­ture that they decide to visit. When they view it in per­son, they find it mes­mer­iz­ing: it has beau­ti­ful lips arranged in a calm, star­tling smile, and they spend an hour gaz­ing at it, find­ing it oddly famil­iar. The two decide that if they ever again see such a smile, they will fol­low it, and they return home “filled with this new rev­e­la­tion.” And, of course, they do find the smile man­i­fested in Catherine’s human form. When we first see her, her face is irrefutably sim­i­lar to the sculp­ture and the afore­men­tioned close-up before she plunges into the Seine.

In attempt­ing a Pla­tonic cri­tique of the redemp­tive value of beauty, specif­i­cally the beauty that flows from Cather­ine to Jules and Jim, Plato’s Phae­drus is a good place to begin. It is here where we are intro­duced to the char­i­o­teer metaphor as a vehi­cle to dis­cuss the dif­fer­ence between mor­tal­ity and immor­tal­ity. In the metaphor, the char­i­o­teer is the spirit of an indi­vid­ual, the light horse is the mind, and the dark horse is the body, and all three of these crea­tures are in pur­suit of the one and only source of beauty: the Beloved. Upon the three’s first sight of their source, one horse exer­cises self-restraint while the other unabashedly rushes for­ward, and the dynamic between the two horses and the maneu­ver­ing of the char­i­o­teer deter­mines whether the indi­vid­ual will ascend into the intel­li­gi­ble realm or descend into the sen­sory. Plato writes on this metaphor as relat­ing to his dialec­tic: “The soul of a man may pass into the life of a beast, or from the beast return again into the man. But the soul which has never seen the truth will not pass into the human form. For a man must have the intel­li­gence of uni­ver­sals, and be able to pro­ceed from the many par­tic­u­lars of sense to one con­cep­tion of rea­son” (Plato, 60). This idea of one con­cep­tion of rea­son begins to lead us to the idea that either knowl­edge or love will be the source of beauty (and there­fore cen­ter­piece of our pur­suits), and as Plato later describes, that source is love.

We can refer here back to the orig­i­nal anec­dote, where Jules retorts to Jim’s claim that the Baude­laire quo­ta­tion refers only to cer­tain women that the quo­ta­tion in fact refers to women in gen­eral. Relat­ing both to Plato’s the­o­ries of techne (“[If] there are arts, there is a stan­dard of mea­sure, and if there is a stan­dard of mea­sure, there are arts; but if either is want­ing, there is nei­ther” (Plato, 7)) and the exis­tence of and devo­tion to forms (“Even so, as I main­tain, nei­ther we nor our guardians, whom we have to edu­cate, can ever become musi­cal until we and they know the essen­tial forms, in all their com­bi­na­tions, and can rec­og­nize them and their images wher­ever they are found, not slight­ing them either in small things or great, but believ­ing them all to be within the sphere of one art and study” (Plato, 28)), Plato educes the idea that beauty is found in uni­ver­sal con­cepts. This is a direct con­tra­dic­tion to the beauty in Jules’ and Jim’s friend­ship that is sug­gested by the film’s nar­ra­tor: that their beauty lies in the details. We see here that although their friend­ship does not change, the intro­duc­tion of Cather­ine to their lives shifts the two men’s focus: instead of hav­ing the knowl­edge of their par­tic­u­lars as their cen­ter­piece, their love for and pur­suit of Cather­ine now pre­sides over their men­tal state.

On that token, we con­tinue on to Sym­po­sium, where Plato fur­thers the idea of the depar­ture of knowl­edge and the rise of love. He writes, “Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul, whose habits, tem­pers, opin­ions, desires, plea­sures, pains, fears, never remain the same in any one of us […] For what is implied in the word ‘rec­ol­lec­tion’ but the depar­ture of knowl­edge, which is ever being for­got­ten, and is renewed and pre­served by rec­ol­lec­tion, and appears to be the same although in real­ity new accord­ing to that law of suc­ces­sion by which all mor­tal things are pre­served, not absolutely the same, but by sub­sti­tu­tion, the old worn-out mor­tal­ity leav­ing another new and sim­i­lar exis­tence behind — unlike the divine, which is always the same and not another?” (Plato, 73). Here we are intro­duced to the Pla­tonic idea of rec­ol­lec­tion, or anam­ne­sis, which is the idea that we hold the truth inside us and now and then we can phys­i­cally see it.

For Jules and Jim, that rec­ol­lec­tion takes place upon their view­ing of the sculp­ture: they see the face, they rec­og­nize its beauty, and they fur­ther acknowl­edge their vague rec­ol­lec­tion of hav­ing seen it before. This brings up two addi­tional con­cepts n addi­tion to anam­ne­sis. Before they rec­og­nize the face, they have to look at it. When the beauty draws them in, their fix­a­tion or gaze on the beau­ti­ful art is pro­longed. The moment of their stare is extended for an hour. The longer they stay, the longer they want to stay so, as said, they make an agree­ment then and there to pur­sue the face if they should ever see it again. This makes a con­nec­tion between beauty and truth: the beauty upon which Jules and Jim fix their gazes prods them toward a fur­ther pur­suit of truth and, there­fore, closer to some form of redemption.

Here addi­tion­ally is that afore­men­tioned tran­si­tion between knowl­edge and love as pur­suits: Plato writes that in anam­ne­sis, our knowl­edge is con­stantly in flux, and so is not of uni­ver­sals. Love, which is eter­nal, is uni­ver­sal. Plato con­tin­ues: “And in this way, Socrates, the mor­tal body, or mor­tal any­thing, par­takes of immor­tal­ity; but the immor­tal in another way. Mar­vel not then at the love which all men have for their off­spring; for that uni­ver­sal love and inter­est is for the sake of immor­tal­ity” (Plato, 73–4).

Here is the redemp­tion we seek. Though the con­sump­tion of beauty for the sake of gain­ing clar­ity relat­ing to truth is of issue for the purifi­ca­tion of our souls, we pri­mar­ily look to make beauty and our­selves immor­tal. In Socrates’ con­ver­sa­tion with Dio­tima in Sym­po­sium (as has been quoted already), Plato writes: “Beauty, then, is the des­tiny or god­dess of par­tu­ri­tion who pre­sides at birth, and there­fore, when approach­ing beauty, the con­ceiv­ing power is pro­pi­tious, and dif­fu­sive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit […] And this is the rea­son why, when the hour of con­cep­tion arrives, and the teem­ing nature is full, there is such a flut­ter and ecstasy about beauty whose approach is the alle­vi­a­tion of the pain of tra­vail. For love, Socrates, is not, as you imag­ine, the love of the beau­ti­ful only. [It is] the love of gen­er­a­tion and of birth in beauty” (Plato, 72).

As men­tioned before, in gaz­ing at the beau­ti­ful sculp­ture, both Jules and Jim pro­long their gazes in an attempt to get their fill of the beauty. They never can, though, because their desire for beauty almost always out­lasts the beauty itself. A method, then, of attempt­ing to pro­long that beauty fur­ther is to make copies of it or, as Dio­tima says, to “beget” more copies of the beauty. Another word­ing of this is to have chil­dren with the source of beauty.

The issue of beget­ting chil­dren brings us back to a dis­cus­sion of the film, where both Jules and Jim want to “make copies” with Cather­ine, and for about the first half of the film, Jules is suc­cess­ful in his pur­suit. He and Cather­ine sus­tain a rela­tion­ship for some time, even­tu­ally get mar­ried dur­ing World War I, and have a child — a girl, named Sabine. There is a moment, how­ever, when Jules, Jim, and Cather­ine are walk­ing back to their vaca­tion house from a day at the beach, when Jules asks Jim if he would mind if Jules mar­ried Cather­ine. Jim replies,

“I’m afraid she’ll never be happy here on earth. She’s a vision for all, per­haps not meant for one man alone.”

This quo­ta­tion fur­thers the idea of Cather­ine as a sen­sory man­i­fes­ta­tion of a form, but it also begins the film on a sur­vey of Catherine’s failed and unortho­dox rela­tion­ships. Toward the begin­ning of the film, before the scene where Jules asks about mar­riage, Jim picks Cather­ine up from her house to take her to the train sta­tion. When he enters her room, she takes a few crum­pled pieces of paper from a pot, puts them on the floor, and sets them on fire. “Lies,” she explains, as they burn and briefly catch fire to her night­gown. Shortly after, in the same scene, she takes a small bot­tle from her purse and explains, “Sul­fu­ric acid. For the eyes of men who tell lies.” Though in Plato, the Gods and the forms can do no wrong, when bad things hap­pen, the expla­na­tion is often that the Gods made those things hap­pen for a rea­son, often as pun­ish­ment. Cather­ine takes a sim­i­lar stance: she has pun­ish­ments in store for when she feels underappreciated.

Catherine’s rela­tion­ships often dis­in­te­grate despite (and per­haps because of) her prepa­ra­tion for fail­ure. It is in these fail­ures of rela­tion­ships where the lim­i­ta­tions of Plato’s idea of beau­ti­ful redemp­tion through beget­ting copies (immor­tal­ity) and the pur­suit of truth (clar­i­fy­ing dis­cerni­bil­ity of beauty) are exposed. After Jules’ mar­riage to Cather­ine, Jim vis­its the cou­ple and Sabine at their home in Aus­tria. There, Jules con­fides in Jim that Cather­ine is grow­ing tired of their mar­riage. She dis­ap­pears for long amounts of time, pun­ishes him for mis­takes he can’t define (much like Jim’s ear­lier tacit agree­ment with Jules on Baudelaire’s analy­sis of women), and has con­stant affairs with other men. Even­tu­ally, Cather­ine decides that she wants to pur­sue a rela­tion­ship with Jim, which he hap­pily begins but even­tu­ally falls to the same fate as Jules. Their rela­tion­ship fails, how­ever, largely because the cou­ple can’t beget children.

In the begin­ning of Jim and Catherine’s rela­tion­ship, there is a point where Jules (who is Aus­trian) shouts down a quo­ta­tion in Ger­man to the cou­ple, and then asks Cather­ine to trans­late. “Hearts that love in vain,” she says, “my God, how they cause pain.” She then asks to bor­row Jules’ copy of Goethe’s Elec­tive Affini­ties, a novel based on a dis­cus­sion of the pos­si­bil­ity of human pas­sions, such as mar­riage, con­flict, and free will, being sub­ject to reg­u­la­tion via the laws of chem­istry. There is a sim­i­lar dis­cus­sion present in Jules et Jim, as we have seen, which relates to Plato’s ideas of redemp­tive beauty. This film bla­tantly asks a ques­tion: can a rela­tion­ship ever work between three peo­ple, where two men love the same woman and the women loves both men?

Through­out the film, we see many dif­fer­ent rep­re­sen­ta­tions of failed rela­tion­ships and lov­ing done in vain — Cather­ine and Jules, Cather­ine and Jim, Cather­ine and Albert, Cather­ine and Napoleon. — based on the Pla­tonic model of the suc­cess­ful cou­ple. We addi­tion­ally see exam­ples of unortho­dox rela­tion­ships, such as the ones held by Therese, Jules and Jim’s friend from early in the film, who hops from bed to bed but even­tu­ally set­tles down with one man, say­ing, “We’re a per­fect cou­ple! No kids!” Here, we can argue that Plato’s the­ory of suc­cess based on chil­dren has not with­stood the test of time, even in the 1960s, and Catherine’s model of the per­fect cou­ple, where for a rela­tion­ship to work, at least one of the two peo­ple needs to be faith­ful, is gain­ing more success.

For Jules, Jim, and Cather­ine, there is a Pla­tonic means of inter­pret­ing their ends. The lim­i­ta­tions of redemp­tion are exposed. The rela­tion­ship between the three ends when Cather­ine dri­ves her­self and Jim off a bridge and into a river as Jules looks on. Here, Jules is essen­tially suc­cess­ful since he is left with a copy of Cather­ine in Sabine. Cather­ine finds some suc­cess in her model of reject­ing all reg­u­la­tions by shed­ding her bod­ily form, though she can­not escape it com­pletely, since her ashes can­not be scat­tered from a hill­top into a field because it is against legal regulations.