Garbo Drinks! ANNA CHRISTIE

Catching 1930's ANNA CHRISTIE last night on a big screen for the first time, I began at last to understand the appeal of Garbo, sober. I used to love her when I was drinking because her mix of asexual bravado and tortured feminine emotion was the perfect amplification for my maudlin swamp moods... but seeing the film, whilst sober? To a sober 21st century mind unprepared, Garbo can be a whiny drag... at least for me, until last night when the link between Garbo and James Dean became clear... a link forged in the hell of pure art and insanity. 

Like Dean, Garbo alternates between being comfortable in her skin and trying to climb out of it; she sails on the giddy highs of some emotions and lets others defeat her. Every weary step of the way, her Anna pours forth with languor and measured early sound-second language enunciative speaking, like a leaky flour sack. There's a sense that she was good at mimicking her elders as a child, of making fun of her English teacher's pronunciation --her pronunciation and accented syllables covered with private little jokey post-it notes. In the long static scenes between her and her "Old Devil Sea"-hating Swedish tugboat captain father, Kris Kristofferson (!), Garbo wears big manly sweaters and slacks and when Kris pisses her off, her shoulders slump inwards as if she's trying to hide her lack of cleavage or keep someone from stealing her football. "Men! Men! Men!" is her lament. She hates them (like Kris hates the ocean) because her drunken father sent her to off to a farm, away from "no good sailor fellers" he says, not knowing--or choosing to be oblivious--that while there she was enslaved, belittled, abused, and eventually raped by her poor relations (we can imagine her a bit like Nicole Kidman's character in DOGVILLE).  She ran away after that, and--after starving on the street-- "worked in a house... yes, that kind of a house." Her restful idyll on the barge is surely well-deserved, and she's much more the worldly woman than her eventually received brutish but innocent sailor feller (played with amusing Irish bluster by the under-appreciated Charles Bickford --see him in my East of Borneo redux here) who is washed onto the barge and falls in love with her after she brings him a wee nip to warm his bones. Bickford wants to marry her, but first--due to her innate moral fibrosis--she has to tell him--and her father too--the truth about where she really worked in Saint Paul.


I've seen this movie a lot (via a self-duped VHS) during my drinking years, and always loved it both for Garbo's world-weary wit and Eugene O'Neill's knowing attention to alcoholic detail. We drunks know where every drop of liquor is around us within a mile radius, be it hidden in a flask pocket or behind six inches of lead; and we sense that Anna Christie does too, but is trapped by convention into the good girl strait-jacket. We know Anna likes to drink whiskey ("don't be stingy, baby..."), but she's given milk by her dad and the sailor fella who both believe she's virginal and "pure." We share her silent revulsion towards the white stuff and her unspoken desire for what the men are drinking. (When Bickford says "I ordered milk for the lady," you want to punch him.) Anna never actually drinks whiskey with the boys until the end--after shattering their illusions of her purity--and knowing O'Neill (he clearly loves both whiskey and women)--it's always clear whose side he's on. Anna's being able to finally knock 'em back with her men is her reward for dumping her abused past onto their laps, returning the full measure of their see-no-evil hypocrisy (plus interest), and smashing their imbecilic censor-sanctioned pipe dreams. The illusions of these sorts of sailor fellers is what makes old drunk tramps like Marie Dressler have to stagger the streets homeless rather then stay on in the house when the "good" woman returns. So they bring it on themselves and we're meant to root for Anna all the way - her every shot of whiskey is an unabashed triumph. She's a cooler kind of female Hickey in THE ICEMAN COMETH, or Eugene himself in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. She's back to try and get peace by shattering the pipe dreams of others and she does-- and her reward is now she doesn't have to keep drinking milk, and her future/older self --the cautionary tale of where she'll end up if she lets her past horrors go unspoken--Marie Dressler, can come in from the cold.

O'Neill is too good a playwright to spell anything out didactically; he just has Anna rear back and declare, "I'm my own master!" and in the process reduce the men in her life to sulking lions in the corner of the tugboat cage. The horrific hypocrisy of the double standard--ala the film's first act examination of the old saloon "Ladies' Entrance" regulations--comes back to bite the men where it hurts most. Her sinful secret is the mirror to her mens' 'dirty' sex drive: once she discharges it, the blame and burden is shifted; she has unsplit the difference between saint and whore, like a reverse atom bomb.

I always feel bad watching Garbo try to be conventionally sexy (MATA HARI) or zany (TWO-FACED WOMAN). She can be those things, but not 'directly', only in passing. Each requires a certain steadiness of emotion; Garbo can't, emotionally speaking, sit still long enough. She runs a whole spectrum of emotion, from abject despair to exalted euphoria, along every line of dialogue. Like the old devil sea itself, her persona is liquid-based --sloshing from artist to art work to audience - all in one weary chuckle. Go see a Mae West film and you enter a jovial Xmas ball helmed by a helluva gal; enter a Garbo picture and you enter a deserted but fragrant church, empty but for a single crying widow and her dancing flower girl daughter --these are the two main components of Garbo's face; the church is the rest of her body, it exists just to cart that face (and voice) around. Her face and voice are so expressive all else fades away --even her hair doesn't matter, which is good because in nearly every one of her sound films, her hair hangs Prince Valiant-flat and lifeless. It doesn't matter anymore than it would to a Hindu temple deity or Stockholm guttersnipe. Her face betrays every tremor of her empathic hypersensitivity, the hypersensitivity of great artists with susceptibilities to drug and alcohol addiction due to low affect tolerance (i.e. Swedish). Just as James Dean could vacillate between Marlboro poster boy and sweet, shy little nerd, depending on the line of dialogue, or sometimes within the same line, so Garbo is always pulling herself together into an unsmiling Teutonic statue and then cracking up back into a wistful little girl. Some art is a reminder to move past the pain of maternal rejection, and some art just duplicates the exact moment of it, so you can live it over and over again, the pain of loss and the final exaltation when your own 'inner mom' kicks in. Garbo's face is the mask of that inner light, the goddess who comes to comfort you when you finally recognize you are truly on your own. The only one sure to call when you cry is, inevitably, Death. See how it lurches over your shoulder and asks you for a quarter? Behind the mask she's just Marie Dressler; sans skin, sans eyes, sans everything, she'll be you too, in time.

--
I used to worship at the feet of the Alice statue in Central Park; she was my thin mushroom-enthroned Buddha. The size difference between us was, I later realized, the approx. same as between a toddler and a mom, or a movie screen medium shot and the average audience member distance. Isn't the first image we fixate on that of a giant female face looking down at us? Isn't that what big close-ups of women's faces in the movies are all about on that subliminal level of seduction and hypnosis that goes into good cinema?

They talk in pre-code books and in DINNER AT EIGHT of the "Garbo widow" - women whose husbands prayed nightly to the giant divinity at the local theater place of worship and gave up the earthly pleasures of their workaday wives. Not that Garbo was nurturing or maternal, but that's part of the point. We love to re-enact that golden rejection, the moment we found the cold Nordic light that could replace maternal warmth.

It's a brilliant stroke of fate that ANNA CHRISTIE should be Garbo's first sound film, as it's all about the feminine ideal coming home to roost in the gutter, the return of the elevated as the return of the repressed in a surprise Louisiana flip. The silent giant woman we've been adoring now speaks, and what she says is a confession: she's not adorable at all, she's "impure" as if the Alice in Wonderland statue started talking and the first thing it asked for was a fifth of whiskey. Unlike Dean, Garbo wasn't granted a quick death but found a fitting substitute - hiding from the public eye after being unable to move gracefully into the post-code era. And more power to her for resisting that saccharine sanctity! ANNA CHRISTIE is, in addition to being many things, an indictment of the yet to be fully enforced code itself; how much worse it would get they could not know!

Now it comes to me in a flash. Old Captain Kris is the perfect stand-in for Joseph Breen and the Catholic Legion of Decency: in using every ounce of their power to prevent their Annas of America from learning about the lure of that old Devil Sea and rapey sailor fellas, they merely left a generation at the mercy of sleazy rapist farmboys. Even worse, the code also made sure Anna no longer got to rub the Kris and Breen crowd's faces in their hypocrisy in the third act. Instead, we'd see frilly MGM yarns where sailor Kriss/Breen gags her, hobbles her, chains her to the stove and makes her smile about it because he got her a nice ring and some cherub-cheeked freckle-nosed tykes to scamper about at her feet. Our fallen goddesses would have to ride out the rest of the 1930s up to their necks in frilly bland lies until the post-WW 2 noir femme fatales found a million ingenious ways to sneak a drink when father's back was turned. Men! Men! Men! How I hate every one of them!