Issue 186 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published May 1995 Copyright © Socialist Review

Too long in exile

Death and the Maiden
Dir: Roman Polanski

It's a reasonable assumption to make that Death and the Maiden will be a successful film. As a play it was widely acclaimed and its Chilean author Ariel Dorfman became a literary celebrity across the world--except in Chile itself.
What is strange about that is the fact that the play/film deals with an experience that is familiar to tens of thousands of Chileans. Its protagonist is a woman who was tortured after the military overthrow of the reformist government of Salvador Allende in September 1973. It is hard to imagine, let alone explain, the savagery with which the new military rulers took their revenge against socialists, trade unionists or anyone who had been active in the movements from below that grew up during the Allende period. Tens of thousands were tortured, murdered or disappeared.
For the next 17 years--until 1990--Chile was governed by the same repressive regime headed by Augusto Pinochet. When an elected government finally returned to Chile, it was led by a man who had helped to engineer the 1973 coup.
The point of giving the background to Death and the Maiden is to emphasise that moral dilemmas cannot be discussed in the abstract. When the woman protagonist recognises her torturer, her reaction is to take revenge and extract from him the confession he tried to tear out of her. Her rage is entirely justified; she does not and cannot forgive. Her husband, a lawyer, counsels her to look at the great ethical and moral issues. Worse, he becomes an accomplice of the doctor/torturer. The key thing, he says, is reconciliation. Her emotion, in his view, is an obstacle to a greater moral purpose--forgiveness, which is a prelude to progress. Small wonder that in Chile these empty abstractions found no resonance.
The play ends as a mirror comes down from the ceiling to allow the audience to look at itself. It's a clever theatrical device, but it has already taken the discussion away from the ground of history and into the realm of individual morality. It is not true that in some general sense we are all guilty for allowing it to happen; Chileans know that. Some did allow it to happen, some colluded in the torture--and some fought back, resisted, or at the very least hated what they saw.
Until 1973 Ariel Dorfman worked in Chile with a team of writers looking at the way in which popular culture shaped attitudes and values. But when he left Chile and went into exile, something curious happened. He continued to write in the US and became something of a spokesman for the Chilean exiles--in fact he became a sort of professional exile. He is an academic, speaks perfect English, is cultured and educated. His novels and writings took the issues of torture, repression and responsibility into an arena of abstractions, of dilemmas resolved in an unidentifiable setting. Widows, a novel, rehearses the confrontation between the torturer and the victim's wife. But it is set in Greece--or somewhere in the region. His latest novel Konfidenz is written for a foreign audience, and set in Europe in 1939. But its occasional references to historical events can't alter the fact that the dialogue is written in a kind of international speak. The result is that the words are just abstractions and all the moral dilemmas posed just experiments in word play.
Dorfman has provided his audience with a safe way to appear to address real moral questions without confronting the bitter and brutal experience that underlines such dilemmas. His credentials as an exile are impeccable and so the catharsis, the harmless and controlled release of emotion, is legitimate and it has no consequences. You don't have to do anything, just glance at yourself briefly in a mirror and go out into the night. And if you did feel emotionally involved at first, you will emerge from Death and the Maiden reassured that all conflict can be reconciled. In the reality of 1995, Hollywood's discovery of Death and the Maiden is deeply suspect. Its message--that reconciliation is the highest moral achievement--is not an abstract question; when the torturers go free, they provide a guarantee to persecutors everywhere that in the end the society will paper over their crimes for fear that the real responsibility of others will be exposed.
Mike Gonzalez

---

Screen tests

Blue Sky
Dir: Tony Richardson

Jessica Lange won a well deserved best actress Oscar for her role as Carly Marshall, the irrepressible wife of army scientist Hank (Tommy Lee Jones) in this film. In the early 1960s, the Marshall family are based in Hawaii and Hank is researching the levels of radiation after the army's nuclear testing programme.
Carly, meanwhile, is unable to cope with the stultifying life as a forces wife and has created her own fantasy world, peopled by movie 'sex goddesses' of the 1950s and 1960s. Initially, in her Brigitte Bardot character, her behaviour attracts the attention of Hank's superiors, resulting in the family being transferred to Alabama. A new home means a new character and Carly transforms herself into Marilyn Monroe.
Initially captivating the other army wives with tales of Hollywood screen tests and make up lessons, Carly is told, 'Women like you are the reason men like women in the first place.' But she soon comes to the attention of the base's commanding officer, who arranges for Hank to be sent to the Nevada underground testing sites. There Hank is horrified when a test explosion goes ahead even though two cowboys have strayed into the danger area.
When he tries to make this public and reveal the effects of radiation, he is first pressured to falsify his reports, then threatened with a court martial, and finally committed to the military hospital's psychiatric wing for 'observation'. Enter Carly/Marilyn as a whistle blowing campaigner, fighting to expose military cover ups and, of course, save her man.
Blue Sky (called after the project Blue Sky because you can't see or smell radiation and the skies remain blue) tries to be both a romance and a military/political thriller and doesn't really measure up to the latter.
When Hank attempts to go public over the effects of testing he's told, 'You work for the army, not the Atomic Energy Commission and not Congress,' and army officers discuss using the Cold War and Russian nuclear testing to justify their actions to Congress if necessary.
But this is merely the backdrop to the real drama, the relationship between Carla and Hank and their children (the oldest wants to set up a 'Kids Against Tests' group on the base!). Nevertheless, Tommy Lee Jones does an excellent job as the only person who can understand his wife's manic-depressive mood swings and the fantasy world she inhabits, defending her behaviour against his superior officers even though she is used to frame him and prevent him revealing the effects of nuclear radiation.
Set in a time when all women were expected to be like Doris Day, sexually repressed and wearing pink gingham, Lange's portrayal of the rebellious Carly Marshall is a breath of fresh air.
Liz Wheatley

---