University of Cape Town – FAM3003S

Jacques De Villiers

17 September 2016

 ‘Organs & Bodies’:

The Even-handed Creative Individualism of Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993)

“For we are asking, in the books and movies by women who most honestly confront the subject, whether it is possible to disentangle the neurotic and imprisoning aspects of love from its positive and liberating ones. Whether a woman’s propensity for “total” love is basic or conditioned. Whether insecurity and dependency are crucial or incidental factors in that love…”

– Molly Haskell in her Introduction to From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974: xii)

“Campion’s reluctance to identify her filmmaking as feminist should in no way blind us to the way that her films constitute a new kind of feminism – a feminist politics for our post-feminist epoch.”

– Hilary Neroni in her essay ‘Jane Campion’s Jouissance: Holy Smoke and Feminist Film Theory’ included in Lacan and Contemporary Film (2004: 213)

“You that make your way past me aspire

Toward charms not my own, not genuine –

Oh, if only you knew how much fire,

How much life had been wasted on nothing…”

– Marina Tsvetayeva in her poem ‘You that make your way’ included in her Selected Poems (1987)

When considering which would be the preferable mode of analysis for cinematic texts like Jane Campion’s The Piano – the feminist or the post-colonial reading, in this case – we are too often apt to forget that the film in question also has a say, so to speak, in how easily it would prefer to be pigeonholed as one portrayal or another. So The Piano is, unavoidably, both ‘a feminist exploration of sexuality and desire’ and ‘an investigation of white colonial anxieties’ set against the primordial splendour of 19^th-century New Zealand, whilst really focusing its energies on neither. Instead it is Ada’s story, an outsider’s fable, and thus concerns itself far more with the perils of attempting to escape all orthodoxy – even the ‘traditional’ feminist line – than with pursuing its own critique of the social mores of the period.[1]The film rather presents itself in context, as a pre-set symbolic order of Victorian dialectics (Civilisation/Nature, Masculine/Feminine, Refinement/Spontaneity etc.), and then uses the love story of Ada McGrath and George Baines to evoke a liminal space of all-too-human agency that seeks to shatter even the contemporary viewer’s preconceptions of the propriety of desire. This is still a problematic method, and I don’t want to give the film too much credit for partially escaping the usual antinomies, but in attempting to make a sincerely radical independent film it can be seen that Campion had to stray from the party line of critical theory so as to be true in her mind to her protagonist’s single-minded urge for personal freedom. Whether this decision still does a disservice to the need for a nuanced portrayal of the Maori people is still to be debated. Inspired by the ideas and terms of Deleuze & Guattari and Lacan, I shall use the rest of this essay to discuss all these raised issues and to bring up the constraints and conditions Theory itself imposes on the liberatory aesthetics of Cinema. The Piano is still worth writing about because if we are ever to achieve an intelligent, self-critical mainstream cinema, its success shows it has to be one of the films to build on.

My thesis here, of the apolitical quality of Ada’s transcendental desire, is based on perhaps the most curious, almost magical realist, aspect of the film: the self-conscious split between Ada herself and her indomitable ‘Will’. Her “mind’s voice” provides the bookending voiceovers because she became mute at the age of 6 for no reason she, or anyone else for that matter, can remember. Her father deems this her “dark talent”, tantamount to a kind of self-annihilatory dedication, but it is precisely a skill she has no control over and cannot seem to reason with.[2]  Instead she transfers her expressive voice to the eponymous piano and plays it with complete immersion, often seeming to lighten up the world and cause the camera to dance around her with the swell of her pleasure. But in conflating her means of communication with her form of self-expression, she uncannily short-circuits her social standing and causes much disquiet amongst her fellow colonials. “Her playing is strange, like a mood that passes into you,” says one of the sexless townswomen, disapprovingly, thinking that music has to have a formal performative quality in order to be beautiful. “The unique nature of Campion’s films is that she stages the “object that is replete with enjoyment” at the beginning of the film rather than holding it back to sustain our desire.” (Neroni, 2004: 217) In other words, despite her silence, Ada – thanks to her piano and Flora’s mediatory company – is happily ‘complete’ when we meet her, but utterly self-contained just outside of the symbolic order of Western Civilisation.[3]But she is still, whether she likes it or not, a British woman in the late 19^th-Century, and so still her father’s property to do with her what he wishes.  External circumstance – her arranged marriage to Stewart – deprives her of her constructed idyll by making her have to depend on Baines for the retrieval of her piano, and he takes advantage of the situation to acquire his own masturbatory enjoyment from the presence of her utterly self-dependent ‘jouissance’.[4]The two men in Ada’s life thus set up a fascinating dichotomy of desire: Stewart ‘owns’ her in marriage but shows no attraction to her and lets her keep her private, pre-Oedipal bond with Flora[5], whilst George desires her intensely but has no right to force her to sleep with him, besides the blackmail of owning what she holds most dear (her ‘objet petit a’), her piano. By not insisting on sex, by following through with their arrangement to the nearest possible intimacy – literally lying together naked – before any kind of consummation, and then freeing her to play all 88 keys of her piano without his presence, Baines momentarily breaks the cycle of enforced ownership and cedes Ada the space for her own voluntary desire, allowing her ‘to learn to love him’ in exactly the way Stewart fails to. By finding his pleasure in her jouissance, but ultimately not taking it for himself as part of their deal, he evidences the respect and empathy for her own freedom that no-one else in Ada’s life has had the moral education to feel. When she comes back to him, she forcibly leaves Flora behind and slaps him several times for taking her through the ordeal of seduction, before kissing him and falling to the bed with lust. No matter how uneasy we may feel about the arrangement as a whole, this is Ada’s choice and she feels her love is justified. A situation in which she appeared hopelessly consigned to being a mere object of exchange for the two eligible white men in the region is transformed into a love triangle pivoting around her. As such, this privatized post-feminist gesture makes all the difference for Ada’s sense of agency, for reconciling herself to her Will and to the world.

What connects these initial observations on Ada’s radicalism to a broader postcolonial critique are the ways in which the film shows up both cultures – the white and the Maori – as being equally sincere performances.  That is to say, in their shared ‘outsider’ status, Baines and Ada meet through the implicit mutual recognition that what is orthodox is merely what is prescribed by the presiding culture. Baines, having lived with the Maori for some time, has a ‘pakeha’ identity, indicated by his tattoos and his easy nudity in the tribe’s company, which shows he has been accepted as a consort and a mediator between the otherwise irreconcilable cultures. Ada, as I’ve already shown, isolates herself from ‘civilised’ culture, but nonetheless uses its instruments – “[the piano itself being a signature] symbol of European bourgeois culture” (Dyson, 1995: 268) – to showcase a personal identity that goes far beyond the merely symbolic. However, in highlighting what separates her two protagonists from their surroundings, Campion necessarily hints at the evident similarity of the cultural conceits they interact with.

As much as the Maori may appear as stereotypically ‘foolish natives’ when they rush the stage to save Bluebeard’s eighth wife, how silly do their actions really seem when compared with Stewart’s puritanical harangue of Flora for “shaming the trees” and her subsequent forced scrubbing of their roots? Have we forgotten too that the myth of cinema’s own arrival in Paris insists on the ‘sensible’ European audience’s raucous flight from a rapidly approaching projected train? And when later on a Maori worker tries to strike a note on a detached key from Ada’s piano, we have to remember the befuddlement with which Stewart previously reported Ada’s “playing [the] kitchen table as if it were a piano” to realize such confusions go both ways. There are great gaps in the knowledge of both cultures, and though the story is told from the perspective of the white colonizers – the colonial subaltern does not even have subtitles with which to speak – the ease with which the Maori people appropriate the dress and culture of their new neighbours has the implicit effect of undermining the formality and decorousness of the entire white community. When two native seamstresses start singing ‘God Save the Queen’ while the townswomen gossip, they find themselves promptly shushed and scolded. This is not to say that the film’s depiction of the Maoris is not condescending, just that the white Christian community is depicted with a near equal contempt and the only satisfactory synthesis of the two is shown to be Ada and Baines’s union. This is problematic in itself, but evidences my foundational point that The Piano is neither a typically feminist nor a dependably postcolonial film, but a turn away from solidarity and inwards to the free pursuit of desire.

The scene which most clearly depicts this, which shows the performativity within desire itself, is the one in which Baines fingers the hole in Ada’s stocking.  In some ways it seems like the negative-image to the skirt-lifting scene in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), in that if the latter was the performance of a sadistic nightmare, this is the acting-out of an idle daydream on Baines’s part. He lies down under Ada’s carriage and insists she reveal herself further and further, and then, with the desired sight patently on show, he merely strokes a hole in her stocking with one finger, momentarily interrupting her playing. There is something more strangely erotic in this shot progression than in any other scene in the film. Ada, though annoyed, doesn’t let herself get distracted from her playing, from her own pleasure, but Baines chooses an approximation of sex, a visual rhyme with which to make contact with her, and by this make-believe of arousal he raises the stakes of their exchange from mere voyeurism to the beginning of caresses. Again, we have an example of the ironic logic of lack: the absence of sexual contact makes this moment more erotic, Ada’s unwillingness to speak makes her self-expression even more important to her and the ‘incomplete’ nature of all cultures makes the process of othering appear to consolidate civilized values.

 The film perpetually pursues this logic because it underscores the internal divisions within the white colonial character. A gap is seemingly always evident between the form and the content of the settlers’ actions, by which I mean that Stewart and the townswomen showcase an insistence on abstract value and decorum that utterly belies the sentimental or unconscious causes of desire. This capitalistic obsession with pure utility, whilst perhaps being the engine of their expansive progress, leads to consistent absurdities throughout the movie. The fact that a photograph of Ada and Stewart’s wedding substitutes perfectly for the actual ceremony, that Stewart can not for the life of him understand why the Maoris think they own their ancestral land if they don’t use it to make commodities, and that no-one but Baines can understand why Ada doesn’t just leave her piano on the beach, all show this unthinking blindness in action. With the colonists’ only recourse to enjoyment being through the mere appearance of reality, we can perhaps, in a Zizekian fashion, invert this to say that Ada’s sublime enjoyment stems, as with most of Campion’s heroines, from an artist’s sense of the perfect reality of appearances.  As such, she is representative of neither a feminine ‘Nature’ nor a white colonist ‘Culture’, but a kind of natural, spontaneous culture of the transcendental individual, which sets herself at odds not just with her own people but also with the Maoris, whose own natural communality fails to mark out almost any of them as having recognizably individual identities. The film’s true tendency of othering then becomes apparent as being two projected forms of communal self-denial: the white colonists are individuals without libidos and the Maoris are libidos without individuality. Ada reconciles this divide through the ‘partial object’ or ‘desiring-machine’, to borrow Deleuze & Guattari’s terms (1972), of her piano. By transferring her lost voice onto it, as aforementioned, she exchanges the formal communication of grammar and speech for the direct expression of the gap between her naked self and the world’s reception. In short, she individualizes her desire.[6]

This is the point of the first climactic scene, in which Stewart drags Ada out of the house, through the mud and chops off her finger as a way of controlling her and threatening Baines. He asks her hopelessly if she really does love his rival and then, without expecting or receiving a reply, silences her ‘second voice’, perhaps thinking that she’d finally return to normal speech.[7]The direct correlation between Ada’s pleasure and the warmth of the frame is confirmed here in the scene’s brutal coldness.[8]Flora’s own inconsolable cries show that her betrayal of her mother was just an anguished attempt at reuniting her broken family, not a plea for hurtful revenge for her infidelity. Ironically, the whole scene is foreshadowed by the earlier communal performance of the moralistic tale of Bluebeard’s Eight Wives, in which a new bride’s wandering curiosity is similarly punished by a shadowplay amputation of her fingers. Watching the film we should know that this act of patriarchal violence is just as fake as the one the Maoris stormed the stage to stop earlier (Holly Hunter didn’t have to sacrifice a finger for the film of course), but somehow the fact that we only hear the sound of the axe’s swing just exacerbates its shock value.  Ada’s subsequently stunned visage and stumbling collapse into the mud show that her pain is still entirely internalized – the shock of a sudden loss of feeling rather than the register of immediate pain.  When Stewart eventually caves in and lets Ada leave the colony to begin a new life with Baines, she takes the complementary step herself and consigns the piano to the deep, and nearly herself with it, claiming “it’s spoilt”, before finally rediscovering her voice and wearing a metal finger with which she now teaches piano, the slight clink of her index forever reminding her of her previous completeness.

The piano then, as its titular importance suggests, represents Ada’s freedom within her confinement. She is trapped within herself, and by her will, just as much as her society constricts her movement. Only when she reaches the zero-level of freedom through the loss of her finger can she abandon the piano itself as the last impediment to her free return to the symbolic order of speech and personal commerce. The artificial finger and the new, impersonal piano show that her dark talent has become shared and relatively impersonal. That this is presented as a kind of happy ending shows that what feels to Ada like her ultimate form of freedom is actually the loss of her intimate self-expression and her re-entry to ‘life’, albeit on her own terms. She is still the “town freak” but at least she now has a societal designation. In this way, The Piano reveals itself as a reconciliation between the artist and society, between the individual and all the peoples of the antipodes, White or Native. Whether this reunion is potentially sustainable or not would be substance for a further essay.

I hope my ‘third way’ of reading The Piano hasn’t seemed like any kind of compromise. Both the feminist and the postcolonial readings are incisive and valuable and have contributed throughout this essay’s composition to my own understanding of Campion’s problematic politics. But weighing them up for arbitrary judgement ultimately obscures a broader analysis of the film’s presiding narrative and sentimental aesthetics. As David Thomson again puts it, The Piano is “more usefully seen as surreal than naturalistic” (2008:716) and so what occurs onscreen is surely more interestingly analyzed as the whims and impressions of Ada’s (and Campion’s) artful consciousness than as a simple, rigid ideological depiction of New Zealand’s colonial era. As such, the film can be self-evidently seen as a plea for a woman’s liberation, if not necessarily women’s liberation. It assesses the conditions of feminine subjectivity at the time and invents a situation in which it could be radicalized, at least on the intimate scale. It ignores the plight of the colonized subject (except by implication) because of its staunch positionality with Ada and her contemporaries. But in her final gesture of returning to society through a kind of botched artistic suicide, we can perhaps read the conclusion that personal freedom isn’t necessarily interchangeable with endless defiance. Instead, one must take on the choice of life as something potentially inalienable, and society as a perfectly imperfect site of self-expression. The film itself, in its own restless creativity, attests to the success of taking such a chance, feeling such a surprise.

Word Count: 3043

Reference List:

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 1972. Anti-Oedipus. London: Bloomsbury.

Dyson, Linda. 1995. ‘The return of the repressed? Whiteness, femininity and colonialism in The Piano’. Screen36.3: 267-276.

Ebert, Roger. 1993. ‘The Piano’ Review. Available at http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-piano-1993[Accessed 17/09/2016]

Haskell, Molly. 1974.From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies.New York: Penguin Books Inc.

Neroni, Hilary. 2004. ‘Jane Campion’s Jouissance: Holy Smokeand Feminist Film Theory’. Included in Lacan and Contemporary Film. Ed. by Todd McGowan and Sheila Kunkle. New York: Other Press.

Thomson, David. 2008.‘Have You Seen…?’: A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films. Great Britain: Allen Lane.

Tsvetayeva, Marina. 1987. Selected Poems. Translated by David McDuff. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books.     

[1]As Roger Ebert noted in his original review: “[The Piano] also gives us a heroine who is a genuine piece of work; Ada is not a victim here, but a woman who reads a situation and responds to it.” (1993)

[2]Hence the ambiguity of the film’s climax: Ada’s Will ‘chooses life’ but what possesses her to reach out her foot and get pulled overboard by the sinking piano? Is she just demonstrating the furthest extent of her self-control, that even on the brink of a happy ending she can still choose to ‘stop breathing’? And by this is she reconciled to her Will so that her return to speech depends on the surreal counterpart vision of her alternative fate, her corpse still floating “under the deep, deep sea”? The word count prevents me from developing this line of inquiry further.  

[3]The constant motif of cage-like environments in exterior locations is the clearest analog to this outcast state: from the opening-shot’s obscuring lattice of red fingers, to Ada and Flora’s warm makeshift tent on the beach, to the rigidity of Ada’s dome-like corset, to the tangle of swampy roots Ada crawls under to escape Stewart’s rage, and even to the piano itself, which is just a box of trapped music after all.

[4]To show that I’m not just throwing around Lacanian terms willy-nilly, here’s Neroni again on what this means vis-à-vis The Piano: “Normally the subject regulates most – if not all – of her/his behavior according to what she/he assumes the Other wants. Jouissance, however, produces a time when the subject is completely unconcerned with the Other’s desire. This disengagement from the Other’s desire is what makes jouissance upsetting or unsettling for those who are not involved in it.” (2004: 219)

[5]He doesn’t even suspect she’s capable of desiring another if she doesn’t yet desire him, insisting that she give Baines piano lessons because of the ‘fairness’ of their business deal, not realizing until it’s far too late that he’s simultaneously become their go-between and cuckold.

[6]This perhaps explains why the score’s signature motif recurs throughout the film, both when Ada’s actually playing it and when she undergoes her most traumatic and joyous moments – either way it’s her soul crying out to us, not distinguishing between the sounds in her mind and the music she makes in reality.

[7]As such, this scene seems to also be an implicit reference to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona(1966), in which an inexplicably mute actress finally screams in horror as her nurse threatens to throw a potful of boiling water at her in the hope that she’ll finally reveal herself. The fact that Ada still remains silent here, that the music just cuts off, leaving her desolated and derelict, is a sign instead that she is no stranger to complete silence and would indeed choose voicelessness over coercion. Thus even in her most powerless moment she still does not submit to Stewart’s patriarchy.

[8]As David Thomson puts it, “[t]he lack of sunlight says a lot about Ada’s lack of speech.” (2008: 716) And this is the film’s most profound moment of lack.