Escapism in Screwball, Candy, and Cemetery

When the term 'escapism' is brought up in film discussions, it generally serves to denote two separate but related ideas: the notion of 'empty' escape, a rejection of responsibility, morality, and dignity as the filmic space is reduced to a flight from the hard truths of reality, and the notion of 'comfortable' escape, a release valve for the overburdened mind and body, a relaxed familiarity that allows for reflection and rejuvenation.

Often the difference between these ideas comes down to the contempt or laudatory treatment of the way that cinema, as all arts, has a reality-denying or even reality-replacing quality -- those afflicted with Stendhal Syndrome can attest to a work of art's ability to transfix our perception and orient ourselves away from the everyday consensus shared in offices, street corners and gas stations. Cinema's appetite for escapism is very acute because it demands a sustained amount of time from us -- a painting can be glanced at, a work of architecture can be walked through with your eyes glued to the floor, but a movie only really works if you play its game, if you isolate yourself and allow a certain degree of hypnosis and imaginative participation to occur. This is a quality that film shares with literature -- getting lost in a three hour epic movie has a similar feeling to spending a whole afternoon engrossed in a page-turner, afterwards you are tired and taxed by your mind shutting out the wider world to engage with this one work.

Thus the critique of 'escapism' rests on something resembling a Protestant Work Ethic -- don't get too engrossed with this aesthetic phenomenon, or you'll neglect the practical duties that life asks of us.

My own obsession with film has led me to compare it to a sort of addiction obtained by an addictive personality, and sometimes I feel frustrated with my inability to see the world without the interpolated medium of movies, and to a lesser extent, literature. When I took a vacation to Colorado last month, I made a choice that I would try and 'live in the moment' instead of trying to cram my camera into everything I did -- looking back, I'm glad I did so, because I think I would have missed out on a lot if I was preoccupied with the tunnel vision of my photos and filmmaking. To take a vacation was already an 'escape' from my regular life, and I came to the awareness that at that moment I didn't want an escape from my escape, or else I'd lose sight of everything altogether.

The way that film gifts us with an extension of reality, these little pocket universes of space and time, is what I consider a lot whenever I watch films by George Cukor, Jacques Rivette, and Jean Rollin. In three different but connected ways, these artists frequently contain moments within their pictures where we are made aware of our own sojourn into fantasy, because the characters themselves do the exact same thing inside the context of their fiction, and we have a nesting egg, an escape within an escape.

In two of George Cukor's best films, Sylvia Scarlett and Holiday, we are treated to these oddball protagonists whose intersection creates a shortly-lived 'bubble' world, a bucolic or nostalgic space that permits different behavior and rules than what the rest of the films show. In Sylvia Scarlett, it is the empty manor and then traveling caravan that our thieves and immigrants learn to call home, a place where a young Katharine Hepburn takes on the identity of a boy, where a duplicitous Cary Grant can pretend to be a society man and entertainer. And in Holiday, we find these two taking a break from the anxieties of romantic engagement and class aspirations to bask in the toys and colors of Hepburn and her brother's childhood bedroom, as all the characters who enter seem to grow ten years younger and start playing games, undertaking mischief, and performing acrobatics.

Time and again Cukor has these little 'bubbles' in his films, precious locuses where the laws governing legality and propriety are suspended, and like in Shakespeare's pastoral comedies, we see characters go outside their comfort zones, experiment with the possibilities of their personalities, and re-enter the larger world with a changed attitude, even if only slightly. For Cukor, it is very important that these sorts of bubbles exist, not because they are permanent ends-in-themselves (they almost always end up collapsing or proving temporary), but because they permit a 'reset' and salve for the beleaguered heroines and heroes who need them -- it is escapism with a therapeutic benefit.

Close to this is the 'theatrical' spaces found in the cinema of Jacques Rivette -- not always meaning theatre itself, although it often is, it more specifically denotes a theatricality that Rivette's gangs and friends can slip in-and-out of, it is a modal sub-world that is tapped into at will as the characters explore different sides to reality. Rivette frequently situates the truth of his mysteries and conspiracies not in one reality or another, but at the meeting point between them, whether it's the leap into song in Up, Down, Fragile or the consumption of candy in Celine And Julie Go Boating. This switching back-and-forth, the contrast of being inside the boundaries of a fiction and then outside them, gives all of Rivette's work a metatextual freedom that sees escapism as a part of a conversation with the mundane -- one doesn't supplant the other, the conspiracies have real consequences and the fictions bleed over one another. What Rivette is fascinated by is the transference of knowledge and sensation by the wilful participation in escape, and then what life looks like after one arrives back from escaping -- this journey gives his films a looping roundabout structure, and they often end not very differently where they begin, yet we as escapists ourselves are deeply changed and challenged by the implications found here.

Lastly, Jean Rollin's decadent imagination takes great pride in the intoxication that escapism can give to the weary and needy. Given that one of his films is literally titled 'The Escapees', we can see that it is a conscious theme that he grew bolder at depicting over time -- almost all of his films begin with the characters existing in a sort of sedentary 'domestic' space that they soon leave, or that they are already on the run as soon as the credits start. What these drifters find on the other side of that is Rollin's favorite imagery of gothic castles, graveyards, unfeeling industrial cities, desolate beaches, and other lonely haunts, and what all of these have in common is the unifying characteristic of private places where Rollin's heroines have come to die in an eerily predestined fashion. Cukor's escapism is a positive look at the imagination, Rivette's escapism is empowering and enlightening, but Rollin sees living itself as a sort of cruel 'interregnum' between states of death, and even his eternal vampires seem to half-welcome the return to disconsciousness.

Rollin's escape is not away from anything in particular, he is not an artist of retrogression or even transgression -- what his stories are about is coming to terms with the transience of mortality, which is a temporary escape from the inevitability of death and decay. The supernatural in his work is the last possible ledge you can stand on before falling down into the abyss -- his vampires and creatures are guardians on the threshold, waiting for release, unable to escape themselves and requiring the 'help' of others. If Rollin's philosophy could be summarized, it would be easily done by Lugosi's Dracula himself:

"To die, to be really dead . . . that must be glorious !"

So I think we must complicate this idea that escapism must be condemned by the 'hard-nosed' embracers of cold factuality, or that escapism is a necessary luxury afforded by self-indulgent lounge-lizards -- through the perspectives of different filmmakers, there is much more to it than we assume. Escape can be a tonic, a transcendence, a reckoning, but the cinema's power to arrest our attention is not a good or bad thing in-itself, nor even a quality that is understood easily -- we delve into an artist's world to explore, to feel, to contemplate, and we must try to identify with their fantasias, even if we do not share them in our hearts. Escapism can broaden our horizons as long as we integrate it with what we're already contending with, instead of trying to treat it as a replacement or a pure negation for a context it is dependent upon -- the point of any escape is that it leads you to another side, not only away from where you began.