Truth and Illusion

Husbands and wives

The Sunday Letter #46

Is it possible for two films to be in direct conversation despite being made 60 years apart? 

I’d argue that Otto Preminger’s 1959 courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder has an unofficial sequel out now, with Justine Triet’s 2023 Anatomy of a Fall, Viewed back-to-back, the two films offer a chilling analysis on the state of gender politics and marriage itself, refracted through the lenses of their respective time periods. 

In Anatomy of a Murder, a thorny Lieutenant Manion stands accused of killing the man that assaulted his wife. The ensuing trial shifts when Manion’s lawyer, played with precision by James Stewart, advocates that the violence of the assault justified the ‘irresistible urge’ that drove him to murder. In doing so, he places the wife’s devotion at the center of the film’s moral axis. The audience must ask themselves whether a woman who is otherwise sexually free and independent is telling the truth about an assault that would drive her proprietary husband to murder. The film was groundbreaking for its time, facing controversy over its free use of the words “contraceptive,” “panties,” and “climax.” But even more radical is how accurate the gender politics ring today, baseless victim-blaming and all.

In Anatomy of a Fall–which I wrote about a few months ago in contrast to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour–a woman is again on trial, accused this time of killing her own husband. The film begins with a female student visiting our main character Sandra at her home, where she lives with her husband Samuel and son Daniel. The student grills Sandra, a writer, on the line between truth and fiction in her work, and their conversation features a playful undertone, heightened by the sudden interruption of Samuel’s loud music blaring from upstairs. The student and Sandra’s son both leave, and by the time the son returns his father is already dead outside on the ground, having fallen to his death. It’s left purposefully ambiguous as to whether Sandra pushed him. 

Murder plays with this ambiguity as well, to more conclusive endings. And like Murder, Fall also features an asymmetrical, uneasy flirtation between lawyer and client. In Fall, Sandra’s lawyer had feelings for her in the past; in the present, he offers a soft sense of protection, though he seems timid around her in this new light. “You need to start seeing yourself the way others are going to see you,” he tells her. She feigns disgust, then calls him back a few minutes later with the seeds of a possible new defense: her husband’s depression, his propensity for harm. 

In court, she finds herself at the center of a marriage on trial, with a ghost as her opponent. “Sometimes a couple is kind of a chaos, and everyone is lost,” she says in response to interrogations about the state of their marriage at the time of his ‘fall.’ She argues that we all think ugly things about each other in ugly moments–does that mean those things are true? 

Later, it’s not just their marriage on trial, it’s her sexuality too, along with her licentiousness. Her ambition, his lack of it. Her libido, his lack of it. Her success, his lack of it. Mind you, her husband believed that she owed her success to an idea she borrowed from him, from which he could never quite recover. “If something needs to be written, someone has to write it,” she defends herself in a surreptitiously-recorded argument from the day before his death. Their screams play out loud for the jury, the judge, the courtroom, and her son, as she sits on display for all of them. 

But is Sandra entirely innocent, really? Triet refuses to stake a claim, arguing that “The subjectivity of opinion is really interesting, the way time destroys the objectivity…and separates people between thoughts and truths.” In a Variety interview, star Sandra Huller said she also preferred to leave her character’s intentions unclear: “I think I wanted to create somebody who would be capable of doing it, I wanted certain people to be a little bit afraid of her…I had a little fun in leaving it in a dark.”

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In Edward Albee’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, adapted in 1966 by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the petty frustrations and long-term aggravations of a marriage are similarly placed on the butcher block. “I swear, if you existed, I’d divorce you,” Martha barks at her history professor husband George after a faculty party. Martha’s invited a young couple over for drinks, despite the harsh mood in which we find them. “Just don’t start in on the bit,” George commands. Over time it becomes clear that all they have between them are bits. 

Their young foils arrive in the form of biology professor Nick and his waifish wife. Blond and childless, they represent an amorphous future George both fears and resents. As the evening progresses into threats of aggression and seduction, the realities of each couple’s various lies come to harsh light along with the sunrise. 

When George returns in the early morning after departing in a fury when he rightly suspected Martha of having an affair with Nick, he arrives carrying a bouquet of snapdragons. Martha coos with glee: “Pansies! Rosemary! Violence! My wedding bouquet.” Together, they taunt Nick, who in his drunkenness was unable to consummate his affair with Martha, itself only a power play for his own career ambitions. Bonding in their shared torture of outsiders, George and Martha reveal that they are decades into their games of truths and lies; at this point, they can only communicate through violence. 

The recent HBO remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 Scenes from a Marriage, starring Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, plays at this boundary between artifice and reality by showing the stars literally enter through the sound stage at the start of each episode. They morph, in front of our very eyes, from Jessica and Oscar into Mira and Jonathan, a similarly academic couple who push each other to their breaking points in a bid for devotion. They push and pull, never quite having the conviction to choose one way or another whether to stay together. 

“Truth and illusion, George; you don’t know the difference,” Martha teases. George replies, “No; but we must carry on as though we did.” 

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In a recent review, Miri juxtaposes Anatomy of a Fall with memoirist Blake Butler’s newly published novel Molly, about the mercurial life and death of his wife, poet Molly Brodak. On Molly, Miri writes, “It tries to establish an objective in what is fundamentally subjective: a person’s ego, their experiences, their death drive. What disappointed me about Molly was how little it seemed to self-examine.” 

Do artists have such obligations to each other in their art? In their relationships? As a friend to both Blake and Molly, Patricia Lockwood offers a cloudy review of Molly in the London Review of Books, in which she marvels at how the Molly on the page could be the same one she knew and loved. “Should I be allowed to make this said?” Molly wrote, in words that Blake, Patricia, and Miri all echo. 

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In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes, “Marriage is memory. Marriage is time.” A simple alliance. The person we look forward to seeing at the end of the day. In a late in life interview, activist June Callwood remarked that she’d had seven marriages to the same man, such that their life together changed so much. Only a few of those were romantic marriages, she teases, and they didn’t last that long. 

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In Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra and Samuel butt heads when they can’t speak in their respective mother tongues of German and French. They must meet on a common ground, no matter how uneven. That common ground happens to be English, a language in which they fell in love, fell apart, and now begrudgingly still use. They share a common occupation as writers, artists, and parents, but they have trouble finding each other through the haze of grief and pain.

In Granta, Merritt Tierce writes that her second husband “feels like he doesn’t know what [I’m] thinking until he reads it in print.” In Rachel Cusk’s divorce memoir Aftermath, she writes of the blurred gender lines at the heart of a separation. “There was no such thing as a mother, a father. There was only civilisation. She told me I was obliged to support my husband financially, possibly for ever. But he’s a qualified lawyer, I said. And I’m just a writer. What I meant was, he’s a man. And I’m just a woman.” 

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In 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, Tracy (Katharine Hepburn) marries and divorces Dexter (Cary Grant), who arrives on the weekend of her wedding to a new man in a plot to stop the marriage. The Philadelphia Story, along with other classic films such as His Girl Friday and It Happened One Night, are examples of the comedy of remarriage subgenre. The infamous Hays Code of the early 20th century barred references to adultery or extramarital sex on film. But by showing divorced couples onscreen, filmmakers could have their characters date around before ultimately ending up back together, all in the interest of evading censorship. The ironic aftereffect is a series of films in which divorce is destigmatized amongst women with powerful senses of self fighting for a better kind of marriage. 

A modern example of a comedy of remarriage: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which a couple breaks up, erases each other from their memories, then fall back in love without realizing it’s for the second time. The two are given the chance to decide, eyes wide open to each other’s greatest faults, whether to take the risk of pain and stay, even if the loss is already built in. 

In Past Lives, a woman named Nora reconnects with her childhood love, Hae Sung, in adulthood. The two Skype from New York to Seoul, reconnecting twelve years after Nora’s immigration first separated them. Across a shaky internet connection and multiple time zones, she tells him that she’s been accepted to a writer’s residence in Montauk. “What’s Montauk?” Hae Sung asks her. She tells him to watch Eternal Sunshine as a reference, and the next thing we see is Hae Sung hunched over, watching the film with subtitles on as one character shouts to another, “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it!” The audience sees the layers of Hae Sung’s devotion, but Nora is committed to the life she is building in New York, in which there is no part for him. They break contact for another 12 years, until he arrives in New York to see her in person for the first time in 24 years. They greet each other timidly, with warmth and a vast history between them. Later, Hae Sung joins Nora and her husband Arthur for a tense, delicate stand-off in a warmly lit bar. Nora, flanked by two men utterly devoted to two different versions of herself, is left to choose her own fate.

Is there an ultimate truth to be found, though? Is there a right or wrong path, or is it simply what is chosen in the smaller moments that lead us to the big ones, in which any outcomes would feel both impossible and inevitable? 

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In Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, the late writer states plainly, “I don’t know what falling in love means… it’s not part of my vocabulary.” Maybe this explains the distance of her writing, the way she never quite lets you in on her secrets. Once, however, in 1979’s The White Album, she offered the surprisingly vulnerable revelation that the couple was currently on “an island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for a divorce.” The documentary’s director, Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne, presses her on this part. Did her husband, John, care that she was writing about the state of their marriage? She scoffs at the idea that such a line could exist between two writers. There was never a question between them about whether they would write about their lives; in fact, he’d edited that line. 

“You used the material,” Didion shrugs. Life is material. Writing was also, it seems, how Didion analyzed and processed her fears, remarking that “Novels are about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with.” So too do all marriage stories offer an element of truth, even in fiction.

As Sandra argues in Anatomy of a Fall, “If something needs to be written, someone has to write it.”

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In Metamorphoses, Ovid writes of Orpheus, son of Apollo and Calliope, whose bride Eurydice dies after a snakebite. Orpheus goes down to Hades to see her, where Hades is so moved by the effort that he allows Eurydice to leave the underworld on the condition that Orpheus not look back once during the journey. As they begin their ascension, however, Orpheus worries that he’s been fooled, and in a lapse of faith he turns to face her, which immediately snaps her back into eternal damnation. 

“Is it not obvious that there is something dreadfully violent about openly displaying one's passion for and to another human?” Slavoj Žižek writes in a recent ode to smoking. “Passion by definition hurts its object, even if its addressee gladly agrees to occupy this place.”

Of the fated lovers, Ovid writes, “Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?” 

This week’s recommendations

Adania Shibli’s hauntingly reflective novel, Minor Detail: “As soon as I see a border, I either race toward it and leap over, or cross it stealthily, with a step.” Charlotte Muth on getting older: “I’m learning: if there is a gun on the table, I will shoot.” Eliza McLamb on discourse bait and the compulsion to respond. Celine’s comment on a past letter I wrote about the function of art criticism: “‘Is this novel good for society and reflective of the politics I want society to have?’ seems to be the operating question in a lot of reviews.” Tracy Clark-Flory on Poor Things and the fantasy of the baby-brained woman. Jessica DeFino on skincare for babies. Mazzy Star’s song Halah: “I guess that you believe you are a woman / And that I am someone else's man.”