In defense of the senses: the lost art of naturalism

In the first installment of a series targeting artistic traits missing in action, I peek into our most intimate connection with the unreal world.

First graze of the keys. Image by Pexels from Pixabay.

Lacing whiskey-colored concert halls and stages with the lilts of slapping doors and sleepy sighs, curt coughs and flapping pages, patrons stall a slow-to-surface silence. Scrapes and susurrations bid it stumble; dimming house lights let it limp across the auditorium until performers are in sight. Itchy throats snatch one last chance to clear… and stale reality slips surreptitiously away.

Enchained in the pandemic’s clutches, what was palpable to us before as live performance wasn’t always so. Loges till the eve of the last century were hotbeds for harangue and hearsay. Opulent cabins sheltered gossipers who scoffed at demoiselles still donned in dresses démodé or diners drooling through dessert. The curtain would be scrapped in favor of a cloak of crude existence: cutlery that chopped up rhythms of a cor anglais and whispers whirling wefts through wistful monologues.

Synchronicity is irresistible to the twin mantles. Even in the age of audience reverence a chortle peals inopportunely, programs tumble to the floor and shuffling feet make way for latecomers long irredeemable. More salient however are the lapses of performers. Leaping inhalations breeze through a recording of Irina Zaritskaya playing Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, “Suffocation”; off-key humming by Glenn Gould haunts his “Siegfried’s Idyll”.

Narrowed in its definition like Rococo waists in their confining corsets, naturalism has become analogous to the mundane. A recent feature listing cinematic classics that are “masters” of the genre sees the movement as synonymous with squalor and the insalubrious; denizens demoralized or destitute. One of its founding fathers in the realm of literature was French scribe Émile Zola. Loath to shy away from sordidness, Zola zooms in on zealous scavengers and shameless desperados.

But room is always made for slip-ups of the senses. In the novel of the same name Zola traces twenty-one-year-old Thérèse Raquin en route to an illicit tryst, “slipping on the greasy pavements and bumping into people on the street in her haste. Her face was damp with sweat and her hands were burning; she was like a drunken woman.” Later the ‘laces on her hat’ are described as they catch on her lover’s ‘rough beard’. In bed with sickly husband Camille, her limbs “shiver in their repulsion”.

Episodes of such indelicacy riddle European cinema. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1991 French-Polish film The Double Life of Véronique sees twenty-two-year-old Irène Jacob splash through a puddle on her way to her father; in the director’s Three Colors: Red she slips up in her heels and falls flat on a busy road’s tarmac. Nobody dies; no violins accompany the stumble. Both examples are just facets of the everyday.

Eschewing gaucheness of this kind unless a pratfall takes part in a plot’s advancement, Hollywood is partial to the polished personage. According to The Cinema Cartography’s Lewis Bond, the industry “spoon-feeds a hygienized and inoffensive version of the reality of life.” Viewers would strain to find the gawky limbs and clumsy loping catchable in the Italian neo-realism of the fifties or the Yugoslav New Wave. In Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Giulietta Masina departs a date’s house as she straightens her skirt with one hand, pulls up a sock with the other and jumps on one foot.

Dušan Makavejev’s 1967 Love Affair, Or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator sees two women chatting at their office. Holding a sandwich, one is perched atop (not on) a chair before her desk; resting a leg on its bottom and dangling the other. The other lacks a seat and leans across the table so her rear peeks out inelegantly. Jibes are exchanged about each other’s love lives.

Seventies Hollywood made space for figures uncomposed: as locks came loose so did the majesty of manners. Exhausted from his search to track down Watergate’s accomplices, Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) turns himself away from a McDonald’s booth until his legs are splayed apart to mime a spider’s. Fifteen years later Jim Jarmusch, the juggernaut of independent US filmmaking, displays Winona Ryder’s brazen LA taxi driver with a limitless corporeality. Clasping a payphone with one hand, she simultaneously smokes and chomps a piece of chewing gum, talks in the mouthpiece and irately shakes her head.

Perhaps the period’s garish fashions compensated for precarious composure. By 1990 natural modes of walking, sitting, spluttering or falling had invaded mainstream romcoms. Woken up against her will by a loud phone call from her roommate Vivian, a frazzled Kit de Luca sits atop a pizza box and grabs a lipstick to write “Reg Bev Wil” (The Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel) in the indelible Pretty Woman. John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club parades a “useless exercises” montage: at the start of the rapscallions’ detention high school student John at first sets fire to his shoe then has to blow it out; Allison loops a thread around her finger almost fixedly while Andrew fidgets with the lace ends of his hood. 

Stoicism strays from movies still delectable. Calling to ask the regal Diane Court out on a date, John Cusack’s Lloyd in 1989’s Say Anything… stomps in and out of his bathtub with a rotary phone when her father picks up, fumbling his speech as he specifies: “Actually, basically, you don’t know me – I’m a friend of your daughter’s – well, I sat with her yesterday at the mall… I drive a blue Chevy Malibu – I don’t know, I guess I’m pretty bad at this, but what I wanna do is – could I please just…”

Scenarios like these persist across the landscape of today – although coronavirus may have curbed them somewhat. Onscreen they’re swiftly growing obsolete. Confined in frigid frames, even child actors feel the stiffness seemingly enforced on them by directorial despots. What passes for a father-and-son Halloween in 2019’s Netflix movie Marriage Story could have been a scene swiped out of M. Night Shyamalan’s portfolio. Khaki are the walls, and frozen father Charlie barely audible. Nine-year-old Henry sorts candy as his father commands him to go to the bathroom before they go trick-or-treat. Levity stops short of their exchange, which is enshrouded in the tension of the parents’ bitter fight for custody.

This battle has played out before – not least in Robert Benton’s 1979 Kramer vs. Kramer. Opening his father’s bedroom to find Ted (again the limber Dustin Hoffman) splayed diagonally on his sheets, the seven-year-old Billy scarcely manages to wake him up as shaggy Dad is slow to rouse and shake his head. Stabs of the boy’s finger finally accomplish it. “Where’s Mommy?!” Grasping his father’s watch, he demonstrates: “The little hand’s on the seven, and the big hand’s on the nine – where’s Mommy?”

Scurrying to the kitchen, Hoffman’s Ted attempts (and fails) to make French toast by pouring egg into a mug that bears his name. “You dropped some shell in here.” Billy alerts him. “That’s all right…” His hands grow gooey as he mixes. “Makes it crunchier that way. You like French toast crunchy, don’t ya?” Ridiculous absurdity joins forces with reality…

Like always.

Food was relied upon not long ago to shed light on the sternest (and the strangest) situations. Proposing that the eight-year-old he had deserted four years previously join Dad on a long trip to find his long-lost mother, Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis waits for little Hunter as he licks his lips in Paris, Texas (1984). Sunlight pours on the McDonald’s fries he eats atop the trunk of Travis’ convertible as the small fellow ruminates. “I wanna come with…”  Hunter finally decides between his bites. “I wanna find her too. When do we go?”

Neither queen nor living legend was too regal to indulge in nibbling.  In All About Eve Bette Davis pokes around cigarette cases before landing on a dish filled with chocolates. Taking one, she samples a brief lick, replaces it and drops the lid back on. Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette finds the queen licking her fingers in bed as she bites on a cocoa slab; husband Louis XVI reads a tome about keyholes.

Slicing silences of pregnant pauses, tinkling knives allow the married Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan to shun the need for conversation in director Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 In the Mood for Love. Enamored with each other while their spouses are already having an affair, the loyal friends depend on food to trammel tension in the face of carnal danger. In her flight from a loud throng of mahjong-playing neighbors Su Li-zhen escorts the man into her bedroom so that he can slip her… noodles.

Dangers of another kind were scarcely a deterrent. Mike Nichols’ 1983 Silkwood tells the real-life story of an Oklahoma worker at a perilous plutonium plant that duped its staff into believing lethal radiation was a quasi-urban myth. Despite its subject matter the dark drama dabbles in droll moments – one of which sees Karen (Meryl Streep) cut her colleague’s chocolate birthday cake still in her work gloves. Dropping cake and crumbs along the (possibly contaminated) floor, she eats some segments; tosses others in the trash. Blithe is the band obliged to work Monday to Sunday at ungodly hours for a lying boss; Gilda the birthday girl is given sexy lingerie which Karen shoves jocosely in her face.

Harmonious background sounds can don a guileful garb. 1999’s The Virgin Suicides unveils sixteen-year-old Kirsten Dunst licking a lollypop. A basketball bounces from the grip of a boy in suburban serenity. Water drips out of a faucet… on a thirteen-year-old girl in a bath growing red from her sliced-open wrists.

Hitchcock was at the vanguard of the placidly deceptive. His ironic murder mystery of 1953 Rear Window thrives on it. Pacifying patters of the nightly rain conceal the surreptitious steps of a conniving murderer. Amidst a stupefying heatwave open windows of a vast apartment complex rival street noise as they lay bare neighbors’ rituals: a young singer warms up with arpeggios; someone walks their dog and whistles; party-goers slovenly sing “Mona Lisa”.

Sounds of a backdrop surface for their unavoidability. Argentine director Luis Puenzo’s 1985 film The Official Story highlights how discoveries most devastating can arise amidst the zaps and pows of video games when Sara meets Alicia: the adoptive mother of her biological granddaughter. Drinking coffee at a Buenos Aires café, Sara offers her a photo of her daughter - the child’s natural mother - telling how the woman was abducted by the military fascist forces; forced to surrender newborn Gaby straight out of the womb.

Alicia’s husband is a government official. Absorbing the tale with a near-mute moroseness, she listens to old Sara speak as vehicles whoosh by on the streets; motorbikes rumble; cars war with their horns.

Never could naturalism be entirely absent from the scenic repertoire. And yet today’s is careful by comparison: grown modest. At the start of 2019 Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Film, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, Mexican maid Adela sings along to ditties on the radio. Later she meets with Cleo to discuss a love letter her boyfriend wrote… to someone else. The young women chew tortas and laugh – but the camera remains at a distance. Intimacy is denied us.

Across the 1990s and 2000s mainstay characters of television dramas slipped, fell, hesitated, slurred their words amidst their lunch and paced in panic. Protagonists of ER, Law & Order and The West Wing - not to mention HBO’s spearhead The Sopranos – were susceptible to tapping pens and fingers; slurping Diet Coke and snoozing.

Not so are today’s endeavors. Hospital dramas such as New Amsterdam or The Good Doctor embody a chilling sterility far from the scrub-room. Marching footsteps sound occasionally on an auditory palette loath to tell of corridor or waiting room shenanigans.

Denuded of reality, detective series for the most part don’t fare better. In the second episode of mini-series Mare of Easttown teenage girl Brianna is arrested for assault as she waits tables at a restaurant. Customers stare blankly when she’s led away in handcuffs. Yet we never hear their glasses rattle as they put them down, and knives and forks are set with quiet acquiescence on their plates.

Back at the station witnesses are questioned on the murder of the seventeen-year-old girl Erin. No phones ring and no treads are heard; so sleepy is the village that stunned birds dare not release a tweet. So silence holds its eerie sway.

“Closure, Part I” – an early 2000 episode from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – presents a sympathetic contrast to this aural chastity. Raped at a street carnival, twenty-nine-year-old New Yorker Harper gives her statement to detectives after having to endure a rape kit. It is almost four a.m. when she begins. Dashing cars fly past outside. Alarms sound faintly from garages blocks away. ‘Erms’ and hesitations fray her struggling speech. The time turns to 4.36. Harper holds a likely empty paper cup of coffee. Detective Olivia Benson rolls a pen in her palm. 5.01a.m. 5.49a.m. “What laundromat do you use?” asks Stabler. Harper exerts an exhausting sigh. Daylight creeps into dismality as black makes room for gray and gray for dirty white until the time of 6.13 has wrapped the walls in yellow.

Contemporary film and television have been seized by the conceit that silence is solemnity. Roma is a gallery of long and quiet shots depicting poor maid Cleo suffering. Abandoned by her beau Fermín because of an unwanted pregnancy, she finds herself in battle with a raging fire at her family friend’s hacienda, is held at gunpoint by her former lover, gives birth to a stillborn and risks death to save the children of her mistress in the ocean.

Grave is her plight. So was Pina’s in Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film Roma, Città Aperta. Filmed months after the city’s liberation, Rome, Open City centers on a pregnant woman played by Anna Magnani who strives to help the baby’s father, Resistance fighter Manfredi, with the aid of Don Pietro, a priest. During a raid by the SS she and her unborn baby are shot dead. Don Pietro meets a grisly end before a Nazi firing squad as altar boys look on.

And yet these actors who survived the war are not restricted to a static, soundless realm. Another priest elects a moment when a woman loots a bakery to snatch a pastry. She berates him: if he doesn’t want to join the fight against collaborators he can “wait for them in heaven”. Don Pietro visits an antique shop and requests the owner fetch Francesco. As he waits he is surprised to find a statue of Saint Rocco facing a large sculpture of a naked woman. Ashamed on the saint’s part, he turns the nude around till it occurs to him that Rocco is now ogling her bare rear. Eventually he pivots her and the pair’s gazes are averted… as is crisis.

Ironically the sensual abstinence so rampant in our visual culture overtook it at the same time as the flight of film itself. Digital shooting has become – apparently - the most efficient form of filmmaking. No crackles crawl across our cinematic screens or flicker like a lighter’s wheel beneath a smoker’s stumbling thumb. Black flies do not invade a pristine picture void of haze. French film director Bertrand Bonello finds himself among the multitude who mourns the loss of graininess: “It gives more sensuality, you know?” He is quoted in a piece for Filmmaker Magazine. “To the fabrics, to the clothes, to the colors.”

Commingled with this melancholy is the fact that this year’s Oscar winner for Best Picture – Nomadland by Chloé Zhao – is strewn with naturalism… of the genuine variety. Frances McDormand is the only actor in a feature that combines the stories of real travelers with adlibs. Sneezing is heard amidst the film’s harsh winter as the heroine scrapes snow down from her windshield. Footsteps and sighs fit seamlessly into a melting pot of traits too real. For naturalism isn’t merely happenstance – but one of many facets that distinguish art from artifice; mimesis from a meager imitation.

Art and reality share a sororal bond of strained interdependence. Both worlds are overdue for a revival of the senses.