Wordplay can be obnoxious, but I think my reversal of the title of Hal Hartley’s short film Surviving Desire (1991) is apposite, given that the film itself requires the viewer—most likely a middle-class young person ambitious to enter the intelligentsia—to perform a series of reversals of his or her own. Hartley in effect presents us with an already-accomplished transvaluation of values in the Nietzschean sense. His characters, themselves minor middle-class members of the intelligentsia, live or strive to live more fully against an outmoded moral discourse of good and bad founded upon weakness and resentment. The drama they enact invites us to ask if we might not like to transvalue those values once again, considering the world coming to birth and the role that intellectuals and artists have played in shaping it.
A summary of the plot only makes the film sound banal: a literature professor named Jude (“like Jude the Obscure”) falls in love with one of his students, Sophie (“It means to know,” one character tells us, but actually it means wisdom). They have a brief affair, punctuated by Jude’s conversations with his friend Henry, an out-of-work divinity student, his and Henry’s encounters with Katie, a homeless woman who solicits marriage from male passers-by, and Sophie’s own conversations with her less intellectually-inclined roommate. The film consistently foregrounds its artificiality through the use of improbably high-minded and formalized dialogue which consistently reflects on the themes of the film, and through the use of non-realist interpolations such as a scene in which Jude performs a choreographed dance with two men who come out of nowhere after his first kiss with Sophie.
The very first scene, in which Jude reads to his students a paragraph from The Brothers Karamazov enjoining us to avoid falseness with ourselves and practice active love, gives us an implicit reading lesson. Jude’s students complain that they have been on this one paragraph for weeks, that Jude has taught them nothing that will help them pass the final exam. They throw things at him and physically attack him even as he tells them to read the paragraph again, while he obdurately refuses to make any positive statements about it. We’re meant to understand the students as the indoctrinated, self-interested, cynical, crudely rationalized products of the Reagan era. But here we must, as Jude enjoins them, read it again. When the students launch an eraser at Jude’s head, he hurls chalk back at them. When one slams him up against the blackboard, he throws the student across the room. His pushy, smug reassertions of his own confusion are fully as aggressive as their demand for a bite-sized lesson that will enable them to succeed in a society whose only values are market values. He meets force with counter-force. Capitalism has idiotized him as much as it has them: he cannot communicate with other human beings. And he revels in it, just like they do. This dooms his relationship with Sophie from the start.
For the film invites us to allegory (with its indirect reminder that Sophia means wisdom) while inviting us to a critique of allegory. Jude is after wisdom, of course—that’s what he desires. But it is his self-involved unwillingness to recognize wisdom as something other than the object of his desire that leaves him lost and lifeless. He has a brief conversation with a bartender while he awaits his first date with Sophie. The bartender warns him, “The trouble with us Americans is we always want a tragedy with a happy ending.” I take this to reflect upon the traditional portrayal of the intellectual as Hamlet, endlessly dissolving the universe in his corrosive all-embracing skepticism while refusing to take an action that would subject his skepticism to the critique of lived human relations, which cannot survive on irony alone. To desire a tragedy with a happy ending is to desire to defer the entrance into human relations indefinitely.
Jude has another conversation before a date with Sophie, this time with his friend Henry, the itinerant divinity student. Henry tells Jude that his problem is that he doesn’t believe in anything. Jude responds with a peroration on the many crimes committed by people who “believe in things”—the list encompasses religious fanatics, revolutionary terrorists, and American militarist conservatives. But Jude has elaborately missed Henry’s point, which we can see if we recall the characters’ previous conversation when Jude read to Henry from Anatole France’s The Gods Will Have Blood. This novel (which I’ve never read, by the bye) describes how a gentle, sensitive lover of humanity becomes a heartless terrorist during the French Revolution. Not knowing the larger point of France’s critique, I would argue that the trouble is not with what one believes—are we to condemn a belief in the possibility of human progress?—but with how one believes. Jude’s fundamentalist, other-disregarding anti-foundationalism is just as potentially terroristic as the positive faith of a religionist or revolutionary.
After Jude and Henry’s conversation, Henry wanders drunk through the city. He encounters Katie, the homeless woman who asks every man who passes to marry her. She asks Henry and he agrees, giving her his college ring. A conversation culminating in an argument ensues, parodying the course of a marriage. But at the end of their fight, they make up and we are led to believe they might actually marry.
The next day, Henry visits Jude after Sophie leaves his apartment after their first lovemaking. Henry sees Sophie on the street and she denies that she even knows Jude. Henry callously reports this to Jude, who descends into an uncommunicative rage and despair remeniscent of his pedagogical affect. Henry is trying to tell Jude something, a Biblical phrase: “Love does not discriminate. Love the one who is before you.” Jude roughly throws Henry out, not heeding the message, which Henry exemplified the night before by agreeing to love and marry Katie. The film’s consistent ironization of our best intentions does not let up here, though: we learn that Henry does not even remember the previous night. He only knows that he has lost his college ring. Here, we might remember that it is Henry who told Jude that Sophia means knowledge when in fact it means wisdom: it is not Jude but Henry, whom we might regard as the moral center of the film, who confuses knowledge and wisdom.
However, it’s important to understand the function of this irony. It does not corrode everything it touches; it does not dissolve all values. Rather, it serves as a reminder: remember, it says, that you have to live your values; that’s the only way you’ll know if they’re worthwhile. This humanist irony reconfirms rather than vitiating virtues of love and faith.
This irony necessitates that we resist allegorization of the movie: sometimes Sophie means wisdom and sometimes it means Sophie. For one thing, Sophie is portrayed as caught in the logic of a romantic intellectual self-absorption as well. Her relationship with Jude—whom she too, remember, allegorizes as Hardy’s alienated countryside intellectual defeated by an oppressive society—seems to be an occasion less for her own experiential happiness than for her writing: throughout the film, she writes a story about Jude (somewhat in the mode of Marguerite Duras, who is invoked by Sophie at one point), anatomizing his consciousness, his fears and his needs. She wants to produce him as an object of her desire, as a text she’s written, just as much as he so wants to produce her.
Jude recognizes this and, in the climax of the film, provides a devastating critique of her solipsism when she reads him a portion of her story describing his own cowardice and weakness and he tells her to read it again, replacing the male pronouns with female pronouns. She does, and the ashamed sadness on her face lets us see that she realizes, as he does, that she has described herself in describing him. It does not seem to register with Jude, however, that she has also indeed described him: that he too is trapped in the self-involvement that forestalls their relationship. He reaches out to touch her, perhaps to comfort her, with a gesture toward his superior knowledge, in her sad self-awareness. She rebuffs him. In a rage, he overturns the table where they sit in an outdoor café. Their relationship is over.
The final classroom scene culminates with Jude’s recitation of the basic facts of Dostoevsky’s life while writing and overwriting on the board the message: “Knowing is not enough.” He dismisses the class. He has nothing more to say. His silence invites us to consider a variation on his message: Not knowing is not enough either. Active love means action. Action is true knowledge, as in the Socratic thesis that only behavior, not what the intellect proclaims, reveals what the soul knows to be good. In the terms the film has established, knowledge is well and good, but it is wisdom that expresses itself in other-regarding action.
Three scenes remain to be discussed. After Jude realizes that his relationship with Sophie is over, he encounters Katie again. Out of desperation, he asks her to marry him. Katie, convinced that she is still engaged to Henry, refuses. He lets her know that she is not really engaged to Henry, but she still refuses. “But I thought you wanted to get married!” he bellows in exasperation. She doesn’t say anything; anguish contorts her face. Finally she says, “I just wanted someone to ask.” The reverberation of this encompasses Jude’s own self-involvement in putting unanswerable questions to his students, as well as Sophie’s selfish over-writing of Jude, as well as Henry’s failure to live his ideals. We all just want someone to ask, but we go about telling. We don’t ask. We command, we demand. We expect love from others, but we do not extend it to them.
Finally, we see Jude lying in the gutter. A passer-by asks him if he’s all right. Yes, he says, he just needs to stay in the gutter for a while. The passer-by apologizes, but presses on: he needs directions down to the river—perhaps an indication that Hartley ultimately intends his film as a Christian statement, as I suspect he does. A look of enlightenment, of realization (“Love the one who is before you”) crosses Jude’s face and he begins to get up to help the stranger.
Complimentarily, we conclude with Sophie at work. We’ve see her at work before, in a large bookstore. The film mocks the faux-politeness of the service industry: over and over again, she asks, “Can I help somebody? Does anybody need any help?” There the film ends, with her repeating these questions—questions that, in the context of retail, we typically don’t want anyone to answer in the affirmative. But she repeats them so many times that their true meaning asserts itself. “Can I help someone? Can I help someone? Can I help someone?” The true barbarousness of capitalism surfaces here: it has, by commodification and rationalization, robbed us of a language with which to express the values and practices we cherish most. It leaves us lost and isolated, and then makes a joke of the practical activity, the restoration of the commons and of community, that would bring us into a life of active love. Read it again, Jude told his students. The slowness and stylization of the film, its Brechtian alienation-effects, and indeed its dense, compressed anti-studio brevity, enjoin us to read it again. Read again the sentence, “Can I help someone?” What does it mean? What would it mean if we actually asked? If we loved the one before us?
That sounds like an encouragement to mere humanist intersubjectivity, but I think the film contains a subtext that reminds us that active love is a politics or it is nothing. When Jude first encounters Katie, she stands in front of a “No blood for oil” graffito, relic of the first Gulf War. The last time he encounters her, it’s at a gas station, the material terminus of the process of imperial conquest and exploitative, anti-democratic corporate energy policy. Similarly, the attitudes of his students, and of Katie’s roommate who valorizes consumption and “wishes [she] were skinnier,” remind us of the ideological network and its constituent material stuff (oil and other resources, including labor-power, extracted brutally from the developing world) that the US middle-class is caught in. To this end, I think we’re obligated to read the film’s foreground against its background. There are no people of color among the main characters of the film. There are no working-class characters—poor as they are, Henry and Katie, with their educated speech, seem to be down-on-their-luck petit bourgeois. However, twice in the film, we see people of color in the background enacting wholly different relationships than those presented in the foreground. Near the beginning, when Jude and Henry go their separate ways after a conversation, two black men in hardhats meet and warmly shake hands in the background. Then near the end, at the outdoor café where Jude overturns the table, a black woman converses with an Asian woman. When Jude’s anger erupts, the two women stand up and look on with fear and worry.
It’s possible to criticize this as participating in the arrogant metropole discourse (going from Heart of Darkness to Lost in Translation) of white middle-class psychodrama played out for contrast against a black laboring background. However, I think it also serves as a pertinent reminder that anomie is a luxury that the white middle-class enjoys. Other models of human solidarity exist in communities under existential threat from the capitalist relations that only inconvenience literature professors and their students. An active love that failed to take that into account would be as useless as the recursive ironies of the self-absorbed intellectual. Anodyne liberal humanism this is not. Here we see again the bartender’s judgment on a nation committed to capitalist ideology: while the intellectuals lose themselves in self-referencing theories and self-aggrandizing despair (“grand hotel abyss”) that prevent them from even imagining, let alone taking or encouraging the public to take political action, too much of the rest of the population believes the old lie that all the exploitation, immiseration and imperial war-making that is endemic to capitalism will result in a happy ending. A call to action, which this film is, must be a call to political action as well.
To survive desire means to arrive at love, as anyone in a long-term relationship can tell you. And what is love but precisely the desire for survival—for the survival of another? Hartley delivers a welcome and fatal blow to the fake transgressiveness of humanities departments which crown individualist desire king of the affects. But it deals a blow too to the apolitical humanist platitudes that the discourse of desire replaced. In the period between Reagan and Clinton, when an anti-capitalist utopian politics was seemingly swept off the field of history forever, Hartley reactivates our (“our”—the intelligentsia’s) desire for its survival almost at the molecular level. The self-loving slavemasters of humanity will cry it down forever, but the dream of a community founded on the principles of active love will always remain, and will not always remain merely a dream.
