Fiction, Frida Kahlo and Grace

Who better to receive Grace than those who know how to live after it?

Words that I wrote in April of 2010 after I’d watched Danny Deckchair again and found in its fantasy gentleness and faith and acts of grace that could not have been planned. In fact, events move and are so moving because there is no way that planning could have granted them.

I watched French Kiss for the first time in many years, and was struck by how much the story is propelled by something very much other than Grace from an invisible source, and yet how powerful that which is invisible is. There are no fantastic accidents in this story, but you cannot pretend that the unexpected is not completely present. Not just was you  see them fall in love; but the moment when you discover that Kate’s got the necklace, that she’s had it for almost the whole movie is astonishing.

Astonishing because it introduces a level to her personality that seems incongruous with what we’ve been told we are to expect. We’ve been told she teaches history. We’ve been told that her family is not present, though not abusive. We’ve seen her fiancé dump her and then we’ve watched her face a serious fear of flying in order to face him and fight for her dream life. Nothing in that picture is indicative of weakness or laziness, but there is nothing of the crafty nature about her, which is how the scene where she produces the necklace has such an impact on the story, on Luc and on us.

There are built in gaps in the characters in part because it is a movie and it is a fiction. Most of their lives up to these defining moments are void. Personal history is dropped as hints, known to the speakers and no one else. The focus on the surface of the dream that Kate is trying to live lulls the audience into a stupor, an illusion. It is an illusion that the writers were careful to break in a sweet and smiling way because this is a comedy and a romance and it is also the story of friends, two people who learn to be gentle with each other. That gentleness would have been completely undermined had Kate not been adorable in her duplicity.

Less adorable is the breaking of illusions in Possession, a novel wherein academics discover a romance between two people who have been held up by different scholars as exemplars of a certain kind of morality and purity of focus. The poet Ash is heralded as a man who maintained a devoted fidelity (in this case meaning monogamy) to his wife for 40 years after several years of courtship during which time no hint of an illicit sexual act ever crosses the pages of words written about or by him. The poetess LaMotte lives in quiet and deliberate congress with a woman who is a painter. They live secluded from the world not simply because of their romance, but because of their shared belief in a domestic life built around the Art of domestic living.

That these two people should have met, corresponded, fallen in passionate love while corresponding and then spent a month together living that love as fully as they were allowed is met with a sense of disarming betrayal: that the Truth, even worse: the Facts, should challenge so much of the Theory is difficult to ingest. The fiction does not misrepresent the stock that scholars put on the subjects they study. It is telling of someone to say that they study Milton or Shakespeare or the Geography of Rap (if you're interested, I totally know the dude who does this) or the Economics of Laundromats. There are specific questions that people ask.  Your conversation, your profession, the way you make decisions, all of these are reflected in the histories and works that fill your days, in the personalities of those who wrote them.

So what happens when you are a feminist post-structuralist literary theorist who suddenly happens on a series of proofs that the subject you’ve comfortably curled up with, knowing her embroidery and baking and concise turns of verse and devotion to Scripture, show a fiery spirit with sharp teeth and grasping hands, show those energies turned to the love of a man, a married man no less? How does that not seem a betrayal? How does it not confuse the scholar who is by definition defined by what she studies.

And how does it define the scholar of the poet Ash who is shown to be devoid of real and comfortable interaction with any of his contemporaries, his wife even. A man who is expected to be solid and morally upright and uncomplicated entering into, in fact inviting, a correspondence in which he is energetic and opinionated, teasing and passionate, ultimately becoming an adulterer challenges expectations in a way that reeks of cliché, and yet cannot allow it.

But these are fiction and must be answered in fiction.

I am reminded of a question & answer session with Julie Taymor that I watched where she was asked directly about the lack of politics in the movie Frida, based on Frida Kahlo’s life as portrayed in a biography about her and also on her journals. Ms. Taymor’s response was that there simply wasn’t tactile evidence of the kind of politicization that so many people have associated with her. She said that the journals were so full of Diego Rivera that they were almost about him, or about her reactions to and love for him.

It was the response of a person who was more aware of maintaining a sense of realism in her work. Perhaps it was the response of a person who has decided to stop being so worried about disillusionment by not courting it with expectation and images. I remembered thinking that the voice of the young woman who asked the question was angry – righteously angry. The question was a legitimate one in the face of a history of Frida Kahlo’s work taken as Statement and/or Manifesto. How to reconcile that with a work of art that is based on biography and is an incredibly beautiful and terrible introduction to the work of an artist who is presented as being almost entirely defined by her love for an unfaithful (used here meaning disloyal) man?

Falling out of a lawn chair into a tree is nothing compared to finding yourself walking the halls of a once known world engaged in an existentialist and political crisis whose end you cannot see.