BetterMost, Wyoming & Brokeback Mountain Forum
The World Beyond BetterMost => The Culture Tent => Topic started by: Brown Eyes on January 02, 2010, 12:23:34 am
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I'm starting this thread as a result of a discussion that came up amongst some Brokies on Facebook a few weeks back. We were thinking it would be fun to watch the movie of Mrs. Dalloway together, but decided a chat wouldn't really work during the hectic holiday season. So, this thread is for people to watch and comment on the movie (or the book) at their leisure.
For those unfamiliar with the story, it's the story of one day in June of 1923 through the perspective of several characters, and through the perspective of Clarissa Dalloway primarily. Through memories sparked throughout the day we learn a great deal about the past lives of various characters.
The film was made by director Marleen Gorris (the director of Antonia's Line... another really interesting movie) in 1997 and stars Vanessa Redgrave as the older Clarissa Dalloway and Natascha McElhone as the younger Clarissa. Rupert Graves (of Scudder fame from the movie Maurice) is also in Mrs. Dalloway as a disturbed young veteran of WWI. Of course, the movie is based on Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925.
I'll refrain from commenting in this inital post, other than to say Viginia Woolf is one of my favorite writers (and I'm also particularly interested in the Bloomsbury Group in general). And, this is my favorite book by Woolf. I was astounded when I heard that they'd made it into a movie in the 1990s because it's such a complex book (written in such a complex way)... it seemed to me that it would be a tremendously difficult task to translate the book into a film. But, I think they ultimately did a lovely, thoughtful job with this film.
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I guess it's time for me to watch it. Netflix has it streaming, I'm happy to see.
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The film was made by director Marleen Gorris (the director of Antonia's Line... another really interesting movie)
I apologize for taking the thread OT for a moment, but I wanted to say that I'm happy to see your comment about Antonia's Line. LOVED that movie. I always thought Jens and me are the only persons in the world who saw it .... ;).
Oh, I have an idea - I'll post a picture of Antonia in the Strong Gorgeous Women thread, then you can reply there if you want, and we won't take this thread further ot.
Back to Mrs. Dalloway!
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I have yet to see the movie. I started reading the novel but didn´t finish it. I also remember that I started on To the Lighthouse, but not finishing that one either O0. The one book by Woolf´s that I actually did finish was A Room of One´s Own, which is more of a long essay than a novel. It was interesting and the topic still felt immediate. But she has a tendency to make the same point over and over again and I found it to be a somewhat tedious read. I find Virginia Woolf herself far more interesting than her work.
I would be interested in seeing the movie though. Perhaps I´d like the movie versions of her novels better.
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Amanda, I have the film on tape and watch it two or three times a year. Vanessa and Natasha, both, are so stunningly beautiful. It's a very intriguing movie with complicated scenarios. For those here who haven't seen it, you definitely need to watch it more than once to begin to understand.
Kind of like some other movie we all know...
;)
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Thanks for the comments Buds! And, Mandy, I'm happy to hear that you like the movie so well too! :D I agree that like BBM, multiple viewings are a good idea. Both movies are good upon first viewing, but after multiple viewings you notice more details and begin to see underlying themes, etc. better. Also, like BBM- it can be a really tough film to watch in that some of the themes are really sad or brutal. The overall narrative seems to be a combination of the really-lovely with jabs of sadness and sometimes unexpected brutality. The intersection of the Septimus (Rupert Graves) narrative with Clarissa Dalloway's is unexpectedly sad. It also seems to be a lot about the fleetingness of moments of happiness and learning how to recognize happiness and opportunities when they come up... to me these themes - fleeting happiness and opportunities taken or lost resonate a lot with BBM. The theme of short moments of happiness seems to be really foregrounded in the movie The Hours (also based on Mrs. Dalloway).
And, Monika, I do recommend seeing the movie even if you couldn't get through the book... the movie, I think, is very helpful in making the narrative and the chronology of events in the book clear. Woolf's stream of consciousness writing style can be extremely confusing. Having just re-read the book the other week... my main observation is that it's almost better to approach the book as if it's a kind of poetry. So much of the book is driven by characters' inner thoughts/interior monologues as part of Woolf's interest in expressing of how thought processes happen throughout a person's day. It was really hard for me to imagine how they'd make it into a movie. The exercise of Mrs. Dalloway really is so interesting.. trying to really trace how memories and sometimes almost random associations are triggered by encountering certain things throughout one's day... and how one thought can lead to something unexpected and non-linear sometimes. The really difficult stream of consciousness writing style I think was a really smart style to use to try to express/emulate the complexity of how thought processes happen.
Woolf's command of language is so subtle and complex (there really isn't any other term that comes to mind but complex)... I think that she's one of the hardest 20th century writers to read. But, I totally love her... once you get into the rhythm of her writing it's really lovely and hugely profound. Virginia's nephew Quentin Bell (the son of her sister Vanessa Bell... I wrote my undergraduate thesis about Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant... the two main painters in the Bloomsbury group) once said that A Room of One's Own is an example of Virginia "speaking" and her novels like Mrs. Dalloway are examples of Virginia "thinking" (I think he means her introspective thoughts vs. her public persona or way of expressing herself more conversationally). Yes, A Room of One's Own was written originally as a lecture and is one of her extended polemical feminist essays, like her longer book Three Guineas. She also wrote interesting literary/political essays like "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." But, her writing like that is so different in style from the novels.
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Hey Bud Amanda! I'm going to watch it again right now, so that I can comment more clearly on your points. Hopefully, we'll get others interested as well. Thanks for bringing up a fresh topic!
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Oh, I would like to join in the discussion. I'll hunt for Mrs. Dalloway, the movie. Another movie based on a Virginia Wolf novel that I really like is Orlando. I usually try to watch it every New Year's Eve.
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Heya Lee or Mandy! Have you had a chance to watch Mrs. Dalloway yet? I may watch it again this week... and I'm definitely planning on watching Maurice this week. I may watch Maurice tonight or tomorrow night actually.
:)
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I haven't seen it yet. I'm headed out right now and will swing by the videotique!
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Hey Amanda, yes, I watched it directly after I said I would and wrote down several comments and questions I'd like to discuss with you. However, I was waiting for the other ladies here to watch it before I put forth any spoilers. I'll throw my two-cents' in as soon as others do:)
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I secured a VHS copy of it and plan to watch it today!
The best laid plans...a strenuous hike plus my rock climbing class interfered, and now I'm off for snowshoeing and ice climbing. But I plan to see it this weekend.
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My first impression was...the young Clarissa....I've seen her somewhere before! Yes, it's that woman from Solaris!! Saschca something. This is only the second role I've seen her in. She's awesome!!
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I'm very interested to hear what your questions are, Mandy!
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All right, Lee, you're forcing my hand here, so I'll go ahead. Amanda and others, please respond at will. To those that haven't seen, please forgive me -- ********SPOILERS AHEAD***********
1. I absolutely love, love, love the actor Michael Kitchen, who plays the older version of Peter. To me, he defines Britishness. Did anyone else see him in "Out of Africa", playing opposite Robert Redford? I thought he was even more brilliant in that, which was a hard thing to do.
2. The name "Septimus" -- why would a British man have such a name? It's a Roman name, which means "seventh" in Latin, generally used to describe the seventh son in a family. If he came from such a large family, what's happened to all his brothers during his time of struggle? Why did he have to go mad from the war, with only his wife by his side, trying to no avail to save him from the brink? How should that particular choice of name be significant to us? What are we to think? Did his lovely wife just give him that name as a term of endearment, or was that name actually given to him by his parents? Where is his family, in the end? And for those that have seen "The Hours", what correlation are we to take from the Richard / Ed Harris character throwing himself out a window? If Virginia was so obsessed with that manner of suicide, why didn't she do it herself that way?
3. Sally -- do we believe that she is Clarissa's first love? Or do we believe she fell for Peter first? We see the very sensual but all-too-brief kiss between the two lady friends, and we see her rapturous reaction to Sally's kiss, yet do we ever see reactions of like to Peter's kisses? In another day and age and place, do we think Clarissa might have been better off if she had embraced her feelings for that woman, and perhaps all women, rather than following the status quo and marrying a good, solid, upstanding man?
4. Virginia Woolf is such a hard author to read. She can write for 5 or 6 pages, sort of rambling with miniscule things, and then, out of the blue, she'll come up with one sentence right in the middle of a paragraph, that will literally knock your socks off and almost make you rethink your entire life and every choice you ever made. I believe she was a genius. Someday, in a future life, I'd be happy to be just like her.
That's all. I hope I haven't given too much away for those that haven't read it or seen it yet. I'd love to hear people's perceptions on my questions and thoughts, and throw in even more.
Amanda, once again, thanks for starting this intriguing thread. :-*
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Heya Mandy!
Thanks for your great post!! :D I'll respond in much greater depth once I'm home from work today. I can't really tackle this big topic here at my work desk.
I've been meaning to write a bit about the "balcony scene" at the end of the film... which, I find so interesting. I'll do that later this evening too.
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Heya bud! Of course I understand. Didn't mean to hit you up with so many questions all at once.
As I said, Virginia is such an obscure, rather obtuse-at-times writer, I am often confounded by what her thoughts might have actually been. And to turn any book into a film, only adds more players and interpretations into the scenario, with directors, actors, producers, etc. So I think this will be a great dialogue of thoughts. Have a great day.
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The movie opens with a war scene of battle, and we see Septimus enduring a vision of death that scars him. Then we segue to Mrs. Dalloway who is planning a lovely party. This disconnect gave me an immediate dislike for Mrs. Dalloway as a first impression. Is that the way Wolff intended it, or was that the intention of the filmmaker?
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The movie opens with a war scene of battle, and we see Septimus enduring a vision of death that scars him. Then we segue to Mrs. Dalloway who is planning a lovely party. This disconnect gave me an immediate dislike for Mrs. Dalloway as a first impression. Is that the way Wolff intended it, or was that the intention of the filmmaker?
Hey there Lee,
Well, that decision by the filmmakers, to begin the film by showing Septimus, was a significant departure from the book. The book is definitely about how the narratives of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus interconnect throughout the one day... but, that is not how the book opens.
The book opens with the famous descriptions of Clarissa going to buy the flowers. The parts in the beginning of the movie showing Mrs. Dalloway going out on her errand are closer to the actual beginning of the book.
I don't know if Woolf would have had any specific intention about readers liking or disliking Clarissa or the other characters. I think they're all meant to be ambiguous (neither perfectly good/ likable or otherwise). I do think we're supposed to understand that Clarissa Dalloway has a lot of sympathy for Septimus.. that somehow turns into empathy by the end... Death comes to Clarissa's party (even if only in the form of the news about what happened to Septimus).
I'm curious about why that opening made you dislike Clarissa?
To me the opening just underscores the reality of wartime... during times of war or in the aftermath of war, people all over the world go about their normal, everyday business. It's a brutal thing, but it happens all the time (even now) as wars go on in other parts of the world. The story of Mrs. Dalloway, as I understand it is meant to happen just as the war has ended.
Virginia Woolf (and pretty much everyone in the Bloomsbury Group) were serious pacifists and many of the men in the group were conscientious objector at the time of WWI. So, Woolf tackling the topic of war would have been a serious thing.
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Even though I have read the book and seen the movie dozens and dozens of times, I found this interesting thread today. Even though it was from CliffsNotes, and it's not very short at all, I found it quite insightful:
While Mrs. Dalloway selects flowers for the party, we leave her for awhile and consider a new character: Septimus Warren Smith. The change of focus is brief, but it is important because Clarissa is only one half of the design for Mrs. Dalloway. While she worked on this novel, Virginia Woolf jotted in her diary that she wanted to sketch, in a shadowy way, "the world seen by the sane and the insane." The book was to be more than a story about Clarissa Dalloway; it would be a novel with two main characters and two stories alongside one another. The two characters — Clarissa and Septimus — never meet in the novel, yet they are linked to one another through various characters and because of the value they both give to that "leaf-encumbered forest, the soul."
Both Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus Smith are intense and sensitive — especially about the privacy of their souls — that collection of qualities which make up a personality's essence and individuality. Mrs. Dalloway has a veneered composure; she attempts to keep her most serious thoughts, dreams, and musings to herself; no one else would treasure or understand them. She restricts the boundaries of her secret world. She lives with her husband and her daughter and among her friends; she is wife, mother, and hostess, but she is never completely relaxed and open with anyone. No one sees the dark depths of Mrs. Dalloway's soul. And when Clarissa uses dark to describe her soul, she does not mean dark to connote something necessarily evil or fearful; dark simply means that the soul is not open for public view. Mrs. Dalloway's soul is a place of retreat, like a private garden. Perhaps this is not the healthiest attitude to take towards oneself, but Mrs. Dalloway is considered sane.
Septimus Smith, on the other hand, is insane. He has almost wholly retreated into his private world. Notice, for example, how his reaction to the noise of a car backfiring echoes and amplifies, but differs from, Mrs. Dalloway's reaction. Clarissa immediately thinks that she has heard a gun shot. There is nothing pathological about this association. The Great War is just over. An era of terrifying death and violence has officially ended, yet the fearful sounds of war remain in the unconscious. England still trembles; the sound stills the rush and hubbub of the streets.
Ironically, it was a gunshot — a multitude of them — which cut Septimus Smith's contact with reality. He is a casualty of the Great War, a victim of shell-shock, Nevertheless, he does not imagine the car's backfiring to be a gunshot. To him, the noise is the sound of a whip cracking ("The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?"). Everyone else is only startled; Septimus is terrified.
In this crowd scene of London, we have gone beyond the exterior of appearance and have had a glimpse into two private, inner worlds — Clarissa Dalloway's and Septimus Smith's. We have seen two confused and frightened people. They differ in degree, of course. Clarissa has been weakened by an illness and she is frightened and furious about Miss Kilman's "possession" of Elizabeth. But, as best she can, she attempts to keep her fears corralled and orderly. In contrast, Septimus' fears cannot be governed; they are too overpowering and chaotic. London, through Clarissa's eyes, is familiar and reassuring; for Septimus, it is only fragments of sensation. To Lucrezia, Septimus' wife, London seems totally alien. She is a stranger in a strange land, with no friends, and with a husband who threatens to kill himself.
Focusing on a simple morning scene, Virginia Woolf has challenged us with a many-prismed view: we wandered through Clarissa's wonderland of past and present thoughts; we drew back and saw the citizens of London react like one unified organism to a car backfiring; then we were jolted by the jagged reality of Septimus Smith's thoughts. Now we see what is happening through the eyes of a foreigner. So what is the "real world" like? Each person has a different idea of what truth and reality are. There is a general, agreed sense of what is true and real in a given situation but there are always highly individual interpretations. Virginia Woolf continually reminds us of such individual intricacies. One of the characters will frequently show us a sense of what is extraordinary in even the most mundane occurence. A car's backfiring is only a loud noise, yet it has unusual effects, individually, and it does something unusual to the mass of people who happen to be together on a London Street. The noise catches their attention, then the important-looking car mesmerizes them with awe. The car does not, for certain, contain anyone important, but everyone has deep veneration for it. And, from far above the story itself, we hear Virginia Woolf meditating, reflecting on the crowd's need to be associated with Greatness. The car is just a car — and even the Queen, if she be inside, is only a woman.
Yet this potent mystery takes the crowd away from its sense of being ordinary. The car endows each person with an Extraordinary Moment. Everyone feels individually distinguished because they have encountered the possibility of being in the same street with royalty, with England. We observe the blind awe of the crowd and listen to Virginia Woolf comment that only historians will know for sure who is in the mysterious car. Her attitude is like the attitude of Clarissa when, earlier, she was crossing London streets. Both women smile at the comic folly of us mortals.
The novel continues on its course as Clarissa's momentarily conferred "dignity" passes. The thought of the queen in the mysterious car reminds her of the queen's party which reminds her of her own party, and thus she is reminded once again of Peter Walsh's taunt — that she would eventually define herself as a Hostess. The pleasant, patriotic, quasi-dignity is replaced by the dread of a more sterile dignity, the dignity of a Hostess.
Suddenly our attention is drawn to something else. Something else mysterious has appeared. A plane discharging white smoke is passing overhead. The instant patriotism for Royal England that held the public spellbound only minutes before is gone — but the awe of the unknown remains. No one knew who was in the black car before; now no one knows what the skywriting says, yet both forces have a similar compelling power over the public. The skywriting letters form words but the message is blurred and indecipherable. What the public is watching is only an advertising gimmick, but they don't seem to recognize it as such. They are enchanted by this riddle of a commercial message in the heavens. Their attempts to read the sky-writing are wryly described, as though there were an oracular significance to the enigmatic letters.
At this point we learn that not everyone agrees that Septimus Smith is insane. Septimus' doctor, for instance, thinks that Septimus' problem is only habitual, obsessive introspection. This is Lucrezia's reason for trying to interest Septimus with the words written in the sky. But we know that Septimus is insane because we enter his mind and are shown the sad beauty of his madness. Time is dispersed; it is stretched, lengthened, slowed down. The smoke shapes do not mean anything to Septimus; they simply are. They are modulating colors of white, rising and tumbling.
Sounds around Septimus are amplified and richly suggestive. The movement of Septimus' sight and sound experiencings are wave-like: the smoke languishes, melts; sounds converge, then break; the light on the elm leaves rises and falls. This water imagery has been used before. It punctuated Mrs. Dalloway's morning walk and the journeys back and forth from her past to the present. The rising and falling is the rhythm of waves and it is also the same rhythm of a throb, the beat of a heart — the beat of the individual heart and the beat of our primeval mother, the sea. The rhythm beckons mightily to Septimus; the metaphorical rhythm of the great Unconscious, of the sea, is like a siren's song to Septimus' unconscious, and the remnant of his rationality fights to preserve itself. He pleads with himself that he will not go mad. Septimus is struggling to be the master of his own destiny, just as Clarissa is still struggling (in a parallel, though much less intense way) to be master of her destiny.
We draw away from Septimus' intense inner conflicts and Lucrezia's fears, and catch a glimpse of the Smiths from another side — from Maisie Johnson's point of view. Like Lucrezia, she is foreign to London. She is Scottish, just down from Edinburgh, and the men and women and the "prim" flowers of London — all the things that thrilled Clarissa — seem odd to Maisie. Especially odd are the Smiths, she thinks. Then we look at Maisie through Mrs. Dempster's eyes. We observe old Mr. Bently. The scene is blurring. Life has gone awry for most of the people we have met since Clarissa Dalloway stepped out of her house this morning to go shopping for flowers. The scene ends with the sky-writing airplane still noiselessly spilling blurred letters onto the sky. What do they say? They might say "toffee" but the message is still incomplete. We can interpret its blurred image any way we choose, just as Clarissa, Septimus, Lucrezia, and Maisie, Mrs. Dempster, and Mr. Bently can each decide differently about London, Londoners, and life. Human beings interpret moments of reality variously; we have seen several striking instances through the perceptions of the sane, the insane, the foreigner, the newcomer, and the elderly.
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Thanks, Mandy! This is enlightening! I'll have to think about the movie more in this light.
Before, I was thinking of Clarissa as somewhat like Scarlett O'Hara in the first scenes of Gone With the Wind, when she was obsessing over the coming party and dismissive of the Civil War that was threatening to break out and to take the spotlight off of her.
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Well, again, I think it's important to remember that the war is over at the time that the film takes place. And, in any case, the war would be a current event that she lived through, but she would have experienced the war in a very detached way... through news stories, encountering soldiers/ veterans, etc. And as I posted before, people go about their daily lives all the time during wartimes and in the wake of war.
The fact that she ends up being a wife and "a perfect hostess" as Peter predicts about her in her youth... is in a way a sad thing. She thinks of herself as "Mrs. Dalloway... not even Clarissa anymore." Her identity and the direction of her life has been driven by her class and social expectations. In her youth, in the movie, you hear her talking about the world seeming very dangerous... and her main concern often seems to be safety and security. Her preoccupation with being safe, actually reminds me a lot of Ennis. They both choose what they believe to be a safe path over more risky paths that probably would have led to greater happiness.
In a way, I think the film/ book is a lot about how life can turn out somewhat disappointing... Sally Seton wanted to change the world when she was young (with Clarissa's help)... but instead both women ended up in very conventional roles. Peter's life turns out to be a "failure" too... he wanted to be a writer... but at the party he reveals he hasn't written a word... and his life seems consumed with social scandals.
There are scenes from Clarissa's youth where we see how unpleasant and conventional Clarissa could be... for example, her attitude about the woman from a lower class who had a baby. But, I think we're supposed to understand that Clarissa had a lot more potential in terms of intelligence and sensitivity... a lot of which she squashes, again, for the sake of convention. I think, again, like all the characters, she's meant to be seen in both positive and negative ways. She was bold enough to kiss Sally, but nowhere near brave enough to really pursue that relationship. Though, from the perspective of a lesbian viewer/ reader, it's interesting to hear her muse at the end that she may have forgotten or overlooked (I'm forgetting the exact wording at the moment) the thing that mattered most to her.
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Though, from the perspective of a lesbian viewer/ reader, it's interesting to hear her muse at the end that she may have forgotten or overlooked (I'm forgetting the exact wording at the moment) the thing that mattered most to her.
I remember her saying that too. At the end of the movie, the members of government and establishment are recommending that young men coming back from the War and their spouses should emigrate to Canada if they can't find employment in Britain within a set time period. This idea is promoted as the solution...just get rid of the overpopulation. But to Clarissa, it almost seems inviting, as if a fresh start. But you know she'll never do it, and probably not her daughter, either. I wonder if Canada presented a good opportunity for those whose sexual orientations or ways of thinking just didn't fit into the mainstream?
It's an interesting study of the times.
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Yesterday I obtained the book Orlando by Virginia Wolf, thought to be the most engaging novel on the issue of gender, that is until Jeffery Eugenides' Middlesex. It's also the topic of the movie by Sally Potter, starring Tilda Swinton and Quentin Crisp (as Elizabeth I). And, oh yes, Billy Zane.
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Yes, Orlando is truly radical considering Virginia Woolf's time period. And, the movie is lovely.
Virginia had a theory about the "androgynous heart"... and Orlando is the most important example of her playing with that idea. Switching back and forth between male and female... or masculine and feminine.
As someone who personally finds androgyny to be one of the most compelling things ever, I truly appreciate Virginia's interest in this concept. It really is revolutionary to think of the concept of the "androgynous heart" coming from a woman raised in a super strict Victorian household.