sin

I watched Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist recently. I first saw it at the Uniondale Mini Cinema on Long Island with my boon college companion, Franklin, sometime after its American release in 1971.

I was a little too young and unformed to grasp the film at that time. I suppose the trials of a self-loathing, self-fearing cipher in Fascist Italy were far from the aspirant experience of a post-hippie lamb such as myself.

One scene did stay with me, in which 13-year-old Marcello is seduced away by a chauffeur, taken to an abandoned villa. Once the boy cannot escape, the man takes off his cap to let his long hair fall around his shoulders. It's shocking against the masculine propriety of the chauffeur's uniform.

I don't think I again had such a sense that a movie character was in deep, deep trouble until I saw Blue Velvet, and we met Frank's idol, Ben - Dean Stockwell in face powder, lip-synching "In Dreams." (Face powder figures in the chauffeur's self-image as well, and for song, Madame Butterfly.)

Is it homophobia that makes both these characters so memorable, so dangerous? That's not something I think I'm much prey to. But after all, Marcello is a boy, and Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle Maclachlan's character) is an innocent, already deeply in danger. And exciting as it may be, the first pass a boy experiences from a man carries a charge of peril, no matter if the boy is excited, or queer, or not.

Marcello, who shoots the chauffeur with his own pistol and escapes, grows up terrified that he will be discovered as a murderer. His defense is to fit in, to conform, to become invisible, never to be distinguished from the crowd.

When his society turns murderous, his safest disguise is as a socially approved murderer, unquestionably a creature of his government. He volunteers to spy on and, likely, kill his old philosophy professor, who has escaped to Paris. He'll mask the old crime with a state-sanctioned murder.

The visual scheme of the film is astonishing. If I had a second life and a couple of years put aside, I'd love to do a scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie. For a taste, you can find a dance scene, featuring Marcello alone in a crowd, posted on YouTube.

I also saw something I thought plainly evident in the film, but not acknowledged by the action or the characters, and not referred to by Bertolucci in the DVD interview.

Marcello imagines that his sin was forced upon him by the chauffeur, that all would be different if not for that seducer. The action of the movie supports that belief. He would have been a normal man, a better man, a safer man, if not for that.

But immediately before the chauffeur finds him, we see a crowd of children bullying a boy lying on the ground, who turns out to be Marcello. "Take down his pants" (or something like that), one of them shouts. The children crowd around. Adults, perhaps even parents of some of the bullying children, watch without interfering, reinforcing the sense that there might be something proper in this singling out, this punishment previous to any crime.

I can only think of original sin. Marcello was marked long before his transgression. When he goes to confession (after decades without), the priest tells him, "You, my son, have always lived in sin." Yet this extremely conscious, very visual film doesn't (so far as I can tell) give us a different source for Marcello's actions, in the events of the film and its conclusion, or in his own mind.

It also works to think of Marcello's mark outside of a Catholic context - as a psychological or spiritual flaw sensed by the children and adults - or the kind of need that can draw an attentive child molester. (Marcello's parents are themselves spectacularly flawed.)

Perhaps original sin is so taken as a given by Bertolucci, and by Alberto Moravia, who wrote the book it's based on, that it would have been as gratuitous to point out as breathing or circulating blood. (The book ends differently than the movie, says Bertolucci.)

This sin of omission (if that is what it is) doesn't mar the film. I've given you no spoilers. You can watch it keeping original sin in mind or not, the experience doesn't suffer.

Snow, Mary

I was puttering around the apartment this morning before work, paying attention only to plans and intentions, when I happened to turn toward the window. "Oh, it's snowing!" I said, in a tone of voice that wouldn't have been inappropriate for a five-year-old.
I've been at work in the grimmest and least spontaneous of offices and heard other grown-ups pipe up at the sight of snowflakes as they never had at any other occurrence. The word "pretty" is as likely to be uttered by taciturn machos as dedicated femmes.
Why this pure, this unadulterated, reaction to snow?
It certainly is a childhood thing. The parent's conveyance of excitement before a snow is a lesson in how to welcome something good from the world. The child has likely heard the word "pretty" applied to a birdy or a flower, but never before to anything as kinetic, as sensory, as enfolding as a snowfall.
A snowfall shows the air. Instead of an imperceptible something, the air is fluttering, depthy, stinging. Instead of the nothing of still air or the constancy of wind it invites the eye to move, here and near and far and near again. How bad can a falling be if it seems endlessly renewed?
In the vertical city, what your eye sees is flattened by habit and facade. You lose the opportunity to focus far. If there's not much in the way of trees around, you don't have the chance to follow motion, to look into depth.
A snowfall plumps the atmosphere, flirts with the eye, capers between you and the usual. It inverts the world, turning the ground brighter than the sky. It can't be bought or financed, canceled or rescheduled. Yay!
As long as you don't have to shovel it, snow is a pure pleasure for the city dweller. For a day or two if you're lucky. If any remains after that, the filth that accumulates on it is made even more vile by the reminding shine beneath. It's enough to make you growl and grow older.

[Note: The "Yay!" above is dedicated to Mary Susan Herczog.]