Orpheus, Eurydice and The Power of the Gaze
(Musings from February 27, 2020)
Works discussed:
Hadestown
A Portrait of A Lady on Fire
Zadie Smith on Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is seemingly ubiquitous: the Met Opera adaptation of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl, the Tony award-winning musical Hadestown, and the film A Portrait of a Lady on Fire have all had their cultural moments in the sun in the last eight months.
Why is this the Greek myth that has stuck with us, and what does that say about our cultural moment?
This question has bothered me for some time, primarily because while the myth provides more than enough fodder for drama (boy likes girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, boy loses girl again), the way that it is often told is nothing more than empty poetry. Hadestown, for example, offers no reason for why Orpheus turns around, adding nothing new to an ending the audience already knows is coming. By turning the characters into pawns who re-enact the same miserable ending without knowing why they make the decisions they do, Anaïs Mitchell wastes not only a dramatic opportunity but a political one, to ask why we lose the things we want the most.
A Portrait of a Lady on Fire, whose lead is not an obnoxious folk musician but a female painter in 18th century France and villain not death but patriarchy, provides the first satisfactory attempt at an answer to the Orpheus question that I’ve seen. It shifts the enigma from why he turns around to instead ask why he’s forbidden to look in the first place. Why is the gaze such a powerful thing? For the first time, it made me think of that turn not as a mistake but as an intentional choice.
My friends’ main critique of the movie was an indifference towards the characters and their relationship, stemming from the lack of dialogue — “How can they be in love? They don’t talk or discuss their pasts! They don’t know each other!” Portrait aims to rewrite what we’ve been taught about courtship as witty repartee (from The Philadelphia Story to Harry and Sally), arguing that the gaze is enough and a form of knowledge too. What better way to investigate the power of the gaze than through portraiture and through the camera?
From its first moments, Portrait teaches its viewers how to look — both at a painting and at a person. It elevates the hesitation of a hand over a canvas to high drama, as in the opening credits, in which we see different hands making their first marks on a blank canvas. The sequence segues into a class, where we hear an unseen model teaching students what to look for, for example how the subject holds her hands. The teacher is Marianne, and her narration acts as a guide to the viewer throughout the movie, particularly in the way she talks through her covert observation of Héloïse. For example, she describes Héloïse’s ear, the curves on the outside and the darkness within, and we see myriad half-sketches from different angles. Her gaze isn’t sexual but scientific, observational without being colored by the need to possess — at least at first.
Portrait also elevates the power of the gaze by comparing it to the inadequacy of words. For example, Héloïse asks Marianne to describe what an orchestra sounds like and what love feels like; each time, Marianne falters in her response. Portrait also demonstrates the power of the gaze by depicting the physical violence engendered by a ‘bad’ gaze, both when Marianne lights the incomplete portrait on fire and when she ruins her own first attempt.
Marianne’s gaze could be thought of as a manifestation of the female gaze — one of the few media studies concepts to have found its place into ordinary conversation, which refers to the repudiation of the male gaze that a priori sexualizes women. Portrait mines the intersection of gaze and desire not only in its depiction of painting but also through the camera — another technology that facilitates the gaze. Its slow, intentional camerawork celebrates, instead of sexualizes, women’s bodies, labor, and camaraderie. The camera’s gaze, like the painting sequences, teaches the audience a new way to look at women within and beyond film.
Portrait goes beyond the female gaze, however, by arguing that the act of seeing is as much about the person doing the seeing as it is about the person being seen. Héloïse has two critiques of Marianne’s first attempt at her portrait — that it doesn’t look like her, but also that it doesn’t ‘fit’ Marianne. While the first is what we would traditionally think of as the criteria by which to evaluate a portrait, it is the second that hits home — that the portrait fails not at conveying the subject but the gaze-r.
The movie builds on this inversion when Héloïse flips the tables on Marianne, showing her that if Marianne knows Héloïse because she is painting her, Héloïse knows her just as well because she has been gazing back. The existence of a reverse gaze is a powerful idea in the context of the gendered history of painter (male) and muse (female). Zadie Smith’s review of Celia Paul’s memoir Self-Portrait speaks beautifully to this intersection: Paul has the unique perspective of a muse-turned-painter, and argues that “the act of sitting is not a passive one.”
[The movie also adds an emotional (feminine) element to the objective (scientific) gaze, by arguing that the way we look at someone might change as we fall in love with them. This feels radical, just as the fact that Paul paints the people she loves (“her son, her four sisters, her father, and especially her mother, over and over again, using her own emotional relation to them as an aesthetic principle”) instead of objects of sexual desire feels radical.]
Portrait extends the inversion of the gaze in painting to inversion of the gaze in movies, putting the camera back on the audience. It does this by depicting stand-ins for the audience, frequently centering the person consuming the art and not the art itself. The final scene is the epitome of this, in which we silently watch not the orchestra but Héloïse’s reaction to it. It privileges the gaze over the art itself and asks us what a depiction of our gaze on this film would look like? What drama is there in the way that our inherited way of gazing at womens’ bodies and relationships was broken down and built anew?
The film also privileges Sophie’s adversarial reaction to Héloïse’s reading of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth. Sophie reacts just as I did, asking disbelievingly, why does he turn around? Marianne responds by asking her to consider Orpheus in that moment not as a lover, but as an artist. He chooses not the love but the memory of the love; In a perverse way, the idea of Eurydice — not Eurydice herself — is his muse, because after all, what better muse than a love forever lost? A few minutes later, we see our own Orpheus glance around one last time at an image that will haunt her forever as she condemns Eurydice to her fate.