Tom Ford’s approach in screenwriting and directing his first
feature film, A Single Man (2009),
which is based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel of the same title, can be
characterized as thoroughness oriented to the use of film as art not merely for
visual storytelling, but also to probe the depths of human meaning and present
the audience with a thesis and thus something to ponder. As Ford reveals in his
oral commentary to the film, that thesis is that we should live in the present,
attending to it more closely, because today might be our last day of life.
George, the film’s protagonist, supposes that in intending to commit suicide at
the end of the day covered by the film, he chooses the final day of his life—hence
retaining and exercising some control over his otherwise hackneyed daily
routine. Though an exquisite use of foreshadowing that subtly and vaguely anticipates
his death, the film gains a depth of meaning that operates at different levels.
The underlying meaning is nuanced, even multivalent, rather than entirely
opaque and transparent. In this essay, I take a look at Ford’s use of hints anticipating
George’s death. Being salient in the script, they serve as a good illustration
for aspiring and even accomplished screenwriters who want to touch the
unconscious as well as awareness.
The most transparent foreshadowing takes place at the
beginning of the film, in the morning before work, in the kitchen. George’s
heart disease suddenly clenches and he winces in a quick spat of pain. In
Christopher Isherwood’s book of the same title, which Ford adapted for the
film, the fit is a spasm—a mere cramp that George has on a regular basis.[1]
The film begins closer to consciousness.
“I don’t see my future,” George says as our narrator at the
beginning of what would turn out to be the last day of his life in spite of his
last-minute decision not to kill himself. Sitting in his modern, Frank Lloyd
Wright-based house in Malibu, California on November 30, 1962, he knows he
plans on killing himself—an intent that is entirely missing in the book. The
professor is genuinely perplexed, as if the lack of any envisioned future would
be any surprise on his last day on earth. He is inexplicably stupefied even as
he goes over his plan to commit suicide. In the book, George tells Kenny at the
bar late that night, “The future—that’s where death is.”[2]
It is all so open-ended, as if a blank screen so bright nothing on it can be
seen.
Just as vaguely, George says “I’m going away” in answer to a
hustler’s suggestion of “Maybe another time?” as the two look into the setting
golden sunlight after work. Later that night, George answers his friend Charlie’s
desire to get together again real soon with, “I think I will be quiet this
weekend.” In the book, George nearly falls down stairs going out from Charlie’s
front door, very nearly falling “ten, fifty, one hundred million feet into the
bottomless black night.”[3]
In retrospect, these remarks are chilling, even ominous, for they imply an
insufferable, terminal void into which even a person’s consciousness and
thought dissolve; and yet, as George lies prostrate on his bedroom floor, dying
of a heart attack just before 3 a.m., his voice narration informs the audience,
“And suddenly it happened.” Another foreshadowing, perhaps, though this one is
for the viewers, who in answer to the anticipated void at the end of their own
lives dare to hope.
The foreshadowing is also done by substituting awkward
inexplicable reactions in place of the expected. The effect is to open up the
narrative, as if pregnant with new-found potential directionality. Looking at
George during cocktails before dinner at her stylish house, for instance, Charlie
observes, “Darling, you don’t look well; remember that heart attack you
had? You don’t look so hot.” Even though
George intends to put a pistol to his head later that night, I find it odd that
he barely registers a reaction. To be sure, he has no incentive to run to a
hospital for a stress test.
After dinner and an enjoyable dance, George lights two
cigarettes and hands one to his former lover. “It’s not like smoking will kill
me,” he deadpans. Charlie, her own drunken state doubtlessly being a factor,
does not take the hint as she should. Is George unconsciously crying out for
help? Rather than two people connecting, the two alcoholics are talking past
each other even as they presume (and crave) emotional intimacy. George lost it
a year earlier when his partner Jim died in a car crash in Ohio, and life was in
black and white for him ever since—except for that last day, when George found
himself amazed with the beauty in the ordinary and then unexpectedly
connecting.
After leaving Charlie’s house, George goes to his neighborhood
bar. Finding Kenny, a student clearly obsessed with his professor, curiously
there (pensively waiting, in the book’s version), George confides to him (hence
establishing emotional intimacy), “You know the only thing that has made the
whole thing worthwhile, has been those few times when I’ve been really, truly
been able to connect with another human being.” The question is thus whether
this new, unforeseen connection will mean a suspension or cancellation of the
current plan.
The answer is not delivered directly or all at once. Once
again, the narrative has depth, and thus reaches out on more than one level
using foreshadowing. Back at his place with Kenny after their short swim in the
Pacific Ocean after drinks at the bar, George realizes that his watch has
stopped. “My watch seems to have stopped,” he says—again, strangely perplexed. A
hint for us that time has run out for George, only he does not realize it even
though he still intends to end his life that night; he is still under the
impression that he is in control of when his life will end. Besides being a
neat-freak, George has nearly suffocated himself tightly in controlling his
interior and exterior, yet as a functioning alcoholic he is anything but in
control of even himself.
Minutes after realizing that his watch has stopped, George
passes out as Kenny looks on. In his recurrent dream of drowning, the
depressed, still grieving professor finally gets to the surface and can
breathe. This awakens him, and he finds and locks away his gun, no longer
intent on ending his life. No doubt the
emotional intimacy with Kenny—finally connecting with another human being
again—has brought color back into George’s life. Ford cleverly varies color
saturation to distinguish the pallid world of George’s depression from
Charlie’s liveliness and Kenny’s emotional connection. In fact, Kenny plays a
savior role, rather than merely that of an obsessed student—even keeping his
professor safe by holding the gun while sleeping on the couch after carrying
George back to bed. According to Ford, although it is not clear that Kenny is
interested in men, he willingly offers his body to George when the two return
earlier from swimming.
Kenny has indeed saved George, at least in terms of suicide.
Yet the Fates, intimated for the
audience by the sight of an owl taking flight as George opens his front door to
glimpse the nearly-full ruddy moon, will have the last word in this affair we
call life. As Ford points out in his commentary, the owl has long stood for
death being not long in coming. George is in a state of suspended animation,
for he finds himself ensconced in one of his rare, fleeting moments in which
the universe and everything in it, including his own life and even his partner’s
crash, make sense. “A few times in my life,” he narrates, “I’ve had moments of
absolute clarity. When for a few, brief seconds, the silence drowns out the
noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp, and the world
seems so fresh; it’s as though it had all just come into existence.” Burning
the suicide notes he had written to Charlie and someone else, he concedes that
he can never make such moments last. “I cling to them, but like everything,
they fade. I’ve lived my life on these moments; they pull me back to the
present.” With that, the thesis is transparent: live in the present, for today
may just be your last. Such alignment is suddenly undercut, however, as George
gets his wish even if he is no longer willing it.
Realizing that “everything is exactly the way it’s meant to
be,” George reaches out for to his bed stand for water only to feel himself in
the clutches of a fatal, all-consuming heart attack. Ford says George is even
wrong about everything then being just right in his life. How cruel it is of
the Fates to cut into one of those rare conditions of insightful equilibrium.
The Fates will not be denied by what little control we think we can muster, or
perhaps George pulled the trigger with all the years of smoking and drinking—a subtle
and gradual means of suicide.
As he lay on the floor barely alive, we hear the slowing
clicks of his alarm clock. The clock stops, and George sees his deceased
partner lean down and kiss him on the cheek—the kiss of death—for “just like
that, it came.” Suddenly the overhead camera shot turn to black and white;
there is no longer any living in the now for George. We are left with what is
perhaps the deepest level of meaning in the film—what now?
With George narrating his own death, his soul must exist in
the film’s story-world. “And suddenly it happened.” People don’t usually say
that death came. So I suspect that
given the sense of amazement in “just like that,” George experienced something
liberating, or at the very least a sudden change or transformation into another
realm of existence in which his emotional pain could not go. He does not mention
his dead partner, Jim, so I suspect that whatever suddenly came, it was
existential rather than restorative in terms of human relationships. In effect,
death relativizes them such that seeing earlier departed loved ones is no
longer important.
Narrative visual art can indeed plumb the mind’s depths and
thus register as substantive instead of superficial eye-candy. Films that leave
an audience thinking and feeling deeply for a sustained period of time are
themselves multi-layered, with multivalent symbols placed at various degrees of
subtlety throughout the narrative to foreshadow. Such films register at various
depths of human meaning and reflect its complexity through the use of
linguistic and visual symbols, each of which contains by its very nature more
than one loosely-related meaning. They play even with time by lending to human
nature more omniscience than it has a right to. It as if the screenplays have
been written as orchestral pieces, with more than one instrument group—each at
its own level of subtlety and duration, and yet likely simultaneous with various
others at foreshadowed intervals.
[1]
Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man ,
(University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1964), p. 13.
[2]
Ibid., p. 157.
[3]
Ibid., p. 145.
