Strangers

I am talking to an Australian, a woman, about Nicole Kidman, and the crucial mystery is there at the start: 'I've known her twenty years, and I've spent a staggering amount of time with her, but I feel I don't know her. Because what she gives you is what you want. A lot of actors are like that. They don't exist when they aren't playing a part.'

This book is about acting and about an actress, but it must also study what happens to anyone beholding an actress--the spectator, the audience, or ourselves in any of our voyeur roles. And the most important thing in that vexed transaction is the way the actress and the spectator must remain strangers. That's how the magic works. Without that guarantee, the dangers of 'relationship' are grisly and absurd--they range from illicit touching to murder. For there cannot be this pitch of irrational desire without that rigorous apartness, provided by a hundred feet of warm space in a theater, and by that astonishing human invention, the screen, at the movies. And just as the movies were never simply an art or a show, a drama or narrative, but the manifestation of desire, so the screen is both barrier and open sesame.

The thing that permits witness--seeing her, being so intimate--is also the outline of a prison.

This predicament reminds me of a moment in Citizen Kane. The reporter, Thompson, goes to visit Bernstein, an old man who was Charlie Kane's right-hand man and who is now chairman of the board of the Kane companies. Thompson asks him if he knows what 'Rosebud,' Kane's last word, might have referred to. Some girl? wonders Bernstein. 'There were a lot of them back in the early days . . .' Thompson thinks it unlikely that a chance meeting fifty years ago could have prompted a solemn last word. But Bernstein disputes this: 'A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember.

'You take me,' he says. 'One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since, that I haven't thought of that girl.'

Bernstein seems to be single--to all intents and purposes he was married to Charlie Kane. I daresay some beaverish subtextual critic could argue that the girl in the parasol stands for the sheet of paper on which the young Kane sets out his 'Declaration of Principles.' Yet the reason why the anecdote (and the actor Everett Sloane's ecstatic yet heartbroken delivery of it) has stayed with me is that it embodies the principle of hopeless desire, and endless hope, on which the movies are founded. Of course, most little boys (even those of an advanced age) feel pressing hormonal urges to satisfy desire. And I would not exile myself from that gang. Still, there is another calling--and film is often its banner--that consists of those who would always protect and preserve desire by ensuring that it is never satisfied. For those of that persuasion--and it is more than merely sexual--there is no art more piquant than the films of Luis Buuel, one of which is actually entitled That Obscure Object of Desire. (In that light, let me alert you not to miss this book's vision of Belle de Jour as if Nicole Kidman had played in it. In fact, I have dreamed this film with such intensity that it matters to me more than many films I actually have to...