Three prominent works of art encapsulate the film’s major themes.
(1) Damien Hurst’s sculpture of a bull as Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows. Sebastian registers as tortured, martyred saintliness, which the bull here redefines as the masculine life force.
As in his debut, A Single Man, writer/director Tom Ford examines the abuse of sensitivity in American men. Susan’s brother is disowned and banished from his family for being gay. Her mother dismisses the sensitive writer Edward as weak and unambitious. Susan has the courage to marry him anyway. But she weakens as her mother’s internalized blues take hold. When she “grows into” her mother’s bourgeois values Susan abandons art-making for art history and then running a commercial gallery. She leaves Edward in favour of slick, specious businessman Hutton who goes on to betray her. Hutton arranges her abortion of Edward’s child. As Hutton seems successful but is warding off bankruptcy he personifies the fake status of his and her parents’ world.
Edward dedicates his novel to Susan and says she inspired it. The hero, which she visualizes as him, loses his wife and daughter to rape and murder when he lacks the brute force to oppose the three brutes. Where in real life Edward watched Hutton drive Susan away after her abortion, in the novel he watches his wife and daughter (who in Susan’s visualization resemble her and her daughter) driven away by the abductors. Edward lost Susan to her adoption of her mother’s values, i.e., to the shallow gloss of the stylish elitist life. In the novel he loses her to savages, evil night creatures, antithetical to the elegants but in effect equivalent.
(2) A Christopher Wool-like painting spells out three layered syllables of “Revenge.” In the novel the hero avenges his wife and daughter by killing one of the assailants and identifying another for prosecution. He seems to kill himself in the process. As his character turns from civilized husband into illegal killer, he demonstrates the moral cost of abandoning the “weakness” of the civilized, honest citizen. So his novel is a form of revenge against Susan for having left him because of his softness.
The novel’s power proves Susan was wrong to have lost faith in him as a writer. Her own dissatisfaction with her luxurious life (and husband) and her high-quality art gallery similarly proves she was wrong to have abandoned her initial calling, making art, which paralleled her leaving him. In her new life she can’t sleep because — despite her elegance, status, culture and material success — she is still the “nocturnal animal” Edward called her, a person of imagination and creativity. She can’t sleep because she denied both her own nature as an artist and her love for Edward. The film ends with her alone in the restaurant where she was to meet Edward. He’s standing her up, just when she seems set to take him back (witness her removal of her bright red lipstick and her plotted décolletage), is a second revenge. It’s not a vicious revenge, though, just a reminder of what he warned earlier. When you reject a true love — or one’s essential self — it can’t simply be recovered.
There’s yet another revenge here. As Edward’s novel avenges her abandoning him, Ford’s film takes a kind of revenge upon the society in which he has made his fame and fortune as a top-drawer fashion designer. Susan’s scene with her mother, the gallery scenes and her husband’s betrayal define Ford’s other, non-film professional world as shallow, materialistic, dishonest and vain. In fact, the scenes of Susan’s real life have such artificial performances and are so shot with the glossy colours and composition of luxury product advertising, that her reality seems artificial. Her visualization of Edward’s novel, with its vulgarity, violence and vile characters, seems realistic.
(3) John Currin’s painting of a large nude woman distorted by an oval lens is another version of the coarse fleshy life that elegant art tends to ignore. Hence — in shocking contrast — the very obese nudes dancing through the opening titles and on screens in Susan’s exhibition. That show combines the large screen images with the fleshy women themselves on platforms, either in person or in 3-D sculptures.The latter ambiguity parallels the film’s shift between Susan’s life scenes, now or in flashback, and her visualization of her ex-husband’s novel. Art and life continually collide and overlap, because art evades reality even as it confronts it. Hence the novel’s plot line which breaks away from Edward’s earlier writing about himself (Susan’s complaint) and yet works out a form of his self-realization and self-presentation.
The tension and confusion between art and life have often been treated in film, but rarely with such complexity and moral engagement. The gallery world is far from the novel’s vile hicks but it has a similar rapacity and abusive treatment of the vulnerable. The novel’s family is driving to the artists town of Marfa when they are run off the road and destroyed.
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