The Searchers (1956): The Gospel According to Look

 

    The Comanche woman that Martin Pawley unwittingly marries erroneously assumes that his repeated “Look” means he has renamed her, replacing her native identification as a free flying spirit. Martin and Ethan stick her with that name. As we expect of such a resonant classic, even such an apparently marginal element is found to carry the heart of the film. Its primary direction is for us to look —  past the superfices of our social conventions into the dark heart of American racism. 

Ethan disdains of the 1/8 Cherokee Martin as a half-breed, a “blankethead.” This despite Jeffrey Hunter’s bright blue eyes and his character Martin’s devotion to Ethan’s brother Aaron’s family. When Martin’s family was slaughtered by Comanches Aaron adopted him and raised him as kin. In an echo of Ethan's epithet, Martin thinks he is trading two Whiteman tophats for a blanket -- but it's for Look.

        Look in a tophat remains in Ethan's view a blankethead. That visual joke holds a central theme of the film. A human is a human whatever the exterior appearance or overlay. The villain here may be Scar but he proves human as Ethan -- and more of a family man.

Martin considers Ethan’s abducted niece Debbie to be his sister. For him, the emotional connection trumps the question of blood. He rejects Ethan’s bequest for denying her as his last surviving kin. He stands in front of her when Ethan is poised to shoot her. In that tense triangle the message is to look beyond differences of race or colour to the common humanity beneath. 

The warm, sympathetic character of Look is significant as the film’s first humanization of the Indian. It breaks the steady stream of references to the savage. When we laugh at Martin’s abusive treatment of her, rolling her down the hill, we commit ourselves to the racist diminution of the Other. She flees when she hears their quest for Scar, but leaves them an ambiguous direction, a stone arrow that m ay direct then to Scar or to her destination. She seems as afraid of Scar as the searchers are. But she is slaughtered among other innocent Comanches by -- the cavalry. The men's words over her corpse are hardly redress for their abuse of her. 

Extending the parallel savageries, when Ethan and Scar finally confront each other, they echo respect for each other’s command of the other’s language: “Did someone teach you?”  Ethan recognizes the “Scar” in the Spanish “Cicatrix,” but he fails to recognize that the film’s radical “scar” is his own racism. We get that “look” of intense hatred in the famous closing-in shot on Ethan’s shadowed face. Completing Ethan’s identification with Scar, the white hero scalps the chief after Martin shoots him. 

The hatred for the native is so sweeping that it corrupts the virtuous Laurie Jorgensen. Though in love with Martin, she approves of Ethan’s plan to kill Debbie: “Fetch what home? The leavings of a Comanche buck, sold time and again to the highest bidder, with savage brats of her own?… Do you know what Ethan will do if he has a chance? He'll put a bullet in her brain. [pause] I tell you, Martha [Debbie’s mother] would want him to.”

Contrary to those racist assumptions, Debbie has blossomed in her life with Scar. As she tells Martin, she always remembers her own family but now wants to stay with Scar and his. “These are my people.” 

Perhaps the film’s moral center is Laurie’s mother. Mrs. Jorgensen is a former schoolteacher, married to the Swedish immigrant rancher Lars. She alone reads Laurie’s experience of Martin’s insufficient letter. In a summary apprehension of America, she articulates the hopeful spirit of the Texican: “nothing but a human man way out on a limb.” The border-American is alone, exposed, endangered, due to the isolation and dismissal of a people. She hopes for a society of acceptance, where people don’t suffer for their difference: “This year and next, and maybe for a hundred more. But I don't think it'll be forever. Some day this country's gonna be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” The unrealized dream of an egalitarian America rings as true for 1956 (when the film was released) as it was for 1868 (the film’s setting) — and, tragically, as it remains today.

Ethan’s own moral center is discovered beneath his conscious hatred and rage. His intention to kill his contaminated niece is at least in part rooted in the fact that — as a tombstone suggests — his mother, like Martin’s, was slaughtered by the Comanches. But in the climactic moment, when he captures Debbie, his conscious will is overruled by a body memory. His instinct to sweep her up reminds him of the identical moment at his homecoming. Finally he accepts their connection beyond the difference in her appearance. He goes beyond his “look.”   

The imperative to look — beyond surfaces, differences — is given both a comic and an epic representation. In the comic, Lars Jorgensen twice puts on his eyeglasses to prepare to listen to his wife or daughter read aloud a letter. The quirk is an amusing reflex for the man who cannot read but will hear the letter. To learn is to look.

The epic “look” command is in the film’s most dramatic composition. In both the first and the last shots, the image is dominated by a thick black frame, which opens to reveal a smaller space that admits the light of the outside world. That darkness is continuous with the darkened theatre in which the film was made to be viewed. The shot establishes the darkness of the freshly planted civilization amid the magnificence of the sprawling, towering Monument Valley where director John Ford found his crowning glory.

That composition recurs within the narrative, when the heroes find refuge from attacking natives in front of a massive cave. Again, the shot originates within a dark frame. Even in the interiors, door frames and windows restrict the characters yet reveal them to us. We have to look beyond our traditional frames.

Perhaps the most moving scene of looking is when Martha, collecting Ethan’s overcoat, lovingly caresses it, feeling alone with her sentiment. That brief moment suggests a backstory: They had been in love, before Ethan took to his solitary journey. Indeed, that suppressed love registers in the characters’ looks, glances, movement. in the earlier scene of Ethan’s return.

       It’s important that we see Martha’s intimate revelation. But we also see the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton see it. Sensing the exposure he dramatically respects that intimacy by looking up and away. He works his donut and coffee as Ethan enters, dons the coat and plants a farewell kiss on Martha’s forehead. In a more dramatic evasion, when Ethan comes upon her raped corpse, he violently protects Martin from that sight, leaving the body to burn in the shed. That prevents an ineradicable look.

As both the lay preacher and the Texas Rangers captain, Clayton personifies the combination of religious and secular law. That doubles his tension with Ethan, whose racist vendetta and outlaw independence leave him forever scarred, forever excluded from the warmth of a community. When Ethan walks away from his reunited family it is to wander eternally through the winds, as he described the fate of Comanches who've had their eyes shot out. 

Here the characters are always looking. Mrs Jorgensen scampers to watch her daughter’s suitors fight it out in the red dust, the wedding party turning into a civilized, ritualized savagery. As Ethan and Martin track Scar, the violent chief comes to recognize Big Shoulders and The One Who Follows. And of course we are all watching the film. As the framing composition makes it, we’re in the dark world of prejudice in need of an illumination. Until we perceive and embrace the larger humanity we like Ethan ride rootless alone.

The Indian as sexual threat was in the 1950s a surrogate for the white man’s fear of the Black. Old Mose Harper is a safe Black, steeped in his inappropriate Bible quotations, alternately imitating the Indian or shooting at him, with one simple craving: a rocking chair by the fire. He brings Ethan to Debby by pretending to be mad, i.e., madder than he is. The domesticated harmless Black appears in place of the sexual threat that has resonated since Othello’s black ram tupping the white ewe. 

Yet for all Ford’s liberal humanitarianism here the film still bears some limitation of its times — and to this day. For all the central drama’s attack on racial prejudice the one irredeemably corrupt white character — Jerem Futterman — is by his name a Jew. This greedy and duplicitous trader per the Reverend Captain Clayton “probably deserved to be shot.” Ford's egalitarianism only went so far.

Tar

  “Time is the thing,” conductor Lydia Tar tells her interviewer Adam Gopnik (unpersuasively played by Adam Gopnik). She’s referring to what her one hand controls on the orchestra while the other directs other elements. Time and its control — by us, on us — could be the central theme of the film. Especially if controlling time leads one to assume they can completely control others' lives.  Implicitly: Time wounds all heels. 

Perhaps that’s why the film opens with a juggling of time in its structure. The first thing we see is an assistant’s phone, with emails reporting the maestro’s awakening and mood. She is the central subject. We hear an Asian singer — which turns out to anticipate the closing scene, where the brilliant Western classical conductor has been reduced to working with a minor Asian orchestra. As we will see, this reduction is not racist.

When the opening credits unreel they are predominantly the technical ones that normally/always come at the end, after the plot has concluded, when everyone is leaving. Here the film conductor — director Todd Field — stops and uses time for at least two effects. He ensures this audience will pay the techs proper respect. (No-one leaves a Cate Blanchett film this early.) He also reserves the end-credit slot for the climactic acknowledgment of all the music that makes this work such a rich experience, even apart from its plot, acting and themes.  

The film is also very much of its time. It surfaces the harassment and sexual exploitation issues we daily hear about, from the classroom and the workplace up through our bastions of high culture. Some of the latter transgressors are named. These abusers are usually men, exploiting their power, personal and official, for their pleasure and advantage. But here the guilty power is a woman conductor, Lydia Tar (whose very name connotes a darkness crying out for retributive feathers).    

Gopnik’s opening recitation of Tar’s prominence may seem to go on too long. That heft is necessary to establish the heroine’s stature and power. Her achievement seems all the more impressive when we glimpse her origins — the shabby home she has kept, her loutish, resentful, righteous brother — and the high-power level on which she asserts her influence. A private flight takes her from Berlin to New York for her book opening and a deposition. Her past echoes in the abandoned ruin to which she follows the pretty cellist she hopes to seduce. Her literal fall and scarring there anticipate her end. 

Tar commands our early respect in her master class, especially when she confronts the young man’s Woke disdain for Bach: “Unfortunately, the architect of your soul appears to be social media.…

The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring kind of conformity.” We may return to her side when an illicit videotaping of that class is rejigged to incriminate her. But she loses us when — with the fury of a woman scorned — her undermining of a young woman’s career drives her to suicide. 

At her nadir, Lydia humiliates herself by physically attacking the conductor of her former orchestra, onstage. She’s reduced to conducting a minor Asian orchestra. Now she’s in a cheap hotel, seeking a massage in a brothel. Worse, her symphony is performing for a ludicrously costumed and masked audience — like a popular culture fan rally. This cultural fall is a bitter parody of the scholarly study she did for her doctorate, immersed in an isolated indigenous tribe’s music.

Cate Blanchett’s achievement here is remarkable. It included her learning German as well as piano and conducting performance. Her tough, determined character admirably pursues a lofty ambition. She channels Rocky in her sequences of running and boxing the heavy bag in the gym. This is a woman working a man’s power. 

Yet she still shows her softness in her scenes with the little girl, who by calling her Lydia suggests she’s the child of Lydia’s violinist lover. She tries to live a motherly warmth she never experienced. Performing sans rehearsal. In approaching the pretty young Russian cellist, however, the woman turns predator.

Perhaps that’s the film’s point. Acknowledging the history of male predators, the film deliberately broadens its target to include this woman. Sexist abuse and predation transcends gender, as Tar’s music transcends culture.

The Names in Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

  Of course the key name both in the film and in the Ernest Haycox source story is Lordsburg to which the societal cross-section on this coach are headed. That gives the parable a religious/moral dimension. How do these characters here prepare their souls for the Lord’s burg? 

My meditation is prompted by the two central — and antithetical — characters and their consanguineal names. Now, what marshall would ever be named Curly? Figures of the law are expected to be ramrod straight. So a Marshall Curly? Then there’s the outlaw, The Ringo Kid, a rather amiable name even before the Beatles magnified a Starkey into a Starr. These apparent opposite characters connect in their names as in their actions and in what they signify.

At the film’s climax the marshall opts not to arrest the outlaw after another killing. Instead he allows him a fresh start across the border, in Mexico. This is to save him from — that crushing irony — “the blessings of civilization.”  The marshall has come to respect outlaw Ringo’s virtue, both in his crime — a defence both of his self and of family honour — and in his respect for and resurrection of the (obligatory) Fallen Woman. 

The men’s names fit that dynamic. The marshall’s “Curly” connotes softness. A curl isn’t hard like “bent” (see Gatewood below). It leads into the implicit circles both in the Ring and its closing O. The circle is a completed curl. These antagonists’ names confirm their shared humanity in their sensitive flex of the law. The enemy Plummer family suggest a deeper evil, the depth they evilly plumb.

Said Fallen Woman is named Dallas, presumably after where she’s from. That is, she is defined by her past. But then Ringo reads a different future into her relationship with the respectable wife and her newborn. Himself a social outcast, he can appreciate a new potential in her.

In contrast to this virtue, the corrupt banker Gatewood’s name evokes the “wood” hardness of the civilization spreading into the frontier. The wood like the “civilization” of banking is imported to the desert. The “gate” suggests the fencing both in the towns the pioneers imposed upon the open West and in the town’s own fragmentation into private yards. When Mrs Gatewood and her cronies drive Dallas out of town they harden this exclusion. Exposing their false morality, Gatewood exploits the broken telegraph line to abscond with the bank’s funds. He is as outlaw as the Indians who broke the connection.

Similar themes appear in the coach’s other two couples' names. Hatfield is especially courtly towards Mrs Malory, even saving one bullet to save her from the fate worse than death should they be taken captive by the savage. Hatfield is the southern gentleman, the black sheep of an aristocratic family. The Confederate major turned “tinhorn gambler.” They are connected through his army service in her father’s regiment but also in literature. Sir Thomas Malory is famous for his poems about flowering knighthood, including the death of King Arthur. Where Mrs Malory reflects Hatfield's chivalry, his name also recalls the family feud with the Hatfields. That connotes social disorder, the bloody rifts within “civilization.”

The whiskey drummer may seem truer to the actor’s name — Donald Meek — than to his character, Samuel Peacock. As the character falls far short of the flashy strut implied in the family name, it’s a comic parallel to Hatfield’s descent. So, too, Peacock’s new friend Doc Josiah Boone recalls Daniel Boone, the famed pioneer who claimed to be trying to escape civilization — only to have it follow him ever further. The genre's stock character of the drunken professional — often played by Thomas Mitchell — is another figure fallen from grace. His weakness either explains his flight from the East or reveals his disenchantment with his new refuge. 

        Not to forget Buck, the hearty driver of the six-horse machine. Bucking is what the wild horses do, until the human master "breaks" or tames (i.e., civilizes) them. The driver's name arrogates the initial power of his charges,

As the names in this richly nuanced classic confirm, the trip to Lordsburg allows even the fallen the possibility of redemption. Indeed the stagecoach trip to Lordsburg starts in Tonto (in Arizona), which means “wild one” in Potawatomi. The journey from wildness to salvation should not preclude moral flexibility and care.

Triangle of Sadness

And so it came to pass that this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or was awarded to Ruben Ostlund’s  Poeme de Merde, abstractly enough titled Triangle of Sadness. 

That makes sense. For if there is any conclusion to be drawn from the current state of increasingly autocratic global politics, swelling injustice and a sober despair it’s this. if, as per the adage, the poor are always with us, the obscenely rich are always against us. And only growing in number and power. (As it happens, I saw this on the eve of the American election.)

The film is a satire of Swiftian decorum and anger. It opens and closes on Carl, a young stud trying to win the love of his Influencer partner Ya Ya. At the end he rushes through a forest in hope of saving her life. In both scenes she's defined as a selfish manipulator.

In the film's prelude several handsome young men are vying for a modelling job. Carl is instructed to “relax your triangle of sadness,” the mid-brow area that expresses emotion. “And open your mouth so you look a bit more available.” Here emotions are to be hidden or fabricated: Targeting such suppression of humanity, the film flaunts that title. 

In Chapter One Carl and Ya Ya quarrel over a dinner check. He bristles against “gender based roles” and “bullshit feminism,” rejects the “trophy [wife] shit” and is determined to make her love him. As “influencers” they are empty beauties selling their image. Despite her claim to be current, Yaya wants the traditional security of the “kept woman.” She expects Carl to pay her way.

In Chapter Two they enjoy a free yacht trip, spewing photos of themselves. It’s so luxurious a helicopter delivers a valise with three jars of Nutella. Another boat is despatched to take away a crew member fired when Carl complains the man appeared bare-chested. The model was disturbed by the genuine hirsute manliness. The ship offers to sell Carl an engagement ring for 28,000 euros.

The passengers are the creme de la crumb. Russian mogul Dmitri proudly declares his fertilizer fortune: “I sell shit.” So he understands the Influencers’ reduction to Image, when Yaya pauses the pasta at her mouth, determined to pose rather than eat. 

The British arms dealer Winston is less honest: ““Our products have been employed in upholding democracy all over the world.” He makes hand grenades. If democracy is held up here, it’s in the sense of the wealthy continually robbing the poor. But they also arm the underclass, as the pirates blow up the yacht with a grenade. As  Clementine observes, “I say, Winston, I believe this is one of ours.” The couple is a homey decline from the Churchills.

The cruise crew is a microcosm of social stratification. To pamper the clients a sparkling white staff are instructed to fulfil every client’s request, however absurd or impossible — in expectation of “a very. Generous. Tip!” In an insensitive imposition of “equality” Dmitri’s wife demands a staff girl join her in the hot tub: “Everyone is equal!. I command you, enjoy the moment!” Of course, one would not command an equal — and could not command enjoyment. 

From the crew’s orgiastic celebration of “Money Money! Money” we cut to the uniformed workers, quiet in their quarters, the hidden but vital Asian and Filipino menials. When the entire crew submits to the water-slide “pleasures” that the Russian woman ordered, the first signs of a serious storm appear. Nature seems to respond to that social disordering.

In what follows, satirist Ostlund almost manages to out-Salo Pasolini. He floods the affluent with effluence. The excrement that studded the language in the first chapter here materializes in force. First the gourmand passengers start vomiting all over. Then comes diarrhea not just human but mechanical. The toilets overflow, flooding the floors. 

        Against the diners' growing nausea the well-trained staff can only prescribe more eating. Cutting back, self-denial, are alien concepts in this world, even when the luxury dining room turns vomitorium.

As the filthy rich are reduced to this materiality a demented German woman continually repeats “In the clouds” — as if only the demented can so locate the human in the heavens.

The ship’s captain has been secluded drunk so far, clearly unable to bridge the gap between his duties and his politics. For he’s a self-styled “shit socialist.”  When the others ate smoked octopus he ordered a hamburger and fries. He and the Russian fertilizer mogul retreat to his cabin. The American Commnunist and the Russian Capitalist regale each other by swapping Socialist jokes. 

Congruent with the shit-flood, the captain demands on the PA “Stop the bullshit and pay taxes.” Then “You’re swimming in abundance while the rest of the world drowns in need.” As played by the affable working-class persona Woody Harrelson, the captain sometimes seems the director’s spokesman: “I’m not angry with you. I understand that your greedy behaviour is just a way to preserve . . . that you’re rich, filthy rich.” The excrement connotes the filth of the self-serving rich. They are, after all, flush with money. 

The captain concludes with his allegation that his government was behind the murder of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and the Kennedy brothers. As if to wreak poetic justice that’s when the boat of pirates appears, blowing up the yacht, which at this point looks like the battleship of the captain’s vision.  

In Chapter Three: The Island, the few shipwreck survivors find their social structure reversed. The Filipino toilet manager Abigail raises herself to Captain because only she can catch fish, clean them and start the fire to feed the others. She also takes Carl away from Ya Ya, buying his romance with — an apt parody of phallicism — pretzel sticks. 

In contrast to her efficiency, one of the men struggles to kill a donkey by bashing its head with a rock. That may provide the clue to how to read the closing scene with Abigail and Ya Ya. The open ending allows the viewer’s choice whether the working class can sustain its hardwon status or will yet again cede it to the less capable but habitual authority. This ambiguity echoes the question in the prelude: “So is this runway casting for a grumpy brand or a smiley brand?” The three characters also form another triangle of sadness, however we decide Abigail's last act.

 

The Banshees of Inisherin

  In playwright Martin McDonagh’s new film the context defines the plot. A few scenes of remote gunfire connote the Irish Civil War in 1923. The Western island setting is remote from the war, with only that occasional aural connection. Yet the village drama is a miniature of the civil strife that erupted after Ireland won its independence. The mainland war replays here as a conflict between two friends. 

The folk musician Colm is suffering from despair. Sensing his imminent mortality he composes a folk tune to provide some afterlife. Exposing that futility, the song’s (as the film’s) title just sounds good. It has no reality. There are no banshees there.

More damaging is Colm’s other resolve. to cease wasting time on his longtime close friend Padraic, who is a standard dumb bloke. But as Padraic’s bookish sister Siobhan reminds Colm, all the men on that remote isolated crag are dumb — or they would long since have left. As she eventually does. 

Like the civil war, indeed like most wars, that small difference swells into a tangle of destruction, both mutual and self. When Padraic refuses his old friend’s insistence upon being left alone, Colm chops off one of his own fingers for each day of offence. He is quickly reduced to one fingerless hand. That ends his fiddling pleasure, leaving him to stab his fiddle into the air in mute musicianship. Once he is unable to play his tune it won’t outlive him.

When Padriac’s donkey Minnie (persuasively performed by Minnie) fatally chokes on some fingers, his injured innocence turns mortal. Rejecting Colm’s apology and offer of peace, he burns his former friend’s home to the ground. Even then he refuses to make peace. They won’t be “quits” until Colm dies. “Some things there's no moving on from. And I think that's a good thing.” On such stubborn squabbles are most wars waged.

The apparently homey little community is rife with aggression. Humorously, Colm disdains of the law: “If punching a policeman is a sin then we may as well pack up and go home.” The priest who hears his confession himself erupts into indignant violent profanity. He reads the Latin but speaks the vulgate. In another family, the father mercilessly beats his wife and son, who drowns himself when Siobhan confirms his expectation that she would never fall in love with the much younger and irritating boy.

At the end Padraic, having supposedly won his satisfaction, is left alone. His sister gone, he brings his cows and horse into his house. This is his finally stable relationship. Colm is left with far more isolation than he requested. Indeed the entire community is left — as Colm admits to and suspects Siobhan of sharing — just “entertaining myself while staving off the inevitable.”

There is a true serenity and beauty in the island’s bleak landscape. And even in this doomed community, a warmth and pathos emerge from the small, tense lives of paralysis and despair. 

And note this: if a calendar turning up April Fool’s  Day did not establish the 1923 setting there is nothing in this film’s setting, speech and themes that could not represent today. If we don’t see ourselves there we’re the April Fool.   

The Tenant (1976)

  Trelkovsky takes pride in being a French citizen, but as a Pole even in worldly Paris he is ever the Outsider. 

At work, he’s a minor functionary disdained by the women and bullied by the brutish males. As we learn nothing else about him he’s a character unwittingly in search of an identity. Polanski plays him as a gentle, nice man — but lacking a firm core. He can counter his prospective landlord’s reluctance but not his office friends’ coarseness.

As if to try an identity on for size, he rents the apartment of a woman who tried to jump to her death. The room’s nine mirrors make it an instrument of self-reflection — were he confident in any self to reflect. Instead he draws into the suicide Simone’s life. He visits the comatose all-bandaged woman in the hospital, where he meets her friend Stella. They meet again at Simone’s funeral, then he joins her party in a bar.

Their possible affair starts with Stella’s erotic initiative at a Bruce Lee screening. A tryst in her apartment fizzles when Trelkovsky freezes on questioning his identity. Is he still himself when he has lost a tooth, when he has lost a limb, several limbs, his head? With that fixation he has begun to lose his self.

The gentle hero’s experience turns Kafkaesque when he thinks the other rooming house residents are conniving against him. Complaints of his noise continue beyond the justified. He becomes entangled in house politics when he declines to sign a petition against another tenant. When he’s robbed, the landlord, Monsieur Zy (evocative of Josef K?)  persuades him not to report the theft, to save the house’s reputation and to avoid himself becoming known to the police. When Trelkovsky responds to a summons he finds they already have a file of complaints against him. 

Now Trelkovsky suspects the community is trying to make him kill himself, as they perhaps did Simone. The conversion begins when the neighbourhood cafe brings him the morning hot chocolate that Simone always had. When he orders Galois they always bring him her Marboros, falsely claiming they have run out of his brand.  

Essentially Trelkovsky is not just a tenant passing through a rented apartment but a man  passing through another identity, the suicide’s. He privately dons makeup and Simone’s dress and dyes his hair her black. Feeding his sense of the unnatural, he espies other tenants using the communal toilet across from his window; they stand there blankly staring. 

On an imagined trip to that toilet he looks across and sees himself spying on himself. A wall of Egyptian hieroglyphics would be left by the Egyptologist Simone herself, from the grave. 

Trelkovsky’s paranoia ultimately destroys him. Finding salvation with Stella, the illusion of Monsieur Zy at the door drives Trelkovsky into mad destruction of her flat. Having lost his self he drifts into repeating Simone’s suicide, indeed doing it twice to properly “perform” her role as he assumes it. 

Though Trelkovsky can’t save his own life he does save another’s. He patiently and generously consoles a man who has secretly loved Simone and has finally come to tell her that — only to have Trelkovsky report her astonishing suicide. 

        In our age of gender fluidity the film offers yet another possibility. The gentle Trelkovsky, sensitive, repelled by his office mates' aggressiveness, may rent the woman's apartment and be attracted to identifying with her as a way to express his own suppressed feminine nature. Hence his resistance to Stella's offer of a sexual relationship, especially when he retreats to speculate about the essence of his own identity. Fantasizing the other residents' determination to kill him may be his way of suppressing his female aspect. He blames them for driving him to kill the woman in him. Hence his double dive -- once as his male self, once as his female.

With writer/director Polanski also performing the lead role, the drama assumes another dimension. A writer like an immigrant moves through a new world with new people and a new life whenever he submits to his imagination. The danger is again abandoning his self and  losing any hold on reality. The film’s opening shot is the view downward from the fatal apartment — the two suicides’ perspective. It’s a doom waiting to be seized, a story to be told and risk being stuck in.