Читать книгу The King Who was a King. The Book of a Film - H. G. Wells - Страница 6

The film entrepreneur having given his imaginative author carte blanche is apt to return upon his tracks with after-thoughts. Among the trade and professional solicitudes that haunt him, one is predominant. He has to secure the services of a starry lady. More than half the normal audience is feminine. He insists they must find themselves in the film, and from his point of view this can only be done by introducing a "love interest." Our hero must have his sufficiently difficult task further complicated by the dire attractiveness of blue eyes or brown—or both. It is necessary that this delusion of the film entrepreneur should be dealt with plainly. A normal love interest has to be kept out of this film. It will be either a triviality or a fatal interruption.

By a normal love interest I mean the story of a man strongly attracted by a woman, or vice versa, and the success or failure of a sustained effort to possess her, the price paid and the good or bad delivery. This is currently assumed to be the chief motive in human life, and certainly it is that in the conventional film story. It is supposed to be particularly satisfactory to woman that life should be presented as sexual to this degree. No doubt sexual attraction is a very vivid motive at certain phases of most of our lives, but it is not the sustained or prevalent motive in the lives of most men, nor do I believe it is very much more important to women. Tradition and social conditions make the lives of most women turn more upon a sex affair than do the lives of most men, and there may be a greater constitutional predisposition in them towards sex issues. But there is surely not that absorption this incessant demand for a "love interest" implies. Women can listen to sexless music and compose and play sexless music; they can do scientific research, produce art and literature, give themselves to sport or business, without even as much direct sex obsession as many men betray. It is, however, not quite so certain that they can lose sight of their own personalities as completely as men can do. If women are no more sexual than men, it is nevertheless open to question whether they can release themselves as readily from a personal reference. My own impression is that, typically, they see the rôle more and the play less.

Now, first, with regard to this film I am convinced there can be no love interest, no chase and capture, of the vulgar sort. I would lay it down as a general rule that a love interest of the normal type in a film, novel, play or any other form of story conflicts with any other form of interest, and either destroys it or is itself reduced to the level of a tiresome complication. I have had a certain experience in the writing of wonder stories, romances about some sort of wonder, a visit to the moon, for example, the power of invisibility, the release of atomic energy for mechanical purposes or the like, and nothing is more firmly established in my mind than that these topics can only be successfully dealt with by the completest subordination of normal sex adventure. Hundreds of failures in that line are due to the neglect of this simple prohibition. Either Juliet must have all the stage and limelight, or Juliet (with her Romeo) is merely obstructing the traffic. That is the law of it. The world grows out of the amiable delusion that Juliet (or Romeo) can be an "inspiration" for anything in the other sex except a strong desire for her (or his) charming self. Our hero wants to end war on its merits. It is no more conceivable that he sets out to end war for a woman, than that he does it for a bet or because some other fellow said he couldn't.

The entrepreneur of this film therefore must deduct from his calculations all that much of feminine humanity which insists upon pictures in which, as a primary element, it is, by sympathetic proxy, desired, adored, wooed, chased, trapped, rescued, dressed up, dressed down, undressed and finally and thumpingly won and made to yield deliciously and completely. That proportion of women will stay away. That proportion of young manhood too which finds its secret wishes embodied in the successful desiring, adoring, wooing, chasing, trapping, rescuing, winning and conquest of the delicious heroine must also be counted off. Perhaps we underrate the last contingent and overrate the proportion of feminine supporters of the dominant "love interest." And certainly our repudiation of the "love interest" by no means implies that the entire feminine sex is excluded from this film or that no appeal is made in it to the consciously feminine element in the audience. It is not merely that it is put to them how, as human beings, they are going to share in the Herculean task of cleaning up all that now festers towards a renewal of war, but also and more intimately whether, as women, with woman's acuter sense of rôle and keener perception of personal values, they have not a very special part to play in the struggle.

And here we must raise a question that is always cropping up in myriads of actual instances in modern life: Do women to any large extent and in any number really want the organized prevention of war? Just as one questions whether they want a mighty growth of science? Or want a world rebuilt on greater lines? Indignant feminine voices, quick to resent an implied belittlement, will retort at once, "Of course they do. Are they not the mothers and wives of the men who must be killed? Is it not their children and their homes that suffer most acutely from conflict and disorder?" But it is just that sort of reply which intensified the doubt. These are reasons why women should want an end to war, but not any proof that they do or are at all disposed to set about helping to end it for its own sake. Many men, although they are the fathers and friends of the men who must be killed and themselves must share the toil and risk, want peace and a reorganization of the world's affairs without any thought or very little thought of this personal aspect. They see war as a nuisance and an offence upon the general field of human work. They see spoilt possibilities in which they themselves may have only a very slight personal share. War to them is a monstrous silly ugly beast that tramples the crops —a beast which may yet give good sport in the hunting. It is hated not as a horror but as an appalling bore. And the soldier is regarded not as heroic-terrible but as a tedious fool. Is there any equivalent proportion of women who see things in this way?

We have to frame some sort of answer to this before we can decide upon the part women are to play in this film. Is there to be a sort of feminine twin to Hercules in this film? A heroine parallel to the hero, profile to profile, like William and Mary on the old pennies? Or contrariwise, is woman to play the part of Deianira and cajole the hero into the shirt of Nessus and ultimate frustration? We have told that last story so often; we have had to tell that last story so often. It is one of the endlessly repeated stories, that story of the woman sex-centred, who wants so to concentrate the love of a man upon herself that she destroys him. But is it as usual to-day as it was in the past? Is this mutual injury through the egotism of love an incidental or an inevitable part of the human adventure?

And anyhow, since we have decided that this shall be a film of present victory and not defeat, even if Deianira is to appear, she will have to be evaded or defeated. Nessus' shirt can go back to the property room; it will not be worn. But it does not follow that parallelism of the sexes is the only other course. If women are going to play the same part in regard to war as men do, what need is there for a separate woman part at all? Fuse her with Hercules and let the film be sexless.

The reality lies between these contrasts. The liberations of our time release women more and more from the sense that custom, training and tradition have imposed upon them, of the supreme necessity of capturing and holding a particular man. But these liberations do nothing to change the essential fact that women do see life much more acutely as an affair of personalities than men do. They too are escaping from submersion in the personal drama, but they do not seem to have escaped to the same degree. They have the power to intensify the sense of individuality in men. They are apter to judge and readier to take sides, and when they take sides they do it with less limitation and compromise. In the vast and complex struggles that lie before us if the world is to be organized against war, women will be mainly assessors and sustainers. In this heroic endeavour to evolve a rationalized world out of a sanguinary confusion of romantic falsehood which is our present theme, just as in the struggle to establish social and economic justice, women will be decisive. Just so far as they give their friendship, encouragement, social support, their enormous powers of conviction and personal reassurance, to the struggling (and often doubting) spirits of creative men, so far will they enable them to realize effort. Just as far as they are dominated by the thought of their own individual triumph, just so far as they subordinate life to the conception of themselves as beloved individuals, queens of beauty, and the chief end of life to the old romantic conception of the egoistic love interest as the supreme interest for women, so far will they be on the side of the antagonists against the hero.

Our chief feminine interest therefore presents itself almost inevitably in two aspects, two parts: the first, the woman as disinterested friend and sympathiser; the second, as woman the decisive, emerging from the romantic tradition, attempting to make a personal lover of our Hercules and then realizing the greater power and beauty of his larger and ampler purpose, giving herself to that and gaining herself, him and everything in that self-subordination. This second aspect is manifestly the more dramatic one, and it gives us the indications for our main feminine rôle.

For the uses of our personified story she can be a Princess, the effective ruler of another State close to the hero's and strategically essential. She apprehends the fine quality of his purpose and his endeavour, she tries to conquer him for herself, she becomes his fierce, and for a time she seems to be his chief antagonist, and then swiftly and decisively she becomes his ally and mate. Like the hero she must be simplified beyond any vividness of characterization; she must be beautiful, vigorous and direct. The frustrations of individuality are all on the other side in this film.