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Rob Schupbach
THAR 573: Theatre History Topics
Dr. Esiaba Irobi
March 2, 2009
The Choices of Miss Celie and Ada McGrath: Existential Freedom in Film
Twentieth Century philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism,” (qtd. in Olson 120). For Sartre, the individual is central to existential philosophy. He posits that people decide their own fates and are responsible for what they make of their lives. There is an emphasis on freedom, choice, and responsibility in his philosophies. Sartre continues by defining existential freedom by writing, “Man cannot be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free, or he is not free at all,” (qtd. in Olson 117). Sartre asserts that life is meaningless outside of our personal choices and stresses the importance of defining your own existence.
If Sartre is correct in his philosophy that, “existence precedes essence,” what discourse can we have in examining film through the lens of existentialism? Sartre speaks of film by saying, “I believe that if you look for the essence of film, you will find that it is to show you man through the medium of the world, whereas theater shows you the image of man in action. There is, therefore, more potential for dialectic treatment in the film[1],” (qtd. in Contat and Rybalka 102). The personal choices that characters make in films are befitting to the exploration of existential freedom.
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Historically, existential examination of film has been within the genre of film noir, within the films of Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, and Woody Allen, and more recently with movies such as I Heart Huckabees, Fight Club, and The Matrix. Many films lend themselves to an existential dissection. However, two films that are prime examples of personal choice and existential freedom are Jane Campion’s The Piano and Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple. The narratives in these two films center on female oppression, male domination, and the quest for individual freedom.
Jane Campion’s The Piano is a film that tells the story of Ada McGrath, a Scottish woman who has been sold by her father to a wealthy colonialist, Alisdar Stewart, in New Zealand. Ada, along with her illegitimate daughter Flora, is shipped off to New Zealand.
When Stewart, accompanied by a band of indigenous Maori and fellow Scotsman George Baines, arrives at the coastline to collect Ada and her daughter, she is adamant that her piano be taken with them. Stewart refuses saying that there are too many other items to take and that the journey will be long. As they travel up the mountain, Ada looks back with despair at her piano sitting on the beach.
Ada is a self-imposed mute that has not spoken since she was six years old. Through voiceover, the first lines of the film are spoken by Ada, “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice,” (Campion 9). She explains that no one, including herself, knows why she stopped speaking.
Ada’s forms of communication include writing, a sign language, and through the music of her piano. Sartre once said, “Speech is the clearest gesture; that is, the clearest representation of the act is speech[2],” (qtd. in Contat and Rybalka 62). According to
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Sartre, a person’s life is characterized by his or her interactions with other people and such interactions are established largely through words. Although Sartre might find that Ada’s resistance to talking makes her less than a fulfilled human being, she has made a choice not to speak.
After they arrive back at Stewart’s hut, he announces that he will be gone for a few days scouting some Maori land he would like to purchase. Ada and Flora then journey to Baines hut and ask to be taken back to the beach and the piano. Although he initially refuses, Baines finally relents and takes them back to the shore. While at the beach, Ada plays the piano (composer Michael Nyman’s piano piece “The Heart Asks Pleasure First”), Flora dances with joy, and Baines closely examines Ada as she ‘speaks’ through her piano.
Baines soon asks Stewart if he can have the piano in exchange for some parcels of land. Stewart agrees and tells Ada that she will give Baines piano lessons. Ada is furious but eventually complies with Stewart’s demand. The piano lessons begin with Ada playing and Baines just listening and lusting over her quiet beauty. Baines soon strikes a deal with Ada in order for her to earn her piano back. However, there are conditions attached. Ada despises Baines in the beginning, but soon, out of the erotic passion, a romantic relationship forms between the two of them.
“Ada’s attachment to the piano is most strikingly portrayed through the “lessons” she gives to Baines. While he desperately tries to make himself the object of desire in place of the piano, Ada clings to her desire for the piano,” (Hendershot 103-4). Ada’s choice of giving Baines piano lessons and allowing there relationship to escalate to a
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heightened furry supports her existential freedom and helps seal her ultimate destiny. Sartre once said in a 1971 interview, “The idea I have never ceased to develop is in the end that a man can always make something out of what is made of him,” (qtd. in Solomon 20). Ada has made her decisions out of what is in her heart and soul.
After struggling with her internal feelings about Baines, Ada makes a clear choice to remove a key from the piano, and engrave the words, “DEAR GEORGE, YOU HAVE MY HEART, ADA McGRATH” on the side of the key (Campion 94). She then sends Flora to deliver it to Baines. This choice supports the beliefs of Sartre:
Humans bring nothingness to their consciousness of the world, and this sets them apart from things in themselves as “not myself”. This gives radical freedom but also alienation and anguish in our relationship to things. As a way of avoiding the difficult responsibilities of life, we tend to act in bad faith, hiding the truth from ourselves rather than seeking it out. (Fortier 43)
Ada makes an extreme choice in confessing her love for Baines. This choice has disastrous consequences. When Stewart finds out about Ada’s betrayal, he charges at her with an ax, smashing the piano. He then proceeds to chop off Ada’s index finger. Wrapping the mutilated finger in a handkerchief, he sends Flora to deliver it to Baines, threatening to take them all off, one by one, if she continues to see Baines.
Campion crafted a beautiful screenplay and assembled a film with the power of a classical filmmaker. Her use of the vast and expansive New Zealand shoreline is contrasted with the dark and murky canopy of the bush. The Victorian era costumes show the domineering forces that surround Ada. However, the most compelling element in the
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movie is Campion’s écriture feminine follows the journey of Ada and the choices she makes along the way to escape the repressive circumstances of her life.
Ada McGrath is portrayed in the 1993 film by noted stage and screen actor Holly Hunter. In a Film Quarterly article, Harvey Greenberg wrote of The Piano that:
The film’s complex heart belongs to Hunter. Her perky American roles (Broadcast News and Raising Arizona [1987], Always and Miss Firecracker [1989] do not prepare one for the acute intelligence and volcanic sensuality spoken by the actress’s pale face, her flashing eye, and her exquisitely tuned gestures. She transforms Ada’s perennial black dress, bonnet, camisole, and bustle into a prison of her character’s body and soul.” (qtd. in Margolis 185)
In addition to the major critical acclaim for her role (an Academy Award for Best Actress, BAFTA Award for Best Actress, Cannes Film Festival Best Actress), Hunter’s performance solidified her standing as a purposeful actor. In Constanin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, he writes that it is, “not necessary to endow every object with an imaginary life, but you should be sensitive to its influence on you,” (97). Hunter made choices that displayed her abilities as an actor to influence her own and Ada’s existential freedom.
Based on the Alice Walker novel[3] of the same name, The Color Purple tells the trials and tribulations of Celie Harris, an African American woman from rural Georgia. Her life is documented through the first four decades of the Twentieth Century as she battles with sexual abuse, domestic violence, and the detrimental separation from her
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sister and her children. Celie’s only refuge in life is her close relationship with her sister Nettie, an attractive, smart young woman.
By the time she was fourteen years old, Celie had given birth to two children by her stepfather. They taken away from her and sold by her stepfather. Soon, a widower named of Albert Johnson comes to ask Celie’s stepfather for Nettie’s hand in marriage. He refuses, but agrees to let Albert marry Celie. “Mister”, as she commonly refers to him, abuses her and treats her like a slave, making her do all the household chores and tend to his unruly children. When Nettie comes to stay with “Mister” and Celie, he tries to make sexual advances towards her. Nettie fights back and “Mister” immediately throws her out of the house, separating Celie and Nettie. As the sisters are physically and emotionally pulled apart by “Mister”, Nettie promises to write Celie proclaiming loudly,
“Nothing but death could keep me from it!” However, Albert refuses to let Miss Celie check the mail and so years pass with no correspondence with Nettie.
The turning point in the movie is when Albert decides to bring home a juke-joint singer that he has been in love with for years, Shug Avery. Film critic Roger Ebert writes:
Shug's first words to Celie are: "You as ugly as sin." But as Shug moves into the house and Celie obediently caters to her husband's lover, Shug begins to see the beauty in Celie, and there is a scene where they kiss, and Celie learns for the first time that sex can include tenderness, that she can dare to love herself. A little later, Celie looks in Shug's eyes and allows herself to smile, and we know that Celie didn't think she had a pretty smile until Shug told her so. That is the central moment in the movie. (“The Color Purple”)
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Shug and Celie form a strong friendship. It is during one of her visits from Memphis that Shug checks the mailbox and sees that Celie has received a letter from Nettie. In the quiet of the guest room, Shug and Celie read the letter from Nettie that ultimately tells Celie, “I love you. And I’m not dead.” Shug and Celie fanatically search the house for other letters only to discover that Albert has been hiding the letters from Celie for years.
Existential theorist Hélène Peters asserts that women, no matter how repressed in their lives, have the existential freedom to create their own lives. “Placed in a stifling, sticky universe, beset by anguish and uneasiness, caught between finitude and transcendence, threatened by death and the flight of time, woman is what she makes herself. Her existence, bound by the human condition, defines itself in its relation with itself and the world,” (Peters 143). Miss Celie chooses to grasp hold of her existential freedom and boldly decides to leave Albert.
After years of abuse and neglect, Miss Celie has chosen to leave “Mister” and intends to reunite her family. Sartre writes of human torture:
No matter how long he has waited before begging for mercy, he would have been able despite all to wait ten minutes, one minute, one second longer. He has determined the moment at which the pain becomes unbearable. The proof of this is the fact that he will later live out his abjuration in remorse and shame. Thus he is entirely responsible for it. (qt. in Olson 123)
The pivotal scene in the movie is during a Sunday dinner, Shug informs Albert that she will be heading back to Memphis and that Celie is going with her. Albert immediately says no and starts verbally attacking Celie. She replies, “You a low-down dirty dog.
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That’s what’s wrong. It’s time for me to get away from you and into creation. You dead body be just the welcome mat I need.” Miss Celie makes her choice to leave Albert and adds, “But Nettie and my kids are comin’ home soon. And when we all get together we gonna sit around and whip your ass.” A befuddled and infuriated Albert screams at Celie, “You’re black, you’re poor, you’re ugly, and you’re a woman. You’re nothing at all!” As she is driving away in the back of Shug’s car, she proudly announces to Albert, “I’m poor, I’m black, and I may even be ugly, but I’m here!” Because individuals are free to choose their own path, existentialists have argued, they must accept the risk and responsibility of following their commitment wherever it leads. Miss Celie is ready, and the choice she made leads to the reunion of her family.
In her debut performance, African American female actor Whoopi Goldberg made her imprint on consciousness of American culture. On December 20, 1985 film critic Roger Ebert wrote of Goldberg’s performance as Miss Celie:
And then, at the center of the movie, Celie is played by Whoopi Goldberg in one of the most amazing debut performances in movie history. Here is this year's winner of the Academy Award for best actress. Goldberg has a fearsomely difficult job to do, enlisting our sympathy for a woman who is rarely allowed to speak, to dream, to interact with the lives around her. Spielberg breaks down the wall of silence around her, however, by giving her narrative monologues in which she talks about her life and reads the letters she composes. (“The Color Purple).
In an interview, Goldberg said, “The Color Purple is not a movie about race. What happens to Celie is happening to women all over the world, of all races and backgrounds,
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that is the fact. This is a story about the trials of the human spirit,” (qtd. in Walker 181-2). Goldberg’s sensibilities about the role of Miss Celie show that she is aware that existential freedom is available when the barriers the human spirit must endure are conquered with choice.
In Acting: The First Six Lessons, Richard Boleslavsky writes that, “the actor creates the whole length of a human soul’s life on the stage every time he creates a part. This human soul must be visible in all its aspects, physical, mental and emotional,” (85). Both Hunter and Goldberg succeed in creating human souls in their portrayals of Ada and Miss Celie, respectfully. “To decide, to choose, because you exist and in order to exist, such is the plane of existence,” (Peters 127). Hunter and Goldberg decide to exist in the world of their characters and show that the choices they make are central to their existential freedom. Regardless of the demands, oppression, or obstacles that stand in their way, choices can and should be made in order to exist.
For what seem to be two movies that display the worst of conditions for the repressed woman, these movies also demonstrate that the paramount intentions of a woman often lead to an existential freedom. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre says:
Our description of freedom, since it does not distinguish between choosing and doing, compels us to abandon at once the distinction between the intention and the act. The intention can no more be separated from the act than thought can be separated from the language which expresses it. (qtd. in Solomon 242)
Miss Celie in The Color Purple and Ada McGrath in The Piano are extraordinary examples of how a choice can lead to existential freedom and stronger human existence.
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Notes
[1] Lecture that Sartre gave at the Sorbonne on March 29, 1960
[2] Conversation published in L’Express, September 17, 1959, headlined “Two Hours with Sartre”
[3] Alice Walker’s novel was published in 1982
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Works Consulted
Boleslavsky, Richard. Acting: The First Six Lessons. New York: Theatre Arts Books,
1933.
Campion, Jane. The Piano. New York: Hyperion, 1993.
Champigny, Robert. Sartre and Drama. N.p.: French Literature Publication Company,
1982.
Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, eds. Sartre on Theater. Trans. Frank Jellinek. New
York: Pantheon, 1976.
Cooper, David E. Existentialism: A Reconstruction. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell,