Last Tango in Paris Page: 3
Synopsis, Review, Comments, Critics
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The Orpheus rescue fantasy, then, would respond to a thoroughly ambivalent retrieval of Rosa using Jeanne as surrogate: to get her back in both recuperative and vengeful terms. This double motive would explain why Brando plays such an impenetrably mercurial role throughout, moving from tenderness to sudden fits of sadistic and punitive behavior. Paul's need for recuperation is, as I have suggested above, most tellingly revealed by the mirroring of the mother role: a project of self-rescue, an effort of recovery of identity. Also, to the degree that Jeanne performs simultaneous roles as sex object and mother surrogate for Paul, we may sense that there is another level of self-rescue at work here:
The mother gave the child life, and it is not easy to find a substitute of equal value for this unique gift. With a slight change of meaning, such as is easily effected in the unconscious and is comparable to the way in which in consciousness concepts shade into one another, rescuing his mother takes on the significance of giving her a child or making a child for her—needless to say, one like himself. This is not too remote from the original sense of rescuing, and the change in meaning is not an arbitrary one. His mother gave him life—his own life—and in exchange he gives her another life, that of a child which has the greatest resemblance to himself. The son shows his gratitude by wishing to have by his mother a son who is like himself: in other words, in the rescue phantasy he is completely identifying himself with his father. All his instincts, those of tenderness, gratitude, lustfulness, defiance and independence, find satisfaction in the single wish to be his own father.
Again, it is possible to understand how fully the presence of A Spider's Stratagem permeates Last Tango in Paris. As a double of Paul and as Mother's/Rosa's lover, Marcel occupies a structurally identical position to that assumed by Athos Magnani in the earlier film. If, as Bertolucci has claimed, the entire relationship between Paul and Jeanne is "an obvious search for authenticity," it becomes evident that this search cannot be conducted without the (impossible) clarity about the identity of mother and father. The apostrophe to Athos père, "Who was Athos Magnani ?" is now addressed to the mother as well.
In this privileged space, womblike in shape and color, a remarkable representation of the unconflicted part of the ego, Paul announces the Orphic command of refusal to look back and thereby attempts to eliminate memory, culture, civilization, and all that they mean in terms of taboos, inhibitions, repressions, and defenses. Just as in primitive language or in the language of dreams, where "contradictory concepts have been quite intentionally combined, not in order to produce a third concept ... but only in order to use the compound to express the meaning of one of its contradictory parts," this command simultaneously prohibits (on the explicit level) and encourages (on the unconscious level) a particular form of behavior. Paul is thus free to experiment in regression to earlier stages of sexual development; pure Oedipal desire, onanism, anal eroticism, and even bestiality (with the dead rat). The ultimate expression of this regressive and thoroughly narcissistic desire occurs during their last moments together in the apartment, when Paul exclaims (ironically, as it turns out, describing himself):
You want this gold and shining powerful warrior to build you a fortress where you can hide in.... Well, then it won't be long until he'll want you to build a fortress for him out of your hair and your smile—and it's someplace where he can feel—feel comfortable enough and secure enough so that he can worship in front of the altar of his own prick.
Nor is this the only example of Paul's primarily narcissistic urge. At one point Jeanne screams at Paul, "Why don't you listen to me? You know, it seems to me I'm talking to the wall. Your solitude weighs on me, you know. It isn't indulgent or generous. You're an egoist." We know that narcissism is to some degree a constant in all creative work, in dreams and fantasies, and that under stress a narcissistic person may regress from socially transformed to primary forms of object relations. What should impress us is the intricacy with which Bertolucci has woven the reflective aspects of narcissism (the themes of self-rescue and the mirror) together with the deeper significance of the Orpheus myth.
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