UBC Communications Essay

English 1115Dr. Eve Preus
Essay Two: Comparative Analysis
DETAILS
Length & Format: 1000-1200 words total, or roughly 4 pages; 12-point font, double spaced,
MLA citation. Include the word count at the bottom of the page as well as a works cited. Do not
forget that a complete draft of your essay is due to your peer review group one week before the
essay is due.
Audience: An academic audience at Douglas College
Prompt: In your last essay, you analyzed a given theme/character/larger concern within the
play Oedipus Rex. You developed an argument for how that idea was rendered in the play and
why it was relevant; to support your claim, you used evidence from the text and analysis of
that evidence to back up your interpretation. In this essay, you will be continuing to practice
the skills of close reading, analysis, and critical thinking, but instead of examining only one
play, you will examine either two plays together or the play and its cinematic adaptation,
generating what is called a “comparative analysis.”
You may compare:
1. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to Reza’s The God of Carnage
2. Ablee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to the 1966 film of the same name
3. Reza’s The God of Carnage to the 2011 film Carnage
Tips for comparative analysis of the two plays: Do not spend too much time initially on their
differences. Instead, find a similarity (that is where the insight starts) and build your own
argument from this similarity. Allow the differences to emerge in the process of clarifying your
points and conceptual relationships. For example, if you choose to analyse how Albee and Reza
present closed room dramas that stage the rupture of hospitality, you must make an argument
about what happens in both when they do and how/why that is significant/relevant. It is not
an argument simply to say that both texts do something; you must tell us why this is
relevant. (Quick tip for checking to make sure that your thesis is arguable: Can someone say
the opposite? If the answer is no, then it isn’t an argument, it is still just an observation.)
Tips for comparative analysis of the play and its cinematic version: Ask yourself how the film
embodies the characters, dialogue, and action to create the themes/ideas of the play. Then ask
yourself how these production choices generate a certain version of the play. Come up with a
claim for how this version does and/or doesn’t encapsulate the main concerns of the play and
to why that is. It is not an argument simply to say that the cinematic production does a
good or bad job of embodying the key ideas of the play; you must tell us why and how it
does and to what effect.
Also, avoid too much plot summary. Your summaries in your introductory paragraph should
only be a 1-2 sentences for each text. They should engage with the critical ideas of each text (in
English & Communication Studies we often call all kinds of mediums “texts”—i.e. novels,
poems, films, plays, etc.) and how that text renders those ideas. Each paragraph should NOT be
a description of the events of the play, but have clear topic sentences that are your OWN points
that support your OWN unique claim followed by carefully chosen evidence (plot,
characterization, dialogue, setting, theatrical devices/affordances, etc.) and analysis of that
evidence as it proves your point.
Note: Putting ideas together develops what are called conceptual relationships:
authenticity/hospitality; instinct/civilization; guilt/punishment; acceptance/change;
society/individual; truth/illusion; innocence/experience; marriage/freedom; love/power.
Focus on building a strong comparison between your texts. You will find that the deeper you
think about your comparison, the more a clear conceptual relationship will emerge. I gave
them to you for the Oedipus paper (i.e. the relationship between free will and fate), but you
will have to identify them and define them in this paper. Watch the lectures, read my notes,
talk to your peers and talk to me to help brainstorm a good thesis!
Marking: See the attached rubric for how I mark these essays. Your essay should include:
1. A clearly stated argument that is comparative in nature.
2. A brief summary of each text in terms of this argument—see the Rhetorical Situation
handout and Critical Reading and Summarizing handout.
3. A logical development of your ideas with appropriate evidence—see the Close-Reading
handout for help with this.
4. Relevant quotes from each text, incorporated smoothly into your paper. Do not put more
than one quote in a paragraph—see MLA and Quoting handouts.
5. Clear paragraphing and signposting that guide your reader through your ideas, including
topic sentences and clear transitions between paragraphs. Don’t make them work too hard
to get your meaning. No page-long paragraphs, please.
6. A conclusion that demonstrates how your ideas have led us to the end.
Writing Goals:
• To examine your own position in relation to published texts and to write both with and
against these texts.
• To explore (through reading) and practice (through writing) the various options that
writers have for positioning themselves in relation to the writing of others.
• To ethically represent through paraphrase, summary, and quotation the ideas of another
writer/text. To understand and use MLA citation.
• To engage in critical comparative analysis of text. To present your own insights with this
analysis.
• To continue to practice the writing process (generative writing, drafting, revision, editing.)
Basic Outline Example
I.
Introduction: Tell Us What You Are Going to Tell Us
A. Topic and Texts under discussion
B. Purpose and Significance (Larger Conversation that links them—i.e.
themes/conceptual relationships; a good place to define your terms!)
C. Argument: Your angle in this conversation, or the REASON and RELEVANCE you are
bringing to the table by putting these texts into conversation. Your “So What?”
II.
Body: Tell Us
A. Supporting Point One: Topic Sentence speaks directly to thesis
• Evidence and Analysis (plot, characterization, dialogue, setting, theatrical
devices/affordances, etc.—be sure to cite!)
• Evidence and Analysis cont.
• Concluding sentence that summarizes paragraph’s main point in a new way
(made coherent by the analysis that came before)
B. Supporting Point Two: Topic Sentence speaks to thesis and logically follows from
Point One
• Evidence and Analysis
• Evidence and Analysis cont.
• Concluding sentence that summarizes paragraph’s main point in a new way
(made coherent by the analysis that came before)
C. Supporting Point Three: Topic Sentence speaks to thesis and logically follows from
Point Two
• Evidence and Analysis
• Evidence and Analysis
• Concluding sentence that summarizes paragraph’s main point in a new way
(made coherent by the analysis that came before) and segues to the next point
D. Etc.
III.
Conclusion: Tell Us What you have Told Us and Where We have Arrived
Remember, don’t let your outline become formulaic. You want each point in the body of your
paper to logically follow from the other. As you write, and because writing itself is a process of
thinking, the outline will most likely change. Allow for this to happen. A helpful scenario to check
and see if your paper is developing a process of critical thinking or becoming too formulaic: if I
were to cut the paper up into paragraphs and then ask a stranger to put it back together, they
should be able to put it back together in only one possible order.
Sample Structure of Comparative Analysis
You needn’t follow this exactly; it’s an example. Some people hate examples, while others thrive on
them. In general, though, your intro should introduce your texts, main topic of comparison, and
your argument.
A. Introduction:
Sentence 1. Intro sentence…
Invite us into your topic, but don’t be too general, universalizing, or vague.
Sentence 2: In her 2008 play The God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza presents us…
This sentence describes what the play is about.
Sentence 3. Her play suggests…
This sentence situates the essay within a larger conversation or theme: for this essay, it is a
critical thematic connection you are making between the two, i.e. hospitality, authenticity,
marriage & children, etc. This is also a good place to define the critical concepts you will be
using throughout your essay.
Sentence 4. Similarly, Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf…
This sentence links the ideas from the previous sentence to ideas the second text explores.
Sentence 5. In this play….
This sentence describes what the second play is about.
Sentence 6 (or 6 & 7). You link them again and you tell us your thesis: Both plays do this…
Remember your “this” should say something about the area in which you are comparing:
for example, “Both plays suggest ____________, so characteristic of _______” Or, “Both plays use
the closed room drama specifically in order to suggest/argue/reveal/propose _____________.”
Or, “Both plays characterize the theatre’s signature way of ____________ for the purpose of
arguing that ______.”
B1. One Potential Organization of Body Points:
Body Paragraph 1 (&2): Play One and analysis of text (plot, characterization, dialogue, theatrical
devices/affordances, etc.) in terms of first point that supports your thesis. Be sure to have a topic
sentence that links your main point back to the thesis. Use the quote sandwich when quoting.
Body Paragraph 2 (&3): Play Two and analysis of text (plot, characterization, dialogue, theatrical
devices/affordances, etc.) in terms of first point that supports your thesis. Be sure to have a topic
sentence that relates to thesis and logically segues from the concluding sentence of previous
paragraph about Reza. Use the quote sandwich when quoting.
Next Paragraph: Expand thesis based on new insight that emerges from paragraphs 1 and 2. i.e:
“In some way, we can see that the authenticity that emerges for each character is not just the
result of dissolving of social boundaries but also….” Now you put the two together in terms of this
new insight that builds off the first.
Body Paragraph ?: Repeat this process.
Concluding Paragraph: Pull everything together in a way that shows us where we have come.
B2. Second Potential Organization of Body Points:
Body Paragraph (or two paragraphs, just be sure to have clear topic sentences): Analysis of Play
One and Play Two in terms of your first point as it builds your thesis. Include the relevant evidence
(plot, characterization, dialogue, theatrical devices/affordances, etc.) as this evidence bears out
your point.
Body Paragraph 2 (or two paragraphs, just be sure to have clear topic sentences): Analysis of Play
One and Play Two in terms of your second point as it builds your thesis. Include the relevant
evidence (plot, characterization, dialogue, theatrical devices, etc.) as this evidence bears out your
point. Topic sentence should logically segue from your previous paragraph.
Etc…
Concluding Paragraph: Pull everything together in a way that shows us where we have come.
Important: You can organize your essay in any way that is coherent; these are just a couple
common ways to organize a comparative analysis. AS ALWAYS, the EVIDENCE (plot,
characterization, dialogue, setting, theatrical devices/affordances, etc.) must be ANALYZED as it
supports your POINTS (your unique insights about how the plays are similar; these are the topic
sentences of your paragraphs), and your points support your ARGUMENT (your overall claim
about how the two texts are alike).
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Oedipus Rex: The Complex Conflict between Fate and Free Will
There is no doubt that the story of Oedipus, as explored in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex,
is one of the most intriguing tales in the world of literature. Not only does it evoke emotions of
terror and pity, but also pushes the audience to reevaluate its understanding of the duality of fate
and free will. One wonders whether Oedipus has the free will to avoid the fate that has been
prescribed upon him. Fate is believed to be supernatural and beyond the control of all humans
and gods. Fate is so powerful that it always happens as it was meant to, regardless of the efforts
made to change it. Even when gods were aware of what was about to befall them, they could do
nothing but wait for it. On the other hand, free will entails the ability to shape one’s own actions.
While the definition of these two concepts sounds simple, the examination of their nature
through the lens of Oedipus Rex proves that their sophistication is unimaginable. In the play, fate
had it that Oedipus would ultimately marry his mother and kill his father. While some of the
actions in between these events would be defined by his free will, the ultimate end of this story
was destined to be the same. Therefore, the story of Oedipus teaches that even when people are
given the opportunity to embrace free will, their choices will ultimately help shape their overall
fates.
In Oedipus Rex, the Prophet is one of the most devout disciples of fate. He believes that
regardless of the efforts applied, it is not possible for anyone, even the gods, to overcome the
power of fate. According to him, what was to be will always be. King Oedipus’ fate is thus
inevitable. The story clearly shows that while his fate was shaped by the supernatural, there were
still many actions that were within his reach and control that helped make this fate a reality.
2
Some of the key factors that contributed to the fulfilment of Oedipus’ fate include his insolence,
ignorance, pride, and disrespect toward gods. He is proud of having saved the town to the extent
that he cares about nothing: “What do I care? For I delivered all this town” (Sophocles 377).
Most importantly, his undying pursuit of the truth would ultimately culminate in the final
fulfillment of fate. All these actions and characters are things that Oedipus chose. Teiresias, the
old oracle, tells Oedipus that he is responsible for the murder of his own father, Laius: “I say that
you are yourself the murderer that you seek” (Sophocles 375). However, Oedipus, using his free
will, in utter disrespect claims that the prophet is a liar. He also uses his free will to attempt to
flee from the arms of his fate as foretold by the oracle.
There are some things that Oedipus does, however, that are purely shaped by fate. When
he solves the riddle and wins the fight against the Sphinx, there is no doubt that these are events
of fate. Also, when he goes on and unwittingly kills his father, the former king, it is also clear
that this is the doing of fate. If he knew it was indeed his own father he was facing, he could not
have killed him, “I did not wish, old man, to shed my father’s blood” (Sophocles 389). It is thus
an event that was beyond his control. Additionally, as fate would have it, when Oedipus marries
the fallen king’s widow, he is oblivious of the fact that it was actually his own mother. By doing
all this, Oedipus is unknowingly following the path of his fate, yet he believes that he is making
choices based on free will.
From this complex intersection of fate and free will, it becomes clear that it is quite hard
to differentiate the two. When Oedipus was killing the stranger he met, and going ahead to marry
the widow, he believed that he was pursuing his own free will. He did not have any idea that he
was still within the realms of his fate as foretold by the oracle. It thus follows that in the conflict
3
between fate and free will, the former always carries the day. However, even when fate is
unchangeable, nature does give human beings the ability to accept fate and make some choices
out of free will to avoid worse outcomes. Toward the end of the play, Oedipus has this
opportunity. Even after discovering the truth of what he had done, he has the choice to forgive
himself and move on. Yet, he goes on and, using free will, gouges out his eyes and punishes
himself for his acts. Here, it is clear that once one is fated for tragic things, even the choices he
makes using free will end up being fateful.
On the whole, Oedipus Rex makes it clear that fate always overwhelms free will. From
the very beginning, Oedipus believed that he was making choices that he had control over, and
that neither the oracle nor the gods could change his resolve. He then proceeded to make several
choices that can be viewed to be of free will, yet their ultimate outcomes all work together to
solidify the fate that the oracle had foretold of him, that he would end up killing his own father
and marrying his mother.
4
Works Cited
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex, translated by W.B. Yeats. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume II:
The Plays, edited by David and Rosalind Clark, Scribner 2001, pp. 369-400.
Carnage and All: A Discussion
Author(s): Noah Isenberg and Rob White
Source: Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Spring 2012), pp. 44-48
Published by: University of California Press
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CARNAGE AND ALL :
A DISCUSSION
NOAH ISENBERG AND ROB WHITE DEBATE THE POLITICS OF
ROMAN POLANSKI’S STAGE-PLAY ADAPTATION
Rob White: Roman Polanski’s new film is an adaptation of
Yasmina Reza’s successful 2006 French play (first performed
in English in 2008) about two affluent couples brought
together in an apartment by a playground fight between their
respective eleven-year-old sons. In Carnage, the couples are
the hosting Longstreets, humanitarian writer Penelope (Jodie
Foster) and hardware-store owner Michael (John C. Reilly),
and the visiting Cowans, investment broker Nancy (Kate
Winslet) and corporate lawyer Alan (Christoph Waltz). Their
four-way conversation starts out mainly polite but things
start to take a less civil turn when Nancy vomits after eating Penelope’s cobbler. The encounter becomes increasingly
heated until, fueled by booze, the participants argue themselves into a state of exhaustion.
Co-writers Polanski and Reza make a few changes in
adapting The God of Carnage (Faber and Faber, 2008) for the
screen. The story is relocated from the Parisian left bank to
Brooklyn and so Parc Montsouris becomes Brooklyn Bridge
Park; clafoutis is replaced by cobbler; whisky is brought out
not brandy. There’s some linguistic Americanization too,
for example the introduction of everyday therapy-speak
(“mitigating circumstances” become “behavioral issues”). A
specter of finance jargon also looms. When Véronique and
Alain debate virtue in the play, they argue about the “possibility of improvement” in human affairs. This is altered in the
film to “possibility of correction,” as in “market correction”
(one of those deceptively neutral-seeming phrases meant
to convey capitalism’s orderliness and tendency toward balance not crisis). There are also two related and rather curious
adjustments. First: when the men speak about fictional role
models in the play they cite Spartacus (guerilla leader) but
Ivanhoe (knight errant) in the film, even though Spartacus
the movie is a famous Hollywood production. Second: one
of Alain’s taunts about Véronique—“She’s a regimental
sergeant major”—gets a spin when uttered by Alan about
Penelope: “She’s a quartermaster on a slave ship.” A slave
Film Quarterly, Vol. 65, No. 3, pps 44–48, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic, ISSN 1533-8630. © 2012 by the Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s
Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2012.65.3.44
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Squabbling
Carnage. Photo: Guy Ferrandis. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
ship? That’s an idea to conjure with, and it makes me wonder
to what extent the spirit of épater la bourgeoisie presides over
Polanski’s film.
The most basic change the director makes is to ignore
Reza’s staging instruction: “A living room. No realism.
Nothing superfluous.” (To have followed it would presumably have resulted in a film like Lars von Trier’s Dogville.)
Carnage is naturalistic in terms of costume, lighting,
mise-en-scène. And the script changes add to the sense
of plausibility. Yet I think we’d do well to take care here.
Consider A. O. Scott’s waggishly expressed charge of bungled detailing in his discontented New York Times review
(December 14, 2011): “I know these people. Why be coy? I
am these people. And while these people might well be the
parents of a Zachary and an Ethan, the sister of a Zachary
would much more plausibly be a Sophie or an Emma than
a Courtney. (Courtney? What is this, Beverly Hills? Reality
television? Come on!)” But why should a fiction film—
even a “realistic” one—be expected to give a character who
doesn’t even appear onscreen a common child’s name? The
assumption is that Carnage needed, census-like, to be as
sociologically accurate as possible in order to satisfy viewers
likely to say, “I am these people.” But what about the viewer
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Michael and Penelope, Alan and Nancy
Carnage. Photos: Guy Ferrandis. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
who wouldn’t make such a claim—who can’t tell much difference between the names Courtney and Sophie? Are we
right to treat this dark comedy of New York manners as itself
belonging to the world it depicts? Is Carnage a credible portrayal of a milieu or is it an attack? What impression does the
film make on you, a New Yorker?
::
Noah Isenberg: My sense is that Polanski is after something
much larger than simply satirizing the local—and for me, as
someone of the same basic demographic as the four characters represented onscreen, very familiar—world of Brooklyn’s
smug, educated elite. Sure, he skewers his caricatures of
smugness, Penelope, with all her sanctimonious humanrights banter, and Alan, with his cloying narcissism and
self-importance, and implicates their respective spouses while
he’s at it. But the larger critique, and presumably the original critique that Reza embedded in her play, is a critique of
humanity, namely, that underneath the veneer of bourgeois
civility—something that is perhaps given a thicker coating in
the Western capitals of liberalism, from Paris to New York—
we’re all savages. It’s simply a matter of peeling away those
layers of artifice, which is what Polanski effectively does by
trapping his four characters in a stifling space, adding copious
amounts of liquor (rare single-malt Scotch, rum, or brandy,
it doesn’t really matter), and allowing things to follow their
natural, corrosive course. What occurs on a Brooklyn playground, vaguely evocative of a Lord of the Flies-style descent
into barbarism, is replayed within the otherwise safe, stolid
confines of the Longstreets’ well-appointed living room, the
rule of law betraying its origins in brute force in both cases.
It doesn’t much matter to me, and I assume means even
less to someone more removed from the implied social micro-
cosm, that Polanski and Reza’s screenplay opted for the name
Courtney instead of Sophie for Zachary’s sister. (Incidentally,
in the translation of Reza’s play by Christopher Hampton that
was used for the 2009 Broadway staging, she’s called Camille,
and Zachary is known as Henry.) I actually think it’s quite
remarkable that the set Polanski and his talented production
designer Dean Tavoularis constructed on a soundstage outside of Paris looks so uncannily close to the kind of Cobble
Hill apartment it’s to be taken for; the only exterior shots of the
film, the two bookends (in which the young boys are seen at a
distance) with the East River, the skyline of lower Manhattan,
and traffic from the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway in the
background—all of it rear projection, as it turns out—amplify
the feeling of authenticity. In the end, however, authenticity
or the lack thereof is of no real consequence, just as it’s of
no real consequence in Polanski’s previous film The Ghost
Writer (2010), whose simulated New England seaside was
filmed on the beaches of Sylt, Germany. Intellectually and
culturally, Carnage belongs, yes, to the world it depicts, insofar as it attempts to satirize the holy pieties of the bourgeoisie
from the inside out. These may be easy targets, rendered a bit
too one-dimensionally by Polanski—the UNESCO plaque
hanging on the wall of Penelope’s study played off against
Alan’s barking “I don’t want you sitting down with victims”
into his phone—but I think the film is, despite a number of
debatable shortcomings, rather forceful as a social satire and
dark comedy.
::
Rob White: I agree with you that Carnage has a keen political
edge, but how does it cut? You mention barbarism and it’s
smart, nasty Alan who gleefully makes the “god of carnage”
speech: African child soldiers prove that that human nature
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Menacing encounters
Left: The Boys in the Band. © 1970 Leo Productions Ltd. DVD: Paramount. Right: Rosemary’s Baby. © 1968 Paramount Pictures / William Castle Enterprises Inc. DVD: Paramount (U.K.).
is bestial, sadistic. If Polanski’s in the business of revealing
an under-the-veneer viciousness, then isn’t he just endorsing Alan’s cynicism? Whereas I think what’s interesting in
Carnage is the extent to which the lid stays on, thus rendering the title somewhat ironic. There’s something fake about
all the apartment arguing—like one of those ritualized broadcast interviews with politicians where the anchor’s mode of
complicity is to make a show of aggressive quizzing that never
actually threatens the status quo. In Carnage it’s more like
the couples are at a swingers’ party, a “safe space” for pretend
transgression. There’s as much bonding in the film as discord (as when the two women mock the men’s gadget love).
Where’s the menace, in truth? It’s worth comparing Carnage
to some other “apartment films.” The director’s previous forays, Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968: another
New York encounter between two couples), are unmistakably and supernaturally scary even though one of the best
things about the latter is the sudden lightness of the ending,
Mia Farrow’s Rosemary surrendering to maternal love for
the devil. Or consider The Boys in the Band (1970), William
Friedkin’s drama about a Manhattan party that builds toward
a genuinely painful outburst of fear and loathing. And
Hitchcock’s enclosed Rope (1948), of course, is all about genteel talk circulating around a corpse.
The question of cinematic technique inevitably arises in
regard to Rope, a film designed to have as few cuts as possible
(the camera thus having to circulate like the conversation).
I would like to read a Bordwellian analysis of Carnage to
see whether it confirms my impression that (by contrast with
Rope) Polanski’s film has an unusually high number of cuts.
My impression also is that the cuts minimize alignment with
characters’ viewpoints, avoiding shot–reverse shot in particular. If this is correct then the cinematic technique is doing
its own disruptive thing with the question of belonging;
instead of encouraging direct identification it makes room
for the viewer by the side of the characters. And I think it’s in
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this strategy as much as any unveiling of brutishness that we
might locate the problem of social critique in Carnage. It has
the potential to make us uncomfortably aware of not being
different enough from the characters—which is why I think
it’s worth contending that Alan’s Hobbesian–Goldingesque
rant is merely a permitted form of edginess (like my generic
news anchor’s pretense of tough questioning) that shakes
nothing up. If this notion is granted then Carnage can be
read in terms not of the horror under decorum, but rather
the horror of civility.
::
Noah Isenberg: Let me pick up on your last point first, as I think
that Carnage is indeed a wicked commentary on the horror
of civility and, more specifically, on the horror of bourgeois
domesticity. Each of the four characters is shown at one
moment or another in the convulsive drama to be suffocating—to the point of violent illness in the case of Nancy—in
his or her highly prescribed role. The horror doesn’t require
a journey up the river into a heart of darkness; instead it
happens right here at home in the “safe space” that is the
Longstreets’ living room (“the monster,” as John C. Reilly
observes in the “Actors’ Notes” segment included on the
DVD, “is the people in this film”). We as viewers are certainly made to feel complicit, for as long as we’re watching
we aren’t free to escape, either the room to which Polanski
confines his characters and us along with them or the charges
that are made within that same space. I think you’re right
that the camera resists guiding us toward deeper identification with the characters and their respective viewpoints.
Paweł Edelman’s restrained, almost detached cinematography works in combination with the skillful editing by Hervé
de Luze to prevent this. Nobody comes off in a positive light.
The pieces of regurgitated cobbler may only land on Alan’s
expensive suit—and on the precious art books—but we’re all,
more or less, soiled by the end.
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Dinner parties
Left: Scenes from a Marriage. © 1973 AB Svensk Filmindustri. DVD: The Criterion Collection. Right: Abigail’s Party. © 1977 BBC. DVD: Water Bearer Films.
As for the film’s critical antecedents, in addition to the
revealing examples you give from Polanski’s own repertoire
and from the films of Hitchcock and Friedkin, we might
think of the explosive dinner party, another four-hander, in
Bergman’s equally hypernaturalistic, claustrophobic Scenes
from a Marriage (1973). Like Carnage, the episode from
Bergman’s film ultimately gives in to the undertow of moral
hypocrisy and the inability to keep up appearances. I happen
to find the earlier film more poignant than Carnage, which
doesn’t quite plumb the depths of the domestic psyche as
unrelentingly as Bergman does. Perhaps a more fitting
comparison would be to Mike Leigh’s pitch-black comedy of manners Abigail’s Party (1977). Another “apartment
film” and stage adaptation, Leigh’s film allows the effects
of repeatedly topped-off cocktails and seemingly petty, histrionic arguments to unhinge the five characters occupying
another airless living room. Still, the granddaddy within this
broader taxonomy has to be Mike Nichols’s screen debut,
his adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? (1966). What begins as a seemingly innocuous faculty mixer ends with all four principals bereft of nearly all ties
to a residual humanity. As Richard Burton’s George admits,
after one of his many vicious, drunken rants, the collateral
damage wrought from their deranged parlor games is “blood,
carnage and all.” Especially in contrast to Nichols, but also
to Bergman and Leigh, Polanski’s Carnage keeps the lid on,
in your apt phrasing. It never reaches that boiling point, that
level of sheer madness, and is, as you also point out, missing
the element of menace we see elsewhere in Polanski.
::
Rob White: There’s a three-couple dinner in Michael Haneke’s
Hidden (2005), and during it one man tells a joke that
involves him pretending to be a dog. It’s definitely a representation of a “beast within” the so-called civilized person but it
also suggests the stupidity of the discourse: Haneke’s diners
think themselves intellectuals (stuffed bookshelves loom over
the table) but their talk is no better than the joke’s punchline
yelps. Isn’t the vomit in Carnage similar? Isn’t it somehow
the film’s most typical “utterance”? It’s both infantile—suddenly Nancy is incontinent—and meaningless. When Nancy
throws up she says no less—which is nothing—than when
Alan worships his “god of carnage,” Penelope frets about
Africa, or John complains about child-rearing chores. It’s all
idiotic; it doesn’t even rise to the level of baby talk. Imagine,
then, if you will, a kind of X-ray of this satire: our four protagonists in romper suits and bonnets, covered in sick.
We only escape the apartment during the bookend
scenes (not to be found in Reza’s play) in the Brooklyn
Bridge Park playground. The fixed camera neither moves
nor zooms as we discern in the distance the boys’ fight at the
beginning. The initial setup recalls the surveillance videos in
Hidden and it’s the same at the end when the boys seem (it’s
hard to tell for sure) to make up, the fight forgotten, belatedly pulling the rug from under the tortuous apartment tussle
(for the apparent reconciliation belies the bargaining adults’
presumption that the kids need to be coerced into settling
their differences). Most of Carnage involves parents negotiating about children absent from the discussion. The last scene
invites us to reflect on the exclusion given that the adolescent
gang (which doesn’t visibly include any girls) seems more
civil than the cobbler-gobbling grownups.
As an alternative to settling down in that horrible apartment—and succumbing to “I am these people”—the brief
open-air episodes discover an outsider position. It could be a
class perspective (how the pretentious Nancy and Alan looked,
FI L M Q UARTERLY
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Civilization and its discontents
Left: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? © 1966 Warner Bros. DVD: Warner Home Video. Right: Hidden. © 2004 Les Films du Losange / WEGA Film / Bavaria Film / BIM Distribuzione.
when they arrived at the Longstreet residence, to longtime
working-class residents of Brooklyn); it could be youth’s outlook on adulthood; it could be non-parents’ view on the nuclear
family; and—strangest of all—it could be the regard of the
nonhuman. In the final park scene a little hamster—the pet
(and symbolic sacrificial victim) that John (who couldn’t even
bear to touch the creature as he did this) has thrown out on
the street. I think the rodent embodies (down there, out there)
a “possibility of correction” after all. At the end of Carnage,
there’s an adjustment to the position of not belonging to the
world of the Brooklyn apartment. The cognitive shift puts me
in mind of a bird the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s The Body
Artist (Picador, 2001) notices outside her window: “When
birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see. Think.
What a shedding of every knowable surface and process.”
::
Noah Isenberg: Perhaps another way of imagining our four protagonists is not so much as infants wading in their own human
waste, though we do have plenty of suggestions to that effect,
but rather as the logical counterparts to the wild, or ultimately
not-so-wild youths seen in the film’s prologue and epilogue—
in that omniscient camera’s static long shot. As in the case of
the two teenagers right at the end of Hidden, we never know
precisely what goes down between the two boys; we aren’t
made privy to their dialogue in the same way that we’re made
privy to, and are made to suffer through, the real-time dialogue of their parents. Here we might locate a weak affinity
with Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation (2011) and the competing claims of the two couples in that gripping drama. The
Longstreets and Cowans may think they’re above this (the
familiar quip “we’re all adults here” or “we’re all civilized”
resonates), but they partake of the same blood sport that’s
enacted by their respective sons. They, too, allow the insults
and infantile taunting to provoke violent outbursts revealing the beast within, or simply all the repressed hostility and
48
bitterness that’s masked by their external bourgeois appearances, the corporate power couple on the one side and the
mildly bohemian, liberal, but affluent couple on the other.
Since the beast within has become one of our major
concerns, it’s worth noting that in Reza’s play the “pet” name
used by Alain and Annette is “woof-woof,” not Alan and
Nancy’s “doodle.” In other words, they ironically make the
canine sound a term of endearment. Although Alan doesn’t
quite bark like a dog à la Hidden, he does bark into his cell
phone and he spouts the dog-eat-dog rhetoric of a ruthless
capitalist. The nonverbal “utterance” by Nancy, when she
vomits, is then almost a collective utterance, neither specifically human nor beastly, a purging of the acute nausea that
we’re all made to feel. There’s yet another significant nonverbal moment, or pair of moments: the drumming during the
bookend scenes that constitutes the main thrust of Alexandre
Desplat’s score. In the first instance, we see the boys in the
park, and the booming sound of the ominous drums increases
in intensity as the altercation occurs; in the second instance,
from a similar vantage point, we see Nibbles the hamster in
the foreground, the victim of Michael’s callousness, but also
the one and only liberated figure, the boys in the background
now gathering peacefully around a cell phone and the drumheavy score suddenly striking a more positive note. After all
we know about home life with the Longstreets, how nice it
must be living al fresco in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
NOAH ISENBERG directs the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College—The New
School for Liberal Arts.
ROB WHITE is editor of Film Quarterly.
ABSTRACT Dialogue about Roman Polanski’s Carnage, discussing the politics of the film:
to what extent does it critique the affluent New York world it depicts?
KEYWORDS Carnage, The God of Carnage, Roman Polanski, Yasmina Reza, black comedy
DVD DATA Carnage. Director: Roman Polanski. © 2011 SBS Productions, Constantin
Film Produktion, SPI Film Studio, Versatil Cinema S.L., Zanagar Films, France 2 Cinéma.
Publisher: Sony Pictures. $30.99, 1 disc.
spri n g 2012
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