WHIRLPOOL

I saw this incredible movie recently, called WHIRLPOOL, directed by Otto Preminger. This is a remarkable movie in many ways. The main character is a beautiful wife (Gene Tierney) who has a problem with stealing, even though she is married to a psychoanalyst (Richard Conte) who makes a comfortable amount of money. In an effort to hide her problem, she becomes mixed up with a creepy quack psychoanalyst (Jose Ferrer), who hypnotizes her and frames her for a murder.

The movie has incredible atmosphere. Gene Tierney is radiant, otherwordly, and almost unbearably beautiful. She has a perfect sculptural head, the quintessential 1940's female head. Jose Ferrer is elegant, slimy, despicable, weak, desperate, charming, horrifying, by turns. He is in the hospital, barely able to move, for a good part of the movie, and delivers his lines through a haze of painkillers with his eyes unable to focus. But from this position he is able to convey myriads and shades of character and meaning that can chill yor spine. Brilliant.

Gene Tierney is genius at portraying women who have psychological disorders of varying intensity, made all the more acute by her alarming beauty. It's very moving to see her struggle with trying to be the perfect wife and to hide her secret, while all the time it is destroying her life and those around her.

I am always fascinated by movies about women who have mental disorders. The simple explanation offered is never really convincing. In WHIRLPOOL, the wife is a kleptomaniac because her father never let her buy anything when she was a girl, and she's transferred this pathology onto her husband. In LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN, the explanation for the character's insane destructive possessiveness is, "Ellen loves too much." In THE LOCKET, a locket given to her as a little girl was taken away, and this accounts for her insanity.

But what seems implied is always that the woman cannot be contained by her society. She loves too much, wants too much, desires too much. She is therefore "woman too much," and this destroys her, destroys life. I was reading some Northrop Frye the other day, and this character--the siren, the harlot, the nymphomaniac, the witch, the all-consuming female--is the prime figure in demonic literary symbolism. The animal most associated with the demonic in literature is the ape, and the natural symbol is water in a turbulent form. The spiral, or WHIRLPOOL, is another important symbol.

What's interesting is, I had no idea that I was taking all of my images from classic literary demonic symbolism. I'd been planning to use all of these images in my next film for a while now: a man in an ape suit, a harlot or witch, and troubled waters. And when I saw WHIRLPOOL, I was very struck by that title. The Whirlpool is also the demonic spiral, as in the opening credits of VERTIGO; it's the Wheel of Fortune, with all that implies about fate, and the worlds of fortune tellers and mystics; and it's the raging waters of Charybdis, that sucks people down without hope. It's life down the drain, it's life being drained away. It's the essence of the demonic, and it's always great material for a drama.