Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two a.m. The campus is dark, the party is over, and Martha lurches into the front hall, casts one bleary look around the book-strewn wreck of the living room, and says: "What a dump." That is the whole film in one frame. A house, a marriage, two people who have nothing left to do but stay inside it and perform their own ruin for an audience of strangers. Nobody is going anywhere. Over the next two hours George and Martha will not solve a single problem, change a single circumstance, or leave the room in any way that matters. They will only talk — and the talking will turn out to be the most violent thing American cinema had filmed in years.

This matters because cinema, for most of its life, ran on a simple circuit: a character sees a situation, and acts to change it. Punch lands, door opens, problem resolved. Gilles Deleuze called this the movement-image, and its engine is action. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? keeps the surface of action — drinks are poured, a car is driven, a shotgun is even produced — but none of it goes anywhere. The action is a decoy. What the film actually films is people who can no longer act on what they perceive, who are reduced to looking, enduring, and inventing. The shotgun fires an umbrella. The plot is a set of "games."

Those games are the key, and the precise concept for them is what Deleuze called the gest (le geste) — a posture or attitude that, instead of advancing a story, exposes a social or theatrical relation underneath it. "Get the Guests." "Humiliate the Host." "Hump the Hostess." George and Martha don't have an argument; they stage a ceremony, and they announce its rules aloud. The body here is not an instrument of action but a thing that carries duration — Burton slumped and dry, Taylor splayed and loud, the two of them wearing decades of marriage as physical fact. This is cinema of the body in the most literal sense: the everyday, exhausted, ceremonial body holding time. Sandy Dennis's Honey, folding herself onto the bathroom floor, and George Segal's Nick, stiffening into the careerist's smile, are not reacting to events. They are being read.

And what we are reading toward is a lie. The couple's son — discussed, defended, sentimentally invoked — does not exist. He is a fiction George and Martha built together and have agreed to keep, a private myth with its own rules (Martha is never to mention him to outsiders). Here Deleuze's most powerful late idea arrives intact: the powers of the false. Classical cinema rested on a contract — the film, like a witness, tells the truth; narration is trustworthy. This film tears that contract up from inside the story. George is le faussaire, the forger: a man whose creative act is to fabricate a person and then, in the final "exorcism," to un-fabricate him — to announce the son's death as if delivering real news. Truth and falsehood stop being opposites and become something one character does to another. The most devastating event of the night is the killing of someone who was never alive.

This is also where the film becomes, in Deleuze's vocabulary, a crystal-image: a place where the real and the imaginary, the actual present and its reflection, can no longer be told apart. The son is as real to this marriage as the gin. The whole house is a crystal — mirrored, sealed, an aristocratic academic order (the college president's daughter, the history professor) quietly rotting from within. That rot has a name too: crystal-decomposition, the ordered world decaying behind its own façade. And the exorcism is the crystal cracking — a fissure that finally lets an outside in. When the fiction dies, George can ask, almost tenderly, whether Martha is afraid of Virginia Woolf — afraid, that is, of living without the lie. "I am, George. I am." The line of flight out of the totality is just two sober, frightened people in a quiet house at dawn.

Haskell Wexler shot all of this in hard, grainy black-and-white at the moment color had won, pushing a near-handheld camera into faces. That choice converts the close-up into what Deleuze calls the affection-image — and more precisely the potisign, the face as a surface where intensity gathers without discharging into action. To photograph Elizabeth Taylor, the era's reigning beauty, in deglamorizing pore-level scrutiny was itself an act of falsity-breaking: the star's face stripped of its own myth.

The lineage is exact. Nichols inherited the template from A Streetcar Named Desire — the faithful stage transfer, the deglamorized star, the single set — and the chamber-combat rhythm from Long Day's Journey Into Night; Lehman's tactic of preserving the language while negotiating the Code is the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof maneuver, and the problem of keeping one room kinetic is the 12 Angry Men problem. What it seeded is just as clear: Cassavetes's Faces took the handheld marital wreckage further into rawness the same year, and Nichols's own The Graduate carried the O'Steen-Sylbert ensemble straight into New Hollywood. The film helped break the Production Code — which is to say it helped break cinema's last promise to only show the permitted, the polite, the true. Watch it again for the games. Once you hear them announced as games, you can never again mistake the talk for an argument. It was always a ceremony, and you were always meant to read it.