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| [To be presented to the audience following an intermission as a kind of ‘artists’ talk’ after a production, but with the actors staying in character. | |
| The setting is Arzner’s home in the desert, in 1975. Arzner enters, dressed in a skirt and jacket, carrying gardening gloves. She fixes her jacket and pats her hair, waiting for Cook. She finds her walking cane, and decides to hide it from sight. She changes her mind, setting the cane before her chair. Cook enters, carrying a tape recorder and a notepad. They shake hands.] | |
| ARZNER: | Miss Cook? |
| COOK: | Pam, please, it’s Pam. |
| ARZNER: | If you like. |
| COOK: | [taking both of Arzner’s hands] I can’t tell you what a pleasure this is for me. You, you’re exactly the way I imagined you’d be. |
| ARZNER: | [uncomfortable with handholding] What a comfort, for you. [dropping Cook’s hand] You’ll pardon me, Miss Cook, I’m too old to dance. |
| COOK: | Oh, oh! Of course, please sit down! |
| ARZNER: | I believe that is my line. [pause] Let’s both sit down. |
| [They sit.] | |
| COOK: | I don’t know where to begin. I have so many questions. I’m so honoured. I’ve wanted to meet you for years. Your home is lovely. I have seen all of your films, several times. Your work – |
| ARZNER: | Pardon me, Miss Cook. I do not wish to appear inhospitable, but if you intend to spend the afternoon showering me with praise, perhaps you could simply tape record your adorations and I could go back to my flowers. |
| COOK: | [nervously] I’m a little nervous. |
| ARZNER: | No, you’re excited. The difference grows more apparent as you age. [pause] Forgive me, I’m an old woman with a bad temper. There is no other kind. Perhaps you had best ask me a question. |
| COOK: | [with notes, sets tape recorder to ‘Record’] Thank you. I’d like to start by asking you about the central problem, or rather problematization, buried in the narrative superstructure of your films – specifically, how your films are important in that they foreground the desires of women caught in systems of representation that allow them the opportunity to play, indeed to subvert, the specific demands of the dominant system. |
| ARZNER: | Miss Cook, do you always speak this way? |
| COOK: | Yes. |
| ARZNER: | It seems like rather a lot of work simply to ask me how I managed for so many years to not get caught. In my day, all a woman had to do to be taken seriously was put on a pair of pants, not speak in tongues. |
| COOK: | You mentioned getting caught? |
| ARZNER: | [sighs] You are asking me how I made so many movies about intelligent, aggressive women and sold them to the studios, to the world, as sob-sister ‘women’s pictures’, are you not? |
| COOK: | Traditional Hollywood films are dominated by the male gaze. |
| ARZNER: | There is your answer – I am not male. |
| COOK: | But the art form is – the single eye of the camera, the way films are composed, frame by individual frame, like a mathematics table, all in a linear, formal pattern – cinema mimics the thinking patterns of male psychology. It’s built into the technology. The camera is a man’s eye. |
| ARZNER: | I was told such nonsense thirty years ago, and I still resist the idea. If I proved anything in my work, it is that technology does not possess a sex. Technology is neutral. Whatever viewpoints appear on the screen are either the individual visions of the director, or, more often, the unfulfilled needs of the audience. |
| COOK: | Are you saying I’m suffering from projection? |
| ARZNER: | Tell me something, Miss Cook, is it not easier for you and your female colleagues to believe that movies are a force unto themselves, that they live and breathe independently of their makers? Is that fantasy not much easier to believe than the idea that perhaps I made some ridiculous, melodramatic and even foolish films, as you say, ‘within the system’, because I wanted to? Because I enjoyed myself? |
| COOK: | Then why did you leave, why didn’t you finish your last film? |
| ARZNER: | I was suffering from pneumonia. Surely you read that in your research. |
| COOK: | That’s the official reason. |
| ARZNER: | [testy] And the only one I have to offer. Your generation automatically assumes official reasons are lies. My generation knew how to mind its own business. |
| COOK: | [nervous] I apologize, I didn’t mean to imply – |
| ARZNER: | Pneumonia was much more difficult to cure then than it is today … it sometimes took years to regain one’s … one’s health. |
| COOK: | [pats Arzner’s knee] Well, you’re in great shape now. |
| ARZNER: | I am 77 years old and by all rights I should pass away at any moment. [takes Cooks hand, squeezes it] Ask me another question. |
| COOK: | Were you aware of the effects of your films at the time they were shown? |
| ARZNER: | I was in New York in 1934, and I noticed dozens of women on 5th Avenue wearing hats exactly like the hats I had had designed for my picture with Katharine Hepburn. It was a very valuable lesson about the edifying powers of cinema. |
| COOK: | Now you’re teasing me. |
| ARZNER: | Louis B. Mayer once said to me, ‘Movies are for entertainment. If you want to send a message, send a telegram’. I thought this quite clever, until I heard him repeat it for fifteen years. |
| COOK: | But your films are loaded with political and social subtexts. |
| ARZNER: | All of them completely irrelevant. Audiences consumed motion pictures in those years the same way people poison themselves with cheaply produced food today. Any nourishment was accidental. |
| COOK: | Then you admit to an agenda. |
| ARZNER: | I admit to doing my job. |
| COOK: | But my study of your films turns up a recurring pattern – whenever the story dictated that the hero and the heroine fall in love, you found subtle ways to show the audience that the woman was not truly happy. Your camera work cleverly dodges and obscures images of male–female love, you consistently undermined the heterosexual orthodoxy. |
| ARZNER: | You are on a very wrong tack, Miss Cook. I was not sneaking about, inserting secret messages and childish, ungrateful, low blows. I was working out a coherent vision. I was very fortunate to be given the artist’s privilege of exploring a recurring theme, which was simply that a woman is never secure or completely whole when she is in love. But that is not enough for young women today, to take another woman’s word when she tells you she was glad to do the work given to her. You must find contradictions, you must unearth something rotten and dark! You talk about your respect for my work, yet you make me out to be little more than a third-rate kitchen maid stealing silver from my masters, and then you expect me to be grateful for the comparison! [pause] Furthermore, there is no sexual orthodoxy of any kind – it is all delusional talk – one does what one does as time and place and opportunity dictate. |
| COOK: | But as a lesbian making heterosexual love stories – |
| ARZNER: | I am not a lesbian. |
| COOK: | [exasperated] Then, as a pioneering feminist – |
| ARZNER: | ‘Feminist’ is a careless and inaccurate term. [begins to rise from her chair] I’m getting tired, Miss Cook. |
| COOK: | Miss Arzner, please … I’ve come such a long way to see you. |
| ARZNER: | Thirty-two years ago I was forced to behave myself. Now, another group of well-wishers such as yourself would like me to reform a second time. Once again, other people are deciding who I am. Well, this is my home. I am in no one’s employ. I reserve my right to remain exclusively myself. Isn’t that the same right you and your friends are demanding? |
| COOK: | It’s not wrong to look for allies. Women deserve to know their own history. |
| ARZNER: | [rising, shakes Cook’s hand] At my expense? No, Miss Cook, I’d rather be left alone. Watch my films, write whatever you see. Pretend I’m dead. |
| COOK: | [standing] I don’t believe you. I think it bothers you that you’ve been forgotten … I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – |
| ARZNER: | You’ll excuse me now, my flowers need watering. They suffer terribly when they’re misremembered. Most things do. |
| [Arzner exits. Cook hesitates, takes tape out of recorder and leaves it on a table. Cook exits.] | |
| END |