12. Carnal Knowledge

RICHARD McGUINNESS

FULES FEIFFER, who wrote the script for Mike Nichols’s 1971 film Carnal Knowledge, has said that he meant it as a sexual history of his own generation, a generation in which men of all political and ethical stripes shared some complicity in the Playboy Bunny aesthetic. To show the immorality, as well as the sheer unworkability of the sexual expectations and exploitation of those times, Feiffer and Nichols included highly selected scenes from the lives of the two American male heroes, from their college years in the late forties through the beginning of their middle age in the late sixties. All of this is presented from so elevated and respectably “artistic” a viewpoint, however, that one would have expected few complaints about it. Surprisingly, following rumored pre-issue studio doubts about it, Carnal Knowledge opened to a good deal of suspicious and hostile reaction from the public.

One sort of reaction came from sophisticated film-goers who honestly thought the male sexual behavior in the film was so selectively chosen as to make the men two-dimensional and overly obsessed with “tits” and such. The way that the dialogue rings true seemed to make it all the more necessary for this part of the public to put the film down.

Missed by them, however, was the film’s strong moral slant on its characters. Though the terse selection of damning material might well be said to be distorted, it is distorted for the most exemplary of ends. In isolating the characters from all cultural context and support for their childish behavior toward the opposite sex, the film emphasizes their culpability toward women, passing a judgment on them that leaves no room for any alibi that “everybody else was acting—or wanted to act—that way.”

The strangest bedfellow for these more sophisticated complaints was the decision of a local censorship board in Albany, Georgia, to ban Carnal Knowledge outright for “lewdness” under the 1973 Supreme Court obscenity ruling. The high-court ruling, which seemed to give each locality’s censors the power to decide for themselves what constitutes obscenity, seemed also potentially to mangle the chances for nationwide distribution of many Hollywood products. Although the Albany banning of Carnal Knowledge was eventually reversed by the Supreme Court, many film organizations have joined forces and are appealing for further clarification of the obscenity ruling.

One can easily speculate about the superficial reasons for anyone’s banning Carnal Knowledge and come up with isolated items like the title, which makes it sound like a porno flick, and the naive, mostly verbal explicitness (plus, one expects, such essentially nonerotic details as the first on-screen unsheathing of a condom in a major American movie). These things were perhaps enough to create visions for the censors of Hollywood turning out high-class exploitation products ever after. However, primitive reactions often have some truth in them, and part of the Georgians’ adverse response to this moral and dour view of sexuality from New York City may have been the instinctive perception that the film, in essential ways, has a peculiarly American odor of obscenity about it; that is, it flirts deliberately with areas that until the last few years were unmentionable except among men in private. But again, Nichols-Feiffer have highly moral reasons: the film promotes the idea that it is in the unmentionable, censorable areas of life that humanity’s worst impulses are liable to flourish. In that light, the repressive Georgia decision is particularly lamentable.

The unhealthy, backroom-sex mentality and its function in male heterosexual relationships are explored in unprecedented though antiseptic detail here through the life-long friendship between the two main characters—Sandy, played by Arthur Garfunkel, and Jonathan, by Jack Nicholson. Though they are different in essential ways, the tie between them is reinforced over the years by their ritualistic advice-giving and commiseration in sexual matters. Sandy is prone to relationships with women in which affection and equal understanding are supposed to play a large part, while Jonathan seems more advanced and adult by American standards because he eschews his friend’s soft-headed idealism and instead concentrates without distraction on more down-to-earth sexual maneuvering. But though they are opposites in many ways, they are still bound together by their shared sexual mythology. Jonathan is the active purveyor of the ideal of the sexual hunt, while Sandy accepts it and distorts it in his own schmucky way.

Jonathan’s unspecified New York-style profession seems to be something like an investment analyst, but throughout the film his appearance remains that of a concupiscent Midwesterner—a traveling salesman—and he perpetually pollutes Sandy’s sedate, thoughtful nature (Sandy becomes a doctor) with his own search for excitement. Eventually, one can’t help noticing that Jonathan’s relationship with Sandy resembles that which the media—and American culture generally —have to the American male: Jonathan is the serpentlike advocate of idealized sex, and manipulates this mirage of carnal adventuring as a way of selling himself and making Sandy dependent on him.

To show how unworkable is the sexual hunt mentality when practiced in the real world, Nichols uses the sort of film technique—coldly shot scenes with few cuts—that suggests the all-seeing eye of the psychiatrist. Many of the scenes are composed entirely of a single shot, and characters are constrained and edgy within an unchanging frame. This technique has sophisticated visual antecedents in Andy Warhol movies and the formal, comic-strip constrictions of a Jules Feiffer cartoon. However, the profoundest source for Carnal Knowledge’s stiff, chilly camera is the quasi-sexual exploitation movie of yesteryear; but instead of our being trapped with two flatly nonperforming actors,Carnal Knowledge’s pseudouninventive technique cages us for long periods with the horny, forlorn characters and their self-defeating behavior.

In a one-shot scene characterized by particular technical meagerness, Sandy and Susan, played sensibly and warmly by Candice Bergen, are standing in a stylized grove of a thousand or so skinny trees. Chastely dressed, they face one another and move very little. Slow-moving, somewhat-considerate Sandy wants to put his hand on Susan’s breast (mostly in order to have something substantive to report back to college roommate Jonathan), and the dialogue revolves almost entirely about this problem. While the scene evinces the old-time exploitation movie’s stingy reluctance to satisfy one’s high sexual expectations of it, the Feiffer dialogue, filled with telling barbs at male self-deception, monopolizes our attention.

It is in these early scenes that the characters have the most mannered and self-conscious words to speak; but the verbal style works, suggesting collegians of an earlier era trying desperately to be honest while unconsciously persisting in selfish behavior (“Why are you doing it, then?” she asks in reference to his hand on her breast. “Because it’s what I should be doing at this stage in our relationship,” he answers guilelessly, meaning, too, that Jonathan will scorn him if he returns to the dorm with nothing to tell).

Even though the dialogue is funny, it is also too dry and concise to leave much room for belief in the reality of the characters; therefore, the sex—the explicitness of the hand on the breast—is the only element of the scene that actually unifies it or gives it any juice. Not much juice, really, just enough to keep the crowd’s attention from wandering. Here, as in the rest of the movie, the sex isn’t really sexual. Like the characters, it is treated clinically, either as an academic topic for cinematic discussion or for dramatic emphasis. Used in such a calculating and detached way, the sex, perversely, tends to come across, if not as pornography, then as a sure indication that this is a movie with its mind in the gutter; otherwise, why would the chaste and antiseptic handling be necessary? The same kidgloves treatment dominated in thirties and forties movies with such hot subjects as white slavery and teenage prostitution.

Adding to the film’s feeling of antiseptic sleaziness, is the device in the college scenes where the older actors are obviously impersonating innocent types much younger than themselves. This gives the naive self-deceptions of the college kids the feeling of older corruption and, indeed, suggests a subjective sense of how the characters are experiencing their first sex: with the assumption that corruption is a definitive byproduct of sexual experience. Sex wouldn’t be sex without it.

Consistent with the amoral, male-supremacist sensibility Carnal Knowledge treats, the script is brutally elliptical in its treatment of its women. For instance, though Susan is Sandy’s wife for a good part of the film, her actual role in the movie ends with the college years, as if her only real importance to Jonathan and Sandy had been as a sexual experimental animal. The effect of her disappearance after all the scenes in which Mike Nichols had directed her so sensitively is one of cruelty and unfairness to her, almost akin to Janet Leigh’s abrupt exit in Psycho. There the dual sides of Norman Bates’s personality played cat and mouse with the woman until she was killed; here, after navigating for a while the perilous Scylla-and-Charybdis narrows between sexy, egotistical Jonathan and thoughtful, dull Sandy, Susan ends up dead, too, having ceased, from the male genital viewpoint, to be of any account.

There is an important sense, though, in which Susan lives on. Characteristic of Feiffer’s best creations, she is both highly individualized while at the same time managing to attain the status of a universal type, in this case, the Whole Woman; and as a whole woman, she isn’t allowed very long in the male universe. Therefore, out of some sort of spiritual mitosis connected with survival, she splits neatly into the two oppressed archetypes encountered later in the film—Ann Margret’s cowlike sex-object, who controls by being passive; and Cynthia O’Neal’s vigilant professional woman, who frankly needs men for support and sex while asserting her conditions and rights in every situation. The Woman is going to be around for a long time, these two types seem to say, and if you don’t want her to be whole, men, then you’ll have to cope with the distortions created by your narrow sexual use of her.

Despite their psychic depredations on women, though, the men in Carnal Knowledge are tolerable because their sexually manipulative behavior stems so plainly from feelings of powerlessness. It is sad and amusing that no matter how badly their relationships with women are going, Jonathan and Sandy can always retire to the kitchen for more tired tit-talk; and as they get older, this sort of reversion to boyhood bonds becomes an increasingly painful admission of their failure in pursuing sexual mirages.

Further, and partly as a consequence of their being well-mannered and so-phisticated New Yorkers, no matter how unfortunate Jonathan’s influence seems to be and no matter how self-satisfied and epigrammatic the acrimony he expresses about women in private to Sandy, he is constitutionally incapable of being directly mean, violent, or vengeful to them. In nonfucking situations, he even promotes a kind of pragmatic camaraderie with his bedmates.

In his relationship with Bobbie, the ideal sex-object played overweight and increasingly passive by Ann-Margret, we get some idea of his inhibitions about expressing hostility to women directly. At the beginning of their affair, he and Bobbie act like sophisticates, aging kids who know how to enjoy themselves without guilt. Jonathan is even able to report to Sandy that before the Bobbie thing, he had begun to have trouble staying hard; but now, with her, he finds sex just the way it used to be. Without warning, though, she begins to grow passive and miserable. She wants to get married, and Jonathan, having admitted that he wants to hold onto Bobbie at any cost as the price of a continued erection, allows her to pursue institutional channels for her passivity—marriage and, presumably, babies.

His difficulties in expressing his loathing for her nonfucking instincts are exposed in an earlier scene in which she has just pressured him about marriage again. Cross-cutting, so rarely used by Nichols in Carnal Knowledge’s dialogue scenes, here gives his wildly indirect expression of frustration at her the feeling of a tempest in a teapot. In literally half the shots, he is strictly isolated with his own feelings, as if he has a stage all to himself. Jonathan rages, but he doesn’t hit or hurt her. He gets into side issues involving her sleeping, her inertia, her not cleaning up, but his attack is not to the point somehow. And the reason has much to do with the fact that Jonathan is a liberal.

He is a gallant and a liberal and has rejected the obvious male-brute role; but his need for Bobbie to be a sex-object is not lessened; therefore, out of pity for him and in appreciation for his graciously having given up caveman rights over her, maternal Bobbie is expected tactfully to recognize his sexual needs and make herself powerless and a sex-object.

The scene ends when Jonathan, in sheer frustration at Bobbie’s horribly unfeeling suggestion that they trade in their love nest for marriage, throws the unmade sheets up in the air and they fall back on his head; but being part of the chilly Nichols vision, the moment isn’t very funny. Neither, on the contrary, has the scene come close to tragedy. As in the rest of the film, Jonathan’s self-deceiving timorousness has avoided tragic implications and consequences. Though he spends the entire movie talking to his fellow like a sexist pig, so to speak, when he is in the presence of women, Jonathan goes around in the perpetual spiritual stoop of the well-meaning liberal.

Just as it’s hard to feel cleansed by any of Jonathan’s confused self-assertions, it would also be pretty hard, even for people in Georgia, to get off on the sex-object Ann-Margret plays here. The film is so bent on giving us uncomfortable perceptions of this distorted woman that at times we almost feel our noses ob- scenely rubbed in Nichols’s directorial perceptions. In Bobbie’s first scene, she is sitting at a revolving nightclub table having her first date with Jonathan; she has an impish look of fun on her womanly face, and her breasts are stuffed so tightly into her lowcut dress that a disconcerting vein—like some needful vulnerability— stands out on one of them. Later that night, when Jonathan buries his face in her still needfully constrained breasts, she stands there passively, without touching him, yet accepting in a motherly way his desire for her mammaries. It is a startling, sobering regression for both of them from the tired, smart pre-sex repartee they had exchanged in the cab.

Much later in their relationship, after a long-winded Warhol-type shot of her, thinking, Bobbie suggests the idea of their shacking up together. Jonathan tries to avoid the question while still giving Mama an answer that will satisfy her. Disgusted with his evasiveness, Bobbie calls him a “prick” in the tiny, sex-object voice so well-cultivated by Ann-Margret. As with the vein on her breast, a feeling of bad taste, even obscenity, comes not from the vulgar word but from our sense of her unnaturally inadequate range of expression. Once only, after sex, does Bobbie have the full-blown laughter of a woman. Otherwise, lust, sorrow, misery, and expectations of joy all seem necessarily to be filtered through the most cruel and unusual of self-limitations.

The film’s cynicism is total, however, for it also assiduously puts down the women and world of Jonathan’s better half, Sandy. Though the Nichols-Feiffer view of him is not as acerbic as toward Jonathan—it is at times almost gentle— we get the feeling that he, too, in his unassuming way, is also muffing life. In his search for wife or mistress with whom he can be equal after leaving Susan, he connects with a hatchet-faced professional Cindy, with whom he eventually admits getting little pleasure; and at the end of the film, when it is the late sixties and he has grown paunchy, Sandy ends up with someone he considers truly “real”: a painted, pointy-faced waif from the Village. She, too, seems to be more of a poorly fabricated approximation of some badly worked-out ideal—even a fetish object (she is old enough to be Sandy’s daughter, Jonathan points out helpfully)—than someone with whom he could enjoy sex or life.

But the filmmakers’ objectivity toward Sandy seems more the result of their self-conscious impartiality, a kind of artistic reverse “equal-time” policy toward the opposite aspects of male sexuality, than it does a convincing condemnation of the equal-and-loving sort of human relationship. The real cause of Sandy’s caricature relationships with women seems to be less Sandy than, again, Jonathan, the instigator of sexual dissatisfaction, the proponent of the kind of sex—carnal knowledge, in fact—extraneous to the individuality of the sex partners and which is sought for its own sake. With Jonathan around all the time, it is impossible for Sandy to forget that his sexual needs are perhaps not fulfilled, or to enter deeply and unselfconsciously into the kinds of relationships he prefers. One wishes throughout Carnal Knowledge that Sandy would stop seeing Jonathan and work things out for himself, but he never does.

This is one of the lessons of the film, though—that Jonathan and Sandy are inseparable, two sides of the same personality: the American—or human—male (again, the Feiffer stylization supports this kind of generality). It is as if, the film seems to instruct, humanitarian love must always be tied to and corrupted by the carnal, and carnal love must in turn ever be frustrated by the humanitarianliberal.

Though the Biblical phrasing of the title does encourage speculation at these lofty levels, the film’s moral vision is most believable when, consistent with Feiffer’s earlier cited comment, it seems to apply to a particular generation of Americans, a generation oppressed and oppressing within the framework of unique societal conditions. In this context, the unprecedentedly vicious analysis of sex role playing in Carnal Knowledge can serve as a negative model against which succeeding generations can test themselves. It would be less helpful—and, indeed, true—to apply to human, or male, sexuality as a whole the shriveling judgment that the film passes.