La Meilleure Façon de Marcher (The Best Way to Walk) (1975) - Claude Miller
“…some little private madness…"
The Best Way to Walk's brutal thematic seemed the unlikeliest of subjects for filmic realization when I saw it as a teen-ager. 40 years later its unsparing exploration of heretofore unclaimed psycho-sexual territory--at once shocking and oddly liberating--continues to define the permanent future of cinema's thematic avant-garde.
Miller's film takes place at a boys camp over the course of the summer of 1960. Eschewing the kind of fussy curatorial outfitting that often drowns period films in nostalgia, Miller focuses on the dynamic between his protagonists: the sensitive and taciturn camp director's son Phillipe (Patrick Bouchity), who oversees theatrical activities, and robust Marc (Patrick Dewaere), in charge of athletic contests.
At the juncture of boy- vs. manhood--a boundary separating the unfinished business of being vs. having a maternal matrix from the attainment of masculine distinction and heterosexual object choice--some waver while others attack.
While Phillipe is mired in divided loyalties, Marc has advanced with lucid transparency to his sense of self, his public and private identity seamlessly cohering. Yet the very unambiguousness of Marc's masculine identity will reveal itself as oddly vulnerable confronted by Phillipe's agonizingly anomalous identification-in-progress.
As a storm rages Phillipe and two fellow counselors watch Bergman's Wild Strawberries on television. Uninterested in the arty fare, Marc and his companions play a rowdy game of cards. The volatility of misaligned temperaments--oblivious vulgarians vs. high-brow sophisticates--threatens to combust into physical violence, but ends with minor feather-ruffling. Tired of interruptions, Phillipe withdraws. The storm triggers an electrical surge that blows out the lights. The ensuing darkness sets the stage for the revelation which will propel a hidden difference into open antagonism.
Looking for candles with a flashlight, Marc knocks on Phillipe’s door. Phillipe asks him to wait, but straight-forward Marc enters anyway. To his shock he discovers Phillipe in front of a mirror wearing a dress and wig, his face heavily made up. Phillipe pulls off the fake hair and wipes the back of his hand across his mouth, smearing the lipstick as the light goes dark.
Mark gazes back in perplexity. Then remembers why he came and asks for candles. His complexion sooty against the candle-light, Phillipe glares back, his mascaraed eyes frozen wide with apprehension. For a brief moment Marc's shock matches Phillipe’s mortification. The rest of the film charts the ramifications of this primal scene of unwitting exposure, and the unwanted intimacy it creates between virtual strangers.
Mark walks back to resume his card game as Phillipe languidly wipes the makeup from his face, gazing at his reflection less enchanted than bewildered. The spell of his clandestine disguise has been broken, its mesmerizing reality displaced by the realization of undeniable oddness.
Hell, Sartre famously demonstrated, is the intrusion of others on our private "madness"--aspirations, vanities, and illusions. Foiling the totality of immanence, the other becomes the agent of disenchantment through whom being and appearance, counting and being counted, are rendered eternally disjunctive.
Whether as Creator crashing his creatures’ dyadic bliss beyond good and evil, or the unwitting neighbor forced into the witness role, each brings a sudden scrutiny which turns innocent play to self-conscious antics. That is, perhaps, the price of self-awareness in its recognitive duplication--nothing is gained without losing something.
For Phillipe's private ontological game of virtual reality any recognition--the ticket to self-substantiation--constitutes a fatal disruption. Rather than being confirmed through recognition, the result feels like a confusion of selves. His dispossession and exile from make-believe eventually opens up the path to owning whom he would be--yet only by way of a tortuous, in no way virtual master-slave altercation from which he will be lucky to emerge alive.
Reappearing in his pajamas with a candle, Phillipe declares himself unable to sleep. Marc invites him to join the card game, but he declines. Before returning to his dark lair, he asks Marc, as if in after-thought, if he has anything special to tell him. “What do you want me to say?” Mark replies, tapping his fingers against his temple in a show of bafflement nervously validated by his chuckling comrades.
To know an other’s obsessions violates their right not to be seen before they are ready. Remaining hidden essentially supports inviolability of individual dignity. In this way private sphere acts as a cocoon in whose anonymity unfinished selves are carried to term. For some the process of birthing a self that can withstand scrutiny never ends.
Discovering an other's secrets invests with power. But exposure cuts both ways. Phillipe's accidental unmasking virtually burdens Marc with his shame. Marc appears to hold the upper hand, but becomes Phillipe's captive despite himself. This may explain why our sympathy is no less with Marc, the exposer, than with his 'victim.'
The film emplots Phillipe’s humiliation at the hands of Mark with sordid detail, interrupted by episodes of oddly respectful sensitivity. Passing him at the suggestion box, Marc pledges with chivalrous solicitude to return the borrowed candles. Eventually he brings them to Phillipe's room accompanied by a friend. Full of mischief, he takes a photo of Phillipe’s fiancée Chantal from the window, draws near and slaps shut Phillipe's book, saying that excessive reading is like masturbation. In a gross violation of personal space, he taps his fist against Phillipe’s jaw, declaring his contempt for “bookworms.”
Later insomniac Phillipe knocks on Marc’s door and gets invited in. He would like to broach a subject “difficult to talk about.” In a roundabout attempt at rapprochement, he says he feels the groups of boys are too isolated, therewith diagnosing the dilemma at the heart of his own disruption: exclusion of the middle ground through which alternatives--here warring factions--would be mediated, if not reconciled. His declaration of intent merely states the problem, namely that isolation engenders and sustains antagonism.
Phillipe insists he wants the groups to work closer together.“That’s what’s been keeping you up?” Mark inquires incredulously. Discouraged, Phillipe rises to go as Marc restrains him by his shirt sleeve and accuses him of being touchy. In what what he hopes will be a decisive example of candor, Phillipe says he's been guilty of not letting his boys do sports. “Excuse me?” Marc enjoins, increasingly wary of Phillipe’s oblique communication.
Don’t other people have problems? Phillipe inquires. With characteristic directness Mark asks why he is the recipient of such disclosures. “It’s only normal,” Phillipe replies unctuously, “I’m confiding in you because everyone admires you.”
Phillipe's desperation to forge a bond of mutual respect out of fear for his reputation necessitates flattering diplomacy. Marc sees through his greasy stratagem, but plays along. With the balance of power shifted, it amuses him to watch Phillipe squirm to re-establish a level playing field. Phillipe realizes he can no longer afford his mildly disdainful superiority, now that the terms of repaying his debt have shifted.
“I’d like us to be friends,” he coyly suggests, pouring wine till his glass overflows. “What about favors?” Marc inquires mysteriously. Mopping up on all fours, Phillipe asks for specifics. Marc remains vague, saying only that as a ‘friend’ he might need a favor.
Though it has the elements of one, The Best Way to Walk is not a ‘gay’ film so much as one about power and manipulation. Which is not to suggest the erotic excludes exploitation. As Oscar Wilde quipped:
"Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power."
The Best Way explores how, in seeking recognition as the basic satisfaction of their individuality, people are placed at each other's mercy. Even positions of advantage engender dependence.
Phillipe is subjugated by his need for Marc's discretion. After initially savoring his authority, Marc finds himself repulsed by Phillipe's undignified groveling.
In Marc’s eyes impersonating a woman for one's own beguilement forfeits masculine honor. Manliness is traditionally exclusive of the project of female vanity--the anticipatory reduction of self to the alluring surface over a repertoire of exploits; identification with the prerogatives of the mother, and with the 'exciting-rejecting object,' etc.
Phillipe's exorcism-by-impersonation of the female suspends him between two forms of participation—being vs. having. As the Miller's film will show, these are not exclusive alternatives.* For Marc, no one who wants to be treated as a woman can genuinely desire to possess one, and that desire largely defines what masculinity is a matter of.
*A female identification in the male is wholly compatible with heterosexual object-choice, for the relation between desire and identification is not orthogonal, as was assumed by the earliest modern investigators of homosexuality (viz. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs).
Is the personification of the female meant to celebrate women or divest them of their power? The theory behind this framing is that transvestism is a denial of separation from the mother, therewith a failure to mourn. Impersonation attempts to elide the difference that makes possible the relationship, and with it the desire and longing for its continuation. This would make cross-dressing a curious mix of denial and restoration.
Male transvestites tend to fixate on, and impersonate, woman as the exciting-rejecting object. This renders the impersonation a kind of usurpation of the female's biological prerogative in the realm of sexual selection, where she chooses, and by the same token, rejects inferior suitors. It is this function which renders the plainest hen the Queen of her line, compared to which the preening of the cock must appear slightly ridiculous, if not tragic, in its futile exorbitance.
(Men are, of course, tragic in another way, viz. qua the disposable sex: as producers of a glut of available sperm (compared to the single female egg) and as the so-called canon-fodder of war.)
One may interpret transvestism in a number of ways: as a refusal to choose or divided loyalties; a tragic failure of individuation; the playful affirmation of possibilities; the rejection of exclusive identification; or the resolute embrace of inclusive non-differentiation. There is some validity in each.
The identificatory project of maleness precludes openness to alternatives. As a project based in separation and sacrifice, it's foundation is the acceptance of radical in-equality. But the rejection of the failure to discriminate, and a concurrent embrace of homophily, is characteristic of the project of gender identity per se. One can see in toddlers of both sexes that the correct identification of others is a non-negotiable, normative dimension of their experience.
While gender-narcissism is not the unique prerogative of either sex, it assumes an existential exigence in the male which is does not in the female, who's original pole of identification--the mother--remains, while for the male she must become 'other.' This suggest a third way in which the male is the tragic sex--as the one who's object-choice is fraught with danger.
The need to stand separate constrains choice. The male who pretends to be, or fancies himself, female, on the other hand, seeks to remain free of alternatives. He wants to be at liberty not to exclude. In this way his ambi-valence mirrors the socio-political practice of non-exclusion. Yet such inclusive freedom from constraint is more virtual than real--a being free akin to the ironist's, who experiences an absolute if purely subjective freedom in avowing the opposite of what he really means. It is a satisfaction ostensibly based on fooling others, though in reality completely dependent upon being recognized as duplicitous.
Is the gratification of the cross-dresser premised on his exposure? Or is his pretending it's own reward--a form of masturbation? Given that recognition is the common currency of social beings, I can't imagine cross-dressing to be a project conducted without the anticipation of the resonance which gives an end to all cultural practices.
Perhaps the transvestite wants it both ways––to fool and to be exposed. To successfully pass denies him the satisfaction of one form of recognition while granting him another. To have it both ways would mean to succeed in failure and fail in success: recognized as accomplished female impersonator and simultaneously as the beguiling (if finally rejecting, hence self-sufficient/narcissistic) faux-male, one 'moment' shading into the other.
Exactly the kind of ambiguity which developing gender-projecting children find so 'wrong'. The public female impersonator, I conclude, desires precisely this shimmering state, in which one hue passes into the other; the foreground into the background, the frame into the picture, and back. He is, in this capacity as unifier of opposites, the original sorcerer.
If play-acting is not affirmed re-cognitively, it remains a private potential. To recognize (or validate) the identifications of the cross-dresser would mean to tolerate his gender indeterminacy as such. To turn a blind eye to it rather than to affirm it. For how could we really affirm as a valid and estimable alternative what we would not consider as such for ourselves? This state of affairs perfectly describes the condition that makes toleration--or forbearance--requisite. And this brings us to the paradox of tolerance, which would accept what it rejects.
This state of affairs is intolerable for the transvestite, who would be recognized in his shimmering duality. Assuming the end of his cross-dressing really is to count as female, he compels recognition of his femaleness while prohibiting awareness of his biological gender, making his public witness complicit in his private illusion. He is playing at appearance rather than embracing reality. Yet this state-of-affairs only presents the surface of the 'transaction' between the transvestite and his audience. It does not consider the possibility that exposure (as biological male, or, what is the same thing--as artist) is what he is after. To be found out and acknowledged as artist means to be recognized as the source of enchantment. An enchantment not incompatible with cognitive dissonance.
From a different angle, spirituality has been conceived as the process of uniting opposites. Lao-Tzu observed: “He who, being a man, remains a woman, becomes a universal channel.” The ideal being the balance of polarities. Whether this is what your average cross-dresser is up to is open to debate. And conditional upon the agenda one is pursuing. One certainly cannot rule out that transvestites are are seeking totality. Whether this is considered regressive will depend on one’s view of the proper end of masculine identification in biological males. Either way it may be interpreted as a station on the convoluted journey to individuation.
Even in the age of gender-gerrymandering, male identity in western cultures is defined against the female by a frequently emphatic, even violent process of self-differentiation. And though a diversity of motives must be allowed the transvestite, what matters here is not the validity of a psychological theory, but the consequence of one character’s perception.
Marc has not been sensitized to the now self-explanatory right to be shamelessly different, specifically the right not to choose in his blurring boundaries. Hailing from a period before gender relativism, he responds to what threatens his identity with self-defensive aversion: rejecting a masculinity insufficiently exclusive of effeminate tendencies. The playful, school-boyish spiritedness in which he expresses his loathing for Phillipe, and his denial of being discomfited, may seem to belie the notion that he is threatened, though in light of his panicked response in the final act, he is clearly unnerved by Phillipe's militant 'otherness'.
Phillipe’s group try their hand at dodgeball, while Marc’s participate in the theater, only to turn a mock battle into a real one. Phillipe accuses Marc of planning the fiasco for his amusement. “You’re baiting me because you saw me that time in my room” “I don’t give a fuck about all that,” Marc insists.
Phillipe: “If I snuck into your room at night I’d catch you at...some private little madness.”
Marc: “As my grandmother would say—you’ve got bats upstairs.”
“All this was your idea,” Mark continues, “out of fear, you romanced me. Afraid I would tell everyone...I want no part of you.”
Phillipe writes his girlfriend, begging her to visit. After some vulgar joking in the cafeteria from which Marc appears to protect him, Phillipe barges into Marc’s room where he is washing his feet in a sink, and demands he stop the harassment. Marc assures him he has not told anyone. Then makes lewd insinuations about Chantal. Phillipe doesn’t respond.
“If someone had said that to me I would already have busted his face. You didn’t even flinch. You are repulsive.” Mark throws Phillipe forcefully out of his room.
As social deviant, Phillipe must appeal to Marc for recognition. But the kind of recognition he seeks--the restoration of his respectability and masculine honor--isn't parceled out on the basis of need or a right to dignity. Marc must be compelled to acknowledge it by a show of force demonstrating shamelessness. In a show-down pitting desirer against desired, each will dare the other to blink first.
At a restaurant Phillipe tells his luminous love-interest Chantal he’s rented a room. She wonders why. They drive into the forest and lay in a fern framed meadow where Phillipe attempts to make love to her. The sequence is handled with Bressonian efficiency.†
Watching the boys play soccer, Phillipe asks Marc about the favor he wanted. “I’ll suck your cock, if that’s it.” Bemused, Marc insists he doesn’t want anything. Phillipe, at wits’ end, threatens to kill himself. Marc apologizes for ‘screwing him around’ and extends his hand. Phillipe shakes it and thanks him. “My pleasure,” Marc responds somewhat disingenuously: “It’s always a pleasure to shake the hand of a gentleman.”
Their rapprochement doesn’t last, of course. Offering to put oneself at someone's sexual disposal is neither dignified nor honorable. Phillipe must find some other way to secure Mark's confidence.
He picks Chantal up at the station. Marc and his squad appear. He invites them to a swimming match he’s set up. “Do we have a choice, Officer?” Chantal asks with annoyance.
Changing in his room, Phillipe looks down to watch Marc entertain Chantal with his antics. Finding himself locked in his room when the door handle comes off in his hand, Phillipe has to climb down through the window, tearing his blazer pocket. Chantal later assures him Marc represents everything she loathes: “I find him cheap and pretentious.”
At a swimming event they reluctantly attend, Deloux is officially expelled for having pornography in his room. Asked to say a few words he throws a tantrum and is escorted out. In the pandemonium Marc rushes over to Phillipe and throws him into the pool, then dives in to retrieve him at Chantal’s insistence. Phillipe feels like throwing-up.
On the pretext of helping him, Mark forces Phillipe to put two fingers in his mouth, then pushes Phillipe’s face into the sink, ordering him to “eat your shit.” Phillipe screams. Chantal enters. “I was helping him puke,” Marc insists.
Marc's casual abusiveness seems more a reflection of his disdain for effeminate males than for those who have sex with other men.* What makes Phillipe the enemy is not his desire, but his vulnerability as a failed project of identification.
*Towards a more spirited homosexual Marc could not respond with unalloyed disgust. The self-acceptance and passion of the agent of desire compels respect. As author of recognition in his own right, he would be a force to be reckoned with. Recognition is not a gratuitous gift, but something compelled by the other’s self-possession and entitlement to recognition.º For Marc to give it there needs to be a level playing field—the very agonistic pitch which Phillipe’s wound disqualifies him from occupying. It is not a matter of indifference whether the person from whom recognition is sought is himself estimable. Recognition is not egalitarian but inherently partial and hierarchic.
º Where recognition has to be compelled, respect has not been earned. Recognition as a form of honoring is risked and won in traditionally homo-social institutions such as the military, medicine, law, and politics. In aristocratic cultures equality, in the form of an equality of the best (aristos) and inter pares, is as essential as it is in egalitarian regimes, where dignity largely supplants honor. A level playing field is the presupposition of any agonistic society where honor secures the arena of commonality through mutual recognition. This very fact precludes honor from being a universal right, i.e., as has been claimed for 'dignity.'
When the suggestion box is emptied it contains nothing useful in the way of a season end's activity. Finally, Phillipe, fully recovered from his ordeal, suggests a costume party, as “everyone likes dressing up.”
He asks Chantal not to come, but she insists. She wants to know what Phillipe wants--all his secrets: “To understand and love them, to show you mine,” she declares in voice-over, finally materializing in a mirror sporting a fake mustache. As festive music strikes up Marc enters as a suave and sovereign Matador.
Abrupt cut to heavily made-up Phillipe in a red dress casting a defiant gaze. Assuming the tone of Marc's superciliousness he invites him to dance. Marc smirks and looks at Chantal. “What do they call the dark Lady?” “They call me La Upa.” Mark claps his hands, bending to jig before offering himself to Phillipe.
“Tonight I only want to dance with Marc!” Phillipe declares. “Okay, but this is the last one.” Phillipe becomes aggressively tender, stroking the back of Marc’s neck. Mark looses is patience and pushes away. “Quit or I’ll punch you.” Phillipe looks at him with mock innocence.
Cut to a panoramic view of Paris “quelques années plus tard.” The camera pan ends on Phillipe looking out a window. A beaming Chantal appears. “Shall we take it?” she asks. As they duck inside a realtor asks if they like it. It’s Marc, his hair longer and mustache bushier, all convivial professional. He tells Phillipe since it’s him they can work something out about the fee. Phillipe doesn't respond to his query about how many years have passed. Unlike Marc, he hasn't married, though he and Chantal appear to be a couple.
Exiting the apartment Marc politely enjoins “after you.” Phillipe insists Marc precede. Back and forth they defer, Phillipe’s hand resting amiably on Marc’s shoulder. “After you,” Marc insists one final time, gazing demurely at Phillipe. The frame freezes and credits roll.
The abrupt end on a note of cordiality resolves the old struggle for recognition in the mutuality of a somewhat awkward civility. That the intervening years should have healed the old wounds, feels miraculous. Marc’s exquisite politeness may be dictated by his role as realtor, but we sense genuine esteem for the new Phillipe who once risked all to become a subject of desire.
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