Death in the Afternoon
There comes a signature moment in Maya Deren’s 1943 short film, Meshes of the Afternoon. A young woman looks placidly out of the picture window of her home, her hands lightly touching the glass. Trees and bushes reflected on the window pane frame her face.
Deren loved this picture of herself. She used it as a head-shot and on book jackets until she died. Composed by her then-husband and cinematographer Alexander Hammid, it is a lover’s portrait, a young man’s tribute to his beautiful young wife.
But this image is more than an artifact of Deren’s and Hammid’s love for one another; it is also a key image in a cinematic investigation into the psychology of dreams.
This “woman” is, in fact, not a woman at all in the context of the whole film She is one manifestation of a sleeping woman’s personality. Meshes of the Afternoon, after all, is a film that explicitly identifies itself as a film depicting a dream. Moreover it proceeds according to the logic of dreams. In order to justify this interpretation of the image, and to make this claim both meaningful and apparent, I will conduct a brief formal analysis of the film as a whole, and place the still image in its proper location in the film.
The cyclic structure of Deren’s film is the first clue that it is meant both to represent a dream, and explore the psychology of dreams. The first episode of Meshes establishes the fundamental motifs of the film, introducing viewers to significant characters, actions, objects, and spaces. It begins when an elongated, obviously artificial, hand enters the frame from above and places a hibiscus flower on a sidewalk in the path of a young woman played by Maya Deren. Shown only in shadows and bodily fragments, the Deren-character picks up the flower and spies a dark figure turning the bend ahead of her. She races ahead to catch up, but cannot seem to overtake the diminishing figure She turns up the steps to what we later learn is her bungalow, tries to open a door, takes a key from her purse, drops it, retrieves it, and opens the door. She surveys the rooms before her, seeing a knife in some bread, and an off-the-hook phone on the stairs to the upper level. She walks up the stairs to a bedroom, stops a phonograph left playing, and, seeing that no one is there, returns down the stairs to the living room, where she sits in comfortable chair in front of the sunny window, puts the flower in her lap, and falls asleep for an afternoon nap.
I spend all this time describing the first loop of the film because all the subsequent loops repeat and transform its significant elements. The flower, the figure, the key, the phone, the knife, and the record player, and the character all reoccur in different settings and situations throughout the rest of the film. Like a dream, which repeats and transforms the significant and insignificant events of sleeper’s day into a semi-coherent set of images, actions, characters, and symbols, Deren’s film fashions a semi-coherent, highly evocative narrative from an assemblage of apparently random and otherwise insignificant elements. These household elements become the physical manifestations of thought; the house itself, the physical representation of the Deren-character’s mind.
Since Deren’s film represents both a dream and an investigation of the power and logic of dreams, the five-fold multiplication of the Deren-character is easily explained as manifestations of her personality. Let us call the first Deren-character the Sleeper. The Sleeper is clearly meant to represent the “real” woman in the film. It is she who dreams the events of the rest of the film; it is she who, ultimately, is killed by the threatening thoughts of her unconscious. I will skip the second Deren-character, the “woman” at the window described above, for a moment and return to her later. The third Deren-character, the first to take the key from her mouth, is clearly threatened by the disorder in the house, that is, by the sleeper’s mental struggle with herself.
She sees the dark figure, she is buffeted on the stairs, and drawn back into the living room as if by the force of a psychic vacuum. The fourth Deren-character clearly manifests a form of the death instinct. Death, for her, is the key/knife. In what seems a game, she ruthlessly forces the second and third Deren-characters to accept her violent solution to the psychological crisis. The fifth Deren-character seems to be the sleeper’s dream-version of herself, who wakes within the dream to avert death. But the power of the dream soon reasserts itself. The young man turns into the dark figure, and the young woman, believing she is striking out in self-defense, plunges the knife into his face, only to have it revealed as a mirror. Caught in the meshes of an afternoon dream, like a fish in the meshes of a fisherman’s net, the sleeper has killed herself.
Only now, when we understand the structure and themes of the film as a whole, can we discuss the contributions of the still image of the second Deren-character. As we can tell from her passage through the house, and, more tellingly, from the placid and curious expression on her face, this version of the Deren-character is not yet threatened by the struggle for the sleeper’s sanity By looking out the window, and initiating the third (and first threatening) cycle of the film, she is only just becoming aware of this struggle. Her hands pressed lightly against the window conveys her interest in that which she is seeing, namely, the third Deren-character pursuing the dark figure of the unconscious, the inaccessible part of the human mind where (according to Freud) our fears and desires go unchecked by the restraints of civilization The reflection of the trees and bushes on the window, projected like a film (or a dream) onto the second Deren-character’s hands, heart, and brow, suggest that the psychological drama outside will soon come to affect her and her sleeping self inside the house. The struggle, that is, between the desires of the unconscious and the civil codes of society will soon come to the front of the conscious mind and demand a resolution.
So far I have argued that Meshes of the Afternoon is a complex dream film, bent on representing a mental struggle for one woman’s sanity and conducting an investigation into the logic of dreams. To conclude, I would like to look carefully at the use of a single motif, captured in this still image, and given special emphasis at the beginning and the end of the film. More specifically, I propose to look at how the repeated plant imagery not only reveals how carefully structured the film is, but how this motif opens the film up to more important questions about the meaning of dreams and the existence of fate.
Plant imagery appears in three different aspects in the still image invoked above. I have already mentioned the reflections of trees and bushes. Note also the floral pattern on the curtains screen left.
In and of themselves, these plant references mean little. But when considered in the light of the whole film, they seem as significant as the knife/key double-motif. Remember, the film begins with an elongated hand setting events in motion by placing a large flower in the path of the Deren character. Her attraction to the flower sets the events of the film in motion. She picks it up, and eventually falls asleep with the flower in her lap. Similarly at the end of the film, when the sleeper stands revealed as a suicide, she is covered in seaweed, suggesting, as I have done above, that she has been caught, like a fish, in the powerful net ofa death dream.
In the still, the languid flower motif on the curtain recalls the initiating hibiscus, while the tree branches which appear to grow Medusa-like from the second Deren-character’s head prefigure the seaweed that signals the sleeper’s final demise. Taken out of context, neither the curtain nor the reflection suggests much of anything. But when understood as significant repetitions of established elements, they bring the mystery of causality and the finality of death into an otherwise calm portrait of a beautiful young woman.
Embodied in the flowers and the trees, the beginning and the end (conceived of metaphysically) frame the Deren-character’s face; they stand as the ground which gives her definition, and mark the limits of her existence. In the context of the whole film, these images of flowers, trees, and seaweed prompt us to ask if modern human beings are driven fundamentally and irreducibly by the primal desires of the unconscious, or if perhaps we can discipline our deepest drives and become all the more human. They also ask us to consider whether the hand of God, the filmmaker, or evolution have determined our ends as well as our beginnings. Such questions, finally, are the ones that great art (and great science) is supposed to ask of us. We need not accept Deren’s answers, but we ought to accept her challenge.
Eric Drown
