There’s a scene in the movie Carol where the two main characters — nervous shop-girl Therese and the eponymous soon-to-be-divorcée Carol — first have lunch together. Therese arrives first and so I watch her watching Carol cross the street, hurrying slightly, her figure seeming to me strangely like my grandmother in my memory — oddly oversized in her coat, wearing dark glasses in winter, co-ordinated accents of colour in gloves and scarf. They sit down facing each other and the camera hovers over each of their shoulders in turn. Carol is wearing a muted, grey-blue jacket, her silhouette streamlined, her slightly-curled hair picking up the gold of her jewellery. Her voice is low and smooth. She is anything but girlish and yet ruinously feminine. She offers Therese a cigarette, leans across the table to light it. Her nails, earrings, scarf and handkerchief are all a precisely matching shade of coral.
After seeing this film I went out and searched for a nail varnish in that shade. Four years later it’s still the family of nail colours I have most of, wear most often — a cluster of subtly different red-oranges, orange-pinks, pink-reds — that still never quite seem to match the colour Cate Blanchett was wearing in that scene.
To want to be someone is to look at them and daydream that you’re looking in a mirror. Carol leans back in the restaurant’s red leather seat and I lean back in mine. She lowers the hand holding her cigarette at a precise angle, rests her hand on the table, and I feel the white cloth against my wrist. Her gaze is bright, she half-smiles, and I feel an echoing flush of pleasure. Mirror neurons firing. Being somehow inside someone else’s body, for a moment, transported.
Aspiration and admiration are thin and hungry things, are a nebulous kind of desire, are the very seeds of the realer, more embodied desire, the desire that doesn’t require that you first be flung out of your own body. And of course this aspiration to be Carol is not totally my own. Therese, sitting across the table from her, can’t look away. When the waiter comes and Carol has ordered, Therese just says I’ll have the same, all of it, rather than waste time looking at the menu that could instead be spent looking at Carol. Admiration and aspiration have always played many roles in queer life. Do I want to be her or do I want her? These feelings make up the socially acceptable mask that queer sexual attraction wears, one tool among many that have allowed us to move through the world — or sometimes to move comfortably with ourselves, denying for a while what we really feel in favour of a more acceptable explanation. Or they are the bridge to wanting, are real in themselves but transitory, the deeply-felt precursor to something deeper still. Therese — lacking confidence and direction, ever so young, wearing her schoolgirl black and white, her black Alice band — is drawn to this woman whom she wishes she could be, someone so together, coiffed and elegant and in control. She sits across from her and imagines that she is looking in a glass, is seeing her own future. Mirror neurons firing. Carol’s low voice falling almost to a whisper: What a strange girl you are. Flung out of space. I know that soon this admiration will transmute into attraction, but it is still a real and moving force, now and later. Towards the end of the film Therese is a year older and her dress sense has changed. In her chic jacket, her more delicately styled hair, her pearl earrings, I cannot help but see the afterimage of Carol. Aspiration as desire from an oblique angle, its object something too brilliant to be examined straight on, that you must see out of the corner of your eye. Again and again, the film shows us Carol or Therese aslant, in one corner of the shot. An eye narrowed, turned half away from the source of light.
Do I desire to be Carol myself, do I myself desire Carol, or am I simply mirroring Therese’s desire-to-be and desiring-for? Because this is how the film functions. Rooney Mara’s Therese is laconic, her answers often hesitant, her expressions rarely dramatic. In Highsmith’s The Price of Salt we have direct access to Therese’s volatile inner world, but in Carol, on the screen, we must know her from without. I browse user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and am nonplussed: Mara is described as dull and expressionless, as wooden, the couple as lacking chemistry. But for me, this is mistaking the frequency on which the film is broadcasting. Therese rarely tells us directly how she is feeling. Instead, the film has us feel it with her: she sees Carol for the first time across the crowded department store and is entranced — I am entranced; she is drawn to Carol, noticing every precise detail of her appearance — I am drawn, am noticing; she feels assaulted and hemmed in by what the men around her want of her, want her to be — I shrink back; she feels the joy of seeing beauty and capturing it on film, and that warmth is reflected in me.
The confused twinning of desiring someone and desiring to be someone has its place in trans experience as well. Before I came out, feeling desire for women could be the socially acceptable face of feeling desire to be a woman, the mirror image of the sequence that many cis queer women walk through. I remember as a kid wishing and wishing I could spend more time around girls, and later the draw of long, silky hair, smooth skin, bodies with curves beneath fabric — all things that could be written off as sexual attraction. The joy of accompanying my partner clothes shopping, the draw to look into jewellery cases and imagine myself wearing each delicate thing — perhaps less so. At some point, all desire for femininity — even masked or transmuted into sexual attraction — started to feel dangerous, poisonous, unbearably masculine, and I worked to silence all of it.
I think about those disappointed reviews of Carol and it occurs to me that many people might not know the role of silence in queer life. The movie asks the audience to function as a mirror, yes, I know what Therese is feeling because those feelings are reflected back in me, but not all mirrors can cast back every face the same. And the film itself is a mirror, too: perhaps a moving image of Therese’s inner world can form within me because I see myself reflected in her, see my own history trailing invisibly behind her, see my own hesitancy and silences in hers. To grow up queer is to grow up knowing at some level that what you want is wrong, must be wrong, is at odds with what those around you are telling you that you should want, at odds even with what it is possible to want. After a while you accept that other people must be right and you must be wrong — this cannot be what you desire, it’s an impossibility, you simply must not know yourself! And so you distance yourself from yourself, become absent or not-quite-human, flung out of space. To dissociate is to live in a world unreal, a world seen only darkly: again and again, Therese or Carol are seen through glass, are seen reflected in glass, see the rest of the world through windows, glass cases, barriers at shop counters. The film’s Therese is a photographer, forever looking at the world through a tiny aperture, through a glass lens.
To live without knowing your own desire is never to learn to say no — after all, your only guide to what you should want is what other people ask of you — but nor can you ever truly say yes — since true assent must come from a place of self-knowing. I’ve got the schedules for sailing to France, Richard says, So whaddya think? and Therese can only hedge, change the subject. Dannie takes her drink out of her hand, kisses her, then asks, Did you mind? and I hear Therese saying No, that she didn’t mind, even as she finds a way to get away from him. And would you like to marry Richard? asks Carol, and Therese responds: Well. I barely even know what to order for lunch. She gives no felt denials or consents. This is the silence of the closet, acquiescence and passivity pervading everything else. Perhaps to someone with no analogue of their own this might read as impassivity, but it is not. Passivity can work to mask something felt, to mask needs assumed to be unspeakable — a quietness to cover clamour. I’m someone who finds it near-impossible to say no, who tends to retreat or prevaricate rather than refuse, always so disconnected from what I want and don’t want that I don’t even recognise what I’m doing. This pervades and impedes every part of my life. A friend texts to suggest hanging out and adds for the love of god say no if you’d rather not even if you’re free XD and I have no idea how to answer, sit paralysed. I see my silences mirrored in Therese and so in turn her desire can be mirrored in me.
There’s a moment in the film that all this comes to a head, when Therese states absolutely clearly what it has been to live in this place of unknowing. The inevitable disaster has come on them, she suspects that Carol will leave her, has retreated into her customary diffidence —
CAROL: What are you thinking? Do you know how many times a day I ask you that?
THERESE: I’m sorry. What am I thinking? I’m thinking that I’m utterly selfish and I —
CAROL: Don’t do this, you had no idea. How could you have known?
THERESE: And I should have said no to you but I never say no. And it’s selfish, because… because I just take everything, and I don’t know anything, and I don’t know what I want, and how could I when all I ever do is say yes to everything?
The thing is, I have been seeing and feeling with her and I know that this time — this time — her fears are unfounded. This is the world upsidedown, seen in a concave mirror, flipped. Therese’s saying yes to everything was never an act of selfishness but of generosity, something that cost her rather than something she benefited from since she was forfeiting control over what she did and did not want. How could I know what I want, when all I ever do is say yes to everything? This fear comes from dissociation, from long-accustomed acquiescence and never knowing her own desire. But I have been walking this with her and have seen that Carol was her exception, the moment she surfaced, found that impulsive spark want and followed it, perhaps for the first time. Arguing with Richard about going away with Carol, Therese says: I’m wide awake, I’ve never been more awake. In the hotel when they first sleep together, Carol makes the first move but Therese is not passive; Carol kisses her, and then in the breath they take together Therese says only Take me to bed. This is not an automatic, habitual assent but something authentic. This is consent. This is a felt yes.
Quiet conversations in restaurant booths, sitting well apart. The Well of Loneliness being taken out of libraries, being passed between trusted friends — but all in quiet. The painstaking search during the lesbian pulp fiction boom of the 1950s to find the rare gems really written by queer women, books willing to present queer women as sympathetic, as complex — but all in hushed and private spaces. These are the silences that The Price of Salt emerged from. On the face of it, Carol presents the exception: Carol herself living as audible a queerness as it was possible to live in that decade, declaring, in the end, What use am I to us living against my own grain? But the roots of these lives were sunk in a loam of silence, drank up water of silence, and even with everything that has changed in queer life, this is still immediately recognisable. This is the power of gaydar, the tacit solidarity of seeing, the power of trans people to find each other even before transition: expressed desire speaking to unexpressed desire. Silence speaking to silence, even through the closet door.
We all live in parallel worlds. Sitting in the scratchy cinema seat, feeling my body a mirror for Therese’s silence and desire, her desire making her body into a mirror for Carol, the silver screen mirroring me where I am and showing me where I hope to go. The seats on either side of me filled with people I trust, queer friends, each reflecting some other version of all this, seeing something different reflected back. The world as seen through a very clear glass. That Christmas that Carol was in the cinemas, me and a friend unwittingly each gave the other a copy of Highsmith’s novel. A few of us sitting around a table in the warm pub, unwrapping two identical books, more pleased than embarrassed.
