Freer, Indirecter Discourse

In my viewing, silence in Frida was at its most, not potent exactly, but certainly at its most demonstrative when the camera and not the performances is given the task of filling the blanks. The scene that comes to mind immediately is that of Frida and Diego’s wedding. The shot opens away from the couple. A few of the guests can be seen wandering about. The mood is somehow somber. The camera is moving through the scene, through the stumbling, drunken guests, and we suddenly realize that the camera is also stumbling, the shakiness of the handheld giving the entire shot the POV of the drunk, its movement slow and loping. We understand that no guest at this wedding, not even the viewer, may celebrate the occasion unimpaired. Slowly, we approach Frida and Diego, and realize that perhaps the slowness of our approach is as much hesitation as inebriation. It’s not clear that we want to be here for this. Something is bound to go wrong. And then we hear them.

Consider also Frida’s first night with (yes, the loaded “with”) Trotsky. The scene opens with a soft focus on the two in bed, seen from the shoulders up. However, the soft focus is not the camera’s. We are viewing the scene first through the lens of Trotsky’s glasses, seeing the encounter from his point of view in a skillful, dislocated way (without his glasses, even, we can imagine that what he actually sees is without focus). This is not the usual sexual encounter in the movie. It is not one of Diego’s fucks. It is not one of Frida’s aggressive conquests. We understand that this is a tender moment, if only because the sex itself is tender, but the camera is telling us something important about how each character experiences this tenderness. Opening in Trotsky’s lens, the frame itself is soft. Edges are blurred. The intimacy here is something that, for all of his intellectual prowess, distracts his focus, that, in fact, softens him. In the next scene, no less, Trotsky literally loses his focus on his work when Frida appears in his room. When the camera pans away from the glasses, though, we see the scene as Frida does: in perfect clarity. To our knowledge, this is the first man she has been with since her separation with Diego, and because of the clarity of the shot we understand just how well she knows what she is doing. This, in fact, is her focus at that moment.

What else to say on the topic? Should we consider the scene of the crash, camera spinning around the characters, shots fragmented in the chaos? Or do we consider the scene in which Frida shows her painting to Diego: The camera moves with Diego as he walks away, and though he passes the painting without a word, his attention – and the camera – stop there, focusing so clearly on the work until his body finally gets the hint and comes back? Or do we consider the funeral of Frida’s mother, the camera opening on the hole in the ground, tracing the sorrow through the crowd until finally landing home on Frida and her father?

Rather, I’ll consider this question of the camera in writing. I can probably say “gaze” instead, even. The gaze of any particular written scene is severely amplified in the absence of dialogue. And it seems to me that there is an important difference here between “gaze” and “point of view”. The scene, for instance, between Frida and Trotsky, is not adopting first Trotsky’s and then Frida’s points of view. We have the sense of seeing the scene first through his eyes, but as point of view, this is an illusion at best. The gaze of the scene is suggesting a point of view without inhabiting it. We can understand Trotsky without being him. And, similarly, Frida. The wedding scene, as well, only suggests a point of view. The camera is not taking the place of a guest at the wedding, but it suggests how one might navigate the occasion.

For some time, I have experimented in my writing with free indirect discourse. I’ve liked this since I learned about it because it provides such an elegant way for a third person narrative to inhabit a first person point of view. I have always struggled, though, with its directness (odd, considering the name), because, I think, it is a point of view intrusion as much as it is an inhabitation. Though untagged, the first person actually speaks. What would it mean to only suggest this speech? Might a passage stumble drunkenly through a scene, mind wandering, emotions uninhibited, language loose and associative, without actually letting the drunk himself speak? Might this love scene, written, open first with diction that recalls Trotsky’s own, though never revealing his literal thoughts? Might the same scene, then, transition to another diction when the gaze shifts? This seems like an idea after all.