but not too sweet
on the desire for the personal
in atom egoyan's latest film, seven veils, amanda seyfried stars as janine, a theatre director who is forced into the opera world when her mentor's last will & testament requires her to put on a production of strauss's salome for the first time in twenty years. like all movies about artists real & fake, the film shifts diegesis between art, memory, & artistry with a didactic unease, the unease of a singular "i" on which not just a sensibility, but an entire world, rests.1 nowhere is this principle clearer in seven veils janine reads a monologue of the narration track which begins, "i am salome, daughter of herodias..." it's a bit too on the nose, that she has to be everything: the artist is the object she seeks, the master is the victim, the act of curation, "good judgement" is the ultimate performance. the narration continues throughout often along similar lines. after her program notes are rejected in favour of the opera company reprinting her mentor's, the higher-ups make a sort of compromise when they encourage janine to keep a "more personal" production diary. for some, "the personal" is art's only redeeming factor. art which one does not have a right to make unless i can be traced back to biography. there is a personal history, a trauma that justifies her voice's persistence, a ghost in the mirror. & yet the more she persists, an "i" who is everything, the more she fades into an overdetermined persona. footnotes in history, digital artifacts, an adapted myth.
egoyan discusses the art that influenced him as "great acts of appropriation."2 the question of whose story is being told, & how tastefully it's being produced, taste as a function of ethics or vice versa. one might then call seven veils a minor act of appropriation in how it substitutes egoyan the director of salome in 1996 & 2023 with two different figures. his spectre is perhaps most felt in janine's father, who spent quality time with his daughter dressing her as the princess of judea. he made home movies of her. there was no reward but the promise of good art. the film makes clear that this is no mere allegory, that there is a history of sexual abuse between the two that we are not being shown. that art might be a violence & moreover, more trouble than its worth, pervades from the most intimate to the institutional which is in the end little more than a series of variegated intimacies: video diaries, intimacy co-ordinators, actors whose bad behavior never manages to outweigh their name value. so it's important to recognize that what sets seven veils apart within the artist's bio-drama is the fact that unlike subjects ranging from yukio mishima to lydia tár, janine has no notoriety to speak of.3 all we know from her CV is that she has been up until now a director of plays. in other words all we know is that she is an outsider to this particular milieu. while she has been gifted this production by a spectre of her past, the dead may only ever grant us conditional freedoms.
in oscar wilde’s salome, once his step-daughter has decided that all she wants from him for the price of her dance is the head of john the baptist on a silver platter, herod attempts to bargain with her. he offers "a great round emerald," "my beautiful white peacocks, that walk in the garden between the myrtles and the tall cypress trees," "a collar of pearls, set in four rows […] like fifty moons caught in a golden net," "amethysts of two kinds, one that is black like wine, and one that is red like wine which has been coloured with water," "opals that burn always, with an icelike flame, opals that make sad men's minds, and are fearful of the shadows," & on & on, a spectacle for her of heretofore unseen relics which in their value as exotica beyond mere commodities mirror salome’s purfume & veils, & her feet which herod describes as "like white doves […] like little white flowers that dance upon the trees." simile upon simile, a panoply of verbal transformations like currency. undiluted colour makes esoterica worth its weight in reality, in nature or the emotions of men. he will not change anything. his eloquence never equivocates anything, it falls flat.
when janine speaks it is mostly for the sake of describing what is exactly in front of her. when she gathers footage for her video diary, the point seems to be that nothing much has changed. when her father had her star in all those home videos she wore a blindfold. now she is preoccupied with the visual. she arrives to a podcast appearance in a red dress, high & candy apple sleek. this appearance was presented to her like the video diary: yet another concession for her to get her voice out without conceding the stamp of authorship. as it turns out, the host is a big fan. he knows more about janine than she expected: the connection with her father, & that the relationship between janine & her mentor was more than just professional. to ease the tension, & to show just how much of a fan he is, he also brings out a bowl of cookies. this is after the episode has started to tape. he instructs her how if she bites into one of these cookies, then it would be unpleasent for the listening audience. so, no munching into the mic. the show continues on, & moments like this will surely be removed in post, yet we are left with a treat which instantly negates itself as a thing to enjoy & is now something to observe.
salome’s want was once so overpowering, all for a single kiss upon a man whose beauty left her disoriented that he would have him killed, & her desire was so fixated upon what she couldn’t have that a servant would take his own life under the steadfast knowledge that his own want was futile. his blood was what she danced on, her dovelike feet as offerings. it feels so low to want, like tugging on your mother’s shirtsleeve as you face rows upon rows of foil candies. that whether who get it or not says something about you, that whether you enjoy it or not says something about your worth. discovering, for the first time: in seven veils the world is defined against the outside where one finds "free information." here there is no free, there are the filial strictures of work & the professional strictures of family. the self holding fast for its object. there is always a threat about it, & an indecipherable humour that comes through whenever somebody tries to resist & do anything but stay silent. in art, nobody gets what they want. more than any other movie i was reminded of an event i attended the night before i saw seven veils, when the DJ started to play robyn’s "dancing on my own," & the chorus which plays the mundane as an admission of guilt, a desire so intense that it negates all pleasure. sometimes this is what it means to be valued.
See Monique Wittig, "The Point of View: Universal Or Particular?" in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Beacon Press, 1992), 59-67.
Noel Ransome, "Atom Egoyan says new film 'Seven Veils' explores themes that have haunted him for years," The Globe and Mail, September 2023, https://archive.ph/unNTI.
there’s that audience expectation for stories to be real which rears its ugly head most notably in cases like tár & the brutalist but also, soon after they announced this years oscar nominees i was getting lunch & overheard someone describe the plot of emilia perez, interrupted herself to wonder whether it was based on a true story or not.