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THE PIANO
An essay on Jane Campion's film
by Carmel Bird
PART TWO
THIS ESSAY HAS BEEN SPLIT IN TWO FOR EASIER DOWNLOADING. PART ONE IS HERE
Freedom Of Speech first appeared in Columbus' Blindness and Other Essays, edited by Cassandra Pybus, published by University of Queensland Press, 1994; ISBN 0-7022-2745-5
The Piano Copyright © Carmel Bird 1996.
All rights reserved
Baines can't read; Ada knows this. Yet Ada sends Baines a love
message written on a piano key. Ada is an angry, self-willed,
scowling woman, but she is not stupid. It is this kind of puzzle
that holds up the story for me while I wonder why Jane Campion had Ada remove a key from her piano (!) and send
a written message to a man who couldn't read. Such events happen
in dreams, of course, but if the dreamscape has crossed over into
the story at this point, there is no clear indication of the fact.
In the published script of The Piano Baines takes the key to some schoolchildren for interpretation.
So it seems that at some point Jane Campion thought about the
problem of reading, and then decided to skip it. The real problem
is not so much that Baines doesn't get the key read, as that Ada
writes on it in the first place.
That Baines should receive a key of some kind is, however, very
significant, because he is a mis-placed Bluebeard figure marked
by the beard-shaped blue tattoo on his nose and forehead. Bluebeard
was a monstrous man who murdered his wives, keeping their bodies
under lock and key. Ada is Stewart's wife in the sense that he
has bought her from her father, but there is, strangely, no apparent
wedding ceremony; nor does there appear to be any consummation.
It is Baines who gets Ada by Ada's consent, selling herself to
him for her piano, and falling in love with him in the process.
Since it is Stewart who wields the axe, he and Baines make up
two parts of the Bluebeard in Ada's life. There is a theatrical
performance of a shadow play of Bluebeard which sharply draws our attention to the theme of the murderous
husband. And in the same concert Flora gets to dress up as an
angel. The angel and Bluebeard motifs move across the two narratives,
now in a real world, now in a shadow world.
When Ada and Flora arrived on the beach one of the Maoris thought
they were angels. Flora acts as a messenger, and she also represents
vitality, spirit, innocence and light. She carries not only life
but death, being the instrument of her mother's betrayal. She
is air (and there is plenty of earth and oceans of water, as well
as a remarkable bit of fire). This film stays close to the elements.
Flora is very knowing in her innocence, and she is associated
with freedom from the opening scenes. All the Europeans except
Baines are strapped into boots, but at the beginning Flora's boots
not only have wheels, but roll about by themselves. (I can't understand
why Jane Campion decided to have rollerskates in 1847 when rollerskates
were not invented until 1874. But there they are. They occupy
the territory of disjunction between the story and the dream.
Perhaps they should be located in the dreamscape. Shakespeare,
after all, could easily have dreamt rollerskates.) The more I
think of it, the more I think The Piano is about kinds of freedom(and power), and the more I see Flora
as the human being at the centre of things.
She is the part of her mother that is alive and running and flying
and dancing and speaking. She is confined and restrained with
her mother, and as her mother is, by the masculine world and by
the clothes she wears. But when she and her mother and the piano
sail away from stuffy Scotland and are dumped on the wild and
primitive shore of a distant land, her clothes (like the clothes
of her mother) start to come off and she can run round in her
petticoat sometimes, and do cartwheels on the sand. She has the
freedom and the power and she is her mother's voice. In her role
as turncoat messenger she has the plot in her hands. Her mother
is punished for infidelity by losing a finger, and Flora, dressed
as an angel, is splashed with the spurting blood. If I have to
pick the most shocking thing in The Piano it is the sight of Flora the angel splattered with her mother's
blood and screaming like a girl in a horror movie. Suddenly Flora
is de-flowered, menstrual, murderous, a fallen angel, a wailing
banshee. And then (oh yuk of yuk) Stewart gives Flora another
message -- she must deliver to Baines the finger wrapped in a
cloth. (You often think, as you watch movies -- well, I could
imagine doing that, and that. Then you get to a bit where you
say -- no, no, no, I can't do that. I reckon I couldn't carry the finger.)
So there is the bloodied angel running off with her mother's finger,
and meanwhile Baines has just got hold of the piano key with the
message. His joy at the key is short-lived, for Flora hands over
the finger. Flora crouches, crushed and incoherent, in Baines's
hut. Her freedom has gone; her voice and power -- gone.
Because (perhaps) of my aunt without the fingers, I have always
been interested in the meaning of fingers. We used to have little
cakes, you know, called 'lady fingers' and if they were on the
table when that aunt was there, I used to feel very embarrassed,
but the aunt didn't seem to care. In finger-lore the index finger
is 'the mother'. (The middle finger is 'the father'.) The mother
was the most magical -- it guided, showed, beckoned, blessed,
cursed. People used to fear the pointing of a witch's index finger.
Orthodox Jewish women still wear their wedding ring on the index
finger because the ring will stop the finger from casting its
spells. So Stewart knew what he was doing when he deliberately
chopped off Ada's index finger, avoiding all other fingers. And
he disconnected her from her spell-binding piano (also mutilated).
With the severing of the finger, a spell is, indeed broken. Ada's
life is quite, quite changed from this point. His rage spent,
Stewart thinks he can hear Ada telling him to let Baines take
her away. This voice in his head is one of the more irritating
elements in the disjunction between the story and the dream. If
the only thing the story-teller can come up with (in order to
move the plot in the direction she wants it to go) is a voice
in a character's head, things are getting pretty risky. In obedience
to this improbable voice (and I mean it is improbable in the film's
own terms), Stewart gives Ada and Flora and the piano to Baines
and they sail away to live in a house with lace curtains. Ada
is still a piece of property, but at least she loves her owner
and he loves her. That's a start.
But I kept thinking -- she has to die. Everything is telling me
she has to die. There is no future for Ada. Flora has a future,
what with everything she has been through, and with her regained
power, freedom, voice. And yes, Ada first tells the sailors to
throw the piano into the sea; then she decides to follow it by
deliberately trapping her foot in the rope as it snakes into the
water. For one of her will, suicide at this point makes perfect
sense. I found Jane Campion's choice of words to describe Ada's
decision very strange. She writes that Ada steps into the loop
of rope 'out of fatal curiosity, odd and undisciplined'. This
is one very peculiar woman, we know that, but would she really,
at the moment when she is on the brink of some sort of happiness,
give in to 'fatal curiosity'. Suicide, yes; but curiosity? What it looked like to me was that she was going to follow the
piano and grab Flora and drown the lot of them. Perhaps even Baines,
why not.
There follows one of the greatest sequences in cinema. Ada and
the piano sink into the sea which embraces them with all the power
of the unconscious mind of God. The tragedy, the glory, the moment.
But suddenly Ada changes her mind, kicks off her boot and frees
herself and is saved. I couldn't believe my eyes. I was very displeased.
But it gets worse. In the house with the lace curtains Ada wears
a floral dress. I don't mean to suggest that she should have forever
worn the old complex and restricting black dresses, but the dimension
she has lost is striking. She has no finger, no style, and no
guts. Added to that, she is learning to speak, and wears a black
cloth over her face. What? Now, women who cover their faces are
in deep trouble. For all that the veil is to help with the speech,
by showing us Ada with her particularly compelling face obliterated,
Jane Campion tells us in our heart of hearts, dream of dreams
that this is no happy ending.
As soon as Ada kicked off her boot, I had had enough. I watched
the rest of the film in detached disbelief, not just at the mish-mash
of the story, but that a director with the brilliance that enabled
her to create, for instance, the image of the piano on the beach,
the image of the drowning piano, could so damage her creation.
The silver finger that Baines makes for Ada is certainly very
remarkable, but is it probable? Particularly useless for playing the piano.
That is where the plot ends. But wait -- Ada's imagination takes
over and we have the real and desired ending. Desired by Ada,
me, and Jane Campion. Ada imagines her piano in its ocean grave,
and imagines also herself floating above it. In the stillness
and the silence Ada is lulled to sleep. We are treated to another
of these wonderful images, the images that Jane Campion creates
with such love and passion. The piano is on the seabed with its
lid fallen away. 'Above floats Ada, her hair and arms stretched
out in a gesture of surrender, her body slowly turning on the
end of the rope. The seaweed's rust-coloured fronds reach out
to touch her.' The real Ada (that is, the dream Ada) has drowned with her piano. The freaky woman in the flowery
dress with the black veil and the silver finger is a sham.
The dense fabric of powerful images and symbols in The Piano overwhelms the pattern of character and plot so that motive and
logic fade and fracture. It seems to me that whatever happens,
the story of the piano, Ada, Stewart and Baines is a mess. But
out of it, with its mud and blood and water is born Ada's voice,
spirit, flower, Flora. It isn't put like that at the end of the
movie, but in trying to make sense of the spaces and dislocations
between the conscious and unconscious stories, I have realised
that if this thing is going anywhere, it's going with Flora. And
Jane Campion knows that.
THIS ESSAY HAS BEEN SPLIT IN TWO FOR EASIER DOWNLOADING. PART ONE IS HERE
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