“What do you have to do to get some fucking intimacy around here?” – Dr. Larry

After my third viewing of Closer I suddenly became aware of an implicit subtext which made me completely re-evaluate the resonance of the story. Intuitively I had been aware the film was special, prior to my ability to even crudely articulate it, but on this most recent viewing my intuition had transformed into conscious awareness.

An early clue for me was the Time magazine blurb on the back of the dvd, which brazenly declares: “At last a love story for adults”. A love story for adults? Before Sunset sure, Annie Hall definitely, but Closer? Most criticisms towards this film have centered on the complete lack of intimacy between the romantic leads and the unsympathetic traits each of the four characters possess at one point or another throughout the film, leaving our romanticized notions of love unfulfilled as moviegoers. Closer is about love insofar as it portrays a world of emotionally stunted individuals all striving for it, and therefore it is actually about the absence of love, love as an ideal which is like a fifth character forever estranged from the central drama. Were it to be truly deemed a love story for adults it would have to be concluded that it is a very pessimistic and ultimately unsatisfying one.

My interpretation compensates for this unsatisfying explanation of the film by presupposing an underlying didacticism at work in this story which is in some ways evocative of Protestant morality plays of the sixteenth century. These morality plays consisted of explicit depictions of sinful activities for the purposes of titillating the moral convictions of the viewers so as to put their faith to the test and encourage personal religious experiences. In a similar way Closer candidly displays for our voyeuristic pleasure a series of adulterous acts which force us to confront our own latent sexuality. Caught up in this voyeurism we are presented with an overt portrayal of depravity, dependent on archetypal caricatures, which both attract and repel us, thus causing the active moral conflict. The subtlety of Closer however diffuses the morality play aspect: there are no explicit devices in the film to warn us of the format, rather it is stealthily concealed within a ‘Hollywood Romance’ veneer which serves to intensify the moral dilemma.

This nesting of the morality play within a ‘Hollywood Romance’ is Mike Nichols’ stroke of genius. The film begins with a formulaic expression of the Hollywood Romance via a slo-motion, pop song choreographed encounter between two young attractive members of the cast. This in part loops back in the final scene with an markedly different significance as a result of the disillusioning effect of the intermittent scenes. This narrative device is quite effective in its effort to disarm us of our expectations on the way in and then remind us of these previous expectations on the way out. The transition into the morality play portion of the film is seamless due in part to the choice of casting, lighting, setting, all of which promote a false sense of security and familiarity that amplifies the resonance of the sexual explicitness of the story. This explicitness is psychological more so than physical and all the more jarring as the four characters wrestle with their lack of intimacy and fear of abandonment.

The otherworldliness of the story between the two aforementioned book-end scenes is perhaps further alluded to through the chosen name of the one partially sympathetic character of the whole film: Alice (played by Natalie Portman). There is a sense of the ‘Through the Looking Glass’ to the detours the story take that correspond to this Alice who enters into the world via a traumatic incident (a car accident). In additional support to this reading of the story is the conceit made in the first introduction of Alice: she is a stripper, and dresses somewhat provocatively, in strong contrast with Dan’s character (Jude Law) who appears to be upon first sight, and indeed throughout the initial dialogue, a gentleman of high moral standards. As the story progresses we come to learn that for both characters the inverse is true, and appearances are misleading on this side of the looking glass.

Not only are appearances misleading but the initial conceit of the Hollywood Romance, that characters are capable of potential dimensionality in their developments (at least a trait of the exemplars of the genre), is soon shown to be fallacious in this movie. No matter how similar the characters look to our conceptions of the genre they continue to transgress their respective roles, abiding ultimately to a more rigid archetypal form of caricature which grows less and less sympathetic as the story develops. There are subtle modulations, vain attempts by the characters to assert their goodness, their ability to change, their dimensionality, but it never develops beyond empty promises. They have become resigned to symbolic representations of licentiousness, and in this respect Closer acts as a morality play. Nichols has created a world where archetypal characters of affluent lifestyles and dominant physical beauty (the likes of which clutter commercials in the hopes of intimidating us into buying products) branch out into an expanded arena of expression (that of the Hollywood Romance’) without the vocabulary or grammar to do so, and in the process demonstrate their vacuity.

At one point, Dr. Larry (Clive Owen) naively asks his trophy wife with genuine bewilderment: “Aren’t we happy?”.

There are several self-referential clues in the script as to why the glossy veneer aesthetic was chosen by Nichols; for example, Dan’s novel and Anna’s photographs serve as points of reference in the dialogues towards a general distrust for visual impressions. All the while that the various characters make these cautionary quips as to the deception of visual impressions, we the audience our relying on preconceptions of the genre triggered by our visual recognition of the outward signs (i.e. the repertoire of actors, the way they are shot, the sort of places they inhabit). Clearly, Nichols is playing with us, not only with these self-referential nods but also in the very title which at once challenges us to probe beyond the superficial dimension of what is shown. Something is not quite right, yet we are lead into this realization gingerly.

Several times throughout the story characters refer to the ‘coldness’ of the acts involved. The coldness is very palpable. It is almost as if the characters are androids (reminiscent of Wong Kar-Wai’s quite literal expression of love through androids in 2046) and they are interacting with one another based on superficial knowledge, as if their entire education of the opposite sex was based on pornography. This android-like quality is explicit in Alice’s embodiment of the male sexual fantasy during the strip club scene with Dr. Larry. Throughout the scene Dr. Larry strives to get an emotional reaction from Alice, but with every attempt Alice regresses into an empty vessel of sexual desire devoid of dimension. Once again, it is as if Nichols is explicitly self-referencing the archetypal significance of these characters, nesting an effectual performance of an archetype within a Hollywood Romance within a morality play. The poster image (shown above) is quite interesting in this respect because Nichols has deliberately shown the four principle actors in a sort of assembly-line way, with muted colors and cold sterile gazes as if to emphasize this android aspect (and is it merely a coincidence that Jude Law has played an android before?).

The android analogy is not meant to be literal, just suggestive: like androids of a certain advanced quality these characters are able to interact with one another and simulate social behaviors without an intrinsically programmed grasp of what ‘love’ is, or how it is to be attained. Working only from observable social practices the androids simulate human behavior but never attain love. The lack of intimacy is always there in their every touch. In one of the more poignant scenes, Dr. Larry stalks through the stream-lined modern apartment like a caged animal infecting the room with his frustration at not being able to capture love. It is as if love was never programmed into them yet they are aware of it and still struggle to conjure it up somehow. Because of this I see the film as deliberately divorced from reality, so as to emphasize this certain ignorance in the adulterers which has a didactic point; otherwise, as a love story it is a complete failure, and it makes no sense at all; rather, I believe Closer serves to show us with complete frankness what a world without love looks like, and that it exists in even the most affluent environments, has no discretion for physical beauty and infects everyone who does not take responsibility for their actions. As a morality play Closer offers a dystopic glimpse into the cold heart of our own latent libidinal urges, and challenges us to love and cultivate love at the cost of our sexual liberties. This coincides with my personal belief that monogamy is an unnatural act that serves as a useful compromise in order for romantic love to prosper.