Love's Locus: The Bed and the Fiction of Family

Essay published on MASKS The Journal, pages 3-14

Excerpt (manuscript):

Just as the salon exists in the 19th century as“the theater where it is exchanged a crowd of nothings,” our love-play continues to take place in the contemporary theatre of the absurd. Indeed, in Paris a middle-class dwelling is the setting for a film by Jean-Luc Godard titled Une Femme est une Femme (1961) [Fig. 5]. The film represents perfectly the challenge that the nuclear family structure faced in the mid-20th century. In fact, the story is rather a tragi-comedic theatre play, where dissonances between the lyrics and the spoken parts, as well as the presence of paradoxical situations—which includes using in an absurd way domestic objects—create a masterpiece of synthesis. In the movie, the vantage point of the spectator (from where the majority of scenes are filmed) coincides with the point of view of the entrance, looking toward the living room. This seems to be both the point of view of a visitor or that of a theater spectator. In the scenes, often frontal ones, it is not intuitive to understand the plan of the house. The bed seems in fact to be an integral part of the living room, therefore, based on the orientation of the room (keeping the table as a constant), it sometimes appears and sometimes seems like disappearing from the living room. In short, the feeling is that the piece of furniture is not a fixed element, it is not stable exactly like the couple. 

The most exemplary scene is perhaps the one in which Emile, husband of the film’s protagonist Angela, moves around the living room on his bike while the couple discusses having a child. While Angela insists on wanting to become a mother, Emile clearly avoids to deal with the topic by sidetracking the discussion. The desire to create a family, to fulfill the duties of reproduction, manifests in that open place of instability. There, the old architectural layout of the typical French apartment disappears, as the nuclear family dissolves along with the rigid organization of the house. Romantic love also vanishes with the fleeting presence of the marital bed, and as the construction of the familial nucleus starts to be questioned, it aligns itself with the presence (or absence) of that particular piece of furniture that has historically embodied social hierarchies.

The appearance of the film’s bed greatly differs from that of the heavily decorated lit à la duchesse, but despite the simplification of forms or absence of a decorative style of contemporary beds, its symbolic value remains intact throughout the centuries. In fact, we can say that the simplification of forms does not necessarily convey a final liberation from the expressive power of the symbolic order. In this sense, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard claimed that today: “[t]he [furniture’s] function is no longer obscured by the moral theatricality of the old furniture; it is emancipated now from ritual, from ceremonial, from the entire ideology which used to make our surroundings into an opaque mirror of a reified human structure.” The new, ordinary furniture defines the objects as truly functional, devoid of their representational character, but despite that, no real emancipation can occur if it is not followed by a complete restructuring of both space and social hierarchies.

In Godard’s movie, a new level of theatricality takes place: the presence or lack of the bed conveys the sporadic presence of love as well as a profound schism between the couple, not a family yet. The play develops within the same space of the living room, so following the artificial theatrical space, the distribution loses its value. The bedroom is divested of its importance, no canopy fosters intimacy or encases the locus of the sex ritual. Instead, inside the movie’s interior the bed seems mobile as a prop, reminding us of the movable nature of the cassoni. The young French couple’s instability is thus reflected in their domestic interior while their loving model seems to get closer to the contemporary one, characterized by the uncertainties of an almost nomadic lifestyle. In such circumnstances, intimacy seems a fleeting and almost impossible condition, passion is sought but never achieved, sex is wanted but impossible because the emotional contact is constantly avoided. Thus, in contemporary love the heavy fabric that allowed the couple to isolate from the world under the canopy finally falls, and as the curtain of a theater stage, it reveals how much fiction is hidden behind the concept of family as the marital bed represents its maximum expression.