Prompted by a sudden impulse — how fitting — I went and rewatched Paul Thomas Anderson's 2017 Phantom Thread, a movie I hadn't seen in many years. I just think it is especially important to see now, amid all the Nolan debates (he loves this movie, by the way), as a kind of contrast.
My thoughts…
🪡 It is very very hard for a filmmaker to be truly wise.
Wisdom — sapientia —, the knowledge of people and the world, is independent of talent, life experience, often even age. True, some artists are more sensitive, more attuned than the rest of the population. But many end up as ultimately less wise because they’re also more attuned to themselves, and focus on the inside too much.
PTA has now been wise several times, and shown that he understands people and the world very deeply: Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love are works of wisdom. I was worried when he hadn't shown his knowledge again until Phantom Thread came out. Phantom Thread is a work of great wisdom, at the level of the novels of Proust or Tolstoy, or the movies of Ingmar Bergman or Sally Potter. Again, this is very very hard to do, and PTA has now done it four (!) times.
By contrast Chris Nolan never made a wise movie until glimpses of sapientia showed up in The Odyssey, a story he finally did not write himself.
🪡 It is very hard to portray being in love on the screen.
You think: oh, but every filmmaker tries it. True. They do. And they mostly fail. As do writers. Especially in our polite, rational, behavioral studies ridden, post-woke era, people expect love and desire to be clean, polite, ultimately risk-free, with every emotion and urge keeping nicely to their little boxes, and even if you want it differently, there is a name for it, now you have a "kink", and even that will be data-captured and categorized for you.
This attitude, needless to say, is the opposite of wisdom. Knowing people is knowing that love is always a revolution, as is art. Nothing is birthed in a polite way. Nothing new can be created predictably. When you say, “I want to make something new” — a new private world with somebody, a new piece of art, a new social entity — you unleash a chaos you know you won't be able to fully control. (Our contracts, norms, weddings are but ways to mitigate the thus unleashed human tsunamis.)
Men and women come from two different systems, and our encounters, be they personal, intellectual, or professional, always necessarily break rank. We rebel for each other, and break things. That is the whole point: to break the stasis, the sterility!
PTA chose to show the visceral, vicious disrespect encoded into LOVE by contrasting the pristine Christian white fabrics and the boiling pagan primordial witchcraft of the kitchen, familiar to every parent of a toddler, anyone with a household, every date, every first communion. It is ME in the white satin. It is also me scarfing down juicy, saucy food, and licking my fingers. Do you like me? Or do you like only the well-washed version of me? You see how that is impossible.
And so from the outside, every couple must look totally insane — if the relationship works, their inner logic will cohere and will look bizarre to everybody else outside. The participants will look unjust, their behavior puzzling, their love unmet. And yet…(Contrast with how unconvincing the self-built couple-worlds of Inception or Oppenheimer felt, intellectually over-constructed for the actors but never inhabited because those relationships did not internally make sense. But love always does make sense to the participants, and in terms of its endurance which is its proof.)
🪡 It takes wisdom to show that the most serious aspects of life are still just a game.
Art, legacy, money — sex, family, loyalty. Nations. Betrayals. The great war of the sexes. The great heartbreaks with lasting trauma. Grief. Hope. Addiction. When you find your willing playmate, the game comes to life and becomes an intellectual pleasure.
There is no sex in Phantom Thread — a movie about a love! — because there doesn't need to be: it is seething with desire in every corner of that old house, with every creak of the stairs, every stitch of the needle and stir of the spoon. Everything these two people do conveys lusting and plenitude, hunger and greed and fealty. When they fight and think it's over is when you know their relationship begins. Words matter little, the people stay.
I often despair over how hard it is for filmmakers to show real desire, the terrifying, embarrassing, impolite, identity-threatening, values-subverting catastrophe that humans experience through their sexuality and both want it and do not want it, flee from it, reject it. And it still happens. Men and women, we break rank even with ourselves to reach the other.
You don't need scenes of naked people fucking to make the audience feel that terror and that beauty. That awe. You can just drape a piece of clean fabric on a woman who does not and will not stay clean, but will somehow cleanse this man who wants to.
A very very wise filmmaker. An impossible feat achieved. A great movie. Paul Thomas Anderson didn't even have a cinematographer, he wanted to be the eyes of this movie. I can see why.
Go (re)watch it.
****
Related:
Wow. I’ve only seen this movie once (in theatres) but now I might watch it again. Incidentally, you might enjoy the documentary “Filming Desire,” which I haven’t seen in years but I recall playing with some of these same themes.