Occupation: Jean Cocteau

Part 1

1. The Two Nathalies

There is a familiar impulse, which I associate with, say, The Smiths, or Belle and Sebastian, or with the gay boy in my class at R*** Elementary School, whose bedroom walls were entirely covered in Obsession ads torn from Vogue —his mom was my Cub Scout pack leader, but she seemed usually to have been so indisposed by prescription pills as to force us to find ways to fill up the time on our own, so we threw t-shirts at his bedroom ceiling-fan as he queried me with sniff-tests of his various fragrances¹—: the pulsing desire to create, namely, in one’s private space, a magazine collage that projects an adolescent fantasy of a greater, sexier, more fabulous life elsewhere. The bands I’ve mentioned elevate this impulse to another level by thematizing the practice in their artistic creations themselves, with album covers venerating other celebrities or unknown fellow-creatives from their own circles, but that always look like they are custom-made to be thumb-tacked beside a teenager’s bed.

How far back does this thumb-tacking practice go, I’ve often wondered? And why do we do it? Perhaps it is in part an externalization of the likenesses that we might previously, at least as far back as the 1740s, have carried around in lockets, along with a little wisp of our beloved’s hair. Just as the colorful feathers of the bower bird’s ancestors go dull in the same measure as the descendant bird evolves the ability to make its surroundings beautiful instead of its body, it seems to me that in humans the bedroom wall as shrine to one’s fantasies must be a recent adaptation too, and a transfer of what had previously been mostly a corporeal expression of desire outward into our immediate milieu. I have generally supposed that this must be mostly a post-war phenomenon, and one mostly associated, in the strain I am trying to get a handle on, with the romantic and the twee, even if no doubt the jocks and the preps, and certainly also the nerds, have long had their own analogous practices.

But here, to complicate things, is a shining example of the practice in question, dating from 1943:

And here she is again in a close-up:

The actress, Junie Astor, is 32 years old here, and she hardly passes for a teenager. But still, there’s something about this image that makes me almost expect to see the cover of The Queen Is Dead (1986)² among the images in the medium-focus shot, and that for some reason makes me read the man to her right in the narrow-focus shot as Marc Almond. This is that special sensibility that is so familiar to me, the one that I knew so intimately for one long chapter of my life, the one that was guaranteed to induce a crush in me when I saw it manifested in others of my cohort, and that seemed to contain within it the formula for a sort of spiritual aristocracy, which any youth from any background could elect to join, and that, having done so, made us superior to the common run of people. I don’t know what to call it exactly, it’s gone by many different names in many times and places. “Bohemian” seems to be the most enduring of its appellations. Even if this is ultimately something of a slur, coming as it does from a perception of the lifestyle of the nomadic Roma who wandered from Central Europe into other parts (more on them in Part 2), still, as is often the case, the oldest term seems to me the most solid, so let’s go with the one that we find at least as far back as Baudelaire.

It will complicate things further to note that these images are not of just any young woman in 1943, but of a woman in 1943 in occupied France, playing in L’Éternel retour, directed by Jean Delannoy and written by Jean Cocteau. The title comes of course from Nietzsche, and the story is an adaptation of the medieval chivalric legend of Tristan and Isolde, which had, again of course, been adapted in the previous century into an opera by Richard Wagner.³ This film was by far the greatest box-office hit during the four years of the Nazi occupation of France.

Junie Astor’s character is Nathalie “la Brune”, the sister of an auto mechanic and old friend of Patrice (played by Jean Marais, Cocteau’s lover in real life). She finds herself in a jealous rivalry with Nathalie “la Blonde”, played by Madeleine Sologne. Here is a still of Marais and Sologne taken from the film:

I don’t think I’m reading too much into it to imagine that this image must have pleased the censors back at the Reichsfilmkammer immensely. The look of the film is decidedly Nazi, even if the story itself is immensely hard to interpret, perhaps even a masterpiece of ambiguity. Some have seen it as an allegory of the occupation, interpreting Patrice’s cousin, the conniving dwarf Achille, as a caricature of Hitler; others have seen the linkage of Achille’s moral decrepitude and his physical dwarfism as an endorsement of Nazi eugenics. But the more subtle and troubling ambiguity emerges in the contest between the blondes and the brunettes. Whose side are this film’s creators on? Jean Marais himself is naturally dark-haired. Why did Cocteau wish to see the greatest love interest of his life effectively dressed up in Aryanface? And why, if Sologne’s Nathalie is our new Isolde, the heroine any Nazi censor could cheer for, does Astor’s Nathalie merit such a loving and familiar portrayal, sunken in the nest of her fantasies, surrounded by silver-screen beauties and perfume ads, communicating in that visual language that Cocteau knew so well, that he did so much to shape, and that was still spoken fluently by the walls of the kids I loved most well into the 1980s?

Which Nathalie is Cocteau’s real Nathalie? Could it be that both of them are the patronesses of the cult of sensibility that I am trying to describe here, the twin mitochondrial Eves of late-20th-century Bohemian culture?

Allow me to pursue that possibility at some length below the fold…