A Master Builder

 A Master Builder

I saw A Master Builder at its North American premiere at the Provincetown Film Festival on Cape Cod in 2014.  I think this was in June, a little before the Cape’s summer invasion by hordes of East Coast tourists.  One of the film’s producers was on the dais to present the movie as were the picture’s director Jonathan Demme with Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory.  

Provincetown is a strange place, an elongated dune broad enough for about four parallel streets running between 19th century boarding houses and cottages.  There’s an aggressive-looking fortified tower at on one side of the town, a hulking landmark commemorating the Revolutionary War – exactly the sort of structure from which Master Builder Solness might catapult to his doom.  In the commercial district, every other building seems to be a little theater or a Drag Queen revue.  I was there at dawn one day and the light was murky and submarine, clouds of mosquitos rising out of the salt water marshes, and some homeless people camped on the dirty beach.  

A Master Builder was screened in the hall of some mariner’s association.  The structure felt like a vast barn built from enormous wooden joists and pillars, an interior like Noah’s Ark.  Alternatively, it was like seeing a movie on a remote screen in the cavernous belly of a whale.  The place was mostly full with casually dressed people, apparently primarily local residents.  Everyone seemed to know Andre Gregory who has a place in Truro just beyond the brine lagoons on the approach to Provincetown.  People referred to Wallace Shawn as “Wally” and there was a vibe that he was regarded as an eccentric character but much beloved by his neighbors.  Wally came late to the screening and seemed to be very drunk.  He had flown in from Los Angeles where he was working as a voice-actor, playing some animated critter in a Disney movie.  

I don’t recall much about the screening or the Q & A that followed it.  From a distance, Andre Gregory looked elegant wearing cream colored clothes and a scarf.  Wally also had a scarf draped around his throat.  It gets cold at night on the tip of Cape Cod. 

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A Master Builder is regarded as the third in a trilogy of films featuring Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory.  Two of these movies were directed by Louis Malle, a famous French film director: My Dinner with Andre (1981) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994).  A Master Builder is dedicated to Malle who died in 1995.   Jonathan Demme is best remembered for his Oscar-winning adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) followed by the AIDS-related courtroom drama with Tom Hanks, Philadelphia (1993).  Demme also made a noteworthy documentary about the Talking Heads Stop Making Sense, a movie adaptation of Spalding Gray’s monologue Swimming to Cambodia, and the incandescent thriller, Something Wild, one of the best pictures of the ‘80's.  He died in New York City in 2017. 

The three pictures in the trilogy document Andre Gregory’s idiosyncratic approach to theater.  My Dinner with Andre is the result of a long collaboration between Gregory and Shawn.  The work evolved over several years as a result of dinner-time conversations between the two men.  At the time of its release, both Shawn and Gregory were well-known as figures in the avant-garde New York theater scene.  Shawn in particular had written and produced several plays, some of them notorious for their sexually graphic subject matter.  (In fact, Gregory’s Manhattan Project theater group was the first enterprise to produce one of Shawn’s controversial play, Our Late Night in 1975; Gregory directed.)  Gregory had studied theater with Jerzy Grotowski in Poland in the sixties, one of Europe’s most famous avant-garde directors, lived at the Findhorn commune, periodically, renouncing the theater for other more spiritual pursuits.  (His adventures are described in detail in his monologue in My Dinner with Andre.)  

During one of Gregory’s sabbaticals from commercial theater, he led a workshop devoted to a single play, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.  Gregory met with a small group of actors weekly for more than four years to work through David Mamet’s adaptation of Chekhov’s theater work.  Gregory had no intent to produce the play commercially.  But these extended rehearsals for a play that was never to be performed were filmed by Louis Malle, resulting in Vanya on 42nd Street – many of the personnel in A Master Builder worked with Gregory in Vanya including Larry Pine, Wallace Shawn (as Vanya) and Gregory himself. (The cameraman on The Ibsen Project, the name for the enterprise involving the 14 to 17 year rehearsals of the text, Declan Quinn, also shot Vanya on 42nd Street.) 

In 1997, Shawn “translated” Masterbuilder Solness – Shawn admits to knowing “some German”, was a Latin teacher after college, but doesn’t known Norwegian.  He commissioned a professor in Scandinavian languages to prepare a literal translation, word for word, of Ibsen’s text, a writing that listed synonyms for many of the expressions in the original.  Using this resource, Shawn made his own version of the play.  Gregory, then, began to workshop the text, convening periodic rehearsals beginning in 1997 through 2012.  Larry Pine (Herdal), Julie Hagery (Aline Solness), Shawn (Solness), and Gregory (old Brovik) were regulars in this 15 year endeavor.  Gregory saw these workshop rehearsals as an end in themselves, a sort of spiritual exercise, and there was no plan to ever present the theater-work to a paying audience.  In 2012, Jonathan Demme attended one of the workshop rehearsals and suggested that a film be made of the play.  Shot over several years, A Master Builder, was the result of this work.  The exteriors in the film were shot in Nyack, New York.  Interiors were filmed in Manhattan at manor house converted into a private women’s club in Greenwich Village, the Pen and Brush Club.  

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Ibsen’s original play is reputedly very difficult to persuasively stage.  This is because of the work’s peculiar mixture of dream-like symbolism and apparently naturalistic realism.  Like Ibsen’s Masterbuilder Solness, the Norwegian playwright was fearful of being displaced by younger rivals, most notably August Strindberg, the Swedish writer, and Knut Hamsun.  In some respects, Ibsen’s Master Builder attempts to best Strindberg at his own game, incorporating aspects of the Swede’s overtly dream-like imagery obvious in plays such as The Father.  (Strindberg’s Dream Play of 1902 seems to reflect back some of Ibsen’s visionary symbolism and, in fact, seems a reaction to the Norwegian’s later works.)

Shawn’s adaptation attempts to solve the problem of clashing styles in The Master Builder by imagining most of the action as the dream fantasy of the dying Solness.  The opening scenes, naturalistic in character, although teeming with oddities, give way to fantasy when Solness repeats the speech about his fear of youth knocking at the door, the second version more vibrant in tone with the literal knock on the door following.  At that point, Solness rises like Lazarus from his “mattress grave” to confront Hilda Wangel haloed by rim-lit radiance, a figure that advances in her “mountain-climbing’ garb (it looks like a skimpy white tennis outfit), some kind of goddess who seems to be literally twice the size of the Masterbuilder.  (Up to Hilda’s entrance, the cadaverous old men, Solness and Brovik, have dominated the film and Shawn’s character, shown as an invalid, tyrannizes everyone from his death bed.)  After Hilda’s appearance, the tone of the film changes radically, with the mise-en-scene increasingly agitated, culminating in hand-held camera shots of Aline running through the house with the blue bottle that has been repeatedly mentioned by Dr. Herdal, and the acting is pitched at an ecstatic tone of histrionic melodrama that seems reminiscent of silent movies.   

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The strange psycho-dynamics of The Master Builder present a riddle that can’t be solved, indeed, a mystery that is designed to implacably resist interpretation.  Hilda seems to represent the embodiment of Solness’ terrifying and indomitable will.  Thus, she seems to be an aspect of Solness’ character somehow freed to act independently of the sensibility to which she belongs and that has given birth to her.  In this respect, mythological correlates are, perhaps, suggestive.  Athena, who Hilda represents, was born from the brow of Zeus and seems to represent some of the God’s qualities although acting independently of her father.  Similarly, in Wagner’s The Valkyrie, Bruennhilde (“Hilda”) is referred to as Wotan’s “will” – her father sends her on a mission to destroy a man who has committed incest in defiance of the God.  But, like Hilda in The Master Builder, the Valkyrie is more than simply the embodiment of her father’s will – she acts in defiance of her divine father, falling in love with the man she is supposed to destroy and, thereby, triggering in a long passage in the Wagner opera in which Wotan berates her as an unnatural child for acting on her own desires and not merely as his embodied intentions.  Somehow, Solness has both spawned Hilda and, then, become her victim.  Solness dream-child, who replaces his actual children who were poisoned to death, is the master builder’s desires in alienated form.  The play reminds us of Emerson’s great characterization of genius in his “Self Reliance” – “in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts, they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”  Hilda is Solness’ intentions and desires materializing before him “with a certain alienated majesty.”  

Ibsen’s theory of life, the “life-lie” to cite The Wild Duck, in The Master Builder is that the man of genius is one who wills that his fantasies take on a life of their own and become embodied in the real world – the Master builder’s designs become structures; Ibsen’s fantasies become plays.  Ibsen argues that the genius’ thought is omnipotent – to desire is to achieve that desire.  In short, the genius can control everything except his own will.  He molds the world to his ends and treats those around him as mere instruments of his desire.  But the one thing outside his Will is his Will itself and this paradox is fatal.

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Shawn scraps the God-defying aspect in his Master Builder.  In the Ibsen play, the death of his twin baby boys has caused Solness to hate God to the extent that atop the steeple of his last church, the Master Builder proclaim to the heavens that he will no longer build churches to a deity who is nothing more than a despised rival.  Thus, the imagery of Solness tempting fate on the high tower with the sound of “harps in the air” – that is, he has invaded heaven and thrown down God himself.  

No one believes in God any more.  And Shawn doesn’t want to run the risk that Solness’ doom be viewed as God’s righteous judgement on the Master Builder’s blasphemous defiance.  So the religious elements of the text are excised; this makes sense but it deprives the theatergoers of a significant motif in the Ibsen original – the repeated phrase that Solness will ascend into the heavens with “the harps in the air” (it’s like Hedda Gabler’s assertion that Lovborg will triumph with “vines in his hair”) is excluded from the text.  

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Ibsen is cumulative.  He insisted that his plays be read in chronological succession, asserting that each work was a foundation on which his later plays were erected.  In The Master Builder, we encounter the motif of poison inherited from the parents – Aline’s poisoned milk infects her baby boys and kills them.  (This is similar to themes in Ghosts and Dr. Rank’s death from inherited venereal disease in A Doll’s House).  The human capacity for self-deception evident in The Wild Duck with its artificial woodland in the garret is mirrored by Solness industriously engineering a phallic tower that will kill him.  Nora’s rebellion in A Doll’s House has engendered the possibility of certain type of liberated modern woman, the femme fatale embodied in Hedda Gabler and Hilda Wangel. (Hedda Gabler and Hilda Wangel are aspects of Ibsen’s “demonic” or troll-like energy, destructively converting thwarted desire into revenging furies, projections from the self that disastrously threaten the self.)  The dolls in A Doll House re-occur as the “nine dolls” – the number of the Muses – that Aline Solness played with until fire destroyed them and her ancestral home.  Examples can be multiplied but the point is clear – The Master Builder summarizes and compresses Ibsen’s concerns expressed in previous plays into a dense, crystalline structure.  

Similarly, The Master Builder encapsulates a Hegelian history of the Spirit (or Geist) in the 19th century.  At first, the Master Builder devised sanctuaries to the glory of God – rural churches that he elevated into high art.  Then, Solness rejects worship for domesticity.  Just as the bourgeois tragedy develops out of  dramas involving kings and princes and generals, so the erection of churches evolves into the design of homes for the middle class, houses for fathers, mothers and their children.  (Consider that Frank Lloyd Wright’s greatest creations throughout his career were houses ostensibly designed for the upper middle class – although in practice too elaborate for any but the very wealthy.  Like Solness, Frank Lloyd Wright largely directed his genius toward constructing homes for his bourgeois clients – in particular, his Usonian homes were aimed at being affordable middle-class dwellings available for the masses.  It’s interesting to observe that like Solness, Frank Lloyd Wright’s career involved the death of his children and the destruction by fire of Taliesin, the “shining brow”, his Wisconsin studio.)  As Hegel predicts, ultimately Spirit or Geist prevails, evolving into its final mode: pure concept.  Solness reaches the conclusion that the only structures worth designing are those that are purely conceptual, fantasy towers erected in the air.  Spirit wrestles with itself; Solness the Master Builder proclaims that he will no longer build except in imagination or theory.  Hilda’s fatal emergence as the female embodiment of Solness’ desire illustrates the final aspect of this evolutionary progression.  Solness is hurled down from on high by the contradictions within his own spirit.  There’s a curious passage in which Aline claims that the fearsome and domineering Solness is really a person with a “very gentle and kind disposition” – this seems incongruous with what we have seen.  But there’s no reason to disbelieve Aline’s assertion that Solness’ secret self may be something very different from the tyrannical guise in which he interacts with those whom he believes inferior to him.  Aline has been, after all, the embodiment of Solness’ desires herself before the death of her children turned her into the skeletal apparition that we see in the film.  A couple days after my father died, I characterized him to my mother as being someone who was selfish, destructively perfectionist, and a tyrant.  My mother responded to me that my father was not the person he pretended to be and that only she really knew him.)  

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Iceland is a post-modern society.  Everyone speaks English – indeed, Icelanders speak English among themselves code-shifting back and forth between their ancient ancestral language (old Norse) and the diction of modernity, English, as the discourse requires.  They vacation in Barcelona and Santa Fe.  No one seems to have any vestige of religion and relations between the sexes are construed, at least, officially, as embodying complete equality. Banking and tourism, with an ecological slant, are the country’s primary industries.   

But all this modernity has, perhaps, a lunar side.  Icelanders are said to be very superstitious.  They believe, supposedly at least, in elves and fairies and other supernatural creatures.  Icelanders will chuckle tolerantly when outsiders bring up anecdotes of litigation to route roads around places where elves are supposed to reside and other paranormal eccentricities.  But, if you bring up the notion of a person’s “fetch”, the conversation will chill notably and interlocutors will evade questions about that subject.  In northern countries, a “fetch” is a part of a person’s innermost being, embodying his or her secret desires and fantasies.  The “fetch” can become separated or dis-integrated from the personality that harbors it.  It is said that if you encounter this embodied aspect of your desires as a Doppelgaenger, death will soon follow.  (The old Norse word for “fetch” is fylgia – this means “one who follows or accompanies”; the fylgia is sometimes described as a “dream woman” – for instance, a “fetch” of this sort appears in Gisli’s Saga as a harbinger of the hero’s death.  Fylgia as “something that accompanies” is also the word used for “afterbirth” or “placenta.”)

It seems plausible to regard Hilda Wangel as Halvard Solness’ “fetch.”  

  

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One strategy often used by filmmakers adapting a play is to “open” out the action – that is, dramatize event only described in the theatrical version of the work.  In this way, exterior shots, landscapes, and, even, action sequences can be staged that would not be feasible within the confines of the proscenium.  Ibsen’s play offers an obvious opportunity for “opening” the work: the director and scenarist could depict Solness’ ascent of the tower, the adulation of the townspeople, and, of course, his fatal fall.  A Master Builder, however, pursues the opposite narrative strategy.  Demme and Shawn don’t show the tower at all, even thought it is said to be visible by Ibsen in stage scenery described in the play.  The creative team producing A Master Builder suspect rightly that there is no real tower, no wreath of victory, no actual fall – all of these things are the furnishings of a dream play and to show these elements would be to make tangible what should be construed as the visionary apparatus of Solness destruction.  

Far from “opening out” the play, Shawn and Demme almost eliminate space and distance entirely.  The film’s paradigmatic shot is a very tight close-up.  Dialogue is staged as two persons with their faces, perhaps, four inches apart breathing their words into one another.  (I assume the film’s budget contained a significant line-item for breath-fresheners, Tic-Tacs, and mints.)  The eccentric staging reverses the ordinary formula for the use of close-ups in film: typically, close-ups are sparingly used and only deployed to emphasize moments of high emotion.  But Ibsen’s text is all high-emotion; once the situation is established, every line and exchange of dialogue has a life-or-death aspect and so the mise-en-scene is one of continuous and suffocating tight close-ups.  The ultimate impression that the viewer carries away from the film is one that is profoundly unnatural – in real life, no one speaks to another at a range of four inches or less.  A Master Builder creates the impression of flesh conjoined, figures literally melting into one another – the effect is not unlike “body horror” directed by someone like David Cronenberg: the characters run the risk of fusing into one flesh.   

 

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A Master Builder suppresses some of Solness’ speeches about his “helpers”.  Solness asserts that his good fortune arises from the assistance of uncanny “helpers”, supernatural beings that implement the Master Builder’s secret desires.  Solness believes that the force of his will is such that he can project his thoughts into others, control them, and make things happen by purely mental energy.  The agents of his “omnipotent thought” as described as the “helpers.”  They work on his behalf to implement the zero-sum game that Solness believes rules human relationships – what makes me strong, makes you weak; my power subtracts from your power.  

Ibsen slips into some peculiar byways in late Victorian thought in The Master Builder.  Evidently, Solness is an adherent of something called Spiritism.  This is the idea that the universe is congested with invisible beings, some of them beneficent and others malevolent.  One can call on benevolent spirits and ask that they “help” with good luck and arrange events in one’s favor.  This notion was elucidated by a French writer named Allen Kardec in a number of influential books between 1857 and 1868.  Solness seems to be referring to these beliefs in some of his speeches in the play.  Spiritist beliefs remain vibrant in some parts of the world – aspects of Latin American Catholicism are “spiritist” in character and many Native American groups in the Southwest (notably the Yaqui Apache and Tohono O’odham in Arizona) practice a folk Catholicism heavily inflected with Spiritist beliefs.

Spiritism should be distinguished by Spiritualism, also a very popular doctrine at the time that Ibsen composed The Master Builder.  Spiritualism holds that the spirits of the dead can be summoned by mediums and that these revenants can prophecy the future and provide useful advice to the living.  The “helpers” in Spiritism are not dead souls, but independent celestial entities. (Needless to say, Spiritism and Spiritualism overlap to some extent and the distinctions between the two doctrines are not always clear.)

As with the religious references in The Master Builder, Solness’ references to his “helpers” will probably fall on deaf ears today.  So, it seems, the Shawn downplays this aspect of the play.  

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Solness’ bleak view of the zero-sum nature of human transactions is effectively phrased in a song by Ry Cooder from his Bop’til you Drop album.  Cooder sings:

My father told me lyin’ on his bed of death / He says “Boy, a woman’s gonna make you a fool of your”/ I sez: “Oh Dad what do you mean?” / He sez: “She’s got somethin’ that makes a man / Lay his money in her hand / Cuz the very thing that makes her rich will make you poor.”   You can put her “behind a deuce and a quarter / Treat her like a rich man’s daughter” but the very thing that makes her rich makes you poor.  (“Don’t make that bad mistake / I’d rather climb into a bed with a rattlesnake” because “the very thing that makes her rich, makes you poor.”)

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Wallace Shawn’s Solness on his death bed is wearing a sort of track suit with red piping or stripes that seems to anatomize his failing circulatory system.  When Hilda Wangel makes him rise from his bed, he continues to wear this odd outfit throughout the film.  In one of the rooms in the house, there is a table on which a small model of the Taj Mahal, the epitome of the architect’s art, is displayed.  A print on a wall also shows the Taj Mahal.  In the corner of the sickroom where Solness is attended by ghostly nurses – they are wearing red like the stripes on his pajamas in the final scene – there is a model of a tower.  Aline Solness wears a double strand of pearls as a choker around her throat.  The pearls seem to be a sort of desperate body armor.  Aline cuts up cantaloup for breakfast.  We see her wield the knife.  In the sun-room, she puts her legs on a bright red Ottoman that is like a puddle of freshly spilt blood.  A figure of a Kore or dead Greek maiden stands in one corner of the sun-room.  A white ladder appears against a wall just before Solness departs to climb the tower.  A moving shot of the sun flickering between the roadside trees marks Solness final delirium – we see this shot as punctuation in earlier scenes.  (The image of the light flickering through the skein of trees alludes to the famous Twilight Zone episode, broadcast in 1964, dramatizing Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” as directed by Robert Enrico – the award-winning French short subject was made in 1964; Bierce’s doomed hero invents an entire narrative of his escape from execution by hanging and his flight through the wilderness to his plantation home during the drop from the railroad trestle in the instant before the noose breaks his neck.)

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Just before Solness’ death, Ragnar Brovik tells the Master Builder that the foreman Tesman will assist in hanging the wreath on the tower.  (Brovik is holding the rather sinister-looking wreath – it seems to be comprised of the pads of some sort of succulent, like a wreath made from prickly pear.)  Brovik praises Tesman as a good and loyal man.  Tesman doesn’t appear in Ibsen’s The Master Builder; rather, he’s a character in Hedda Gabler, Hedda’s scholarly “specialist”, an ineffectual man with expertise in the “domestic handicrafts of the Brabant.”  In A Master Builder, Kaya or Aline says that she saw Solness “burning the book”.  This is also an irruption into The Master Builder play from Hedda Gabler.  In the earlier theater piece, the malevolent Hedda Tesman nee Gabler burns the only manuscript of Lovborg’s treatise on the future and fate of civilization.  She does this as part of her scheme to compel the doomed alcoholic Lovborg to commit suicide.  These allusions suggest that Solness is the same as Hedda Gabler, a figure who desires to have the power of life or death over others.  And many modern critics have seen Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler as a self-portrait of the playwright himself.  (Harold Bloom notably claimed that Hedda Gabler represents Ibsen’s secret self as refracted through the lens of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.)  Shawn takes up this theme in the last instants of A Master Builder.  The film is not “the” Master Builder by Ibsen but rather “a” Master Builder, that is one iteration of themes in that work among many other possible versions