Young Goodperson Brown
YOUNG GOODPERSON BROWN came forth at evening from the bright lobby of the Film Studies Department, but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting word with Faith, his beloved fellow student. And Faith, as she was aptly named, leaned after him from beneath the festival banner, her hair gathered in a blue velvet scrunchie, while the lobby doors breathed warm air and the murmur of panels into the cooling quad.
“Do not go down to that late screening tonight,” said Faith, softly and with some trouble in her face. “Such midnight screenings breed strange dreams, and stranger thoughts after them.”
“My love and my Faith,” replied Young Goodperson Brown, “let dreams trouble those who sleep. I shall only look in, and return before the night has made more of the matter than it deserves. Of all nights in the year, this one errand must be done. What, sweetheart, do you doubt me already, and we but second-years?”
Now the department to which they belonged was small, yet in its own esteem a grave commonwealth. Its professors, tutors, undergraduates, and festival volunteers knew one another’s seminar remarks, preferred auteurs, public cautions, and private enthusiasms almost as villagers know the tones of a meeting-house bell. That year’s festival bore the title Cinema After Harm: Care, Context, Repair, and all day there had been discourse on gaze, violence, context, accountability, and the responsible handling of problematic images. No film was suffered to enter darkness without a lantern of introduction carried before it.
Among these young scholars none was more earnest than Brown. That cinema mattered he believed with his whole heart. Yet from this good belief there had grown in him a sterner article of faith: taste was character made visible. A virtuous film, he held, should make its lesson legible; a virtuous viewer should admire only what had first been properly indicted. Above all, an image should condemn itself before pleasure could take hold.
“Then may you find all well when you come back,” said Faith.
“Amen,” cried Brown. “Keep to the public screenings, dear Faith, and no harm will come of anything.”
So they parted; and Brown pursued his way toward the older rooms below, where it was whispered that an unofficial midnight screening had been prepared. At the stairwell he looked back and saw Faith still watching him, melancholy despite the blue velvet scrunchie.
“Poor Faith,” thought he. “After this one night, I shall cleave to her and to legibility forever.”
With this excellent resolve for the future, Young Goodperson Brown felt himself justified in making what haste he could upon his present errand. He continued down the stairwell until he came out into a lower hall he knew only by daylight, and scarcely then.
There may be an unframed image behind every door, thought Young Goodperson Brown. The posters in their glass cases looked dimly out; the taped arrows curled at the corners; and from afar came the faint mechanical pulse of a projector.
Soon he beheld a man seated beneath a dead monitor. He arose at Brown’s approach and walked onward beside him.
“You are late, Young Goodperson Brown,” said he. “The last roundtable ended fifteen minutes ago.”
“Faith kept me back awhile,” replied Brown, with a tremor in his voice, caused by the sudden appearance of his companion, though in that place not wholly surprising.
As nearly as could be discerned, the man was of an elder generation. His clothes were plain, his manner courteous, and about his neck hung a festival lanyard crowded with passes, badges, and faded credentials, so that it seemed less worn than accumulated. He had the air of one who had survived more manifestos than governments, and who would not have been abashed at any dinner-table where taste was discussed and denied. In expression, if not in feature, he bore some likeness to Brown, as though a young scruple might, with time and weather, become such an amusement.
“Come,” said the critic, “this is a dull pace for the beginning of a screening.”
“Friend,” said Brown, stopping short, “having come thus far, it is my purpose now to return. I have scruples touching the matter you know of.”
“Let us walk on nevertheless, reasoning as we go,” replied the critic. “If I fail to persuade you, you may yet turn back. We are but a little way below.” “Too far,” said Brown, though he resumed his steps. “My old professor would never have taken such a path. His essay on spectatorship is the foundation of all we do.”
“I was well acquainted with your old professor,” said the critic, “better than any who ever sat in his lecture hall. It was I who found him the print of Salò, when even the archive would not release it. It was I who threaded the projector, and sat beside him in the dark, the two of us alone with what he had spent his career teaching you to fear. He wrote the essay on spectatorship you quote from memory. He believed it, every word. And still, each September, he asked me privately whether a cleaner print had come to light.”
Brown stared at his companion, who smiled as if no charge had been made. As he turned, the black cord of the lanyard shifted against his breast in a manner that seemed almost independent of him, though this, no doubt, was only the uncertain light.
“You have been told that art instructs,” said the critic. “Sometimes it does. More often, my young friend, it betrays. The public syllabus is theatre; the private canon is confession. Watch closely tonight, and every soul shall give itself up by what it cannot stop admiring.”
As they turned deeper into the basement corridor, the critic lifted one hand, and Brown beheld a woman crossing before them with a programme folded close against her breast.
“A marvel, truly,” whispered Brown, “that Professor Goody Cloyse should be so far below at this hour.”
For it was she who had first taught him the male gaze, the grammar of erotic control, and the violence by which women were turned into images. Many a time had Brown sat beneath her instruction, feeling his conscience clarified frame by frame.
“With your leave,” he said, “I shall stand aside till this good woman has passed. She might ask whom I was consorting with, and whither I was going.”
“Be it so,” said the critic. “Let me keep the path.”
Brown withdrew into the dimness by a locked seminar room, yet took care to watch. The critic advanced softly until he stood beside Professor Cloyse, who started, then peered at him over her glasses.
“You again,” said she, not displeased.
“And how did Vertigo sit with you?” asked the critic.
“As it must,” said Professor Cloyse. “Terribly. And still, there is no honest account of its terror that does not speak of its beauty.”
“Beauty,” repeated the critic softly, turning his head a little toward the shadow where Brown stood.
The professor passed on into the half-light of the corridor, and presently could be discerned no more.
“That woman taught me the gaze,” said Brown; and there was a world of meaning in the simple remark.
Beauty! The word seemed to Brown a confession. She had taught the violence of looking by day; she had named beauty by night where indictment should have sufficed; thus was Professor Cloyse revealed to him as a misogynist.
“Friend,” said Brown, stopping short, “my mind is made up. Not another step will I take on this errand. What if Professor Cloyse choose to go down where I had thought no such woman would be found? Is that cause enough that I should quit my dear Faith and follow after her?”
“You will think better of this by and by,” said the critic, composedly. “Sit here awhile. When you feel like moving again, my way will be plain enough.” Without more words, he slipped aside and was gone.
Brown stood alone in the basement corridor, applauding himself greatly. With what a clear conscience, thought he, should he meet Dr. Gookin in the morning seminar, nor shrink from the eye of the student society’s ethics chair, whose care in speech was so exact that she had once corrected a visiting speaker for saying “complicated” when he meant “harmful.”
Amid these pleasant meditations, there came from a second stair halfway along the corridor the measured descent of footsteps and two voices conversing soberly. Brown drew himself into the shadow of a poster case. The speakers passed from the stair into the passage ahead of him; yet, owing to the dimness there, he saw little more than the pale swing of their badges. “Of the two,” said a grave voice like Dr. Gookin’s, “I had rather miss tomorrow’s panel than tonight’s screening. Ford’s horizons remain terrible, and yet — no, therefore — sublime.”
“Mighty well,” answered another voice, calm and youthful. “And Raging Bull, for all its masculine violence, is formally inexhaustible.”
The voices passed on toward the older screening rooms.
“Whither, then,” cried Brown, clutching the poster case, “are these guardians of harm proceeding?”
Dr. Gookin, patient enemy of empire, had spoken tenderly of Ford’s horizons; thus was his anti-colonialism shown to be but daylight conduct. The ethics chair had called Raging Bull inexhaustible; thus was she revealed as an apologist for masculine violence. Brown looked up the stair by which they had descended, toward the lighted world above.
“With Faith above, and legibility below, I will yet stand firm against the dark,” cried Young Goodperson Brown.
The words were still upon his lips when there arose from the turn of the corridor a confused and doubtful murmur of voices. Once he fancied that he could distinguish the tones of his own department: tutors and students, the careful and the careless, those whom he had heard all day in panels and those whom he had seen whispering at the back.
The next moment, so indistinct were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard anything but the ventilation moving through the old building. Then came a stronger swell of familiar voices, heard daily in seminar rooms, but never, until now, so deep in the night.
There was one voice, of a young woman, uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow.
“No, I know what that Lynch film is,” the voice seemed to say. “I know what it does. I would not call it innocent. And yet —”
Here the murmur rose around her.
“Stay with that,” said one voice.
“Do not resolve it too soon,” said another.
“The fascination matters,” said a third.
“Faith!” cried Brown, in a voice of agony; and the corridor gave him back the name from several indifferent surfaces: Faith, Faith, Faith.
The cry was yet in his throat when the voices sank away, not into silence, but into a low laughter, or what his heart, being now instructed in suspicion, took for laughter. Something lay at the foot of the stair. Brown seized it, and beheld Faith’s blue velvet scrunchie.
“My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no good in looking, and harm is but a name. Come, critic! For to thee is this world given.”
Maddened with despair, and laughing loud and long, Young Goodperson Brown set forth again through the basement corridor at such a rate that he seemed rather projected than walking. The passage grew stranger and more faintly marked. The posters leered in their glass. The EXIT signs burned with doctrinal redness. Somewhere a projector clicked like teeth.
“Ha! ha! ha!” roared Brown, when the building seemed to laugh at him. “Come formalist, come aesthete, come lover of ambiguity, come devil himself! Here comes Young Goodperson Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you!”
In truth, through all that haunted department, there was nothing more frightful than the figure of Brown: now giving vent to an inspiration of horrid criticism, now laughing so wildly that the locked seminar rooms returned him echo for echo. Thus sped the demoniac on his course, until he saw, at the far end of the corridor, a red light trembling beneath a door.
In the interval of silence, Brown stole forward until the light lay full upon his face. The door was propped open by a wedge of folded programmes, and within was one of the oldest screening rooms of the department. Its walls were black, its seats descended steeply, and at the front the blank screen gave back a pale and expectant glow, as if it waited to accuse whoever looked upon it.
A grave and dark-clad company had gathered there.
In truth, they were such. As the projector-light trembled, Brown beheld faces that would be seen next day at panels on care and repair, and others that had looked devoutly all afternoon toward the lectern whenever harm was named. There was Professor Cloyse, composed among the first rows. There was Dr. Gookin, patient and grave. There was the student society’s ethics chair, her notebook already open upon her knee. Tutors, volunteers, undergraduates of excellent repute, and certain careless persons who were known to laugh too loudly at receptions, sat strangely mingled together; nor did the careful shrink from the careless, nor were the careless abashed by the careful.
But where was Faith?
At the front stood the old critic, no longer merely Brown’s fellow-traveller, but plainly the hidden curator of the gathering. His crowded lanyard shone and darkened against his breast as the projector stirred behind him.
“My friends,” said he, with a courtesy that seemed to mock neither them nor himself, “you have come to this screening of A Clockwork Orange without the shelter of a panel, without the mercy of a prefatory apology, and without the clean handout by which an image may be handled and yet not touched. Welcome.”
Near the screen stood Professor Martha Carrier, who was to introduce the film, and who bore herself with the total ease of one who felt no need to justify the room.
“Look well, young friend,” said the critic to Brown. “They all read the programme. Yet here they all are, in my screening room.”
Brown looked; and by the unsteady glow he saw them all, the village of his studies, the commonwealth of careful looking, gathered in one place. These were the mouths from which he had learned caution, the eyes before which he had trained his own. He had thought virtue might consist in looking rightly, and that the soul could be preserved by sufficient framing. Yet here they sat, not innocent, not wholly guilty, not absolved, not ashamed: waiting for the image.
“Welcome,” murmured the room; or perhaps it was only the projector coming awake.
Then, in a seat not far from the aisle, Brown saw the slender form of a young woman. Her hair was loose; the blue velvet token was gone. The light touched her face, and it was Faith.
The wretched young man beheld his Faith, and Faith, perhaps, beheld him.
“Lo,” said the critic, almost sadly, “there you are, my children, depending upon one another’s eyes, and hoping still that virtue were a simple matter of what one could bear to watch. Now are you undeceived.”
The projector brightened. The screen filled with white.
“Faith! Faith!” cried Brown. “Resist ambiguity!”
Whether Faith obeyed, he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when the white light broke over him, and all the room, with its company of watchers, was lost. The next morning Young Goodperson Brown came slowly into the quad, staring about him like one who had slept little, or dreamed too much. The festival had resumed its daylight countenance. Volunteers stacked chairs. A technician wheeled a projector case across the paving stones. New posters went up for the morning panel, Toward Responsible Looking. The coffee urns steamed innocently.
Professor Cloyse passed him near the library steps and wished him good morning. Brown shrank from her courtesy as from a dangerous image. Through an open classroom door he heard Dr. Gookin discussing the schedule with patient gravity. “What empire does that man serve?” muttered Brown. The student society’s ethics chair, seeing him pale and disordered, offered him a spare programme; but he looked upon her notebook and turned away.
Then Faith appeared beneath the festival banner, and at the sight of him her face brightened with such relief that she almost came running across the quad. Her hair was gathered again, or seemed to be, with something blue at the back of it. Whether it was velvet, or only the morning light upon a shadow, Brown could not tell. She reached for his hand.
“Where have you been?” she said.
But Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face, and passed on without an answer.
Had Young Goodperson Brown dreamed a wild dream of a midnight screening? Be it so, if you will. Yet it was a dream of evil omen. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative young man did he become from the night of that doubtful errand. When a professor praised a film’s beauty, he heard appetite. When a classmate condemned a film’s violence, he heard appetite ashamed. When anyone said “complicated,” he heard a guilty plea. He trusted no context, for context might be camouflage; no warning, for warning might be permission; no silence, for silence might conceal delight.
In time he became a critic of severe reputation, and many praised his vigilance. He wrote with uncommon discernment of the harms that beauty laundered and the pleasures that judgment failed to purify. Yet from that night forward, he never again saw a film. He saw only the souls of those who watched.