MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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who grows up, who has an ache in his voice and dirt on his face. No wonder
the playful wooing scenes that follow are so inferior to Olivier's. This
modern Henry, like Oliver Stone's heroes, this is not a character who
easily can shift gears and put the horrors of war behind him.
This brings to mind another impressive recent film that, like Stone's,
isn't a war movie so much as an after-the-war movie, a terrible inventory of
the human consequences ofwar. Paul Mazursky's fine
Enemies, A Love
Story,
based on the novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is set in a meticulously recon–
structed New York City of 1949, among the battered survivors ofa conflict
that has left them, like Ron Kovic, feeling more dead than alive. But where
Kovic feels dead because he's lost his sex, can't feel his body, these people
have only sex to simulate being alive. In this story of one man frantically
bounding among three women, Singer and Mazursky adapt the material of
bedroom farce and risque ghetto comedy into a strikingly unusual exploration
of the haunted mentality of the survivor. The hungry, groping passivity of
Herman Broder and the operatic extravagance of the women who surround
him
are different versions of desperation, ways of living on when life has lost
all
meaning.
For these people, as for Stone's Kovic, the war will never end. The
wounded, shell-shocked soldiers in Hemingway could make a separate peace,
though they found no peace. But the people in
Enemies,
with their surface
normality, their never-ending nightmares and hair-raising secrets, have gone
beyond suffering into black farce. Deviousness and paranoia make perfect
sense to them. Concealment is their strategy for survival. The flesh is their
only reality. They live for the moment, but the past inhabits them corro–
sively and the moment by definition can never arrive. There's something
even gay about them but it's the gaiety beyond tragedy that Yeats de–
scribed in a late poem, "Lapis Lazuli," when he wrote, "Hamlet and Lear
are gay; / Gaiety transfiguring
all
that dread."
