A Failure of Seriousness: Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein

WITTGENSTEIN

I’d quite like to have composed a philosophical work which consisted entirely of jokes.

KEYNES

Why didn’t you?

WITTGENSTEIN

Sadly I didn’t have a sense of humour.

On the face of it, to make a comedy illustrating the life and ideas of a philosopher may seem a form of bizarre, self-imposed challenge. Abstract, argumentative writing aimed at rational persuasion is not an obvious place to look for laughs, perhaps particularly so in the case of Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein – the subject of Derek Jarman’s unorthodox 1993 biopic – given that his early interest in the field was spurned by the thorny, esoteric and unfunny question of providing a logical foundation for mathematics.

Yet in Wittgenstein, it’s the very self-seriousness of its hero that is found ripe for comic treatment, his deadpan earnestness ever-failing to mask an obsessive eccentricity. In a surreal image near the film’s beginning, Wittgenstein is photographed testing a defective ‘prototype’ for an aircraft engine, standing vainly stone-faced as he holds two rotating lawn sprinklers, a pair of bat-like wings strapped to his back like a bodged-together Halloween costume. Abandoning engineering, he moves to Cambridge in order to study under eminent logician Bertrand Russell (Michael Gough), and finds himself a fish out of water amongst an equally “queer bunch”: the university’s foppish intellectual elite.

Weaved largely from quotations, the film’s colourful dialogue reveals that the real Wittgenstein wasn’t entirely devoid of wit. The script, originally penned by Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, was radically reworked by Jarman, retaining its Wildean thrust and parry, while trimming much of its exegesis. The result carries a resemblance to Wittgenstein’s own terse yet wide-ranging literary style, in particular his 1921 treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which famously consists not of arguments but 525 declarative, hierarchically numbered statements. The film, like the Tractatus, is aphoristic and disjointed, replete with enigmatic statements and pithy images, and while a great deal more generous to a lay audience, Jarman similarly trusts the viewer to pay attention and interpret a structure that may at first seem whimsically abstruse.

In another major change, Jarman gives us not one but two Wittgensteins: a boy prodigy (Clancy Chassay), fresh and supple-minded, confidently narrating in direct address toward the camera; and the unhappy adult (Karl Johnson), encumbered by thought, struggling to express himself in a difficult social world. Exteriors and set dressing are eschewed for spare, theatrical stagings that set vibrant colour against black infinity. “I was to spend a lifetime disentangling myself from my education,” the younger, more flamboyant Wittgenstein tells us; in an image alluding to his latent homosexuality, he sews a piece of red vermillion fabric, surrounded by the cacophonous whispers of his darkly-clad minister-like tutors. In another, he introduces his family of ‘self-made’ Viennese aristocrats – dressed in ersatz Imperial Roman costume – he himself bare-chested except for a gold sash, wearing a fabulous helmet made of fake jewels and crinkled cloth.

In contrast, the adult Wittgenstein who arrives in Cambridge confines himself to a musty sports jacket, a monochrome island amongst a sea of decadent colour. Russell, dressed in cardinal red, purrs like a preening, satisfied cat, while his mistress Lady Ottoline (Tilda Swinton) is enveloped in bright faux-ostrich feather trimmings under the brim of a gigantic Gainsborough hat. Jarman gleefully inverts the British self-image of steadfast restraint, finding in Wittgenstein’s new milieu a sexually permissive “brothel”. Ottoline, who lounges beside carnivorous Sarracenias, is rumoured to be fucking her gardener, while the non-monogamous economist Maynard Keynes (John Quentin), bisexual and always formally dressed in Joker-like hues of purple and green, engages simultaneously in multiple relationships. The running joke: the whole world seems to be deviant. Wittgenstein’s sister Hermoine (Sally Dexter) paints a butch model in the nude, and even Russell, whose real-life counterpart was presumably straight, is not beyond suspicion of sodomy: reading aloud his intensely fond description of Wittgenstein – “he affects me just as I affect you” – Ottoline stares concernedly for a beat.

Jarman’s highly decorative, artificial sensibility is completely at odds with the real Wittgenstein’s own, who, following the influence of Viennese architect Adolf Loos, expressed a vehement disdain for ornamentation – considered by Loos a ‘waste of health’ when not an essential part of an object’s construction.¹ Distrust in masks and appearances was widespread in Vienna’s intellectual circles during Wittgenstein’s youth, as the city stood at the centre of an antiquated Habsburg Empire in transparent decay.² But for Jarman the distinction between mask and self cannot be made so simply. His treatment of style might be described, following Jean Cocteau, as “a lie that tells the truth”;³ his sophisticated camp is moulded to both satirical and affirmative effect. In the film, the austere integrity of Wittgenstein and the frivolous excess of his peers play off each other dialectically, each in their turn both ridiculous and blessed.

Wittgenstein makes two dramatic breaks away from academia. First, to enlist as a volunteer in the war on the front lines, and then to teach elementary school in the Austrian provinces. Desiring to transcend his position of wealth and privilege, and philosophy altogether, he only gets so far – while sympathetic towards the working class, he’s clueless about their material needs. Disliked during his stint in the Austrian infantry, his Tolstoyan dream of bettering the rural poor through education also results in disappointment. (As does later a plan to find a manual job in Soviet Russia, which is oversupplied with unskilled labourers.) In a darkly absurd scene, a young girl is kept in by Wittgenstein during recess for instruction, dwarfed by propositions from the Tractatus written in chalk on an exaggeratedly large blackboard. The harder he tries to communicate the more he torments her, his ruthless honesty working against him. Frustrated, he resorts to pulling her ear and hair, angrily snapping a pencil.

For Jarman’s Wittgenstein, it is his difficulties with the social world which drive the development of his ideas about language. His ‘picture theory’ of language – holding that statements, thoughts and the world share the same logical form – is shattered in a humiliating encounter which it couldn’t account for: a group of women cyclists taunt him, calling him a “fairy” as they flip him the V. The timeless, impersonal designations of the Tractatus are replaced with a new emphasis on language as an embodied activity, expressive of human needs. Language, Wittgenstein now asserts, has no single governing ruleset; it is more like a set of separate games, each with its own rules, expressive of a “form of life”. (“What is the picture of Queer?”, Jarman once wrote, reflecting on the film. “There is no picture”.)⁴ In a recurring motif, characters play games that reflect their worlds: two prisoners of war play a board game with spent bullets, and Keynes assembles a jigsaw puzzle resembling the shape of a globe.

One such language game is depicted in one of the film’s clever inventions: an episodic conversation between young Wittgenstein and a mugging furry-suited Martian, Mr. Green (Nabil Shaban), in which the differences between their frameworks of understanding are played for silliness. Perched jester-like beneath an upended glockenspiel, Mr. Green confounds terrestrial certainties. He points to a “hand” located on top of his head, and dislodges the boy’s erstwhile reasonable assumption that “philosophers have ten toes” – Martians as it turns out have eight, and couldn’t they also be philosophers? The theme is taken from Wittgenstein’s posthumously published On Certainty: our frameworks are not obtained by proof, but are the “inherited background” against which we distinguish between true and false. Such reference points are necessary for making sense of things, but may nonetheless shift as the banks of a river do.⁵

Wittgenstein’s longing to replace philosophy’s picture of the “lonely human soul brooding over its experiences” becomes acute when he meets and falls in love with Johnny (Kevin Collins). The most obvious source for the character is Frances Skinner, a young Cambridge philosophy student who was Wittgenstein’s lover; but another is Collins himself, Jarman’s real-life partner, who cared for him as he was dying of AIDS-related complications. Devoted to Wittgenstein, Johnny first appears wearing a matching tracksuit of pure white, a soothing angel and emblem of grace. But not even he can shake Wittgenstein’s demands for purity, who in one image sits pensively inside a human-sized birdcage, holding another smaller cage, his desire for connection thwarted.

There are moments when the film’s therapeutic lens, while getting at something of Wittgenstein’s uprooting approach to his philosophical dilemmas, comes very near (as the character of Russell complains) to trivialising them. In this conception, and as Wittgenstein sometimes spoke of it, philosophy is a therapy against the need to do philosophy; in an echo of Karl Kraus’s famous quip about psychoanalysis, it is the disease for which it is itself the cure.⁶ But as Bernard Williams once pointed out, how could something continuous with philosophy’s tradition, as Wittgenstein’s work was, lead to its eradication? If philosophy were a disease we’d do best to stay clear of his ideas altogether, for we’d be exposing ourselves not to the vaccine but the virus at full strength.⁷

But the pathos of Wittgenstein’s struggle resonates all the same. Described poetically in the film’s penultimate monologue as a marooning “between earth and ice”, it is also dramatised in the opposing worldviews of the religious Wittgenstein and the worldly Keynes. Wittgenstein speaks of morality as absolute, and is sure that there’s more to our life here than “having a good time”, his pangs of conscience felt as the voice of God speaking within his heart. Keynes, anchored by “the warmth of a sated body”, urges latitude, viewing Wittgenstein as his real-life counterpart saw the laissez-faire economist: guided by distant projections at the expense of current affairs. (As he used to put it: “in the long run, we are all dead”).⁸

Jarman, on the evidence of the diary entries he wrote late in life, seemed to have taken little comfort from the thought of a cinematic legacy left behind after his death. Stressed by the demands of shooting, feeling the effects of his illness, he wrote of his insecurities: Was his public notoriety eroding his work? Had he been deceived and controlled by the forces of commerce? Is cinema really worth much after all?⁹ Some of this doubt finds expression in the film; its hero, placid in the face of death, leaves with a secret his author doesn’t know. While Ray Monk, in his biography of Wittgenstein’s life, concluded by affirming a life lived with integrity and seriousness, declaring that “it would survive the scrutiny of even that most stern of judges, his own conscience,”¹⁰ Jarman ends his film more ambivalently. Painfully, the question of what comfort such ultimate consecration might bring is left open.

Wittgenstein (1993 United Kingdom 72 mins)

Prod Co: Channel Four Television, BFI, Bandung Productions, Uplink Prod: Tariq Ali Dir: Derek Jarman Scr: Derek Jarman, Terry Eagleton, Ken Butler Ed: Budge Tremlett Phot: James Welland Mus: Jan Latham-Koenig Art Dir: Annie La Paz Cos Des: Sandy Powell

Cast: Karl Johnson, Michael Gough, Tilda Swinton, John Quentin, Kevin Collins Clancy Chassay, Nabil Shaban, Sally Dexter, Lynn Seymour

Endnotes