Starring Jack Nicholson
Know what I mean?
“In a Lonely Place”, “Scarlet Street”, “Sunset Boulevard”, “Out of the Past”… are we purged, or does the corruption of the human soul seep out of what’s left of the screen, like a viscous insinuation, a low-slinking ooze, a foul, rancid gall that crawls under our flesh, galvanizing the voice of guilt and tormented self-recognition, slowly driving us mad?
Obsessed with noir, I convulse in the sickly-sweet fever of spiritual decay.
With the ‘60s, noir is broken and Jack Nicholson is suddenly standing at the crossroads of The New Hollywood, an icon in the making.
In the 1970 “Five Easy Pieces”, a movie drama directed by Bob Rafelson, the five musical pieces referenced by the film’s title and played in the hour-and-a-half movie are Frederic Chopin’s “Fantasy in F minor”, Op. 49, Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue”, BWV 903, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-flat major”, K. 271, Chopin’s “Prelude in E minor”, Op. 28, No. 4, and Mozart’s “Fantasy in D minor”, K. 397 (see Wikipedia entry for this movie).
If thought of in terms of these compositions, the word ‘Easy’ in the film’s title is clearly ironic, as the Bach piece, for example, is not easy at all.
The music, which is emotionally engaging, becomes a harmonic counterpoint to a lot of the sharp and emotionally jarring dissonances among the film’s characters, particularly the conflicts between Nicholson’s character, Bobby Dupea, and just about everyone else he comes in contact with. Thus, the irony of ‘easy’ penetrates deep into the film.
While all other groups quickly work out viable, though precarious and fragile, harmonies among their members, Bobby is never an ‘easy’ fit. He consistently rejects every small association, finding himself always on the periphery, never quite able to join.
While Bobby has to be at fault for some of this, society – the society that is in the heads of people generally – is largely to blame.
In most noir, where the source of badness is almost always the individual, we are purged of evil once the source of evil and societal discontent is eliminated, usually through death.
But in “Five Easy Pieces”, we are never purged of the source of our disappointments, discomforts, and dismay, because that source is society itself – something we are inescapably surrounded by. If Bobby is in any way “evil”, it is not evil that comes from within, but that is largely provoked from without.
Throughout the film, Bobby is desperate to find life and love and to center them in a construct of his own – outside the norms and rules and expectations dictated by society. But the invisible hand of society’s relentless influence is never subtle and always rudely intervenes, and Bobby feels he must escape.
At the end of the movie, we witness Bobby escaping – yet again – and by now we know this is merely the latest in what will probably be a lifelong pattern of futile breaks with society. The irony: Society causes his isolation, but through his own actions, he is to blame.
In “Five Easy Pieces”, the motif of individuals fitting into small functioning groups as a way to satisfy their needs is played out throughout the movie using Nicholson’s Bobby as the odd man out, as the piece that is never easy, as the piece that never quite fits, in a variety of social sets spanning the collars from blue to white; from low ambitions, bowling and pisswater beer to neurotic high culture pretensions, classical music, and fine wine.
One common denominator traversing the social classes is sex. As Jack London noted in the mind of his working-class, or no-class, superboy, Martin Eden in the novel of the same name, women are the same no matter what class they belong to. They are flesh and as such respond to the same things. And sex is perhaps the only place where Bobby, so to speak, fits. He beds his working-class and upper middle-class women in pretty much the same way, with the latter, perhaps, being a little more work.
We learn that Bobby, who has taken the life of a blue-collar worker in an oil field, is actually an escapee of his privileged youth as part of an eccentric musical family and a precocious piano prodigy.
In the movie, the individual human pieces are not always five; the size of the social units Bobby struggles to interact with is five or smaller, the point being to show that he never fits.
There is his lower-class girlfriend, Rayette, who loves Bobby, and he tolerates her for the easy sex, but in larger settings is embarrassed by her low manner and stupidity. Perhaps despite himself, his background and upbringing come through. Bobby does not fit.
Bobby may not like it, but he is a social construct. He knows he has been trapped from the get-go and has never had any real choice between being trapped and true freedom. His every lurch toward freedom finds him in a new trap, part of which is his self as a social construct predetermined before he had ever become conscious of his own free will and the exercise thereof. The price for freedom, for even desiring it, is social exclusion.
At the home of his oil rig buddy, Elton, Bobby is barely able to sit there watching TV while Elton lolls around happily with his wife and kid on the couch. Bobby doesn’t fit.
Again with Elton, they are out bowling, where they pick up two lower class floozies, whom they party with in their underwear and then bed. But Bobby doesn’t want this, either. He doesn’t fit.
On a road trip with Rayette, they pick up two weirdo female hitchhikers and stop at a roadside diner for something to eat. This foursome actually seems to get along fairly well, but then Bobby runs into a conflict with a fifth player, a waitress who categorically refuses to accommodate a simple special order he tries to make based on the menu. Bobby smashes the tableware and the four leave the restaurant hungry. Bobby doesn’t fit.
The motif is at its most poignant when Bobby reaches his boyhood home to visit with his family of professional classical musicians – his violinist brother Carl and his sister, Partita, who is also a pianist, and his father.
It is largely on account of his father, regarding whom Partita tells Bobby has suffered two strokes, and from whom Bobby is estranged, that he makes the visit.
The father, brother and sister make three, but there is the brother’s fiancée, Catherine, which makes four. We find out later that there is likely a serious relationship going on between Partita and her father’s bulky male nurse, which makes five.
Where does Bobby fit? And does he fit? Can he fit after all these years, after rejecting the promise and probable fame as a concert pianist and recording artist – a legacy that was to have been his by natural right, by birth. At one time, Bobby had fit. At one time, he probably could have been the piece that fit the easiest, the one that called the shots, the one around whom the others would have sought to fit themselves, but he rejected this.
Having ditched Rayette at a motel to save himself the embarrassment of having her around while he visits his family, he moves toward them, trying, perhaps, to reconnect, to find himself again, at last; a prodigal son reconciling his differences with his father and finding peace within himself, contentment, and the fulfillment of his quest.
But when there, he becomes physically drawn to Catherine, his brother Carl’s fiancée, and the attraction is mutual. Bobby makes fun of Carl behind his back, flaunting his own superiority. When Carl isn’t around, Bobby has sex with Catherine, violently breaking through her neurotic pretensions and forcing her to acknowledge her animal desire for him.
But now Bobby wants Catherine; his desire for her has gone beyond the initial physical attraction and sex. He sees in her the partner he has been looking for, but in all the wrong places – because she had been close to home all along. He sees her as the key to the permanence and happiness he is seeking and wants her to break with his brother Carl and go away with him. Perhaps home is truly where the heart is. On the other hand, you can never go home again.
But Catherine proves to be spoiled. She got what she wanted from Bobby and now she rejects him. She wants the comfort and permanence that his family and Carl have to offer her, even if Carl is clearly inferior to Bobby as a physical specimen, and probably musically as well.
Using her smug security with Bobby’s brother, and Bobby’s perceived lack of rootedness to attack him, the more easily to justify her dismissal of him, Catherine accuses Bobby of being incapable of loving anyone or anything. Bobby is simply too great a risk for her to take; this, despite the obvious feeling Bobby had put into playing a piano piece for her at her request. In that scene, when he is finished, Catherine acknowledges as much; she has been taken by his playing; she has been taken by him.
In effect, Catherine’s rejection of Bobby is what runs him off from his own family – possibly for good.
In the scene I refer to, Bobby plays Chopin’s “Prelude in E minor”, Op. 28, No. 4, a slow, haunting, but technically easy piece, which he then tells Catherine he specifically chose for its simplicity, adding that he had played it better when he was a child. Childhood itself is a simpler, easier time, so a child’s affinity to and interpretation of an easy piece, albeit of vaulting magnificence, may very well be superior to what an adult can muster somewhere in the travail of his time-wracked and tormented life.
During the scene, the camera moves to Nicholson’s hands, showing that he is the one actually playing the piece. As his character Bobby plays, the camera moves away from the piano and the two people in the scene and studies the facing wall.
The wall is mounted with family photos and the camera pans them in a moment of quiet but insistent intensity during which we become aware that the portraits are a history and record that tell of how the family had grown and been put together – from its separate pieces.
The entire scene, then, is about Bobby’s childhood, and so his playing harkens back to his past, and as the notes disassociate from the hands playing them, rising up from the piano to pore over the images of Bobby’s past on the wall, the piece becomes the voice of his memory. It becomes a halting plea, filled with remorse and contrition, confusion and self-doubt, to somehow get back to the fold that had engendered him, from which he had waywardly escaped.
But Bobby no longer belongs.
Manny Face, August 14, 2014