Hell is My Natural Habitat: "Under the Volcano"
Perhaps my favorite scene in Under the Volcano comes when Geoffrey Firmin (played by Albert Finney), erstwhile British diplomat and full-time paramour of all things alcoholic, has passed out in the street of the Mexican town in which he lives. A fellow Englishman comes roaring up in a convertible and, finding his passage blocked by the insensate body, leaps out to investigate. Firmin awakens. Dirt smudged on his face and clothes disheveled from his long-ago abandonment of sobriety, he nonetheless leaps to his feet and insists that he's fine, simply splendid; he smites the fellow with his charm, commenting on the Oxford University tie the other man is wearing around his waist, matching him plummy tone for plummy tone. The driver of the convertible notes that he keeps a bottle in his car for emergencies, and Firmin gratefully downs the whole thing before bidding his fond farewell.
In its manifold layers of despair and humor, the scene serves as a core sample of the whole film. Its saturating influence is alcohol. Firmin is never sober in the course of the two days that comprise the story, nor has he been sober for a long time, as his alcoholism is advanced enough that his system can no longer go without. His primary relationship in the movie – and this becomes key to the action – is with drink. But to reduce the movie to a character study of an alcoholic is to risk missing the entire point. (This is also the case with the novel that provides the film's source material, and is one of the least-read and most devastating of the Modernist masterpieces produced in the early part of the last century, which is saying something, given that devastation is in some sense the ground which the entirety of Modernism treads.)
Rather than simply being about alcoholism, the film is about internality, and the vast distances between one person and the next. It's about the basic constitutional differences between us. At its core it's about doom, and about the fact that each of is ineradicably doomed to be exactly who we are.
That we are all different from one another is one of the signal platitudes of contemporary life. But it is a platitude, I think, that most people do not actually believe. Or, more precisely, they believe it exactly up to the point at which it begins to threaten them.
Think about the thought that many of us first had when we were younger, which is that the color I see as blue, and call blue, you may see as red, and yet call blue, because we're looking at the same thing and have a common set of words. Our eyes or brains may work differently, that is, such that different colors appear to us in different ways despite the fact that we call them by the same name, and thus believe that we are seeing them in the same way.
There is a destabilization in this thought, particularly when you are young. This is especially true because if the sky looks, say, yellow to me (or what you would call yellow), and purple to you (or what I would call, perhaps, green), we will never discover this difference between us because we will simply go through life describing it with the same word: blue.
This means, horrifyingly, that we may live in an absurdist world in which none of us are ever really able to connect, because our differences are masked by misconceptions. In the words of Bob Dylan, some of us may indeed perceive that "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken," but none of the rest of us will ever know that.
As we get older, I think, the force of this thought lessens. A kind of commonsense commonality kicks in. Science, for example, assures us us that the rods and cones in our eyes all function in a pretty similar way. Or a kind of ersatz philosophical pragmatism crops up in us, allowing us to believe that the functional similarities between us – we all get along in the same world, and can communicate extremely well, right down to articulating what we agree and disagree on – overweigh the solipsistic differences that can seem so overwhelming when we are younger. Perhaps I do see the sun as chicken (whatever that means), but that little blip between you and me is far less important than the fact of our ability to connect with one another in inarguably tangible ways.
This connection occurs, of course, despite the fact that we are confronted by very real differences in the way that the external world comes into contact with each of us. Some people are colorblind. To some people, cilantro tastes like soap. Certain people are plagued by a low rumbling sound – the so-called "Hum" – which they cannot source, despite the fact that it appears to be external to their bodies, and which other people seem not to be able to hear. Some people seem to be far more chemically susceptible to addiction, whether to alcohol, nicotine, sugar, drugs, or anything else. The list goes on and on.
As these kinds of small differences between us don't seem to present much of a challenge to our world view, for most adults they are of little consequence. (Although they can be a source of distress – while some people seem to be inclined to no vices at all, for others of us, in the words of David Lee Roth, it "seems like everything I like will make me sick or poor or fat.") We admit that they exist, that is, but don't seem much bothered by them.
But push the idea of differences between human beings too much further, and most people rebel. There is the idea, for example, much in vogue among certain believers in neurology, that political differences stem not from conviction but from differences in brain structure. Here, many people do not dare to tread, because it suggests that what they conceive of as considered opinions based in fact and research and hard-won knowledge are probably as attributable to brain chemistry as anything else, and that all our rationality is little more than an after-the-fact justification for what we are each predisposed – that is, hard-wired – to believe.
I have no idea whether this idea holds water or not, but I do think it makes a large number of people uncomfortable, because it undermines the foundations of that most inviolable thing: the ego. People want to believe that they are who they are because they have studied life, or worked hard, or educated themselves, or have some access to "Truth," or are self-disciplined, not because the chemicals and physical structures in their brain are organized and interact in a certain way.
We are, in other words, in most people’s view kind of different from one another, but we can't be all that different, because the foundation of our selves is too deeply intertwined with the notion that we are in control of our lives. I am different than you, according to this line of thought, because of what I have done (or not done), what I have built (or not built), what I have earned (or not earned), and therefore what I deserve (or don't deserve). But at base, we're actually pretty similar.
But what if this isn’t the case? What if life is simply easier for some people, not because they were born wealthy or good looking or in a privileged part of the world, but because of the way they are constructed? And what if, for some of us, life itself – the way the events of the world rub across our senses and sensibilities, like a cheese-grader across flesh – is more painful, or uncomfortable, or outraging than it is for the rest, not because of the events of our lives, but because of the mechanics of our souls?
Here is the difference that is a bridge to far. Here is an idea that for many borders on the distasteful. This is because it suggests that life is not fair, pain and happiness are not distributed equally, and that doom – in the sense of being singled out by the gods for inexplicable punishment, and for no reason at all – is real. And it suggests that if you are someone for whom the experience of living itself is not somewhat agonizing, you are one of the lucky ones.
This idea – or question, perhaps – of the inequality of pain is the real subject of Under the Volcano. And the film treats it in the only possible way: as lying at the exact conjunction of comedy and tragedy, humor and annihilation, joy and hell. Released in 1984 (the novel was published in 1947) and directed with the kind of mastery that only a lifetime of work can produce by John Huston (or is he simply a better director than other folks because he’s built that way?), it revolves around a performance by Finney that is absolutely mesmerizing; the revelations about what it is to be alive that he brings out of the character allow everything else in the movie to succeed.
It's 1938, and Finney’s character, Geoffrey Firmin, is the former British consul to Quauhnahuac (Cuernavaca). A year ago, his wife Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset) left him, and Firmin has been drinking ever since. (Although, in the words of Nic Cage's character in Leaving Los Vegas, it's unclear if he started drinking because his wife left him, or if his wife left him because he started drinking.)
Also on the scene is Firmin's half-brother Hugh (Anthony Andrews) a journalist with leftist leanings who is lately back from the Spanish Civil War; the situation is complicated by the fact that before she left Firmin, Yvonne and Hugh had an affair. Now, Yvonne has come back to Mexico, in a desperate attempt to repair her relationship with Firmin.
The plotting of all this is extraordinarily simple. We begin on the Day of the Dead, with the town alight in celebration. Firmin drinks his way through a Red Cross banquet and is still drinking the next morning when Yvonne arrives. Their reunion is an unsteady one: she’s unsure about whether she can repair the relationship, he's still full of rage about her affair with Hugh. But Firmin has a redoubtable charisma, undergirded by the fact – apparent to both Yvonne and Hugh – that his life is spiraling toward tragedy.
The three of them spend the day together, approximating the way things were before the affair. They go to a neighboring town for a festival and watch a bull fight. But Firmin simply cannot return to life as it was, to life as it exists for Yvonne and Hugh, to a life that is not doomed. He drinks himself mad once again, and runs from them.
He ends up at a decrepit seraglio, where he’s robbed by corrupt local policemen (there are fascinating callbacks here and elsewhere to Huston's other work, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in particular). When these policemen try to take from him the only thing he cares about – a packet of letters from Yvonne – Firmin resists, and is killed. In the process, a white horse (which played a part in the Day of the Dead ceremony early in the film) bolts and runs down Yvonne, killing her as well.
In our era of the medicalization of all things human, in which addiction (like depression) is treated as simply a deviation from normality to be remedied by science, it's tempting to read the film as a kind of morality tale about the perils of alcoholism. But the particulars of the film run strongly against this, pointing to more subterranean subjects.
Early on, one of Firmin's friends, a local doctor, explains that the Day of the Dead ritual is about the fact that on that day, "when the spirits come back to us," it’s because "the road to heaven must be made easy." Which is to say that the framing of the whole is spiritual, rather than a scientific. The topic is the inevitable approach of death; the subject is the soul itself, which, precisely because it is incorporeal, is not subject to the vagaries of inebriation.
This is reinforced when, in his climatic confrontation with Yvonne and Hugh before he leaves them, Firmin declares that "Hell is my natural habitat." The film seems to want to, in other words, stake out as its ground our basic metaphysical constitution. The doom at play goes down into the misty depths of existence itself, a place where angels and demons tread, far from some thin surface understanding of biochemical addiction.
As does the novel, the film also places the 1935 Peter Lorre movie The Hands of Orlac (released in the U.S. as Mad Love) in a position of symbolic prominence. Early in Under the Volcano, Firmin steps into a theater to see a scene of Lorre strangling a woman (named Yvonne, although we are not told this). The theater owner explains to him that it is a good story, about a man who was a pianist but lost his hands in an accident; when a surgeon attached new hands, it turns out they were the hands of a killer. "These hands murder people," the theater owner explains, "but his heart does not."
The idea is clear. Lorre’s character is bifurcated, like Firmin, between his intentions and his actions, between the destruction he wreaks on other people – the image on the screen in the theater is, of course, a foreshadowing of the death of Yvonne at the end of the Under the Volcano – and his own intention. This is the hell in which Firmin lives, a place in which the person he wants to be (or the world he wants to inhabit) is far different from the way things are in reality.
This is, also, of course, a reference to the role of his drinking in his life. Much as he would like to stop, and even vows that he will stop, Firmin cannot. But the Hands of Orlac metaphor is no more reducible than to the rest of the film to a parable about the dangers of dipsomania.
The issue is not that Firmin drinks, but who he is. This is made clear throughout, such as in the moment when his friend the doctor declares that Firmin lives with too much sadness, and suggests that this is because of the moment (the lead-up to World War II) or maybe because of the fact that love has deserted him.
Firmin's reply goes to the center of things: "It's not in the times, of course," he says, "but in the heart." His doom, that is, lies in his own heart, in the very specifics of his own creation. As with the man in the Hands of Orlac, the doom is one of physical constitution, the way he has been built (or rebuilt, as in the Lorre character). And, try as he might, through alcohol or humor or good cheer, he cannot escape this.
Which brings me back to the scene in which Firmin passes out in the street and then interacts with the motorist. What we see in that scene is a pair of men who are, on the surface, interchangeable. They are both products of the British empire, both able to identify the university one attended by the color of the tie one wears around one's waist, both in Mexico on adventures that have pulled them far from their original environs, both possessors of the stiff upper lip that is the famed badge of pride of their countrymen.
But beneath this, they are so radically different that one cannot really say they experience the same world, or experience the world in remotely the same way. When they part at the end, one motors off to continue his thrilling journey through a fascinating country; the other continues his descent into hell, laughing, raging, drinking, and suffering because of the constitution of his own heart.
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