The Price of Self-Respect: Todd Haynes’ Carol and Joan Didion
Of all the dreamy sequences in Todd Haynes’ Carol, my favorite opens with the titular housewife purchasing a Christmas tree. The mousy Therese loads film into her camera— an action captured in fetishistic detail,by cinematographer Ed Lachman. The rhapsodic score swells as she photographs the moment from afar. Noticing but pretending not to, Carol seductively poses for Therese. And through her camera’s lens, we watch the girl bring the woman she loves into focus. The tender moment slips away after only a minute, but despite its brevity, the scene felt enormous to me; in the source novel, however, it warrants just a paragraph that, save an observation on the “dark green sharpness“ of the holly’s aroma, lacks the sumptuous attention to detail of its cinematic counterpart. Oddly enough, in Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, Therese isn’t a photographer at all, but rather an aspiring set designer for the theatre, but this plot point is so inconsequential to the narrative that it’s curious that screenwriter Phyllis Nagy felt the need to tweak it at all for her adaptation.
Nagy’s narrative alterations contradict one another to the extent that it’s difficult to extract an overarching reason for all these contradictory changes: The film eschews the novel’s first-person narration from Therese—seemingly robbing us of insight into her psyche—yet it invests more time into Therese’s self-development in the novel’s last act than the novel ever bothered to. So, what is Carol about to Nagy and Haynes?
Throughout The Price of Salt, Therese displays a penchant for noticing infinitesimal details. After hopping into Carol’s car, for instance, she takes note of the “freckles along the bridge of Carol’s nose” and likens her “short fair hair” to “perfume held to a light.” It’s almost as if Therese is turning these details into mental snapshots-- an internal process that’s externalized through Therese’s interest in photography onscreen. But is photography the only noticing-intensive occupation there is? Couldn’t Therese just as easily have been a painter—or, like Joan Didion (who also spent her early twenties adrift in ’50’s New York City)- a writer? Coming to a peculiar observation in an old notebook, Joan Didion wonders “Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all?” Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook” finds her wondering how the hell she expected to make use of the facts, recipes, and bits of overheard conversation she’s compiled in notebooks since childhood. One such entry details the author’s father returning home from Detroit in 1945. Didion is puzzled as to why her younger self embellished the story with the arbitrary, yet oddly specific reference to the cracked crab she had for lunch that day (which Didion believes to be a fabrication on the part of the ten-year-old who wrote it): “The day's events did not turn on cracked crab,” she quips. And although she dismisses it as an “embroidery”, it dawns on her that it is “precisely that fictitious crab that makes [her] see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt.”
Didion finds a certain paradox in this finding; when she takes notes, she imagines that “the notebook is about other people”—a symptom of “the ethic that other, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than oneself,” -- and yet somehow “[her] notebooks give [her] away,”: the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I." Might Therese’s photos of Carol have a similar effect on her, despite the fact that they are not, in a literal sense, pictures of herself? Do they allow her to “keep on nodding terms with the [person she] used to be”? Photography, perhaps more so than writing, is an inherently recursive act; if a photo isn’t revisited and developed by its photographer, there is no photo at all, only an exposure on a roll of negative film, lying dormant. After being jilted by Carol and returning home, Therese returns to the images she captured of the woman she loved. Might Nagy be suggesting that in revisiting these photos Therese is also revisiting the girl who took them? And if so, I wonder what self she sees when she looks back at those photos?
In her essay “On Self-Respect“, Joan Didion details the pitfalls of a lack of self-respect— one of which is being “peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.” This “compulsion to please” seems to dictate the roles Therese takes on throughout the film. For Richard, she plays the part of the adoring fiance, willing to drop her life and elope to France with him, despite her lack of any desire to do so. For her friend Danny, she plays the part of the pretty lamb, who will allow her fiance’s friend to kiss her, despite her lack of interest or consent. In the department store she works at, she plays the part of the submissive salesgirl, “confined to [her] desk,” accepting the condescension of her superiors, and reluctantly putting on the humiliating Santa hat employees are required to wear.
During the scene where Carol and Therese go to lunch in The Price of Salt, Therese allows Carol to order for her as a mother would order for her daughter: “the woman ordered an old-fashioned without sugar, and invited Therese to have one, or a sherry, and when Therese hesitated, sent the waiter away with their order.” In the film, however, Carol, with characteristic certainty orders “the creamed spinach over poached eggs. And a dry martini. With an olive.” And a sheepish Therese copies her dining companion’s order.
It’s almost as if in Carol, Therese has found a role she longs to play, rather than a role she plays out of reluctance--as if she tries attain Carol’s elegance and self-assurance in order to feel worthy of her love. In “Carol - The Love Story in a Look,” the video essayist, notes that “the photos Therese takes of Carol take on a sense of captivating authenticity, as if in capturing her image, Therese has captured the very essence of the woman she loves.” And is she capturing this “essence” in order to study and imitate it, so she may gain the respect of the woman it belongs to?
What, then, do we make of the scene in which Therese finds a photo she took of Carol by the Christmas trees? What is going through her mind as she stares at it? Or could it be that the photo that once stood for her “eagerness to please” (“On Self Respect”) now stands for a growing sense of “[her] intrinsic worth.”(On Keeping a Notebook) This section of the film, its last third to be precise, is a departure from the novel, where Therese is left in the country after she and Carol are caught by a private investigator. She spends a period of weeks waiting for Carol to return to her. Eventually, she returns home on her own, but Highsmith chronicles the period of time between Therese’s return to New York and her reunion with Carol in only four pages. Nagy and Haynes, on the other hand, dedicate roughly fifteen minutes of the screentime to this section of the film. Just the addition of a few scenes gives us a sense of Therese maturing and gaining a newfound sense of self-respect, so when the first scene of the film--the scene that frames the narrative-- recurs and Carol says that Therese has “suddenly blossomed,” we believe it.
Hayne has said Carol’s framing device was inspired, not by The Price of Salt, but rather David Lean’s 1945 film Brief Encounter. In that film’s opening moments, a conversation between a man and woman in a train station refreshment room is interrupted by the woman’s obnoxious friend. The man hears that his train has arrived. He leaves the woman with a goodbye and a light touch on the shoulder. The woman, Laura, struggles to hide a look of sheer distress as her train pulls out of the station. We return to this refreshment room goodbye in the film’s last act. Laura’s recollection of her affair with Alec has forced us to see this interaction not as an innocuous encounter cut short by an interloping acquaintance, but a final goodbye ruined by an oblivious onlooker. Alec has left her life for good. Home again, her husband comforts her, unaware of her infidelity. She sacrifices passion for rectitude.
When the opening scene of Carol recurs, and we see the scene play out in full, Therese chooses her new path of self-determination over her past life as personified by Carol. Those who recognize the homage might expect the film to close moments later with Therese and Carol returning to their separate worlds on a note of regret plucked from Brief Encounter. The film goes a different direction. Haynes follows Therese into a Christmas party.
She’s a fish out of water—unable to make even the most basic conversation with the other party-goers. Her self-respect prohibits her from complacently engaging in the mindless chatter that she used to enjoy for the sake of others. At the party, she runs into Richard and Danny, both of whom have moved on to other girls. She no longer has anyone’s expectation to meet, but her own. Perhaps Therese has “run away to find [herself], and [has found] no one at home,”(“On Self-Respect”) as Didion put it. Perhaps in her intense “alienation from self”, she runs back to the familiar— in search of a role to reprise.
But could it be that Therese has “run away to find [herself],” has in fact found herself at home, but has found “home” to be a rather lonely place to live? In The Price of Salt, Therese admits her love for Carol to the reader early on. In the world of Carol, however, the phrase “I love you” isn’t uttered until the restaurant scene recurs. In Haynes and Nagy’s world love springs from respect for oneself. As Didion said ”To lack [self-respect] is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.” (“On Some Respect”) In Haynes’ and Nagy’s world, Carol’s protagonist has earned the happy ending that eluded Laura, because she has “given [her] back to [herself]” By initially turning her back on Carol’s love, Therese, paradoxically, and for the first time in the film, has proven herself to be worthy of it.
