Revisiting Eva Marie Saint's White Glove: On Props, Neurons, Subtext, and Empathy

Revisiting Eva Marie Saint’s White Glove On Props, Neurons, Subtext, and Empathy Andrew Kimbrough In what is known as the “white glove scene” of Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, Eva Marie Saint’s good-­ girl character, Edie Doyle, does not wish to spend time talking in a New Jersey waterfront park with the longshoreman thug Terry Malloy , played by Marlon Brando. As she turns away from him to walk home alone, she takes her gloves from her coat pocket and accidentally drops one. Terry picks it up and, rather than hand it back to Edie, he sits down on a swing, casually cleans the glove of dirt, and then puts it on his left hand. The behavior was not scripted for the film yet it accompanies Schulberg’s dialogue, which is mostly uncomfortable small talk initiated by Terry in a labored attempt to seek out a connection with Edie.1 For cinephiles the white glove scene has acquired mythic status. It holds a special allure for many reasons, one being that fans of the film appreciate it according to its intended reception. Kazan, providing an authorial, psychoanalytic interpretation of the scene, says, “As they were walking along, she accidentally dropped her glove; and Brando picked up the glove; and by holding it, she couldn’t get away—the glove was his way of holding her. Furthermore, whereas he couldn’t, because of this tension about her brother being killed, demonstrate any sexual or loving feeling towards her, he could towards the glove. And he put his hand inside the glove . . . so that the glove was both his way of holding on to her against her will, and at the same time he was able to express, through the glove, something he couldn’t express to her directly. So the object, in that sense, did it all.”2 In other words, the glove served Brando by allowing him to express through behavior the subtextual yearnings of the character. Because of his guilt for the role he played in Edie’s brother’s 100      A n d r ew K i mb r ou g h death at the start of the film, and because of his own sense of worthlessness , Terry does not feel permitted to express verbally his attraction for Edie. Brando found a way to express the character’s desire behaviorally with the assistance of an object, and appreciative audiences thrilled at the virtuosity of the performance. Looking at the scene from another perspective, Paul Willemen and Noel King call it “epiphanic,” which they define as providing revelations beyond the intention of the performance text and towards “an aspect or dimension of a person . . . which is not choreographed for you to see.”3 In phenomenological terms, something in excess of the character and the story became present in ­ Brando’s performance, even in the filmic medium. In light of Bruce McConachie’s admonition that theatre scholars apply cognitive research to their objects of inquiry whenever feasible, this article reevaluates the kinds of audience responses conjured by moments of performance like the white glove scene.4 McConachie specifically cautions against relying upon twentieth-­ century critical theories like those reflected by Kazan and Willemen and King, but rather than reject those theories, he asks that they meet the demands of falsifiability—that is, that they be tried by the scientific method.5 Yet, as David Saltz points out in his editorial comment to the Theatre Journal issue devoted to cognition , while McConachie tends to regard semiotic and phenomenological theories as “inadequate” to account for audience perception, other theatre scholars find that cognitive science may be used productively with other theoretical approaches, specifically phenomenology.6 This paper argues that common ground exists between psychoanalytical, phenomenological , and neurological considerations of behavior, object use, and audience reception, especially in terms of their understanding of empathy, which is a touchstone issue of central concern to McConachie’s work in cognition. The article seeks a better understanding of how various discourses inform our comprehension of the co-­ affection and empathic responses audiences experience during moments of heightened stage and film behavior. Rather than simply extol further the virtues of...