Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema

7. Exacting Revenge on “Cunt Men”: Holy Smoke as Sexual Fantasy

154 1By the time Campion had completed the three films of her middle career—An Angel at My Table, The Piano, and The Portrait of a Lady— she had gained a deep insight into the psychodynamics involved in the condition of women who are depressed or repressed. She had also, through her representation of the character of Isabel Archer, come to understand what happens when a woman, in Campion’s words, “keeps trying to placate the husband who seems to hate her” and “stays on, hoping that by fixing up a damaged man she can heal her own childhood shocks and wounds.”1 Behind both of these explorations, as we have seen, there is a concern on Campion’s part to understand her relationship with her mother, and how that relationship might have influenced certain of the predispositions she has recognized in herself. Nevertheless, the ending of Campion’s adaptation of Henry James’s great work, as many critics have pointed out, leaves a strong impression that much unfinished business remains to be explored and that the indecisiveness depicted in Isabel Archer may reflect indecisiveness on the part of the filmmaker.2 On one hand, by her own earlier admissions, she had grown deeply mistrustful of the romantic impulse; on the other hand, she continued to profess her desire for intimacy and a need to be loved. The problem for Campion was to find a way of reconciling these two contradictory impulses, and at the heart of this problem was the nature of eroticism: what role it might play not only in the subversion of romance, but also in the attainment of love—especially in a world in which,inherview,“organizedreligionhadbeenlargelyrejected,”3meaning that one has to look elsewhere for something that can take its place.4 7Exacting Revenge on “Cunt Men”: Holy Smoke as Sexual Fantasy Exacting Revenge on “Cunt Men” 155 In addition, her exploration of the father-daughter relationship between Osmond and Pansy in James’s novel had brought her face-to-face, yet again, with issues that, one can infer, were inherent in her relationshipwithherownfather ,whoseattention(accordingtoAnnaCampion) the young Jane constantly sought in response to paternal neglect.5 In James’s novel, one of the things that renders Isabel Archer vulnerable to seduction by Osmond is, in the words of McHugh, “her mimetic captivation by an image [of father and daughter],”6 which is shown to have arisen out of her father’s neglect of her when she was a child. Isabel’s yearning to enter into a relationship with an older man who is capable of repairing the lack she experienced as a child eventuates in the same kind ofincestuousfantasythatCampionrepeatedlydepictsinherheroinesin onefilmafteranother,implyingherongoingawarenessofthissyndrome as a personal problematic to be resolved. Holy Smoke and In the Cut, Campion’s next two movies, as I will show, were designed specifically to address the issues inherent in this complex—a classic manifestation of a disturbedfamilyromance—alongwithotherissuesthatwereimportant to Campion in her personal life. 2As usual, in talking about the genesis of Holy Smoke, Jane Campion is forthright in identifying the autobiographical roots of the movie, which was based on an original script written collaboratively with her sister, Anna. Apparently, Jane wrote “the beginning and the end,” while Anna wrote “the more intimate scenes between PJ and Ruth.”7 Commenting on the character of Ruth in the film, Jane Campion reveals that “she is a girl pretty close to myself [at that age]”: I was too cautious to do what she did in terms of going to India and allowing myself to be influenced like that at her age. I think I would have been terrified. I had a very close friend who was my flatmate and she joined the Moonies. It really threw me that she could so completely change, and she was really working strongly to get me to join her.8 Campion, then, as a young woman, had become interested in spirituality as a phenomenon that offered hope in a world that seemed to her to have rejected religion and spiritual values. This interest is reflected in her decision to attend the Forum,9 one of the personal growth seminars conducted by Anthony Robbins (commonly known as the “Mahatma 156 Jane Campion of motivation”) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Despite her mockery of tantrism and meditation in Sweetie, Campion also attended classes in meditation, and in 1999 referred to herself as having “greatly changed” since...