The red shoes are never tired

Ambition, community, theft and satiety

How often it is that a great career begins with a theft by the advisor. Or, maybe some other kind of issue. It doesn’t necessarily need to be by an advisor per se. I’ve also seen it happen at the hands of other seniors — co-authors, PI’s, professors who hire research assistants. It is not common, but then again, it is supposed to be vanishingly rare, and it isn't. It does happen. Even just in a small way, such as muscling in on juniors’ projects when you really have no right to. That happens pretty frequently. It's just that we don't really talk about it.

A few times I have thought about sharing the names of the people I know to have done this stuff, or other comparably bad stuff. But there is relatively little point. If I shared their names now there would be a furore on the internet for a couple days, maybe a week or two. And then everything would go back to business as usual. Nothing would happen to these people. Even if something did start to happen, or threaten to happen, it would quickly be undone or reversed, because these people want to hold onto their misbegotten positions much more and much harder than any of us wishes to oust them from them. You will never win when your opponent is fighting for survival while you are merely fighting for justice. Nobody's passion for justice is ever really that inflamed.¹

The Red Shoes (1948) opens with a theft by an advisor. And as the titanic Lermontov says to Julien Craster, the young composer whose advisor has stolen from him, “It is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from.” Seductive line there, isn’t it — but I think this is false. Not entirely false, admittedly: I’ve been surprised how many successful people have stories of being stolen from or bilked of credit, before eventually I realised that other people were stealing from them precisely because their work was good.² But there are many other people whose thieving or unethical advisors or senior colleagues had driven them out of the profession; and I learned that this can happen no matter how good you are.

And there is something more that is sad and discouraging about being stolen from: the knowledge that this must be commonplace to whomever has stolen things from you. The knowledge, finally, often too late to be useful, that we are not living in a meritocracy, that it's not the case that crime doesn't pay and evil doesn't prosper and blah blah blah etcetera. (Actually if you think about it the concept of merit isn't properly coherent or objective but whatever.) It is possible that you are the first time someone has stolen something, of course it is possible. It just isn't likely. And it’s that disgust and heartbreak that prompts people to leave.

Actually, the whole opening scene of The Red Shoes feels profoundly contemporary, as if it were speaking to our moment. A bunch of students almost breaking down the door of the building, rushing to get inside. A petty sniping competition between adherents of different forms of snobbery. A thematic treatment of the tension between ambition and happiness, particularly for women, but also for gay men, and why not straight as well. When I watched it I was quite astounded. This film feels so fresh as to almost seem clairvoyant.

Victoria Page, the dancer who falls victim to the red shoes, is a rich aristocratic young woman, expected to keep dancing as her hobby, not devote her life to it, eschewing marriage and children and society as she is clearly deeply tempted to do. It is painful and strange to see her wrestle with it, to even see Lermontov point out harshly that Vicky's new fiance — it's Julien Craster! Surprise! — would never have to sacrifice his career to have her in the way she would need to do in order to have him. It's 75 fucking years later, and we're all still wrestling that stuff now.

That fierce and penetrating insight from Lermontov is just one of many reasons why it’s impossible not to read the role as gay.³ Of course there are insightful heterosexuals (don't laugh!) but it is much easier to see the more painful aspects of our gendered reality when you yourself are definitely shut out of them. Though it's really Powell and Pressburger who could see this and apparently neither of them were gay. I always think they were because to me it seems like Black Narcissus (1947) could only have sprung from the mind of a gay man — and also because that other famous film duo Merchant and Ivory certainly were gay — and and and, with each other!

The real person on which Lermontov was based, Sergei Diagilev, was gay, and in fact he was the lover of Nijinsky. Not all ballet dancers are queer obviously, at least not in the sense that they fuck members of their own gender, but socially, culturally, indeed there's something here. At least it is gender-transgressive. Perhaps that's not the case in Russia, but since anglo masculinity is about as repressed as it is rudimentary, folks, what can I say, here we are. Even just to see, among men, a high level of sincere emotion invested in artistic creativity, is irrevocably for us bound up with queerness: to quote Fran Lebowitz quoting Herbert Muschamp, “Ballet is baseball for fags.”

Well, it was. Not anymore, I guess. But seeing the high level of obsessive and passionate connoisseurship of the students in The Red Shoes’ opening scene audience is what made me think again of that interview clip, and particularly of Lebowitz’s description of the high level of connoisseurship of the audience of the New York City Ballet in the 1970s before that community was decimated by AIDS. In some sense, the New York City Ballet died with the audience.

There have always been snobs and connoisseurs and fanatics, and there always will be snobs and connoisseurs and fanatics, but there are more of them at some times than at others. Just as the decimation of the audience degraded the level at which the ballet could be performed — due to the symbiotic nature of creation between whomever we think of as the author, and who we think of as the audience, though in fact, there is typically or often no essential separation — just as this must be happening also in literature now (you see it), the effect that anti-intellectualism in the broader culture has had on academia is manifestly evident as well. It's not only in that people get meaner and they fight more and more over less and less grant money. We’ve been spared much of that in economics and stats, but: you do better work when you sense that other people care about it. And when you know that nobody cares, then your work has to be worse.

It’s uncomfortable to admit to being so malleable. And so we leap from this knowledge into the arms of trying to claim that one can do this kind of work in a vaccuum, for the pleasure of only oneself. Bullshit. Nothing happens in a vaccuum, ever. Absolutely nothing at all.

***

All work is done in a community. All scientific progress happens in community with others. When the community is good then the work will be good; when the community is rancid then the work will be rancid. Or at least that will be the tendency. The reason for this is that our peers are the audience, the people we make our work for, and the people we also rely on to set and hold the standards. That's part of what makes theft and credit so difficult in our world, too.

Part of what's so satisfying about watching The Red Shoes is how neatly and fulsomely it takes care to portray that aspect of making anything, surely including films. In watching this “quintessential backstage drama”, I found myself thinking but this is just a science lab. This is an academic department; this is enterprise. I think The Red Shoes is about work as much as Glengarry Glen Ross is about work. We are not better than that.

Academics, artists and doctors often think of themselves as drawn to a calling. While that can be true, that thought is also often accompanied by an assumption that say a lawyer or a marketing executive couldn't experience this, and I think that is not true. I think workaholism among mid-level tech executives might be the same phenomenon as extreme dedication in the arts. I think that there is a distinction between workaholism that is generated out of a deep desire to produce excellence — an artistic focus, a clarity, which does exist — and workaholism that produced out of sheer anxiety and busywork, from an inability to function in the might-call-it "outside world". But one man's petty minutiae is another man’s private symphony. And the borderline between those things is difficult to find.

Academia in general has now done what Lermontov did, and what the men he was modeled on must have done before him: driven away a great many faithful and devoted servants by insisting their devotion should be absolute. You are supposed to sacrifice. It will not even be regarded as sacrifice. It cannot be regarded as sacrifice, for then it could be weighed up — then we could tackle the question. That can never happen. That must never happen. Lermontov clasping Vicky: Life is so unimportant.

It’s crazy that he says it — I think I actually gasped. But people’s actions betray that they believe this all the time. What’s confusing is that this attitude can persist even in those who get married and have children. They simply neglect those relationships. And that has the consequence of making the personal life lacking in satisfaction, which only reinforces the belief that it is not worth very much.

Not that people ever admit it! Typically, they don't admit it even to themselves. Very often this neglect can be covert and everything can look fine on the surface, and in fact the more everything looks fine on the surface the more likely it is that there is some kind of rot underneath. And despite ample evidence of that at every turn we seem collectively committed to rejecting it. If something looks good it is good: that’s what we want to believe. (The function and value of gossip is to remind ourselves that that is not true — and that if something looks too perfect, it is too perfect, and so it’s not good if things are too perfect. And if things still seem perfect when you drill down, then you should be more afraid again.)

Something that looks effortless is usually the result of an enormous amount of strain. This holds in life as in ballet. The Red Shoes has Lermontov speaking its praise: Don’t forget, a great impression of simplicity can only be achieved by great agony of body and spirit. In some sense what is happening in our moment, where the brooding impresario also has to have a family and pretend to be a rational person, is that such people are all still subsumed into ambition, but the ambition is now to have it all, to be it all, and also, to make it look perfect. This is just as insane as killing yourself over ballet. Actually it’s probably worse.

***

The other thing that's strange about all this is that there is no satiation.

Even people have attained the greatest heights of ambition do not in fact feel satisfied by it. They don’t act satisfied by it. Ambition, like desire, might sometimes only want to sustain itself, and I think that is in fact the contention of the Red Shoes: the girl is tired, but the red shoes never get tired.

So much for the fairytale. But this actually happens in life! And in real life this is confusing, because people always present their ambition as rational or natural, and they present the consequences of failing to achieve their ambition as materially harmful, and that therefore the only possible route to well-being is the triumph of the ambition, when of course that really isn't true.

It's very easy to find a senior academic, a very successful senior academic, someone who might perhaps be in the running for some kind of prestigious prize they're frittering their life and their health away over, who is very worried about becoming irrelevant. People with money and tenure, who have done seminal work with thousands of citations, who still feel that they cannot slow down, if they could even admit to themselves that they want to, and that they are weary and tired.

Is it not enough to have made one big contribution? Never. You only think that way until you feel it for yourself. Before you succeed you think success is going to relax you — never! The more you have the more you want to grab it. It takes an act of enormous effort to unclench things from your grip. To lose power and influence is painful. It is also a loss of identity. Workaholism is so much more thorny a problem than people give any credit to. It is an unusually powerful anaesthetic, not only because it meets with approval — no, worse, it can seem to resolve life’s deep paradox. It's addiction at the level of meaning; an addiction at the level of the self.

That way lies madness, obviously. The fact that it is commonplace does not make it un-mad. The fact that it is celebrated does not make it healthy. Popular, celebrated things can be bad and wrong — they're often bad and wrong — just ask a social psychologist! (Or better yet ask one of their ex grad students.) And nobody really wants to hear it. And so this complex, sophisticated film about the impossibility of life and work was not popular in its time and it isn't popular now either, despite the many efforts of Scorsese.⁴

Another reason for this lack of popularity is that the film is kind of essentially avant-garde, and it reads as avant-garde even now. Not only in blurring the borders between fantasy and reality within the film itself, but also in presenting work as a kind of fantasy and thus blurring the borders between work and reality as well. (My favourite little touch is the spotlight following Grisha as he walks and talks to Lermontov, when he tells him Craster has quit.) Passion for your work is indeed a kind of madness. It's just a kind of divine, inspired madness, to which we are supposed to show reverence and attend. It can be beautiful, surely. But it then requires effort to stay tethered to the world. A divine inspired madness is still madness! What do you think happened to all those stupid crazy saints?⁵

It’s Lermontov who first smashes the mirror, a move that current audiences associate with the much later Black Swan (2010)⁶. So it's not a ballerina who cracks up first but in fact the Svengali himself. He’s so human, which I think even now is unusual for characters that occupy this narrative role. I saw this film in its newly restored version in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Center a couple weeks ago. At the moment in which Craster lashes back at Lermontov, saying that he thinks ballet is a second-rate art, the audience made an audible collective moan of unhappiness in sympathy with how much that must have wounded the aging prima donna on the screen.

He is lurking and cruel, and yet strangely sympathetic. This too is an accurate portrayal; don’t be fooled. At times you can see the kind of fire of obsession in his eyes when he looks at Vicky, on and in whom he has pinned all his fresh creative hopes. It's a hunger to possess and consume, but isn’t sexual. He wants to have her artistically. And to my view, Anton Walbrook — previously seen in that other prescient classic, Gaslight (1940) — plays the role almost explicitly thus.

In the scene where he informs her feverishly of his dream to make her a star, the frenzied glint of lust in his eyes, the collective eye of the audience is drawn to his hand gripping the arm of the chair, flexing almost convulsively; lust here, certainly, but not of the flesh. The libido at work and on display here is intelligent, intellectual. Later in the pivotal scene we see Craster, with whom Lermentov is locked in fierce conflict over the body of Vicky, shouting at him hotly you’re jealous of her! — yes! why deny it — Yes!

But not in a way that you’d ever understand!

***

It's not just that Craster is straight. (And therefore, according to Lermontov, whom I am reading subtextually, it is impossible for him to look at a woman's body without thinking of what he can gain from it.) It's the ambiguity of the sentence, jealous of, signifying both the desire to possess the ballerina and to become her, and here we are hovering over the edge of the way in which it's impossible to extricate being gay from being transgender, that these are really the same phenomenon, expressing themselves in importantly different ways.

It's also that Craster is young. He is young and he is not yet disillusioned. He believes in the promise of his talent and his marriage — the awful violating act of academic theft committed against him is but a distant memory to him now. He feels himself to have triumphed over it. He forgot that with triumph comes debt.

In the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale version, the story opens describing how a little girl, Karen, is poor, and she has uncomfortable badly-made shoes which rub her feet raw and red. That is the beginning image that sets the tone for the triumph of the red shoes, where she gets what she wishes for a moment, which then of course ends in disaster. To me that seems portentious, in the sense that what we triumph over is never left behind, and we always bear the mark of the thing we vanquish in us, whether we are later destroyed by it or not.⁷

The shoes are not cursed in the original story. The fact that once Karen starts dancing in them she's unable to stop is an unintended consequence of what’s supposed to be a blessing: the shoes that don't come off when you dance. That this kind of dynamic is true, undeniably, is part of my horror at the notion of the “best life”. I am just not that confident that I always know what it is; I’m suspicious of those who think they do. I've been wrong so many fucking times, and so have you! It is lack of reflection that hides this, nothing else. I'm not saying that I know nothing about what is good for me, or that anyone else knows better, or that this is any excuse for avoidance and inaction. But these things are not easy to discern. Sometimes you wake up after you get everything you wanted and you realise, as Adorno described it in his letters to Walter Benjamin, that this is not it at all. (Adorno was referencing Proust.)⁸

Craster, in the movie, doesn't realise this yet. But Lermontov doesn't either, evidently, since he's still trying to get his rocks off and win eternal relevance through Vicky, and he's old and should really know better. It's just that he's been cast out of the domain of the family, and love, by his queerness or perhaps by something else, by his difficulties, something else, who knows. So unlike Craster he has no alternative. Art is the only thing that he can love.

And yet the fact that career ambition is so plainly demented does not make romantic love or family or brotherhood any more sane. It does not mean that subsuming yourself to the cause of the family would make you feel any more satisfied. Powell and Pressburger do well, even by our own modern standards, at avoiding the sentimentality of portraying Vicky and Craster's love as essentially any better. There's even this beautiful stupid weird moment where they're laying together in a carriage and Craster is pre-reminiscing about it, looking forward to re-living it rather than just living it the first time. This is classic academic nonsense. And so the comfort of human love that Lermontov disdains is not indeed inherently self-justifying. We are not supposed to think it’s good purely because he disdains it.

This position is still relatively sophisticated. Even today, when we are supposed to be beyond this, our essentially childish desire for there to be some type of safehaven in the world leads disillusionment with one area or aspect of life to generate excessive credulity in the salutary power of another.

If you think of life as a puzzle or a problem, then it is easy to swing between despair and elation of thinking you've finally solved it, realising you haven't, thinking this time you have it, etcetera. First I'll try this; that didn't work — I'll try something else, no that didn't work either. To keep trying to “win at life” is to essentially engage on the terms of the addict. Just one more hit and I'll be satisfied; ready and able to walk away.

Whatever drives this bone-deep fear of irrelevance — what sustains the delusion that immortality through art or science or commerce can ever be attained — whatever it is has got to be the same thing that drives people to theft and to fraud. Something that always used to puzzle me is why people who succeed with fraud don't stop after they get some vaunted job, or get rich, or get tenure. (Andy has a theory about it here.) But a lot of behaviour is like an addiction in the sense of reinforcing itself. Why would you stop, I guess? Who's going to stop you? Once you make it so far without penalty, you start to believe your own bullshit, whatever narrative you tell yourself that keeps you from keeping up at night. Anything to avoid a confrontation with reality.

But, to paraphrase Keynes, whose name simply has to appear when discussing both ballet and economics, in the long run we are all irrelevant. We are now only haggling about timing. Surely you don't think you are going to be Aristotle! There's ONE Aristotle, one Confucious... even Shakespeare has only had his run for 400 years. And then the heat death of the universe, then what. When I went to the Parthenon, on the foothills, there are monuments to long-forgotten playwrights who were heralded by the romans — the greek playwrights the romans loved the best. We don't even have copies of their plays now. We have no idea what they said.

That way we all go, with vanishing exception. And so if this is not workaholism, then I'm afraid it is simply insanity. The Red Shoes can make us see that. Reading Vicky as Lermontov’s victim would be too easy. She was free of him; she left, then she came back. Why? She wanted to be famous? She wanted to be great? Fame or else work; marriage is no replacement. Love and vocation are two different things. Maybe she had never thought about her earlier wish, her conflation of dancing and life, too deeply; she had simply gone with Craster when that felt good, she had never really confronted the trade-off, and by now she had convinced herself that she would never have to.

You can see sometimes on their bodies, the lightness of people who believe that they have escaped from a trap. Indeed it's possible to escape from traps in this world. Unfortunately, sometimes a narrow escape does nothing but inflate one’s private ego, and then you start to believe that traps are no problem for you, and that's how it pulls you back in.

***

Two stills from the remastered version; Lermontov above, and below we have Vicky and Craster. I believe the film is out of copyright, so these are in the public domain.

1. Indeed, I think a misconception oppressor groups have about civil rights struggles is that the oppressed group is fighting for justice when in fact they are fighting for survival because they cannot really go on in the status quo. The oppressor group’s collective delusions about the experience of subjugation work against them in this area.

2. This is not only hearsay — I and others have verified these stories in some cases.

3. It’s not just me who thinks this! The BFI thinks so too!

4. I only knew about it because Letterboxd interviewed Emma Stone on youtube and she put it in her top 4 of all time. Social media is good actually.

5. Find out in this surprisingly chatty Britannica article here: https://www.britannica.com/list/murder-most-horrid-the-grisliest-deaths-of-roman-catholic-saints

6. Aronofsky denies the influence. I thought he was lying until I discovered that Natalie Portman still apparently doesn’t know about this film’s existence! She says nobody had ever made a ballet psychological thriller before Black Swan in this demented interview. This kind of ignorance is just embarassing.

7. The story would not work if it was magical blue shoes. For that to work the girl would've had to have cold blue feet at the beginning.

8. I came across this in Jansen (2003).