Destroy, She Said

by Marguerite Duras

  DURAS: Do you have children?

  RIVETTE: No.

  DURAS: Don't get the idea that things were easy for me before I arrived at the point where I said to my son: “Do what you want to.” I had to do a fantastic amount of work on myself. Moreover, I believe I wouldn't have written Destroy if I hadn't had this child. He's wild. He's impossible, but he has found something . . . something that's outside of all the rules. A freedom. He enjoys the use of his freedom. He possesses it. This is extremely rare. And I often observe hippies: my son goes around with them, there's a whole group of them . . . What is curious is that when you go from one to the other, you see hardly any difference at all in their relations with adults. It is within the group that they become different, do you see what I mean? They form a sort of common front against us. A friendly one. Not a violent one. But they all turn the same face toward us. When you come right down to it, you can't get to know them. You're going to think that it's because I have this son that I defend hippies: that would be too simple . . . One of his pals slept through the baccalaureat exam. They found him there asleep. Not a word. He didn't write a single word. But we've got far away from the film . . .

  RIVETTE: Not all that far . . .

  DURAS: Were you perhaps shocked by the violence? By the way Bernard Alione was attacked during the meal together? I cut some of the violence out . . .

  NARBONI: On the contrary, I found this scene very powerful and very true to life, all the more so in that it was a very difficult scene to do and the character Bernard might have been rejected early on and relegated to a sort of position as an outsider that would have been comfortable for the others, for the spectator, for the film, and for the director too . . .

  DURAS: He isn't lost, is he?

  RIVETTE: Exactly. I was very much afraid, during all the beginning of the scene, that it would become a real . . .

  DURAS: A trial? That was the danger . . .

  RIVETTE: And to be truthful, I was more than relieved at the precise moment it became clear that he too could be “saved"—that isn't the proper word. . . .

  DURAS: Changed.

  RIVETTE: Yes, that's it.

  DURAS: He asks to stay. One day.

  RIVETTE: And we realize he can be loved . . . too.

  DURAS: That's right.

  RIVETTE: And that moment is the point of greatest intensity in your film, and after it . . .

  DURAS: To me it's the moment . . . yes, there's no doubt that it's the one that's most important. “We could love you too.” When they tell him that, they are being absolutely sincere. Aggression had to be prevented. They are indiscreet. They are immodest. But they don't attack Bernard Alione. I don't know, though, if that's the way it appears in the film . . . I didn't have them eat, you see. That may interest you. Because Bernard Alione would have been the only one eating. As in the book. He would have been ridiculous simply because he was eating, whereas eating is something that everybody does, both people who are asses and people who are not. So I eliminated this false ridiculousness . . .

  NARBONI: And Gélin acquitted himself remarkably well in this scene.

  DURAS: I replaced certain things. When Stein asks Gélin: “What sort of work do you do?” for example. Before, in the book, he answered: “Canned food.” Now he answers: “I'm a real-estate promoter.” I thought “canned food” was too easy a way to ridicule him . . . It has something touching about it, and something naive too . . .

  NARBONI: And the sort of haste on the part of Elisabeth, who finally almost goads Bernard into leaving just when he's been asked outright to stay—do you intend this to be interpreted as a still greater distance from people, perhaps, than that of her husband, or a panicked reaction on the part of someone who feels close to . . .

  DURAS: This is the last time she panics. After this her panic disappears. The last death-throes, if you like. Before she dies to her former life. When they say to her: “You vomited,” it's her life that she's vomited out. She doesn't know this. All she knows is that it was gratifying. Elisabeth expresses herself in this movement. She leaves to protect her “interests,” interests that she then vomits up.

  NARBONI: In the book there was a sentence about Elisabeth that I don't remember in the film, a very severe phrase, something like: “She is not capable of loving,” or “she will never love . . .”

  DURAS: I took it out. The book had: “She could have loved you . . . If she'd been capable of loving.” It was too much. It rang false.

  NARBONI: And the film thereby emphasizes even more the “final panic” aspect of the scene. The book seems less forgiving at the end.

  RIVETTE: All the times she panics . . . It's something I didn't think of at all when I saw the film—I suddenly had the feeling that the whole thing acted like successive emergences, from deeper and deeper levels, of material that Elisabeth has previously repressed, and that the film works somewhat as analysis does. I doubtless felt this very deeply during the film . . .

  DURAS: The card scene especially. It's practically an analysis . . .

  RIVETTE: The whole thing . . . But once we've said this, we doubtless shouldn't push the point too far, otherwise one would be tempted much too quickly to see Stein as the analyst, for example, whereas in fact, the roles are much more . . .

  DURAS: Evenly divided. Shared. During the meal.

  RIVETTE: Not only during the meal, but throughout the film: that is why the film cannot be reduced to a linear interpretation that one can immediately grasp: all through the film there is that elusiveness, that famous “gliding” from one role to another, so that it could just as well have been Max Thor as Stein, as Alissa too in a certain way, since all of them are in one way analysts, and also in another way analysands. Except that Elisabeth, perhaps, is purely and simply an analysand.

  DURAS: She remains an analysand. Except for one moment in the mirror scene, where the roles slip . . . where the censorship, particularly of the relation between persons, is lifted. The identity of Stein and Thor that I spoke about, which makes them practically interchangeable at the end of the film, shows up at a certain moment during the mirror scene: “How much we look alike” . . . Isn't that right? That is to say, there is a “gliding,” as you put it, from Elisabeth to Alissa. For a few seconds they are one and the same. This can be called love. Or the demand that communism makes.

  NARBONI: I find the film quite a bit more complex than the book. In the book one has somewhat the impression—which one loses in the film—that Stein is something of a dispenser of wisdom.

  DURAS: He says one thing about there being no need to suffer any more that illustrates what you are saying: “It's not worth it to suffer, Alissa, not ever again, not anybody, it's not worth it.” This is more or less what Bakunin said: “The people are ready . . . They are beginning to understand that they are in no way obliged to suffer.” Blanchot was . . . I don't want to distort his thought. Anyway, he wrote me a very upsetting letter. He hasn't seen the film yet. He said that to him Alissa was the pivot of the book, he saw her as continually seesawing between death and life. He saw her as facing death continually. Always on the point of being struck dead. At each minute of her life . . . People have said: “Stein is Blanchot.” For Philippe Boyer, in Quinzaine, Stein is the one who “speaks the desire of Thor,” and who is going to allow him to go beyond modesty, the rules of the outside world, the world of order. For him Alissa is—I quote: “the one who destroys and who brings on madness in all its power.” Many people have said that the characters in Destroy are mutants. That Stein especially is a mutant. I more or less agree.

  NARBONI: What struck me most was a sort of passage from numbness, in the full sense of the word . . .

  DURAS: A hippie numbness, almost . . .

  NARBONI: . . . to a waking state.

  DURAS: In Stein? Or in everybody?

  NARBONI: In all the characters. It is a film on a state of drowsiness, with escapes, with arousals from this state of numbness . . .

  DURAS: That pleases me a
great deal. I was very frightened while I was writing it. I was fear itself. I can't tell you the state I was in. A genuine fear though. Maybe that's what you were saying when . . . Or else the fear of being overcome by this numbness. I had no idea where it would take me. Or else I was afraid I'd wake up.

  NARBONI: The word “destroy” comes much later in the film than in the book: “Destroy, she said.” And the film has: “She said: ‘destroy.’ “

  DURAS: Because this caused lots of misunderstandings. Because, when Thor and Alissa said it, when it was said as one person to another, between just the two of them, people thought that it was a reference to an erotic intimacy that did not concern the others. In the film the word is said in public. I take it to be a slogan. Otherwise . . .

  3

  DURAS: . . . that's exactly what Lacan says about the word “Stein.”

  RIVETTE: With its German meaning of “stone” as well . . .

  DURAS: Yes. Lol V. Stein: paper wings; V., scissors; Stein, stone. Lacan had me meet him one night in a bar at midnight. He frightened me. In a bar in a basement. To talk to me about Lol V. Stein. He told me that it was a clinically perfect delirium. He began to ask me questions. For two hours. I more or less staggered out of the place.

  RIVETTE: But he didn't say anything to you about Destroy?

  DURAS: No. I don't think he'd read it yet. Perhaps he'll be sorry about the displaced person Lol V. Stein. I don't know. Blanchot talks to me about Alissa in that letter. He sees her “in the first stage of the relationship with death, in the death that she deals, and that she continually meets.” He says that we are all going to wreak capital destruction. He says wreak, make destruction. This wreak delights me. Blanchot is someone who fills you with love and joy. I am aware of what he says about Alissa when I see the film. Alissa may die for approaching Elisabeth Alione . . . Do you find her disturbing? I personally find her very disturbing . . . She wants to kill. That young girl from where?—from Manchester. That little English girl makes me think of Alissa . . . That little murderess. She is constantly seesawing between loving and killing. I hope this comes through in the film?

  RIVETTE: And at the same time this is balanced by her penchant for breaking things, as if she could break herself . . .

  DURAS: Perhaps because I wanted her to be very physical. The first thing we know about Stein, for example, is the word “Stein,” as the word has its effect on her. She says “Stein” . . . She takes the word inside her body. And then when she sees Stein, this merely confirms things. Alissa to me is completely physical . . . if you like. At a certain moment she talked too much, and I cut all that out. She talks more in the book than in the film.

  RIVETTE: In the film she acts by coming closer, by making contacts, even at a distance, by . . .

  DURAS: Tropisms . . . Nobody can bear her except Stein. I think that's what Blanchot means; she is not made for living and yet she is alive.

  RIVETTE: She is discomfort, in the strongest sense . . .

  DURAS: Yes, That is to say: she is anxiety itself. Lived anxiety. Lived innocently and with no recourse to speech. I can't talk about a character; I tell myself that the actors are going to read the thing, and say: see, she prefers Alissa to Stein . . . No, Stein is the character most like a brother to me.

  Would you like us to talk about conditions while shooting? The film was shot in fourteen days, after a month and a half of rehearsals, and it cost $44,000. I don't know whether that will interest your readers.

  . . . Just imagine: I have a hundred and thirty-six shots.

  RIVETTE: A hundred and thirty-six? I would have said many fewer. I would have said fifty.

  DURAS: There were a hundred and thirty-six shots, but a good sixty of them weren't used. The closeups of the meal. But I realized after shooting, during the rough cut, that what was interesting was the impact, for instance during the card game, of the other characters’ words on Bernard Alione. It wasn't the others saying “we're German Jews,” it was Bernard Alione reacting to this. Or rather having it thrown at him. Then we cut down drastically on the number of closeups in general. But in fourteen days . . . Just imagine: we sometimes shot closeups one after the other, without even numbering them—if you can imagine. That could have been dangerous. But it didn't matter. One must let oneself go.

  RIVETTE: What do you mean “let oneself go"?

  DURAS: Oh, I let myself drift along. Because I had used a certain emptiness in me as a starting point of the book. I can't justify that now. After the fact. There are things that are very obscure. Which aren't clear to me at all, even now. In the film. But which I want to leave like that. It doesn't interest me to clear them up. For example, the direction all through the scene of Alissa arriving. . . .

  NARBONI: . . . To what extent do you feel more or less tied to adaptations of your own novels? You have worked on several of them.

  DURAS: Destroy cancels out the rest of them.

  NARBONI: Even La Musica?

  DURAS: This was a deliberate gamble; the conversation itself was the subject of the film. The bet paid off, but . . . Were you afraid when you saw Destroy?

  RIVETTE: Yes. Fear, as a matter of fact, that the film would stop being uncomfortable.

  DURAS: I've been told that it's a frightening film. It frightens me.

  RIVETTE: I was afraid that it would be a film that would stop being frightening.

  DURAS: But Destroy represents a break with everything that I've written for films: the couple . . . It doesn't interest me any more at all now to do what I've already done before. I'd like to make another film on a text that I'm writing. It's called: Gringo's Someone Who Talks.

  RIVETTE: Would it be written directly for the screen?

  DURAS: No. Another one of those famous hybrid texts . . . And it would be a little like Destroy as well, that is to say a sort of superexposition of certain things—and the intrusion of the unreal, but not a voluntary one. That is to say that when it happens I leave it in. I don't try to pass it off as realism.

  RIVETTE: I wouldn't use the word “unreal.”

  DURAS: I nonetheless believe that that word isn't far off. But when I say the word “superexposition,” does it mean anything to you? And if I use the word “unreality,” you don't see. How about if I use the word “surreality"?

  RIVETTE: Yes, I'd understand that better, except that “surrealism” has the same connotations.

  DURAS: Hyper-reality. Yes. But where are we? This film . . . is not psychological in any way. We're not in the realm of psychology.

  RIVETTE: We're, rather, in the realm of the tactile.

  DURAS: Yes, that suits me fine . . . That cuts me off from everything else in a strange sort of way. The book too. Except for certain other books, such as Lol V. Stein, and The Vice-Consul. That still is all right with me. But the others . . . In Moderato Cantabile I was still getting in my own way. This was less true afterwards . . . But as for Destroy, I was really quite comfortable. Even though I was afraid. And at the same time, completely free. But frightened to death of being free . . .

  * Cahiers du Cinéma, November, 1969.