David and Lisa
1962, directed by Frank Perry
The names “David” and “Lisa” are so common that anyone might take them for generic placeholders protecting the identities behind Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin’s novella, the source of Frank Perry’s David and Lisa. One might think it’s no more than a curious coincidence that the world’s most famous sculpture is called David and the most famous painting is the Mona Lisa. One might think so, that is, until late in the film when the characters visit the Philadelphia Art Museum, opening the possibility that the film says as much about art as about psychology.
On further reflection, David’s rigid bearing makes him rather statuesque, and Lisa spends much of her time drawing. Kate describes David as an ideal type, like Michelangelo’s marble figure, and when he throws an ashtray at Dr. Swinford’s clock he reenacts the blow on Goliath that the famous statue is poised for. David likes to play chess, apparently more comfortable with hard figurines than with human flesh. Likewise, Lisa’s schizophrenic confusion between two identities is analogous to the famous ambiguity of Leonardo’s great portrait, whose location in the Louvre is hinted at in the Paris-themed party, and like the Mona Lisa her other name starts with “M”. When Lisa first approaches David, she sits in the rectangular frame of an interior window like a living portrait. When David returns from his home, the two are reunited in a 70-second shot pairing him the whole time with a bust in the stairway and her with a picture on the wall.
David’s chief symptom is a compulsive aversion to being touched, and when Lisa nestles herself in the embrace of a sculpture at the museum, a guard promptly reminds them that a sculpture is also not to be touched. At least in David’s conscious mind, the human touch is linked with death, and becoming like a statue is one way to resist the ravages of time. He’s fascinated with clocks, but in his nightmares a clock becomes a fatal weapon, and Dr. Swinford’s smashed clock reveals that time is his enemy, the Goliath towering over him. He’s oddly particular about the precision of clocks, wishing to invent a radio-controlled timepiece that would synchronize the world. Apparently his wish to master time is another means of staving off death.
There are many ways, though, that a compulsive person might try to resist death. David’s particular symptom may mimic an objet d’art, but it doubtless has a sexual component as well, and we’re allowed some insight into his feelings there. In Dr. Swinford’s office he finds a cigarette box from Rome with a Renaissance-style pair of clasped hands (vaguely evoking Michelangelo’s Birth of Adam), which he calls “corny”, though the picture is clearly echoed at the end when he accepts Lisa’s hand. His revulsion to physical contact is supposed to keep death at bay, but its more definite result is to preclude sex, and his parents give a clue to the reason. He hates his mother, who’s evidently an incurable snob, and he has contempt for his weak father whom he calls a “marshmallow”. Unable to identify with either parent, it’s not surprising that he’d find a sexual relationship challenging, but when his father finally stands up to his mother it’s a step on his way to healing.
It’s no accident that David’s parents’ personalities reflect two common attitudes to art – snobbery and helplessness. The snob uses art to feed the ego, and the abject attitude looks up to art as an impenetrable object of awe or worship. David manages to combine both attitudes, adopting a superior posture in public (“Exercise is for idiots!”) but crying pitifully when left alone. His statue-like behavior says a lot about his inner life, but it also calls attention to the gulf that so often inserts itself between people and artworks – either from above or from below – interfering with a proper appreciation.
Lisa’s symptom complements David’s, completing a critique of art’s place in modern Western society. She speaks only in rhymes, and she won’t engage with people unless they also rhyme. Her habit corresponds to the poetic symmetry expected of classical artworks, including the Mona Lisa. It’s important, though, that Lisa’s rhymes do not sound poetic. They’re childish (“big black cow, big fat sow”), grating (“I’m not a lump, and I like to jump”), or frantic (“David, Navid, Lavid, Savid, Tavid….”). They represent the emptiness of pure formalism, a tendency that divorces art from considerations of its subject and its purpose. It’s controversial, for instance, whether or not the Mona Lisa was composed to fit an elaborate combination of golden ratios, but in any case, reducing it to its geometry can distract from the humanity in it.
The common denominator in all of this, which both protagonists should help us to realize, is that our society likes to treat art with a kind of preciousness that ultimately diminishes it. A statue too good to be touched, a painting whose virtues are a sacred mystery, or an artwork too lofty for any consideration of its practical benefits bespeaks an attitude that masquerades as sophistication but is actually a sign of bourgeois fussiness.
From this point of view, David’s and Lisa’s symptoms share a common root, and David’s seemingly opposite parents are not so different after all. Each is overly protective in some way, his mother pushing him toward an Ivy League education and his father wishing “to make the world over… so that nothing ever could scare you or disappoint you.” Each holds an idealistic expectation for him, the same way people demand an imaginary perfection from art.
We needn’t infer from this argument that museums, for example, should relax their restrictions, allowing visitors to handle their sculptures. There are valid reasons for conservation, but there should also be a place in the world for public sculptures that people can touch and embrace as Lisa does.
For all that it might say about art, David and Lisa gives at least equal weight to the humanity in its characters, but the conceptual analogy to art goes hand in hand with the human story. They’re not separate threads. Like most good films about pathological psychology, the lessons extend to ordinary life. David’s and Lisa’s journeys toward greater freedom from their symptoms can also help us to overcome inherited ideas and social neuroses that separate us from each other and from the fruits of creative expression.
It’s remarkable how closely both of their journeys dovetail, even while their progress remains almost indiscernible. First Lisa observes David on his arrival, then David watches Lisa interacting with John, each displaying their main symptoms when being observed. Lisa approaches David, asking him to play with her, then David approaches Lisa in the art room. Each then tests the other’s limits, first when David tries to stop rhyming, then when Lisa drives him back across a room with an outstretched finger.
This alternating pattern then carries over from the personal relationship to therapeutic breakthroughs. David is the first to accept something his therapist says, repeating to Simon what Dr. Swinford had told him, that Lisa can’t help her actions. Next, after David calls her “a pearl of a girl,” Lisa finally admits to John that she’s a girl. Despite each of them resisting human connection, David fantasizes about being the son of a black woman he saw cradling her child at the station, and Lisa seeks the embrace of the museum sculpture. David shows a flash of self-awareness when he tells Dr. Swinford it doesn’t matter what other people think, then Lisa comes to admit that Muriel and Lisa are the same person. David asserts his autonomy by running away from home, seeking shelter in Dr. Swinford’s school, and later Lisa flees the school, seeking shelter in the art museum.
In most of these cases David goes first. Lisa seems to look up to him, and on two occasions she draws circles right after David makes diagrams of clocks, as if imitating him. Nevertheless, when it’s time for a courageous breakthrough, she goes first. When David finds her on the museum steps she speaks to him without rhyming, inspiring him to gather his own courage and ask for her hand. It’s a powerful moment, and the story might have ended here if the psychological drama were the only substance of it – but the private mental breakthroughs in David and Lisa also tell a greater story, ostensibly about our relationship to art, but also offering us an escape from the mental trap of preciousness, from the impulse to lock things or people up in a misguided effort to preserve them. Until David and Lisa hold hands, they’ve been living like museum pieces, he on a pedestal and she in a frame – but in the final shot we watch them from above, framed between the portico’s columns, stepping down into the real world.
CONNECTIONS:
The Blood of a Poet – Statues associated with immortality; critique of society’s overly precious concept of art
Vivre sa vie – Overestimation of art at the expense of real life
Diva – Argument that a proper relationship with art aims not for worship but for intimacy