I Would Like to See It: Drowning by Numbers

No director has ever made me feel such intense and aching love as has Peter Greenaway, both for the characters and settings of his lushly baroque films and for the medium he has mastered, reinterpreted, and changed via seismic shift for nearly half a century. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without Greenaway there is no Aronofsky (for good or ill), whose Mother! virtually robs the tomb of Greenaway’s The Baby of Macon, no Wes Anderson with his antiseptic and infantilized versions of Greenaway’s famous sets, no Fuller’s Hannibal with its collision of aristocratic refinement and grotesque appetites. Highbrow and low, American cinematic culture owes Greenaway a profound debt. Watching Drowning by Numbers I was struck as though for the first time by the depth of Greenaway’s impact not just on the art form I love best, but on the way I see the world.

The tender dirtiness of Cissie 3’s (Joely Richardson) request that her husband “kiss [her] backside” as they lie together on the side of the road near a pair of dead cows invokes not just the relationship between death, uncleanness and sexuality but the inextricability of these forces. Young Smut’s (Jason Edwards) memorial fireworks deconstruct our social rituals around observance of death, transforming grief into spectacle, mourning into wanton celebration. Rituals of baptism come apart into bursts of liberatory androcide. First a bath, safe and domestic, then the wild and untameable sea, and finally the sterile tedium of a swimming pool: the promise of adulthood rendered lifeless and artificial. Throughout the film Greenaway weaves together fairy tales and folk games — some real and some invented — to make sense of our maturation and mortality, of the ways in which we build society to contain us and then rebel against its precepts.

The games Smut describes to us create a world on the cusp of adolescence, a transitional and tumultuous moment ruled by repetition, punishment, arbitrary judgment, and desire. Counting leaves and bees and the hairs on a loved one’s head in a futile effort to impose structure on a world both ruled and abandoned by it. The young boy’s botched self-circumcision also provides an inroad to the film’s deep ambivalence toward gender roles, a viewpoint at once poignant and prosaic. When asked why she drowned her husband, Cissie 1 (Joan Plowright) replies that it was because he never cleaned his feet, because his buttocks were hairy, because his nose was too red. The signs and symbols of aging are inescapably gendered and deeply entwined with the generational discontent of the three Cissies in their marriages. It’s Greenaway at his best, pulling back the curtain and inviting us to look at something at once highly regimented and utterly, gloriously wild.