I just finished watching the film version of this amazing play. Every respected critic or literary authority who broke it down (that I’ve read, anyway) basically agreed that the major themes were revenge, reality versus illusion, etc.
While I tend to agree with their analysis, I took away something extra after watching the interaction between George and Martha: they truly **loved** each other. But none of the treatises I've read that deal with the play come remotely close to agreeing with me.
One glaring example is: why would a couple that only lives for these scathing fun and games take the time and effort building up the illusion of having a son in the first place? Also, I believed that the constant verbal sparring might of been their only way (at that point) to express their love to one another. Finally, there is the telling closing scene where George is tender towards Martha knowing full well that he had shattered her built up walls and that she knew how to fear again. It was that poignant scene where I got the impression that they were going to build their marriage again, albeit from scratch, based on a sturdier foundation.
Did anyone else feel this way after seeing this movie?
I haven’t seen the movie all the way through but did know the stage play fairly well at one point. (Seen a production and then did scene studies)
I think the fabrication of the child started as a way of them coping with being childless.
A good-natured, shared delusion of a young in love couple. Over the years as their personal issues started turn them into a bitter old married couple, the fictional child (like a real child can) became the thing that ties them together and a weapon for either of them to wield.
I think the removal of that delusion either lets them restart or lets them let go.
Excellent observations all around. However, I have to quibble with you about “the fictional child (like a real child can) became the thing that ties them together and a weapon for either of them to wield” statement. If this imaginary son was to be used as part of their arsenal, why did they agree between them never to mention him in the first place? Or was the agreement to never mention his (non)existence in front of other people?
One of my favorite movies - the acting is near perfect, and the characters have so much depth…I read the play, but have never seen it performed live.
IIRC, it was Martha who continually disillusioned herself into believing they had a child; George went along for the ride knowing he could pull the plug at a point where he needed to “have hand”.
Besides the themes of revenge and reality/illusion, there’s also the games that people play in their relationships, i.e. you don’t always know what goes on behind closed doors.
I agree with you, Darth, that G & M love each other despite their warfare, and the end is a new beginning, although who knows how many times they’ve played the same game?
While loving someone can sometimes involve grief, struggle and pain I like to think that genuine love for another human being means no deliberate abuse. A couple who love each other will use those times of disagreement and discomfort to build a stronger, more harmonic relationship, I think.
George and Martha may have begun their union in love but somewhere along the line their own insecurities, perhaps heightened by the loss of their dreams, caused them to use their turbulent times to search out in each other those areas where each was the most painfully vulnerable, and like mirror images, use them as trump cards for their next session. It’s an abuse cycle.
That’s how I see it. It’s a mutually self-destructive bond. And self-damaging people haven’t learned how to love themselves enough to protect themselves from harmful others much less learned how to love others.
Many dysfunctional people form very strong relationship bonds from feelings other than love. Some form bonds of grief. Some of pain. Others of narcissitic flattery or one-up-manship. Looks like George and Martha had it all and didn’t even know it.
For what it’s worth, Willard Maas and Marie Menken (the real life couple that George and Martha were based on) remained together for forty years until their deaths.
I agree with this. A perfect example of your description would be the scene where Martha and George form a strange unified front when they start hurling their abuses against Nick, calling him their “houseboy.”
However, I still contend that they do love each other. Take, for example, Martha’s startling revelation during the kitchen scene with Nick. Martha exclaims, “There is only one man in my life who has ever…made me happy. Do you know that? One!”
I thought the agreement was not to mention him to other people since… that would clearly make them crazy.
It could also work for them to have come to an agreement to not mention him to each other anymore. That way they could keep a private ideal version of him to themselves.
I see what you mean. By now the three of them are so rip-roaring drunk that it seems they are spewing nonsense, but there can be grains of truth in booze talk too.
Wasn’t Martha a “daddy’s girl?” I took this sentence to be her killing both of her kitchen birds with one stone. Only her perfect daddy through whom she got her sense of worth and power could be that man in my mind.
After I responded last night I was thinking about my post and wondered if there isn’t a part of all of us who would like to believe that love can be unconditional, that there’s nothing you can do to another person that “love” can’t conquer, that if a certain person fulfills some need in us there is always the hope that we’ll get it right tomorrow.
I’m not sure George filled any of Martha’s narcissistic needs. He was a failed surrogate father figure in my interpretation.
Maybe that’s the love/hate affair we have with George and Martha - that we can create a marital love that tolerates all. And my reaction to that in the land of reality is fear because it is dangerous.
While we’re at it could somebody please explain that ending to me where George says he “ate the telegram” and the Sandy Dennis character drunkenly acknowledges this as the truth? WTF? This made NO sense to me! What was the point of that entire exchange?
I wouldn’t put any stock into Honey’s reaction here, because she was a basketcase at this stage, if I recall. The poignant part of that scene was George saying, “I ate it”. Because by saying that, he knew, and Martha knew, there was no way to prove him wrong. It was all made up, so she could deny the reality of the death by demanding real world evidence of it. If he ate it up, then he robbed her of any hope at all of forcing him to ‘prove’ the death…thereby ‘killing’ their son irreversibly.