D.S.K.: Windows and Walls

Something there is that loves a wall: France. The wall that opaquely divides the private from the public has been in the spotlight since the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the most revealing and trenchant remarks I’ve read on the “D.S.K. affair”—meaning the French outrage over his perp walk and the widespread (and particularly American) reproach to the French media for not having made enough, in the past, of accusations regarding his sexual conduct and possible misconduct—come from an interview with the French sociologist Dominique Wolton in yesterday’s Journal du Dimanche:

Americans have an obsession with transparency, but everything shouldn’t be made public. They themselves don’t yield to it, happily. Even if a man or a woman cheat in their private life or come to an arrangement, that doesn’t authorize journalists to inquire everywhere. Transparency can be totalitarian. The “right to information” itself has limits in a universe that’s saturated with information, in which it can resonate very well with voyeurism and demagogy. The greatness and the risk of the profession of journalism is to not say everything.

Of course transparency can be totalitarian—when it’s applied to private individuals and exposes their intimate affairs to those in power. But opacity can be equally totalitarian: when those in power are shielded from scrutiny by the presumptions of power. The American way of politics is to expect those who seek power to yield a significant amount of their privacy on the principle that their fitness for office is based largely on their personal qualities. We expose public officials to an extraordinary scrutiny and air the details of their private lives because of the notion that politics is as much a matter of character as of ideas. If, to French eyes, American reporting converges to gossip, much of French reporting, seen from here, looks like the analysis of speeches (that’s why some American intellectuals fantasize about the elevated level of public discourse there).

Unlike character, ideas are something one tailors; speeches, something one controls; a public image, something one tries to fabricate to one’s own specifications. Wolton discusses that image-fabrication in relation to Strauss-Kahn’s arrest:

We’re in an illusion of equality: the treatment is the same for all American citizens, so, also, for DSK. But everyone isn’t the head of the IMF and doesn’t have hundreds of photographers following him! There’s a thrill in bringing down a powerful person in the name of equality, but the fact of being powerful doesn’t suffice to make you guilty. The right to the image and to human dignity has been brushed aside. The Americans, the great proponents of individual liberties, have trampled on all the values that we have in common.

It’s worth remembering, as I mentioned the other day, that France has traded its hereditary aristocracy for an aristocracy of achievement, which is why the notion of special treatment for Strauss-Kahn wins widespread favor there. As for the “right to the image,” it’s an even greater illusion that the public image is a sort of creation, a personal art work, that benefits in effect from the notion of freedom of expression—that one is entitled to appear as one puts oneself forth, until proven otherwise. The United States is the land of the image—and here, we are all stars in the Hollywood of our dreams, but, as in the real Hollywood, we can’t freely choose our roles but only negotiate them. Whereas in France, as I wrote here several weeks ago, social life is inherently theatrical—walking into a café, a person puts on a game face and betrays the impression that he’s being watched, that he’s on stage. In France, the social art form is still theatre, which is why the greatest French filmmakers are either the most sublimely theatrical (Jean Renoir) or the most radically anti-theatrical (Robert Bresson), or else derived their idea of movies from Hollywood (Jean-Luc Godard and, overall, the French New Wave). The “right to the image” vanishes here as soon as one enters the public realm, and, as movie actors know, they don’t control their image: in theatre, the actor gives; in the cinema, the actor is taken from.

There are a few other reasons for the French attitude in favor of what Wolton calls “the respect for the public-private frontier” of public officials. In general, the kinds of flirtations and propositions that seem scandalous here are widely accepted in France, in part because French society is more rigidly conditioned and socialized, and places firmer upper bounds on conduct—and below those bounds, a much greater amount of low-level anarchy is acceptable. For instance, ethnic jokes and stereotypes haven’t gone out of fashion because actual racial insults and anti-Semitism are illegal (as seen in the John Galliano affair); fisticuffs (anecdotally) are more likely after a minor traffic accident or barroom incident and are far less likely to become matters of law, because guns are less common and the fights are less likely to get out of hand; and low-level violence of all sorts is more tolerable: for instance, several weeks ago, while walking around in his district, a French politician, Jérôme Cahuzac, slapped in the face a young constituent who addressed him insultingly by using the familiar “tu” rather than the formal “vous” and other coarse language (comically, Cahuzac also responded to him in kind, telling him, “Tu me respectes. Tu ne me tutoies pas!”). His gesture has met with no public outcry and no official reproach.

France is, after all, a society of walls: the quintessential French institution is the courtyard and its wall, which separates the residence from the street and renders the building itself invisible to the eyes of passers-by. And one great film that makes the wall a crucial part of its visual schema is Jean Renoir’s “The Testament of Dr. Cordelier,” his 1959 version of the Jekyll/Hyde story, starring Jean-Louis Barrault both as the scientist Cordelier and the monster Opale. When it came out here on DVD in 2007, I wrote in the magazine that “the drama is set in contemporary Paris and its plush suburbs, where the high walls and hidden courtyards play a central role: in Renoir’s philosophical view, these barriers and recesses embody the hidden desires and bourgeois repression that drive Dr. Cordelier to conduct his ill-advised experiments.” Those walls also kept out of the public eye the transformation of the respected and accomplished expert into a predator.