Give Every Man Thine Ear

A woman lies pale and immobile, half-submerged in a flooded room. Thin light streams through the dark interior, which is a curtained box of a suburban house. The watery grave of Gregory Crewdson’s “Untitled (Ophelia),” a photograph from his 2001 book “Twilight,” disturbs the viewer with its morbidity and a corresponding lack of reaction from the surrounding environment.

I saw this photograph for the first time when I was 12 years old. A friend e-mailed me a link to Crewdson’s photography along with some exhortation, “This is unbelievable. Check it out.” It was four years before I read “Hamlet” and five years before I discovered more art about suburban life, in movies like “American Beauty” and “The Graduate.” Yet some element of Crewdson’s photography struck a chord in my mind at the time. An indefinite characteristic of his dark suburban macabre resonated with me, a girl who had lived in a city for her entire life and knew the suburbs through only her parent’s childhood memories.

I returned to the photograph years later for a final paper during my first semester at Harvard. Over the course of the assignment, which used photography to talk about film, I realized how art could take part in a larger academic discourse.

The paper I wrote was for Expos 20, similar in style to one I would have written in an English class. Yet across disciplines at Harvard, faculty members invoke and interpret art in their own methodological style. Using Crewdson’s photograph as a point of departure, I set out to investigate how various departments viewed art in terms of its meaning, value, and intention.

“OCEANIC FEELING”

Assistant Professor of History and of Social Studies Andrew J. Jewett’s small office in a corner of Robinson Hall is lined with books, but he readily admits that art is not among the various disciplines he’s studied. Bespectacled and enthusiastic, Jewett stares perplexedly the image I’ve pulled up on my laptop. Though he has no formal background in art history, Jewett has done research into the cultural objectification of the middle class, and agrees to give my project a shot.

For this history professor, placing the photograph chronologically and analyzing details are the foremost methods of art interpretation. “There is this sort of reflection on the ceiling, which is sort of weird,” he begins. “There’s a plant that is knocked over in the back there. Everything else is upright.”

“Oh gosh, what is she floating in?” he asks with surprise. “This is difficult.”

“Water,” I answer.

“Well,” he replies, “if I hadn’t known what [the photo] was called, I would have thought, well, it could be blood, it could be chocolate, all sorts of other things.”

Nailing down the substance of drowning wasn’t the only ambiguity Jewett noticed in the image. “It’s hard to identify the [time] period. It could be in a number of different times, in terms of the age of the furniture, and the wallpaper especially. There’s really nothing in it that’s particularly modern except, maybe, the book.” The coffee-table book does indeed have a glossy sheen reminiscent of drugstore mass-market copies, and it provides the only anchor in a temporal vacuum. Having spent his academic career studying the past, it makes sense that cultural artifacts immediately pop out to Jewett.

Focusing on another relic of the cultural past, Jewett recalls the extensive genre of suburban films that center on suburban dissatisfaction. “The first thought I had,” Jewett says, “was of that movie ‘Far From Heaven’ … it’s got all these impossible things going around and people being trapped, and that was what resonated with me when I saw the house, first, and then thought of that movie.”

Film history continues to form the background of Jewett’s interpretation. For every idea he recognizes in the photograph another film pops into his head. “For some reason I just keep thinking of trains and trains of movies. It’s an entire genre, the sort of miserable suburbs movies.” Then he touches on something oddly appropriate, given the photograph’s watery theme. “There’s always the undercurrent of boundlessness—I think of a kind of oceanic feeling that, in some ways, is a positive—but in other ways is soporific … a life of valium, just self-sedation.” In grounding his interpretation with the history of mass culture he knows so well, it comes as no surprise that film anchors Jewett’s analysis.

Describing another movie about the suburbs in the 1950s, he recalls being left with an image of “a stultifying, repressive world.” He transfers this lasting impression to the world Crewdson created—but “Untitled (Ophelia)” is “more than stultifying,” he says. “This is deathly. Fatal.” Jewett imagines the suburbs of Crewdson’s world as malicious; symbolically or fictionally, it has broken down the last defenses of one unlucky inhabitant.

DOMESTIC CONSEQUENCES

“The first thing I think about is depression,” says Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, an enthusiastic young College Fellow in Women and Gender Studies (WGS) who teaches classes on topics ranging from the sex industry to gender politics. As an educator in WGS with a Ph.D. in sociology, Lakkimsetti’s interpretation focuses on feminist theory and psychology. “I think about Betty Friedan’s work from ‘The Feminine Mystique’ and the suburban housewife’s life,” she says. “I’m also thinking about how grotesque [the woman in the picture] is, and I’m not sure how to interpret that. If her grotesqueness is a way to represent depression, it’s almost as if she’s submerging in domesticity. She’s consumed by this ideal suburban life, a psychologically depressing space to be.”

Lakkimsetti heavily draws on Freidan’s research into suburban housewives from the 1960s, using images and ideas from Freidan’s study to explore emotions and background knowledge in the photograph. She imagines that Crewdson’s Ophelia exists in the unfulfilling world of housewives that Friedan examined. “I think it’s morning [in the photograph],” Lakkimsetti says, “and she is in her house after sending her husband and her kids away. That seems to me what I see in this—this whole idea of this idealized feminine domesticity.” Theory is the primary organizing force in this response, as Friedan’s study creates the lens through which Lakkimsetti views Crewdson’s morbid scene.

The suburban housewives are supposed to be happy to have this suburban home and a middle class lifestyle and a husband and a child,” she says. “As Betty Friedan says, the ‘problem without a name’ is that women are supposed to feel good about [their lives] but are not feeling fulfilled. They go to psychiatrists and therapy, but therapists … they’ll never acknowledge the women’s feelings of depression or lack of identity. This is what the picture presents for me.” A variety of disciplines coalesce in Lakkimsetti’s interpretation, which fits the interdisciplinary approach of her department.

The woman’s death in the photograph symbolizes the inner struggle of the housewife, Lakkimsetti says, in her attempt to overcome the oppressive expectations engendered by her role in society. “A certain idealized domesticity does [this] to a middle-class housewife.”

SHAM CEILING

For philosophy graduate student Aleksy I.V. Tarasenko-Struc, it is the synthesis of various details in the photograph that merit consideration. Taking advantage of the last warm days of the year, he is conducting office hours under a fiery red tree in the Yard when I approach him. He admits to me outright that there’s no real philosophical connection he can draw between this photograph and his studies, but he is intrigued nonetheless.

“[The photograph] seems to be about the kind of dazed paralysis that you might think is a piece of this kind of lifestyle,” he muses. “I sort of like how the figure is ... tacked on as an afterthought onto the rest of the image.” What lifestyle is he referring to—just a domestic one? Instead of specifying a time period or a cultural marker like suburbia, Tarasenko-Struc first makes a claim about the aura of the photograph, finding a unifying theme into which Ophelia is projected.

Our conversation reveals stranger elements to the picture that I had overlooked. “I like how the wall kind of gives way to this kind of patch of color,” Aleksy says, pointing at the amorphous ceiling.

“The ceiling reflects the water,” I suggest. “It doesn’t look like a real ceiling.”

He nods. “It looks like it’s taken from a watercolor painting. I like that. It makes this look like a diorama—it kind of no longer looks like a real home once you notice that. I like how it’s cut into three distinct parts—here’s the ceiling, there’s the home part, and there’s pool of water.”

“It’s kind of like a landscape,” I say. “A landscape inside a diorama.” This confusion of settings is key to the mystery of the photograph, which I realize is one of the elements that drew me to the picture to begin with. Its compelling to think about which elements remove the image from the real world and imbue it with a dreamlike sorrow.

OVERCOOKED STAGING

Art interpretation within the English department offered a completely different approach. Some faculty searched for meaning in terms of composition or theory, while others latched directly onto the Shakespearean reference and built their analysis of the photograph around their grounding in literature.

“This is a riff on [John Everett] Millais’ Ophelia,” writes Ernest Bernbaum Professor of literature Daniel Albright in an e-mail, referring to the English painter’s famous 1852 image of the doomed character. In his analysis, Albright focuses in on the formal elements of the photograph and draws meaning from the basic composition. “This Ophelia seems about to fall through the shiny reflective floor,” Albright offers, “as if the surface tension of our commonplace lives were so weak that we were all in danger of drowning if we relaxed our vigilance.”

In “Hamlet,” the majority of the action is contained within the increasingly tension-filled walls of a castle, Professor of English Gordon Teskey reminded me in an e-mail. Yet Ophelia’s death occurs outdoors—Ophelia sings songs and weaves flowers into her hair until her demise. Her death, immersed in the natural world, stands in contrast to the rest of the play, which divorces itself from nature through its ubiquitous indoor setting.

“In ‘Hamlet,’” Teskey writes, “the drowning of Ophelia is a catastrophe that precedes and is necessary to the catastrophe of the whole play. But Ophelia’s catastrophe is disconcertingly reported by Queen Gertrude in exceptionally lyrical, beautiful language. The scene that is painted in this language of Gertrude’s is outdoors, where a willow tree hangs over a stream.” Focusing on language in his interpretation, Teskey draws out the differences between the deaths of the two versions of Ophelia—the Shakespearean nature-death, and the Crewdson death, which is as unnatural as a death can be.

Not all English professors, however, were as impressed by Crewdson’s reworking of a classic image. For Visiting Professor of English Henri Cole, the crudeness of the death was inauthentic. “It seems kind of kitschy,” he writes in an e-mail. “[It is] stagey and directive—why not a collie, instead of a woman in a slip?—and overcooked, like meat.”

Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography Robin E. Kelsey also criticized the photograph for being overly theatrical. “What cultural work might this pastiche of pre-Raphaelitism and cinematic fantasy be doing?” he asked in an e-mail. “Is it staging the very unconsciousness that it requires to be taken seriously as art? I have my doubts.”

DEATH AND EUPHORIA

Visual and Environmental Studies Visiting Lecturer David W. Hilliard studied with and worked alongside Crewdson at Yale University. Hilliard talks about the childhood influences that led to Crewdson’s fascination with suburbia. “I don’t think I can be as objective as some people,” he says about the photograph, “because I know so much about the process. When I look at the photograph, I immediately think about what I know about him. His father was a psychotherapist, and he’d meet people in his home office. Gregory would listen through the door and floorboards as kid, and he picked up on some strange things. His work is the analysis of what he heard through walls, as well as his love of film, fiction, and art. The image is a distillation.” There is the difference between fact and conjecture in the biography Hilliard provides and the intelligent analysis offered by other Harvard professors.

“When I look at the couch in the photo, it looks like a therapist’s couch,” Hilliard says, guessing that Crewdson took this childhood image he associated with his father’s practice and transplanted it into his probing photograph. “The suburban living room also is reminiscent of the work of Steven Spielberg with his focus on twilight stuff,” he says. “Crewdson consistently employs ‘twilight’ as a narrative tool in his works … this light often acts as metaphor for passage, loss, fear, obscurity, and wonder.” Hilliard’s focus on the effect of light makes sense, coming from his own background in photography. Yet it also harkens to the philosophical perspective I heard from Aleksy, where the effect of the water’s reflection and framing were essential to the piece’s underlying meaning.

While Cole and Kelsey criticized Crewdson’s work for being derivative and overly theatrical, Hilliard suggests that the conceptual elements that motivate these criticisms are the key to understanding Crewdson’s work. In a sense, his work is intentionally overdone. “He loves the production [process] so much. These elaborate sets would be built. He loves hiring a set crew, actors, and assistants. An incredible cast of characters comes together for one photograph, which is really just a still from a film. In a way it’s strange. I think in some reviews he’s been criticized: where a film director would have a movie, he gets a slice. But that’s what he likes.”

“Photography, unlike a film, allows you to linger on just one thing,” Hilliard says. “Instead of a series of images, you get one image that you project the whole movie onto. Depending on your history or your perspective as viewer, you can look at and think of Shakespeare, Spielberg, domesticity, gender, or women’s issues … I like that they’re so open to interpretation yet so simple.” This summary of the photograph highlights its ultimate ambiguity. “Untitled (Ophelia)” can yield a vast array of interpretations, each one equally nuanced and important for reaching a multi-perspective understanding. The essential components shared by different sensibilities elucidate the most important parts of the picture—its commentary on suburbia, its filmic narrative.

Hilliard also teaches me something new about this photograph I love. To create the illusion of deep water, Crewdson cut off the legs of furniture and actually flooded the set only a few inches deep. “She’s drowning in nothing,” Hilliard says. “She is probably lying on the floor.” For its barrage of interpretive violence, the theatrical setup is more functional and simple than imagined.  “You don’t think about it at first, but she’s drowning psychologically, not physically. She looks like she could be alive. It’s death and euphoria at the same time.”

—Staff writer Leanna B. Ehrlich can be reached at lehrlich@college.harvard.edu.