Candice Wuehle
CAMP AND COPING IN CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7
I.
About halfway through Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, the film’s heroine reaches up and removes part of her head.
Not her head, really, but a pouf of blonde wig-hair that has been affixed to one of those deconstructed rococo updos that Brigitte Bardot claimed were the result of ocean salt; a cocktail
of grime and beauty that turns hair into clay, into the material of art.
So when Cléo casually removes her hair, we see not so much a costume change (from doll-girl to real-woman) but a composition change. This simple gesture stuns me every time I watch this film because it's uncanny, because Cléo plucks her hair off so playfully. She is like a little girl ripping the heads of her Barbie dolls and laughing, but, of course, Cléo is her own Barbie.
II.
In the grand scheme of this grand film, the removal of a pouf of hair is fairly inconsequential. I watched Cléo from 5 to 7 for the first time while, like Cléo, awaiting a major medical event. I was twenty-five years old and, after being sent to a neurologist to find out why a small triangle of skin on my left cheek had gone numb, I discovered that I had a rare disease that was causing the bones in my skull and face to thicken and crowd the nerves and organs in my head.
My neurologist pressed her thumb and pointer finger together to make a circle. She explained that the skull contains thousands of tiny tunnels through which nerves pass. If the skull thickens, these tunnels compress or close completely. When this happens, she said, the nerves in the tunnels go dead. She closed the circle between her fingers to demonstrate until her hand morphed into a fist.
III.
So, of course, illness is the other reason why it guts me when Cléo takes off part of her wig. It is impossible in this moment not to see Cléo—quite unexpectedly—as a cancer patient, bald, ill, in decay. She appears, simultaneously, as an artist manipulating her material and as a human ever vulnerable in the face of precarity.
The body itself as site of artistry—not simply a canvas, but a co-creator in collaboration with the artist themselves—appears many times in the second half (the post-wig half) of the film as we observe Cléo observing street performers in the 14th arrondissement. She watches as a man plucks living frogs from a tank and appears to swallow the amphibians whole, their legs protruding from his lips, gelatinous and repulsive until he opens his mouth to spew a surreal fountain of water.
It is a man who has pierced the flesh of his forearm so that a thick black spike obtrudes all the way through one side of the arm to emerge on the other, however, that Cléo mentions to her friend. “I saw a man piercing his arm,” she says, seemingly apropos of nothing except perhaps the darkness that has penetrated the screen as the camera careens through a tunnel, “It made me sick. What a day. I’m out of it.”
IV.
Really, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise to me to learn that I needed a craniotomy to relieve the pressure my skull was exerting on my brain. Osteopetrosis is hereditary. Expecting not to be affected by a hereditary disease is like screaming into a canyon and expecting not to hear the echo, except the scream comes from someone else’s mouth.
Forty years before I lost sensation in my face, my grandmother began to experience severe pain in the same small triangle beneath her left eye. This little expanse of flesh has a name: the trigeminal, or fifth cranial, nerve. This has always sounded to me like a sort of somatic Bermuda Triangle, a place where life gets lost.
In actuality, pain in this region is a message from the body’s most militaristic nerves: the ones on the first line of keeping us alive, the ones trained to use force. Wolfgang Liedtke, a Duke neurologist specializing in head and facial pain, explains, “The trigeminal system evolved to provide sentinel information from the head and face, the location where animals have evolved to detect danger. If that system malfunctions, it can cause some of the most devastating pain that humans can suffer.” A feather across the cheek can be excruciating. Historically, trigeminal neuralgia was classified as a “suicide disease.” As in, the pain was so awful and so untreatable that its sufferers often committed suicide.
My grandmother visited multiple hospitals across the Midwest in search of a neurosurgeon who would perform a procedure that would deaden the nerve. Cruelly, the reason my grandmother could not find a neurosurgeon willing to perform the procedure was the same reason she was in pain: the bone was just too thick. For reasons of practicality and liability, there was simply no surgeon willing to try to cut into the dense skull.
I’ve heard this part many times, but somehow the end of the story never quite gets told. I think it finally surfaces because the world itself has changed, has become extraordinarily awful, and now has the room for extraordinarily awful memories. What I mean is that it is 2016 and my family is talking about the current president and for the first time that I can remember, one of us mentions the Holocaust, which prompts my grandmother to tell me that the surgeon who finally agreed to perform her surgery was a survivor.
“The drill bit broke because the bone was so hard,” she tells me. “He had to have another one flown in during the surgery. He worked on me for eleven hours straight.”
V.
The frog swallower and the flesh mutilator are especially shocking because Cléo from 5 to 7 is, to me, a film that is not just beautiful, but whose primary subject is beauty. This is evident in the film’s lavish opulence, its aggressive stylishness. Within ninety minutes, Cléo models four different exquisite costumes. Her life is an assembly of polka dots, marabou feathers, stiff silk, and hats. So many hats.
Feathered hats, pom-pom hats, veiled hats, winter hats, summer hats, hats that look like cages and hats that look like halos.
“Everything suits me,” Cléo gleefully tells her assistant. “Trying things on intoxicates me.”
Being beautiful is, for Cléo, a somatic experience; it intoxicates.
Critics have had a lot to say about this particular scene, often pointing out that Cléo is melodramatic and shallow, obsessed with appearances, trapped in surfaces. This, they argue, is underscored by Varda’s incredible shot of Cléo seen from the street outside the hat shop, in which she seems to disappear into the reflections of the city street, to be trapped in mirrors and reflections.
This interpretation manages to omit the premise of the film: that Cléo has just discovered from a cartomancienne that she has cancer. Cléo (who is far more superstitious than scientific) already knows the results she awaits from her doctor will confirm the Death card pulled by the reader. This complicates and, I have always felt, weaponizes Cléo’s “intoxication” with her own reflection because it transforms it into act of self-healing: Cléo has taken her body in pain and, using nothing but her own girl gaze, transformed her somatic state.
Cléo’s apartment (an ultra-femme, radically girly fantasy-scape festooned with jewelry and roses and seething with gamboling kittens) functions as a dollhouse infirmary powered by whimsy. Cleo’s interior design is so girlish—complete with an indoor swing—that it becomes camp. “The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” writes Susan Sontag in “Notes on ‘Camp.’” “Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is a love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.” Through the act of Campification (of her living space and of her own body), we see Cléo cope with her cancer diagnosis through her love of the exaggerated.
The first thing Cléo does upon returning to her home is to shed her street clothes and dangle from a bar affixed to her ceiling (which, combined with her indoor swing, turns her apartment into an actual playground). We then watch as Cléo and her assistant perform what appears to be a daily routine in which her assistant helps Cléo into an opulent feathered silk dressing gown. With a grunt of pain, Cléo drops to the ground and says, “It hurts, but it does me good.” To numb the pain in her stomach, Cléo applies an unduly cute heating pad, itself shaped like the kittens who infest her apartment. It is undeniable that the only moments in the film in which Cléo’s physical pain is acknowledged are steeped in a world of exaggerated girlhood. Watching this approach to illness as I awaited my own surgery, my face numbing and my vision blurring, helped me to define my own way of being a body in pain.
Cléo from 5 to 7 suggests an approach to illness we don’t see much. Looking back at analysis of this film, I’ve been appalled to find that most critics excoriate the traits of Cléo that I found inspiring. What I’ve always seen as confidence, critics interpret to be selfishness. What to me is self-care is to them vanity.
In the fantastic opening of the film, Cléo’s tarot card reader pulls nine cards and, as she flips them over one by one, tells Cléo it will be easier to read the cards if she can see Cléo in them. This is such a small moment, but it states the terms of the film: in order to understand yourself, you have to see yourself. Camp, or existing and seeing in an exaggerated style, then becomes a means of coping.
VI.
My own surgery took nine hours, and the surgeon used a laser, not a drill.
I woke up in the ICU as the intubation tube was being removed from my throat. If there were one piece of advice I wish I had received prior to the surgery, it would be: imagine what it will be like not to be able to imagine. Acute pain tends to strand the body, severing it from the past and the future. Essentially, I wish I had left myself a map with directions out of overwhelming sensation and back to my mind. Sometimes pain expresses itself as a disembodied sensation, but for me it was the opposite: I was ultrabodied, but depersonalized.
Mirrors, or, rather, a lack of mirrors, had a lot to do with this feeling. Because there was no way to see my reflection and I did not have the imagination to ask for a mirror, I simply was sensation. I received information from the expressions on the faces around me, from questions asked by doctors and nurses, from the machines I was connected to, but I didn’t organize it in any meaningful way. Vaguely, I began to gather that a lot of my hair had been shaved off, that there was an eight-inch scar running from the base of my skull to the C7 vertebra, and that there was now a hollow in my head about the size of a scoop of ice cream.
After four days, the pain eventually began to dissipate, and the first thing I began to imagine was what I looked like.
VII.
Mirrors are the primary motif of the first half of Cléo from 5 to 7.
“The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror,” Varda explained in a 2009 interview. “You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world… Sartre said, ‘Hell is other people.’ Well, I don’t agree with Sartre. I like others.”
This returns us to that famous shot of Cléo reflected through the window of the hat shop. I suppose we could see this as Cléo disappearing, of her self-absorption rendering her dimensionless, pure surface, shallow. There are many remarks that Cléo makes that could arguably make the same point. For instance, “Ugliness is a type of death. As long as I’m beautiful, I’m even more alive than others.”
Another reading of this shot could emphasize not so much the way Cléo fades as a result of being reflected, but the way it places her on the same visual plane as the people on the street. Notably, many of the passersby reflected in this shot are soldiers in the Algerian War. In this brief moment, Varda palimpsests Cléo with the larger world and we come to see that a mirror isn’t so much a reflection as it is a translation, that beauty is not so much an aesthetic as it is a language.
We also suddenly get the sense that time is not occurring in a linear trajectory, but rather that moments are piled one on top of the other, existing concurrently like the reflections themselves. This in itself is a remarkable gesture in a film that unfolds minute by minute. While the documentary-style, real-time pacing of the film agonizingly emphasizes Cléo’s wait for her biopsy results, this palimpsested shot seems to be Varda’s way of suddenly suggesting we are all interconnected. It’s a shot of empathy: a suggestion that other people are, indeed, the opposite of hell.
I think this is what it means to my grandmother that the surgeon who saved her life was a survivor; it’s a profound reminder of the actual divinity of our connections to one another, of the way in which time flows forward, backward, and inward.
VIII.
It has been a decade since I first watched Cléo from 5 to 7.
That same neurologist who made her hand into a fist and described the unruly terrain of my skull to me ten years ago also told me that at some point I would need an even more invasive surgery in which a piece of my skull would be replaced with a metal plate. For this reason, I’ve saved Cléo from 5 to 7 as an in-case-of-emergency measure. I’ve regarded it as a hundred-dollar bill hidden in the sole of my shoe, an extra lipstick in the pocket of a raincoat. It is what I’ve planned to watch in the hours after I get the news that I’ll need another surgery.
It simply never occurred to me that Agnès Varda would die before that happened.
My favorite moment in all of Cléo from 5 to 7 is when Cléo tells her friend, “Streets should have living people’s names.” She then goes on to suggest that the streets of Paris be named after celebrities: “Piaf Street, Bardot Boulevard, Aznavour Avenue. They could change the names when they die.”
So, by Cléo’s own dictate, Varda Street has been renamed. This has forced a closure in my own life; I finally watched Cléo from 5 to 7 again. Not as an emergency measure, but as an act of celebration and appreciation for Varda, who gave me permission to be ill and beautiful, campy, a self-in-portrait portrayed in the mise-en-abyme of other selves in portrait. For Varda, who, tarot-like, insists on seeing yourself.
CANDICE WUEHLE is the author of the novel Monarch (Soft Skull), as well as the poetry collections Fidelitoria: fixed or fluxed (11:11 Press), Death Industrial Complex (Action Books), and Bound (Inside the Castle Press), and several chapbooks. Her writing has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, Tarpaulin Sky, The New Delta Review, and The Volta. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas.
