On Kissing

 

Daniel Harris’s “The Romantic”, from 1999, made the surprising argument – or rather, exhibited the surprising implication – that the Production Code, the Catholic-generated censorship manual for movies in the era between the beginning of the talkies in the thirties to the late fifties – actually encoded a device that pornographers now generally use.

“During the heyday of romantic Hollywood films, the cinematic kiss was not a kiss so much as a clutch, a desperate groping, a joyless and highly stylized bear hug whose duration was limited by official censors who also stipulated that the actors' mouths remain shut at all times, thus preventing even the appearance of French kissing, which was supplanted by a feverish yet passionless mashing of unmoistened lips. This oddly desiccated contact contrasted dramatically with the clawing fingers of the actresses' hands which, glittering with jewels, raked down their lovers' fully clothed backs, their nails extended like claws, full of aggression and hostility long after the star had thrown caution to the winds, abandoned her shallow pretence of enraged resistance, and succumbed wholeheartedly to her illicit longings. … The stiff choreography of this asphyxiating stranglehold suggests apprehension rather than pleasure, the misgivings of two sexual outlaws who live in a world in which privacy is constantly imperilled, in which doors are forever being flung open, curtains yanked back, and unwanted tea trolleys rolled into occupied bedrooms by indiscreet maids.”

I am not sure I find the “desperate groping” and the “clawing fingers” of the beringed femmes fatales as joyless as does Harris. Desperation and joy are not enemies. But I like it that Harris throws himself into a matter that has long fascinated anthropologists: the culture and cult of the kiss.

An Italian semiotician, Marcel Danesi, in his History of the Kiss! (the exclamation mark strangely kissing the sober title, in effect raking its back with clawing fingers), makes the immodest claim that kissing today is an artifact of the literature of the middle ages. Or, perhaps, the literature of the middle ages, like a seismograph, recorded the surge of kissing as the patriarchal household, where women were the chattel that sealed alliances, started to collapse. Along the way he gives us such fascinating facts as this: that there is a science of kissing and it is called philematology. This is crossword puzzle knowledge gold. Plus, now, when I am asked what I do for a living, I will reply, serenely, philematologist, and give the questioner a daredevil look while I glide away like Groucho Marx with a rose in his teeth.

In actuality, to return to the subject of desperate kisses, the Legion of Decency permitted only three seconds. I must admit, I don’t recognize that desperate groping in, say, the kiss Grace Kelly gives Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window.” Was Hitchcock breaking the rule? But there is something to Harris’s vision in the kiss that Rita Hayworth gives Orson Welles in the San Francisco aquarium in Lady From Shanghai. “Take me quick”, she says, and quick it is – although the three seconds are cleverly extended by a cut away to the unwanted presence of a group of school children, who in that instant come around the corner and see them. This kiss was long in coming – at the center of the movie is a fight between rich plutocrats aboard the yacht of Hayworth’s rich, crippled husband, which was followed by a song from la belle Rita with the sign off line: “don’t take your lips or your arms or your love … away”. This is a case of illicit longings indeed, with the camera lingering on Rita’s lovely unkissed lips.

Even if I don’t take Harris to be accurately describing the entirety of the heyday of romantic Hollywood films, he is onto something in the censored administration of a kiss.

“Hollywood kisses are carefully arranged compositions that invite the public, not only to approach the necking couple, but to slip between them and examine at close range every blush and gasp of an act that, on the one hand, optimizes the conditions for viewing and, on the other, makes a bold pretence of solitude, of barring the door to the jealous intruder and excluding the curious stares of gaping children who stumble upon adulterous fathers while seeking lost toys in presumably empty rooms. Lovers are frequently filmed in stark silhouette against a white background so that, for purposes of visual clarity, their bodies don't obscure each other, a bulging forearm blocking from view a famous face, the broad rim of a stylish chapeau a magnificent set of wistful eyes brimming with desire - a cinematic feat of separation similar to that performed by pornographers who create a schematic type of televisual sex by prying their actors so far apart that they are joined, like Siamese twins, at the point of penetration alone.”

Harris has, I think, definitely read his Robert Coover.

Ah, the cathected interdiction, the fetishized prohibition! Bataille’s insight, which was taken up by Foucault, was that here, sexual desire is secondary to its interruption. Power is not repressive so much as productive, a maker of the perversions it spends its times blotting out.

However, Harris’s promising start on the kiss as spectacle devolves into a romantic view of realism that seems to me to have no historical basis whatsoever:

“The exaggeration of privacy in a culture that has become, relatively speaking, morally lenient is symptomatic of the distortions that occur in novels and films when artists can no longer satisfy the demands of narrative by drawing directly from their daily experiences, since actual behavior and its fictional representations are drifting further apart.”

They seem to have been drifting apart since Moses was a pup. In fact, of course, this account of some realistic paradise in which artists satisfied the demands of narrative – a curious phrase, as though narrative were some hungry domesticated animal – with their “daily experiences” curiously trashes the idea of the imagination. The aesthetic trend of the post-code era – of the sixties – encouraged the idea that “daily experience” was equivalent to the authenticity that would allow us to enjoy imagined stories and poems without being accused of being childish and non-productive. At a same time, a response to this notion of authenticity formed, under the slogan: eat the document. Thus mixing our sensual and ideological categories.

But let us not kiss off the kiss like this. Danesi quotes the evidence that is often used to claim that there is something unique about the Western cult of the kiss. For instance: Sheril Kirshenbaum writes: “In the Vedic texts no word exists for ‘kiss,’ but the same word is employed to mean both ‘sniff ’ and ‘smell,’ and also has connotations of touch.” I find the deduction from the lack of a word a little suspicious, since a “word” is not the only designator of a “thing”. A phrase can obviously have the same weight as a word. In the Kama Sutra, there is a chapter on kissing that is much more extensive than any comparable text in the West.

“The text goes on to describe four methods of kissing—moderate, contracted,

pressed, and soft—and lays out three kinds of kisses by a young girl or virgin: nominal kiss (the girl touches lips with her lover but does not herself do anything), throbbing kiss (the girl, setting aside her bashfulness a little, responds with her lower but

not upper lip), touching kiss (the girl touches her lover’s lips with her tongue, closes her eyes, and lays her hands on her lover’s hands).”

This is not the letter of the Code, but it is the spirit – directives that choreograph kissing.

Danensi quotes enough evidence from the Bible, the Greeks and the Romans to cast doubt on his thesis. But I find the thesis interesting anyway:

“Because the kiss originated as a need to subvert the extant religious and patriarchal order in medieval Europe, it acquired great appeal wherever it was introduced through narratives, poetry, and visual art.”

Although this might be overstating the case, the idea that our set of romantic behaviors is transmitted through narratives, poetry and visual art has a lot of appeal for me, getting us outside the notion that “experience” and these aesthetic forms can be usefully reified as antitheses.

This is, I think, where the moment of realism comes in. Contra Harris, the ideology of realism is always a matter of showing that daily experiences are always drifting away from narrative – from the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Julian Sorel, the “realist” hero par excellence, gets his narrative about himself not from his daily experiences, but from his reading of Napoleon’s memoirs. The “demand” of narrative is actually the demand of the narrator, who, grammatically and existentially, is the one who can demand. Encoded in this idea of some fatal drift between the daily experience of the artist and the art is the sovereign consumer, the hero of neo-classical economics, whose choices have an unimpeachable logic, follow Arrow Debreu’s theory of preferences, and has no personal tie to limit his only reason for existence – accumulation.

Still, outside of this detour through my pet peeves (and the image of art and experience as kissers caught in the moment of separation, lips coming off of lips), I have to give kudos to Harris for seeing that the cut and edit of the kiss scenes in classic Hollywood cinema could accidentally give rise to to the loops of porno films: which, although seemingly all about unending coupling are, in reality, as time constrained as Rita Hayworth’s kiss. Once one begins mapping sexual desire to the time of its representation, sexual desire becomes another factory made assemblage – a matter of intentional efficiencies. Kisses roll right off the assembly line. Is there, in the behavioral sciences, a basis for the three second kiss metric? I wonder. But its arbitrariness creates a basis for further metrics and transgressions of metrics. For instance, Hitchcock, in Notorious, got around the three second by having Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kiss for two seconds, stop, then kiss again, and so on.

How this influenced the natural history of kissing in America is a curious question I leave to all of you philematologists out there.