Blue

Photo by Christina Schmidt

Blue

Mark Brazaitis

        I’ve watched the movie Betty Blue twice. The first time was two-and-a-half decades ago in my father’s cabin outside of Charles Town, West Virginia. My girlfriend, L., had wanted me to see it. So we’d rented it before making the one-and-a-half-hour drive up from Washington, D.C., where we both were living, she in a house with two other recent college graduates, I in my mother’s basement. The cabin used to belong to both of my parents, bought late in their fourteen-year marriage. They’d hoped a vacation home would heal the wounds they’d inflicted on each other, but it hadn’t been an elixir and had gone to my father in the divorce.
        Soon after we arrived, L. made dinner—spaghetti, although her meals were usually more ambitious—and we watched Betty Blue. It must have been the two-hour version of the film rather than the three-hour director’s cut I saw more than twenty years later. What I remembered from the first time I saw the movie were Betty’s beauty and carefree sexuality; her devotion to her going-nowhere-fast boyfriend, a handyman and piano salesman who has written a novel only Betty believes in; her descent into madness; and her mercy-killing murder by her boyfriend when she was in a psychiatric ward. At the end of the film, her boyfriend’s novel, which Betty has typed with two fingers from his handwritten notebooks, finds a publisher and becomes a success.
        L. didn’t tell me why she wanted me to watch the movie, but I could guess. From the start of our relationship, I had declared I was going to be a writer—a serious writer—a writer like the writers I admired: Tolstoy. Hemingway. Steinbeck. Sometimes I hesitated in the pursuit of my dream and said I might become a politician instead. My father was a political reporter, and I’d attended the 1980 and 1984 Democratic and Republican National Conventions with him. I loved the idea of giving a speech in front of howling masses waving colorful signs with my name on them. It was a variation on my dream of becoming a writer: I wanted my words to move people.
        If I were the talented but undiscovered writer in Betty Blue, L. was Betty. Both Betty and L. were dark-haired and beautiful and unabashed about their sexuality. L. wasn’t likely to stand naked on her porch while insulting a landlord, as Betty does early in the movie, but her imagination when it came to sex was expansive—sometimes so expansive I felt puritanical in comparison.
        Like Betty, L. believed in her man and what he could accomplish. She based her optimism on less than Betty did. At least Zorg, Betty’s boyfriend, had actually written a novel. In college, I had been the sports editor of The Harvard Crimson, for which I’d written a regular column called “Mark My Words,” and I was now stringing for The Washington Post, covering such monumental subjects as high-school wrestling. I’d been praised for my writing, but fifteen inches of copy in a newspaper was a far cry from The Sun Also Rises. L. said she’d glimpsed greatness in my work. I wasn’t so sure.
        In the film, Zorg never appears unhappy, even as he labors at the most tedious tasks. He may have had ambition enough to write a novel, but he doesn’t have the drive to sell it. Nor does he seem to care. It is Betty who is periodically unhappy. In the beginning of the movie, her unhappiness is directed outward—at the insensitive landlord, at a publisher who has rejected Zorg’s novel. Later, she turns her discontent on herself.
        L. and I had been dating for two years, since our junior year in college. As the months piled up after our graduations, she was, I sensed, becoming impatient with me. It was one thing not to have written a novel; it was another not to have started.
        For L., I suspected wouldn’t have cared what field I tried to succeed in. One evening, frustrated with her questions about what I was writing (or perhaps frustrated with my perpetual answer: nothing), I told her I had decided to run for Congress when I turned twenty-five. She asked for details. I said I would run from the district in Ohio where I was born. Although I hadn’t lived in the state since I was eight years old and had no idea what politics prevailed in Cuyahoga County, she didn’t see my plan as the braggadocio it was. The next day, she told me she had rustled up three future votes for me after speaking with some of her Ohio classmates. I thought she was joking. She wasn’t.
        If Zorg had been a painter or astronomer instead of a writer, Betty would still have been fiercely ambitious for him. At no point does the film show her curled up with a novel or a book of poems. Unlike Betty, L. loved literature and enjoyed reading, but my success was her aim, no matter the field.
        I wondered about her fixation on seeing me triumph. I worried there might be something unhealthy in her ambition for me, something dark in the force driving her to drive me. Was dissatisfaction with the world as it was and a desire to see it bend to what she wanted (and impatience and frustration when it didn’t) what she also had in common with Betty? “I get the feeling Betty wants something that doesn’t exist,” Zorg says to a friend. I wondered if L. was in pursuit of a similar utopia.
        I wondered, too, if, as with Betty, L.’s drive might contain in it a touch of madness.
        Or was this an excuse I used to cover my fear that I lacked the talent and ambition L. required in a partner?
        I knew I couldn’t go on forever writing freelance stories for the Post at $50 an article, but more appealing and profitable work wasn’t forthcoming. I’d submitted applications to Teach for America and the Peace Corps, but no one from either organization had contacted me in months. L. said she might be able to find a writing job for me at the Department of Agriculture, where she worked. Concerned I would be confined to writing press releases about pig vaccines and fluctuations in the price of corn, I declined. “Well,” she said, “what are you going to do?”
        I was Zorg without the brilliant manuscript. Betty would have walked months before. Soon enough, L. and I broke up.
 
        Béatrice Dalle was twenty-one years old when she played Betty Blue’s title character. If her life doesn’t exactly mirror Betty’s, it is more similar than dissimilar, especially in its episodes of intense romance, impulsiveness, and outright oddness. Indeed, as she prepared to play the part, one wonders how much invention was necessary. Perhaps she found Betty’s character already whole within herself.
        In her late teens, when she worked in a morgue, Dalle and several of her colleagues, high on psychedelic drugs, ate the ear of a corpse. She was arrested for shoplifting in France and possession of cocaine in Miami. She was banned from visiting the United States for more than half a decade when she struck a U.S. consul who had mentioned her drug use.
        In 2004, at age forty, she married Guenaël Meziani, whom she’d met while shooting a film in a French prison. He was serving a twelve-year sentence for the rape, kidnapping, and beating of his ex-girlfriend. The courtship between actress and prisoner was the stuff of an art house film. Before marrying, they spent a total of twenty-four hours together, parsed into one-hour-a-week visits. Soon after Meziani was granted a conditional release for good behavior, neighbors called police to Dalle’s apartment when they heard him threatening to kill her. The marriage eventually fell apart.
        Like Betty, Dalle can be fiercely loyal to her partners. As one of her former lovers, the actor Rupert Everett, wrote in his memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, “I knew I would never find another girl as good as Béa. She was perfect. When she was with you, she was with you. She had faith and you could do no wrong…until that attention would be switched off, like an electric light.”
        Meanwhile, Jean-Hugues Anglade, who plays Zorg, seems to have lived as steady and unassuming a life as his character. His best-known films aside from Betty Blue are La Femme Nikita (1990), Queen Margot (1994) and Maximum Risk (1996) although he does not star in any of them. In his online biographies, there is no mention of drug arrests or romances with prisoners.
        Like Zorg, however, he knows what it’s like to live in the shadow of violence. On August 21, 2015, he, his partner, and his sons were passengers on an Amsterdam-to-Paris train in which a gunman opened fire. Three Americans, two of whom were in the military, subdued the shooter. “They saved my life, my sweetheart, my sons’ lives,” Anglade told People. With Zorg-like optimism, he added, “It is a shame not to be born an American, not to appreciate the way you think about certain things, the way you live.”
 
        When, twenty-three years later, I watched Betty Blue again, I discovered I hadn’t remembered the entire movie. I failed to remember, for example, the provocative, two-minute opening scene of Betty and Zorg screwing in sweat-filled ecstasy beneath a reproduction of the Mona Lisa as Zorg, in a voiceover, intones, “I had known Betty for a week. We made love every night. The forecast was for storms.”
        Even the scenes I remembered best I saw differently upon my second viewing—sometimes dramatically so.
        Toward the end of the movie, Zorg rushes back from an out-of-town excursion to find Betty in the psychiatric ward of a hospital. In the most damaging act of her despair and self-loathing, she has poked out her right eye. She looks pale and wasted, a diminished version of her radiant self. Zorg is rightfully horrified by her debasement. When he discovers the rainbow-assortment of pills she is taking, he confronts her psychiatrist, accusing him of treating Betty as a pharmaceutical experiment.
        The psychiatrist is doubtless intended to seem monstrous, which is the way I remembered him from my first viewing. But in my second viewing, I saw him as reasonable and rational. The message he delivers isn’t outrageous but merely truthful: “I can’t guarantee that she’ll ever recover,” he tells Zorg. He follows with more hopeful news: “Chemistry has made great strides. Electrotherapy gets results. Ignore all these dumb lies. There’s no danger.”
        But Zorg doesn’t believe the doctor. “I’m taking her home,” he declares. When the psychiatrist tells him this isn’t possible, Zorg attacks him. Orderlies appear and throw him out of the hospital.
        The same night, disguised as a woman, he returns to the hospital to end Betty’s life. I’d remembered the scene coated in a romantic blue, as if to emphasize the sadness of what Zorg was doing. I’d remembered his action as noble and necessary.
        But despite Zorg’s final words to the woman he loves—“We’re going away together…No one can ever separate us—no one ever”—I didn’t find the scene, the second time around, to be chivalrous or romantic. And I was surprised to discover it wasn’t shot through a gentle blue filter but in a stark, realistic light. In his red dress and mascara, Zorg looked like a cross-dressing clown, which made the scene both creepy and uncomfortably comical. Most startling of all, Betty didn’t look nearly as awful as I remembered. Yes, her hideous eye patch announced her self-destructiveness and illustrated how difficult her struggle back to sanity would be, but otherwise she seemed like someone in a medicated sleep. Was she incurable, unsalvageable? I’d once thought so; I didn’t now.
        I didn’t think so because, a decade before, I had been in Betty’s position. I hadn’t poked out my eye, but I’d wanted worse. I’d wanted my own extinction. I’d even tried to ensure it.
 
        Before my breakdown, I didn’t comprehend that I had been clinically depressed off and on since elementary school. Nor did I consider that my condition was bipolar II as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders. One symptom of this condition was periods of elation, as when I wrote nonstop from ten at night to seven in the morning over the course of one three-week period in graduate school. Without an adequate vocabulary to describe my condition, however, I didn’t understand it; I couldn’t explain it to myself or anyone else.
        After my college graduation, I was, I understand now, in a state approaching clinical depression. Naturally, my breakup with L. didn’t help my mood. Nor did my job prospects—or lack thereof.
        There was soon hope on the latter front. After months of silence, Teach for America asked me, as part of my application, to give a teaching demonstration. I was nervous; I’d never taught anyone anything. Two weeks later, I was in a classroom at Georgetown University with two other applicants and three Teach for America evaluators. One of the applicants, auditioning to teach French, had come with half a dozen handouts, and he expected us to have the first page memorized within minutes. When he asked me a question—in French, of course—I, distracted by thoughts of my own upcoming audition, mumbled in the universal language of embarrassment. I tried to sneak a peak at the handout. He flattened his hand on my desk. “From memory,” he insisted. When I failed to utter a word, he moved on, abandoning me to my shame.
        Unsettled, I was next up to teach. Having planned to instruct the class how to juggle, I’d brought a dozen tennis balls. Seconds after I handed them out, they were flying everywhere. I tried to rein in the chaos. But even after I’d demonstrated proper juggling technique, tennis balls bounced into the room’s far corners and out into the hallway. The would-be jugglers’ laughter had in it the timbre of derision. It was clear I wouldn’t be teaching America. I left the room a failure.
        The days dragged. I missed L., but the one time I called her, she let me know I wasn’t welcome back. She was dating someone else.
        One morning, wandering in downtown D.C., I ran into a friend of mine who’d recently finished a Peace Corps tour in Paraguay. He said he would write a letter to my recruiter in Boston to see if it might loosen up the logjam my application was stuck in. Within a month, I had an invitation to become a volunteer in Guatemala.
        By the time I settled into the small town of Santa Cruz Verapaz, in Guatemala’s northern mountains, my dark mood had lifted. I worked in communities whose struggles—with illness, with poverty, with the devastating effects of the country’s three-decades-long civil war—often seemed hopeless. I was a privileged outsider to their problems, but in committing to helping solve them, I found everyday meaning in my life.
 
        Depression, bipolar disorder, and other mental illnesses can manifest themselves even when the circumstances of those who suffer from them seem fine, even ideal. Call it the “Richard Cory Paradox,” after the poem by Edward Arlington Robinson in which the wealthy title character, who “fluttered pulses” and “glittered when he walked,” goes home one night and puts “a bullet through his head.”
        At age thirty-seven, I seemed to have everything. After graduating with an MFA from Bowling Green State University, returning to Guatemala as a Peace Corps trainer, and doing adjunct-teaching in New York City for four years, I was a professor at a good university. I had a beautiful wife and two beautiful daughters. I was fit and healthy. Nevertheless, I felt a creeping disquiet. My teeth were loosening, my dentist said, the result of short roots due to bad orthodontics; I feared I would be toothless by forty. My beloved grandmother had died recently; kidney cancer was slowly killing my father. The earth itself seemed like a terminal patient; global warming was its deadly fever. What world had I invited my daughters to live in? How could I, diminished by time and tortured now by a relentless anxiety, protect them?
        I hated our flawed, troubled world; I hated my flawed, troubled self. I felt incapable of stopping the apocalyptic decline of either.
        Like Betty, I wanted a world that didn’t, and couldn’t, exist.
        Several scenes before the devastating conclusion of Betty Blue, Betty hurls herself off a large rock and into a river, where she floats on her back and stares up at the sky. We don’t know what Betty is thinking, although we have hints because of Gabriel Yared’s eerie score. Betty’s universe, the scene implies, isn’t merely indifferent. Despite its blue skies and puffy white clouds, it is outright hostile and menacing. As I spiraled toward madness, I felt the same dread and suspicion. Horror loomed everywhere.
        Like Betty, I wound up in a psychiatric ward, where I popped a rainbow assortment of pills and, yes, eventually agreed to electro-convulsive therapy. ECT, plus the time I spent in a place safe from my panic-driven, self-destructive impulses, succeeded in curing me. If I didn’t learn to love the imperfect world and my imperfect self, I at least learned to forgive us both and keep living.
        Perhaps Betty, too, might have overcome her demons. But Zorg didn’t give her the chance. On my second viewing of Betty Blue, I saw his act, born of a misguided and narcissistic romanticism and a layman’s ill-informed mistrust of psychiatric solutions, as selfish, rash, and even criminal. He doesn’t show the same faith in her that she showed in him. In euthanizing her, he murders any hope of her rebirth.
 
        The metaphorical signposts in our lives—intimations about who we are and where we should go and what we should do and not do—often seem obvious in retrospect. Betty Blue was such a signpost, but L. and I misinterpreted it, seeing ourselves only in the characters who shared our genders.
        After leaving the Department of Agriculture, L. received a law degree as well as a Ph.D. She worked in private industry, then again for the federal government. She played an instrumental role in designing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. She didn’t marry. It is easy to imagine myself as one of several men in her life who proved unworthy of her ambition for us. I picture her, a boyfriend or two after me, throwing up her hands and saying, “Okay, losers, I’ll do it all myself.” She did—and then some. In the end, she was as levelheaded and talented as Zorg, but with superior motivation.
        And while I’ve written seven books, it isn’t Zorg in whom I now see myself when I think of Betty Blue. Like Betty, I know what it’s like to stare at the sky and feel its menace. I know what it’s like to want to repaint the canvas of the world so it’s more beautiful or at least less ugly. I know terrible despair and what it means to see in oblivion its only remedy.
        And while I understand why Jean-Jacques Beineix, Betty Blue’s director, found it necessary, for dramatic purposes, to kill off his heroine, I think she deserved a different ending. After successful ECT treatment, or after she’d begun to feel the beneficial effects of an antidepressant, she might have risen from her hospital bed, not into a morning full of glorious, hopeful sunshine, but into the light of an average day, which would, nevertheless, have felt like a blessing. Zorg might have been still at her side or long gone. Although scarred by her ordeal, she would have been a little stronger and a little wiser and a little more forgiving of herself and the world. She would have left the hospital resolved—no, both resolved and eager—to find in her life something sustaining.
        The last shot of the film might have seen her stepping into something incomplete—a half-painted room, a half-planted garden—to finish what she’d begun.