the kitchen sink
The Kitchen Sink: Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers
by Kristie Alshaibi
Imagine a multi-volume encyclopedia including both the history of Western art and a thorough exploration of contemporary art concerns. Now imagine that it moves, has a soundtrack, and recombines elements of itself in varied and engaging ways. Imagine also, that it is so beautiful that you barely trust it, and so complex that you must move through it many times before understanding its density. You have just read a description of the works of director, writer, and artist, Peter Greenaway.
What makes Greenaway stand out as a filmmaker is the same thing that very firmly situates him within the mainstream of contemporary art. Not only does he share the same underlying themes with painters, photographers, and land/public artists, but he seems to turn his work into a sort of collage or catalogue of them. He studies and comments on them as an art historian might. His films include nearly every issue that has circulated through the veins of the art world in the past fifty years (and some that predate modernism). The list includes interests in sexuality, gender, mortality, corporeality, artifice, irony, text (as image and in relation to image), semiotics, psychology, tableau, notions of beauty, history, mapping, structuralism, deconstruction, process, metaphor, and even shock and controversy, only to name a few. He goes as far as to beg questions as large as the meaning of our existence (while knowing he can never offer resolution) and as small as how one object fits next to another, giving neither precedence over the other. His work spans the spectrum from physical to metaphysical, from formal to conceptual, and almost every area surrounding and in between - often all within a single scene.
Despite the broad range of knowledge he works from, however, it is impossible to see a film by Greenaway and not immediately recognize him in it. His style is a very particular and unmistakable one. And if there is one film that could be considered quintessential Greenaway, it might by Drowning by Numbers.
“This game has everything in it except the kitchen sink.”
The words of the eldest of three female lead characters in Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers, perfectly describe the film. The quote refers to a game called “Hangman’s Cricket,” invented by Madgett, the town coroner who is obsessed with three women, a mother and two daughters, all named Cissie Colpitts. The three women in succession drown their husbands, and Madgett, hoping to gain a little “physical comfort,” covers the whole thing up at the expense of his reputation, and eventually much more.
What is remarkable about this film, however, is not the story, but the fact that it really does contain everything but the kitchen sink (though there are a couple of tubs). There are references to myths and fairy tales (Sylph, Salamander, Undine, and Gnome), nursery rhymes (The Three Billygoats Gruff), bible stories (Samson and Delilah), painting (a girl dressed like a Velazquez Infanta), and a good number of references to other Greenaway films (A Zed and Two Noughts, and The Falls). And just by looking at the sheer density and opulence of each and every frame, one is left to wonder what object Greenaway can’t use as a symbol correlating with the story or with a specific character. Props are meticulously placed within each scene to bring out the meaning of the image. Greenaway takes such care to load each set and each shot that one could watch the film ten times and catch new references with each viewing.
All of this moves to the rhythm of counting from one to one hundred, labeling points of interest in the frame as well as in the soundtrack. Why one hundred? As the young girl shown counting stars in the opening scene (stars with fictitious names, some of which are names of characters in previous films) aptly puts it “A hundred is enough. Once you’ve counted a hundred, all the other hundreds are the same.” Working like the alphabet in A Zed and Two Noughts, in this piece, numbers are the key structuring element. By the time one sees the huge number fifty planted in the second Cissie Colpitts’ lawn, one becomes aware that the movie is roughly half over. And the last image one sees, of course, is the number one hundred, painted in bright white on the side of a sinking boat. You must watch and listen carefully to pick up all the numbers in between, and just when you think you’ve grasped the pattern, a number will go missing and pop up again, totally out of order. This is not a mistake on the writer/director’s part, but a typical Greenaway game, to keep even the most attentive viewer on their toes.
He lets us know he’s playing games by describing a few others that he has made up. Through Smut, the young son of the coroner, we learn the rules for such entertainments as “Sheep and Tides,” “Reverse Strip Jump,” and “Dawn Card Castles”. Most prominent in the film is “The Great Death Game”. In it, Smut carefully numbers and paints road kill with yellow paint on Tuesdays, and red on Saturdays. He sets off fireworks to celebrate each corpse. The game becomes a race between yellow-paint-days and red-paint-days for the title of Best Day for Violent Deaths.
Smut, like Greenaway, is a great collector and cataloguer. He counts everything from bees to berries to the leaves on trees. His penchant for creating systems and taxonomies for everything he sees reflects the cool intellectual methods by which Greenaway painstakingly constructs his films. This same detached nonchalant rationalism exists within the other characters as well. They give the film a keen sense of dark comedy, smirking their indifference at matters of life and death. But there is a feminine, intuitive side to Greenaway too, that shows up with incredible force in Drowning by Numbers.
Water, a common theme with Greenaway, is an all-encompassing metaphor in this film. It is everything feminine, and everything unpredictable or confounding. It is both suffocation and cleansing. This sets up a purposefully unresolved tension, leaving the sensitive viewer to wonder just what it is he’s saying about gender relations. It is another of his games to confuse and disturb us. For example, near the end there is a literal game of “Tug of War” between what Madgett refers to as “good and evil.” But just like confusing the order of the numbers to make us lose count, Greenaway refuses to let us fall into an easy binary view. He sets the protagonists up as murderers, and when questioned about who is good and who is evil, Madgett simply says, “It depends on how you look at it.” The amoral Greenaway never takes sides. His is an in-between world. According to Amy Lawrence in The Films of Peter Greenaway(Cambridge University Press 1997), “water evokes a trace of longing in Greenaway’s work, something of the rootlessness of the amphibian, caught between land and sea.” and “the combination of fear and yearning in relation to water becomes enmeshed in attitudes toward women.” This is exemplified in the character of Madgett, caught between his rational, professional side and his lust for the three Cissie’s.
These three women could be representative of all womanhood. They are three generations: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. The youngest even asks Madgett if he thinks they are all the same woman, because they have the same name. He replies that he does sometimes think they are one, because of their camaraderie. This camaraderie is strengthened by the murder of the men in the story. When the youngest Cissie is asked why she drowned her husband of only three weeks, one of her reasons is “loyalty”.
This family of females is a force of nature. Every time they appear they are accompanied by the intrusion of animals, plants, fruits, and insects into an otherwise man-made world. Snails, a classic Greenaway symbol for decay, crawl everywhere and moths flutter in every corner. The country-side is truly alive and wriggling. And following in a great tradition of British mystery novels, Drowning By Numbers paints murder as an eccentricity common to that idyllic setting, and as natural as nature itself.
There are many layers to Greenaway’s film, all of which contain surprises. For instance, the number three takes on great significance. Smut will only answer the phone after the cock crows three times, there are three Cissies, and Madgett tells them that drownings “like many things” come in threes. However, at the end of the film, Greenaway threatens to break his own rule of threes with a fourth drowning. Delightfully, though, he’s too careful a writer to let that happen. He stops the film before we see the fourth victim go under, abruptly cutting the scene with the appearance of the number one hundred. If the fourth victim were to drown, it would be outside the frame of the script, outside the limits of the counting game.
Drowning By Numbers, like most of Peter Greenaway’s works, is a complex web of images and meanings. It is loaded with objects, symbols, metaphors, and merciless humor. With its strange constructed images, like a car that seems to radiate light from the inside, the shadow of a young girl skipping rope cast three stories high by the headlights of a passing car, and spaces crowded with odd items, built up like altars to unknown gods, it is no surprise that some critics have called it surreal. But this film very consciously defies categorization. Greenaway makes up his own rules. Then he leaves us to play them out. Like a child with a paint-by-numbers set, we have to work at turning erratic patterns into something recognizable. The only problem is, as soon as you recognize it, it changes. He is a master at creating systems that pull themselves apart, and make us reconsider the very notion of categories. He does this through the sheer density of his work, by throwing disparate things, both abstract and material, into a big pot and thoroughly stirring them up. And in the flavorful soup of Drowning By Numbers, he lets everything but the kitchen sink.