Airplane windows, especially on ascent and descent, are movie camera lenses we look through but don’t direct. I prefer window to aisle. It’s not that I am so enamored of the view (all things being equal, I’d rather meet the sky from below, feet on the ground); I’m shy, and a window gives me the sensory and psychological equivalent of an emergency exit. On ascent and descent, looking out, I ache to be down, down in the patches of green and brown woods and fields, not swimming but somehow partaking of the pale blue or silver lakes and rivers; even just to be so small and speck-like, hidden down there, smaller than the houses. But as I was descending over Detroit not long ago (chewing gum to relieve the pressure mounting in my ears), vast lots full of new cars, inert in their tidy spaces, resembled shining beetles pinned in rows. Those car lots reproduced—on the ground, in miniature, multiplied ad nauseam—the simultaneously threatening and protective behemoth in which I was descending, pinned to my seat, one of many passengers. There we were: living beings voluntarily strapping in to something that moves much faster than we do, at the cost of our own mobility. Immobilization, I think, is particularly hard on shy creatures—the capacity to take flight under one’s own power is not to be given up lightly. Shyness is one way the survival instinct manifests. In familiar terms, it is the disposition to flight over fight. Of course it can be mixed and ambivalent, but this instinctive shyness is also very basic, and it is shared with other forms of life.
There is something about moving vehicles in relation to living bodies, something movies seem to know without needing to be told. Movies are peculiarly adapted to channel that creaturely exposure to nonliving force. Directors and cinematographers make use of and give shape to this predisposition of their medium, but it can also register at a more passive and unconscious level—the level at which, on one side of the camera or the other, we experience an illusion. This potential for illusion, while motionless inside a moving vehicle, is familiar to anyone who has been on a high-speed train and felt the landscape to be ‘rushing’ past them rather than the other way around.
Movies know this phenomenon inside and out. For what it is to be outside a fast-moving vehicle, on the side of the road or on a train platform, is the inverse of that immobile swiftness. Inside, you are passively conveyed. Tacitly, you consent to be transported. As a freestanding creature, by contrast, you must be on your guard—you must STAY BEHIND THE YELLOW LINE. The strange thing about that instruction, I find, is that it not only addresses the fatal risk of carelessness, but also warns against the attractive force of what is about to appear, almost out of nowhere. When it is a freight or an express train, I feel I am in the path of a meteor. Or: as though briefly, suddenly hunted. Don’t worry, I won’t jump. On the contrary, in my constitutional shyness, something in me is responsive, and quickens to the speed of the train that doesn’t stop.
All of which is to give you some context for my preoccupation with the creaturely magnetism of the express train upon the shy Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945). The unconsummated love story of Brief Encounter has been ridiculed for its dowdy English middle-classness by those who can only see the reserve of Laura Jesson and Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) as a kind of unnecessary prudery, suffering because of pressures they could easily flout if they only had the courage. It is what might still be called an ‘emotional affair.’ In any case, I do find marital fidelity a compelling enough force and value to be convinced by Laura and Alec’s dilemma, as well as their anguish. And yet I, too, find Alec simultaneously inscrutable and overbearing, overriding Laura in predictable masculine ways: deciding for her, against her expressed wish, that she wants a bun at the buffet; confidently dismissing her suggestion that she might have hidden musical depths. And then, she doesn’t so much profess her love as he “gets it out of her,” in Richard Dyer’s phrase. Alec pressures Laura to assent that she reciprocates his love. Yet his coercion does not preclude the authenticity of her feeling for him. For that matter, as Dyer also comments in his BFI Films Classics volume on Brief Encounter:
None of this is remarkable; neither Laura nor the film is drawing attention to the way [Alec] commandeers their interchanges and presumes to know what she thinks and feels; they take it for granted…the price of the film’s giving [Laura] narrative authority is the insistent reminder that the terms in which she speaks are laid down by men.
The men in the film, Dyer observes, don’t really listen to Laura. “But we listen. Laura does not speak to us, yet her voice is for us alone.” I hear volumes in that oblique intimacy. There is something in that particular mingling of intensity and indirection that’s native to me. I’d call it shyness, though I don’t find gender gets us very far into the heart of it. Laura’s communion with the express train, which rhythmically structures the film, brings her shyness most acutely into focus; I would almost say it voices her shyness.
Shyness, as I experience it, is also a slowness to speech, which is not for lack of expressive will. It is partly why I write, to have a little shade in which to try the words—to sound and taste them before giving them over to you (besides, it takes longer to write this sentence than I would dare make anyone wait to hear it said). We don’t overlap with each other, you and I, and that is important; there is this indefinite space the words find their way to, once they’ve left me, and that’s where you encounter them. I believe the words go through certain small but necessary changes there in that interval, as they adjust to the light. They have to go there, you see; it isn’t just a formality. There can be no question of me handing them to you directly.
And so, in the dream-logic of this particular shade, the express train in Brief Encounter is called the express not only because it doesn’t stop, but because, in its not-stopping, it expresses the shy heart of Laura Jesson. Or rather, there is a charge that passes between her body and the rushing train, and in that passing current she is expressed. That is why she’s compelled to go see it through.
Laura even seems to cover for this private ritual happening on a public platform in the opening sequence, which drops us in towards the end of the narrative. The first mention of the express train comes when her irritating but ultimately harmless acquaintance Dolly (Everley Gregg) has blundered in and interrupted, all but stolen her last moment with Alec. Alec has to leave for his train, his only intimate farewell a hand on Laura’s shoulder. Dolly continues to prattle on, when the bell announcing another train registers on the soundtrack. Dolly asks the woman behind the counter, Myrtle (Joyce Carey), if that’s the Ketchworth train, to which Myrtle answers no, it’s the express. Laura adds, with a seeming redundancy, “the boat train.” Calling the express by another name, she diffuses its intensity, eagerly concealing but at the same time calling attention to her private affair with it. Dolly goes to the counter for some bars of chocolate; when she turns around, Laura has disappeared—only to come back through the door a few moments later. “I just wanted to see the express go through” are the only words she offers by way of explanation. Those few elided moments—of very few in the film from which Laura is physically absent—stand for a whole delicate inner world. We cannot be shown those moments of Laura’s in the opening sequence, because we cannot yet be trusted with them.
That heavy theme music of hers, the Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2—for which the movie has sometimes been jeered at as embarrassing, vulnerable to parody, swelling to an unwarranted pitch of feeling—is likewise imperative as a displacement and an amplification. Laura’s feeling for music is that intensity about her that can’t be articulated. I love Brief Encounter for giving Laura such means of oblique expression, for never betraying her shyness. As the plot explores a compromising, if not a rupturing, of marital fidelity, the film as a whole is faithful to Laura, to her limits of expression, to what she can never say. If the brief encounter to which the title most consciously refers is the romantic one between Laura and Dr. Harvey, the one that stays with me is Laura’s charged proximity, not quite contact, with that “boat train.” The express train is linked to the human romance of the film (it blows grit into Laura’s eye, so Dr. Harvey has the occasion to offer her his services). Yet that faltering romance does not exhaust the train’s implication. In the encounter between Laura and the express train, a feeling is exalted, of life unfolding within huntedness, not quite hauntedness; the thrill of a shy heart.
The next scene featuring the express train, the one most central to the plot, begins very like what has come to be called the Lumière Brothers’ Arrivée d’un train (à la Ciotat) or The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, one of a handful of films of a similar type or genre made in the last half-decade of the 19th century. In the 1896 version I’ve seen, the train approaches on the lefthand side of the frame, with the platform on the right. The whole setup has become a trope, and trains themselves are as pervasive in cinema as cigarettes and guns—or more so, since they belong to every genre. (There’s even a brief article by none other than Yasujiro Ozu, in whose films trains tend to have a steadying rather than a stirring effect, providing a sort of baseline, suggesting with a twinkle in his eye that “trains are also fun.”1)
The myth of the arrival of the Lumière Brothers’ train, of the audience panicking as it seemed to head straight towards them, is powerful because it dilates upon the relationship between human bodies and mechanical bodies, when the latter take on a life of their own. Movies did not create, but they have exploited—a mythology that began with the railroads themselves. For Thoreau, the Fitchburg Railroad train became an “iron horse” which “[made] the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing smoke and fire from his nostrils.” A page earlier in Walden (1854), he wrote:
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk… I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion,—or, rather, like a comet…
The railroad’s rapid expansion was a phenomenon that cried out for metaphor, to be somehow incorporated into a known world. Thoreau’s susceptibility was extreme, but the imaginative consequences of trains, as of planes and automobiles, exceed the practical and commercial ideals of progress that drove their advancement. A moving picture can, for a time, hold that mechanical excess in suspension; it can create the illusion of a train becoming insubstantial at the moment it would demolish our bodies. The cost of this illusion is a reciprocal one: that we also briefly become insubstantial, ghostly, as the train passes into us without consequence.
But that ur-train of cinema circa 1896 is already in the process of slowing down from the first moment we see it, gradually slowing to a stop—which is why it’s a film of “arrival” at the station. By contrast, the Brief Encounter express train neither slows nor stops. For Laura, going out on the platform to “see the express go through” is an experience sought for its own sake. I see it in the way she puts her book away—with not quite a smile but a pleasure of self-possession—at the sound of the express train’s distant approach, walking out (passing unawares in front of Alec, whom she has not yet met) at a sure but unhurried pace. We then see the platform and the approaching train before Laura re-enters the frame; it is dark, a porter or a conductor is walking away from us, away from the camera. The lights on the platform illuminate the train as it moves, and illuminate its puffs of steam. It grows louder as it approaches. It is a scene that invites us in during those seconds before Laura enters; a scene I want to inhabit (I almost said, return to). A train stands for industry and mechanism, I remind myself, and yet the scene’s dark and quiet—the whole shadowy collective impression it gives reminds me of some kind of wilderness. I want to be there on that dark platform, perfectly safe, in the same way I want to be down in those green woods, brown fields, and watery places I see from airplane windows. The train thwacks Laura with wind as it bolts past without slowing down, blowing grit into her eye, and tousling her fine downy hair from under her little soft hat has a wildness to it; is a form of weather.
That wind is one among the complex of phenomena that arise in the moment of perilous fascination a hurtling vehicle can exercise upon the flesh. There’s a scene in Martin Rosen’s animated version of Watership Down (1978), almost an inside joke, riffing on the oversaturated significance of moving vehicles in cinema: rabbits on a journey must cross a road, and they are alarmed to encounter a road-killed hedgehog. (It makes me wonder about all the unacknowledged roadkill in road movies.) A world-wise older rabbit named Bigwig explains that this grisly death was caused not by a particularly bloodthirsty murderer, but by a hrududu, the suggestively onomatopoeic “lapine” word for a motorized vehicle. It is a “man thing,” dangerous for its complete indifference to anything in its path. A demonstration follows: the oblivious rush of cars past these lithe, hesitating animated bodies. It is a moment replete with what Gerard Jones calls, in his essay for the Watership Down Criterion booklet, the movie’s (also the book’s) “sweet, sad wisdom about the nature of life in the shadow of death.” One of the extraordinary things about Watership Down is how it imagines, fulsomely, the perspective of a prey animal—the rabbit—whose form of existence is shaped by being hunted. No human can ever know that lapine state of being. But my imagination, entering into sympathy with real and imagined rabbits, goes straight to the core of my human shyness. In Richard Adams’s book, the hrududu “for an instant…filled the whole world with noise and fear. Then it was gone and Bigwig’s fur was blowing in the whack of wind that followed it down the hedges.” Shyness is not the same as fear, but can be a way of living with or accommodating fear, if we experience fear as a fierce desire to remain in life even “in the shadow of death.” Later, the story also features a train (another sort of hrududu, pluralized—“as big as a thousand hrududil”)as both salvation and source of trembling awe to our rabbit-heroes, dividing them from a nasty gang of rabbit-villains in their pursuit. One rabbit does his best to describe, with Thoreauvian flare, the train to those who weren’t there to witness it: “It was full of fire and smoke and light and it roared and beat on the metal lines until the ground shook beneath it…I tell you, I was beyond being afraid.”
But what is beyond fear? When something ought to terrify but does not, it is as though perceived at the infra– and ultra– ends of the spectrum at once—at the edges of perception. The flash of this hrududu (the lapine word now indicating something for which I also have no name, because train is deceptively tame and safe, and the rabbit’s-eye view reveals what ought to remain shattering) sends through this body a disconcerting sense of being helplessly alive. Brief Encounter conceives of life circumscribed within limits that threaten to deaden, to numb; it conceives of an awakening of desire, a painful sense of life exceeding those limits. Maybe there is something dire in the thought that the express train teaches Laura Jesson that she is alive. If she doesn’t know this already, what can an extreme exposure to mechanical speed and force, charging “the whole world with noise and fear,” possibly reveal to her? As I see it, she abandons herself to the desire to live, in spite of life’s drastically limited scope. I think of Noriko (Setsuko Hara) at the end of Tokyo Story (1953), when her dismayed younger sister-in-law Kyōko (Kyōko Kagawa) suddenly realizes, “Isn’t life disappointing?” Noriko replies, beaming, “Yes, it is.” I’m relying on subtitles, but the effect is bound up with Hara in her radiance, affirming life’s disappointment, with no consolation except the absence of bitterness. For Laura’s encounter with Dr. Alec Harvey briefly holds out a doomed alternative: not a great romance tragically renounced, but rather a brief illusion of escape. Dr. Harvey, himself sometimes unnervingly bland and opaque, offers neither escape nor expansion of life for Laura. In the end he makes the limits of her existence all the more apparent. Laura, for all that, is not a tragic figure.
In the scene near the end of the film, which repeats and fills in what was elided in the opening scenes, we hear the express train coming closer and see Laura sitting at the table, her wide eyes widening further after Dolly has risen to go to the counter for her chocolate bars. This time we see Laura rush out the door onto the platform directly before we see the train, not calmly and inexorably approaching from the distance as we have seen it do previously, but already suddenly upon us, and Laura coming right up to the brink of contact—with us and with the train in equal measure. As much as it is a scene of suicidal impulse—neither explicitly acknowledged as such, nor carried through—it is also a saving instant, filling the world with noise and with fear, and then subsiding. Had she left with Alec—in order to find that wherever she goes, there she is—that would have been the beginning of despair, because it would have been a false liberation. To take the limits of her existence seriously is not to insist that they must be lifted. This shy creature, who cannot tell what is in her heart, dashes out to meet the train but does not throw herself under it. She quickens to it. She is wondrously and merely alive.
- Someone who can translate from Japanese: please publish an English translation of it! From what I can tell, it has only been translated into French (as “Les trains aussi sont amusants,” by Mathieu Capel in the July-August 2014 issue of Présences du Cinéma). The original appeared in the Japanese review, Hanashi, in April 1937.