In Peter Greenaway's 1988 film Drowning By Numbers, Madgett the coroner and his son Smut collaborate on a book of accidental deaths during professional cricket matches. The father-son team illustrates the fatalities by a series of photographs of Smut, cricket bat in hand, stripped to his underpants and covered in multi-colored tape-crosses to indicate the sites of each victim's mortal wounds. The photos, however, soon land in the hands of the police, and Madgett is accused of child abuse and pornography. By presenting a scenario depicting public misunderstanding of abstruse artistic projects, Greenaway implicitly parallels the fear and distrust surrounding his own oeuvre.

With their visual opulence and textual allusiveness, Greenaway's films often typify the erudite and arcane art-film for the average filmgoer. But with their proliferation of full-frontal nudity (male and female), at least one instance of cannibalism, and an overarching attitude of amorality, destruction, and homicide, his films are also regarded by many as dangerous pornography. And they are all the more dangerous in their elusiveness: how can one argue effectively against a film's worth if one can't even say what it's about? Hence the viewer can often be intimidated into silence after watching a Greenaway creation, disconcerted by the events on the screen but fearing that they've missed the point.

The fact that we spend much time watching Greenaway's films wondering what it all means illustrates both their specific appeal and their inherent limitations. Greenaway's films are wholly cerebral experiences, little more than intellectual exercises to decipher each film's inner logic. Greenaway allows for no sympathy, no character identification, no personal engagement - indeed, the hallmark of a Greenaway production is a marked absence of feeling.₁ The human element is missing in his narrative, rendering them strikingly impersonal; if any traces of passion can be identified, it's a passion to shock and stymie. Thus Greenaway helps us to distinguish a potential difference between art and artsiness: Greenaway is all head and no heart. Understanding better Greenaway's agendas as a filmmaker, we need not fear him as a mirror of our artlessness.

Peter Greenaway made his cinematic debut in the early 1980's and has since been credited with renewing critical attention on the British film scene. His unprecedented creative energy contributed to a distinct allegorical style which contrasted mightily from the industry's dominant Hollywood-ized formulas. Though in Great Britain his work for TV is equally popular, in the United States he is mostly known for four films. A Zed and Two Naughts (1985) follows two recently-widowed zoo behaviorists who pursue a scientific explanation for existence. The Belly of an Architect (1987) involves an American architect who is commissioned to execute an exhibition memorializing his artistic idol in Italy but is halted by a stomach ailment. In Drowning By Numbers (1988), three generations of wives commit husbandicide with the assistance of an amorous coroner. And the title characters in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) play out a Jacobean revenge tragedy in a lavish restaurant. The Cook… was actually the first film distributed to American audiences, its popularity boosted by one of the MPAA's first-ever NC-17 ratings; the subsequent release of his three similarly-rated earlier works has since increased his following.

Knowing the plot of a Greenaway film, however, fails to serve as an accurate guide to what actually transpires on the screen. The cinematic medium consists of two components, the narrative and its visual representation on the screen, and both elements convey the film's ultimate message. But whereas most filmmakers since the inception of the medium focus their energies on dramatic conventions (borrowed from theater) in order to communicate a narrative, Greenaway comes from the painterly tradition of visual representation. His studied and intricate visual style betrays his origins in painting academies, and such an understanding is essential in approaching his films. Greenaway is still primarily a painter but with a celluloid canvas. Thus Greenaway's strength is not what he says, but how he says it; the narrative conventions of drama - character, event, and emotion - are always subordinate to his visual conceits of color-coding and set design. Even the narrative itself is structured to illustrate Greenaway's artificial games, thus becoming part of the form. The medium is indeed the message in Greenaway's case, but this imbalance threatens to reduce his films' contents to mere abstractions.

With A Zed and Two Naughts Greenaway commenced his cinema of ideas by investigating the endless categorization, itemization, coincidence, correspondence, and symmetry that science relies upon to order the universe. Since science's most basic ordering system is a language of discourse, the film's title plays on the alphabet and spells out the film's primary setting: ZOO. Zed's protagonists, the formerly-siamese twin brother behavioral scientists Oswald and Oliver, serve as allegories for the scientific method but are also themselves an illustration of symmetry and order. Their lives proceed unexceptionally until both of their wives are killed in a car crash in which a swan flies through their windshield on Swan Street.

The bizarre coincidence surrounding the accident, coupled with their grief, drives the brothers to speculate on the meaning of life by studying time-lapse photography of various decomposing life forms. Their subjects inadvertently progress through the eight Darwinian stages of evolution (from an apple to prawns to a crocodile to the murderous swan to a dog), their disintegration visually counterbalancing the vital growth of evolutionary theory. The brothers also have an affair with their wives' surviving driver, Alba, who lost a leg in the crash: she soon orders her remaining leg to be amputated in order to retain physical symmetry. Alba eventually becomes pregnant, births the brothers twin sons, and dies. In the final phase of the film the brothers, still without a satisfactory explanation for their wives' decomposition, complete the evolutionary cycle of their study by a joint suicide under time-lapse photography.

Zed's visual action reflects the film's theme of order as well. Most sets are constructed symmetrically, and Oswald and Oliver often heighten the mirroring effect by standing on opposite sides of the screen. The brothers' conflicts with numerous antagonists illustrate the social Darwinist idea of survival of the fittest. Greenaway also employs color-coding, identifying each character's essence by their wardrobe: Alba is always in white, the zoo's meddlesome owner and his lecherous daughter dress in black, and Alba's bloodthirsty surgeon and a lustful seductress bedeck themselves in red. The seductress invokes references to Vermeer's feared Lady in Red; Greenaway has furthermore admitted to cloaking the entire film in Vermeerean colors, with the interplay of black and white against color to give settings a moral weight. Besides its visual games, however, the film serves little use; Greenaway merely itemizes and categorizes to no end, asking many interesting questions but offering no answers: "If the evolutionary span of life on earth is represented by a year of 365 days, and man made his appearance at eight o' Clock on the thirty-first of December, did woman arrive just after eight?" His facetious games make for a hollow if engaging experience.

The Belly of an Architect is a dark and multi-layered investigation into the worth of art, with its single most unavoidable form - architecture - as the medium of study. Belly's protagonist, Storey Kracklite, is a small-time architect from Chicago who yearns for artistic legitimacy while designing shopping malls but actually owes his beginnings to the Italian mafia, thus commenting ironically on the "purity" of the art world. Chicago, architecturally rich but also known as the city of blood, meat, and money, parallels Kracklite's eventual destination: Rome, architecturally the longest-existing city in the Western world and filled with an enormous artistic history, but also the home of Fascism. Rome's dichotomy of character questions the moral usefulness of art: if Rome's citizens were so enriched, why do they have such an awful history?

The Italian capital commissions Kracklite to design an exhibition commemorating the life and work of his hero, the eighteenth-century visionary architect Etienne-Louis Boullée. Boullée (an actual historical figure) contributed enormously to the development of architectural thought but had only five of his designs actually built; Boullée's obscurity thus serves as an example of the elusiveness of personal fulfillment despite the gift of artistic genius. Kracklite's dream project is actually a ruse, however, to attract American capital to the flagging Roman art business and to finance other projects; thus the artist is unknowingly used for business's ends. Greenaway carries his cynicism of art's value to every corner of the film, potentially subverting his own professional legitimacy.

Greenaway's central question in Belly is "can art make you immortal?" Typically the art remains after the demise of its creator, but to what extent do these masterpieces validate the artist's life? Greenaway invokes a parallel between Boullée and Kracklite in response: just as Boullée faded into obscurity, Kracklite is eventually forced by the art-world mafia to relinquish control of his project, and though the exhibition carries on, Kracklite is left behind. Greenaway also intersperses throughout the narrative images of the various artistic modes through which men have reached for immortality: sculpture, painting, photography, and photocopying. The sequence degenerates in historical order from the oldest, least prominent art form (sculpture) to the newest, most common and banal medium (photocopying), signifying the particular triviality of art in this age. Kracklite is eventually forced to evaluate his legacy when a stomach ailment makes him painfully aware of his own mortality; his wife's simultaneous pregnancy acts as a counterpoint to his own deteriorating insides, however, and serves as Greenaway's final answer. In the film's final sequence Kracklite commits suicide as his wife gives birth, and his only true bequest is his gene pool: Greenaway suggests that artistic pursuits will always take a back seat to biology's imperatives.

Greenaway's topic for Drowning by Numbers is games. Greenaway includes swimming, biking, running, jumping rope, tug-of-war, cards, and several of his own devising: Flights of Fancy, Dawn Card Castles, Sheep and Tides, Hangman's Cricket, Deadman's Catch, and the Great Death Game. The ultimate game that the characters play, however, is that of relationships. A grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter, all named Cissie Colpitts, drown their respective husbands. To avoid punishment they enlist the aid of a local coroner, Madgett, who sexually desires all three. Madgett uses his knowledge as a bargaining toy to win the Cissies' affections, but they eventually drown him as well.

In the meantime Greenaway teases us with yet another game, Find the Numbers. As a reference to the centrality of numbers and counting in organizing game-playing, Greenaway counts through the film from one to one-hundred either visually or verbally. For example, the number one appears in the first scene painted boldly white on a tree; one-hundred is painted in white on the prow of the rowboat in which Madgett drowns in the final scene.

By this third film Greenaway is evidently developing a consistent thematic style, as he draws elements heavily from both Zed and Belly. Madgett's son Smut revives the categorization and scientism of Zed by his obsessive efforts to catalog everything around him; he counts the hairs on dogs, numbers the leaves on trees, and even numbers roadkill in the Great Death Game. Greenaway also litters the set with numerous images of decay, with animals, food, foliage, clothing, and other items all in some state of decomposure, alluding to the twin brothers' investigations in Zed. An overarching atmosphere of matriarchy suffuses Greenaway's works as well; in the first two films the central female character succeeds the men through childbirth, while in Drowning women's superiority is abundantly evident. The Cissies' aquatic methods of murder also alludes to the water of the womb and man's pre-evolutionary ancestral home, restating Greenaway's Darwinian concerns with procreation.

Mirroring the extravagance of its title, with The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover Greenaway reaches a zenith in visual excess. Once again his central topic is art, this time in the form of haute cuisine. The Thief yearns to gloss over his barbarism through consuming high culinary art at a posh restaurant but spends much of the film force-feeding his dominance on others: he makes one man eat human feces, serves a young boy his shirt and trouser buttons and eventually his own belly button, murders his Wife's Lover by stuffing him page by page with a book on the French Revolution, and stabs a call girl through the cheek with a fork.

And yet every night he exercises his faith in elegant food to gain respectability; the kitchen is even built like a cathedral, with boy dishwashers singing Psalms, to illustrate the Thief's new religion. His frustrated and abused Wife eventually acquires a regular Lover among the restaurant's clientele, but the Thief discovers her affair and threatens poetically to kill and eat him. Kill him he eventually does; but it is the Wife who, in perverse Jacobean style, makes sure he follows up on the rest of his promise. Thus the Thief finally carries his consumption and devouring to the limit.

The Cook...'s brutality contrasts mightily with its dizzying and lavish artistic ornamentations. Franz Hals' 1616 Dutch painting "The. Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Guard Company" covers the dining room's back wall and guides Greenaway's visual enterprises. (The restaurant itself is appropriately named Le Hollandais.) The physical arrangement of the film's characters echoes that of the painting, and its colors are used to code the rest of the film. The dining room is blood-red, the kitchen glows green, the bathroom is an ironic white, the Lover's library is entirely gold, and the parking lot yields a cold blue. Additionally complicating, the Wife's dresses change color to match the setting. Greenaway's painterly skills extravagantly decorate each scene but as per usual the visual display takes precedence over any depth of character. In The Cook... Greenaway's obsessive and sometimes alienating formalism tilts to the extreme; the film could easily be accused of being little more than an intellectual game of citational hide-and-seek, confusing with its visual codes but nauseating in its violence.

Crucial to an adequate understanding of Greenaway's artistic corpus is the difference between his artistic ambitions and his actual accomplishments. He is a structuralist par excellence, in which the meaning is found entirely in the film's formal ordering systems. In each of his works Greenaway the cinematic graphic designer employs every possible artistic device such as geometric form, visual detail, and physical grouping to allude to his dominant theme but rarely do the systems of order refer to anything beyond themselves. His films are closed systems with no connection to the world outside. (Or, in the case of his project following Cook, an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, they refer to another work of art.) Greenaway's taste for esoterica calls into question any claims to genuine artistry, as his work merely sharpens our critical faculties but fails to illuminate our existence or facilitate any degree of catharsis.

Those viewers discomfited by the brutality depicted in Greenaway's films should feel better equipped to articulate their moral reservations once it is understand his visual gamesmanship serves only as diversions. Greenaway's cinematic worldview is admittedly dark at best. Each of his four films ends in death, and is sprinkled throughout with enmity and homicide. Not one character's behavior from Zed to The Cook could be described as admirable or selfless. His use of violence is as stark and as frequent as his heretofore unrivaled proliferation of nudity; Greenaway unreservedly present of self-circumcision, sex with popsicles, forks through cheeks, gratuitous vomiting, cooked male genitals, and high-speed physical decomposition. Though in each film he investigates a different mode by which we structure our daily existence - science, art, games, food - he subsequently takes each to its extreme, characterizing it as absurd and flawed. This is an amoral aesthetic nihilism at play, and while its flawlessly and sumptuously executed on the screen, it's not for everyone.

The films of Hollywood and those of Peter Greenaway stand at opposite poles on the continuum of cinematic art, each committing their own disservice. While Hollywood is more apt to pander to audience taste, providing a steady narcotic stream of romantic comedies and car chases for its patrons who don't mind emotional manipulation, Greenaway condescends to his audience, discarding emotions for a heartless and endlessly referential cinema of intellect. If a healthy medium were possible, we might be treated to sympathetic plotlines with stunningly creative veneers. Instead our choices seem to be unimaginative theatricality versus ingenious but pretentious visual innovations, the extremes of all that can go wrong with motion pictures. If both camps could learn from each other, films might exercise both the head and the heart. But while Greenaway's films are still typefied as the ultimate in "art-films," we can hardly blame the average moviegoer for avoiding offbeat cinematic fare.

April 1992

₁ This was nothing less than a prescient assessment, as in a later interview on Salon.com in 1997 Greenaway would state:

I always think that if you deal with extremely emotional, even melodramatic, subject matter, as I constantly do, the best way to handle those situations is at a sufficient remove. It's like a doctor and a nurse and a casualty situation. You can't help the patient and you can't help yourself by emoting. And Idon't think cinema is intended for therapy, so I object also to that huge, massive manipulation which is perpetrated on the public. I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film. It's a series of representations.