Feminism, Marxism, Catholicism: Symbol and Meaning in Chytilova\'s Daisies

Daisies

The Czech director Vera Chytilova's 1966 film Daisies invites an allegorical reading from the outset. It is clear that we are not in the realm of any sort of realism, but the question remains whether the symbolism here is in any way coherent. However, considering it is a film by a female director with dual female leading roles, it is worth examining the role of gender in the film.

Chytilova's credit sequence seems to be a wink in the direction of Soviet-style socialist realism: we are watching a world of heroic machinery, cogs and gears. When we first see the paired female leads -- one blonde, one brunette, both named Marie -- they seem to be part of the machinery as well. As the girls make their stylized movements, we hear a loud squeaking sound, as though they were dolls or automata whose joints were machinery that squeals with each movement. It might be worth recalling here that the English word "robot" is originally a Czech word, coined by the Czech avant-garde dramatist Karel Capek but derived from the Czech word for "serfdom" or "forced labor." This is a possible way of interpreting Chytilova's intended meaning for the two girls, but more importantly it points toward the social context of Chytilova's film. Czechoslovakia was a Communist country in 1966, and under Soviet domination, but uneasily so -- Daisies is produced in the waning years of the Novotny government, which was barely holding off popular demand for reforms, and it predates the Prague Spring of 1968, when a brief thaw and embrace of reformism under Alexander Dubcek (who replaced Novotny) prompted a Soviet invasion to stop the liberalization. These facts are important to bear in mind because any examination of the sexual politics of Chytilova's film should probably begin with an understanding of the larger overall Marxist politics of Czechoslovakia in 1966.

In some sense, though, one way in which the sexual politics and the Marxist politics of the film collide should be evident from the film's opening. Why are these two girls both named Marie? It cannot just be a whimsically perverse attempt to confuse the viewer. In reality, the meaning of the symbolism is established very quickly when one of the two identically-dressed girls places a floral crown on her head, and remarks that she looks like a virgin. Czechoslovakia was, of course, one of the largely Roman Catholic countries that nevertheless fell behind the Iron Curtain and embraced Soviet-style Marxist ideology -- Poland, which would ultimately produce an anti-Soviet Pope, is perhaps the better known example, but Czechoslovakia was also largely Catholic, and Very Chytilova herself had been raised Catholic. But official Communist ideology was, historically, atheist: it denounced religion as superstition, following Marx's notion that it was the opiate of the masses. What does this have to do with Daisies? Quite a bit, when we attempt to think of how a female film director -- raised within Catholicism but liberated from the religion by official state ideology -- might have been considering the question of gender. Roman Catholicism has notoriously been accused of promoting a "Madonna-whore complex," by fitting women into social roles where they are either virginal and pure, or sexualized and wicked. Of course, one can argue that this aspect of gender relations in Catholic countries merely derives from the New Testament itself, where Jesus has two crucial women in his life, one a virgin (and his mother) and the other a prostitute (and his follower), and both named Mary. In other words, Chytilova's contemporary audience in 1966 would have known exactly how to approach the symbolism of two contrasting girls named Marie, especially when one of them tries on a garland and asks if she looks like a virgin. The gender politics here seem to implicate the church's traditional role in suppressing female autonomy, which is a convenient way for Chytilova to sidestep any questions about how Communism did or did not benefit women. The simple fact is that the fairly reactionary gender roles the girls end up playing here -- in being coquettes for a series of (presumably lecherous) older men -- can easily be blamed upon the religious, rather than political, construction of gender roles. The girls have the same name, but different looks: however, Chytilova does not differentiate them by making one a virgin and the other a whore. Instead "virgin" is a proposed social role that can be adopted if one wears the right costume for it. In some sense, the two girls are experiencing the idea of gender as performance, and gender as social construction.

And "construction" does seem to be le mot juste in considering the two Maries: as noted, their opening appearance seems to hint at the status as robots. But unlike the "forced labor" that provided the Czech language with the actual word "robot," these girls seem to do no work whatsoever. Instead, they seem to be machines built to eat, and flirt. The nonstop consumption of food has religious significance -- the first few appearances of food give us the apple, linked in Christianity with both original sin (disobedience) as well as femininity itself. Indeed, when we see the girls plucking fruit directly from a small well-tended apple tree, Chytilova clearly intends an allusion to Eve picking the apple in Eden. When the girls propose the seeming plot of the film -- that the world is getting bad, and therefore they are bad, and they should go misbehave accordingly -- we seem to be looking at a post-Christian deconstruction of the idea of original sin, and the implicit gender politics (it was Eve, not Adam, who picked the apple) involved in the idea of original sin. But Chytilova seems to want to combine a mocking allusion to these traditional Christian notions with a contemporary (and possibly satirical) Czech Communist notion of people who eat and eat without ever doing any work. In other words, the girls sit in society rather like the Marxist idea of the bourgeois -- consuming without producing, parasites upon society. Whether this status, which leads to their seeming comeuppance in the films conclusion, is meant by Chytilova as somehow a gender-based critique is a trickier question: it seems entirely possible that, beneath the obvious swipes at women's subordinate and stigmatized role in Christianity, there is also a more subtle critique of women's role in a supposedly egalitarian Communist country. The fact that they wear bikinis in the film's opening, when bikinis were readily identifiable in 1966 as an American and capitalist costume, suggests that they are hardly intended to be good Marxist girls in the first place -- for confirmation of this political interpretation of their bikinis, one may consult a Hollywood movie of five years earlier, Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three, in which the bikini plays a crucial role in how American capitalism is imagined behind the Iron Curtain. It is also worth noting that Wilder's film is itself based on an earlier Hollywood confection, Ninotchka starring Greta Garbo, which similarly imagines the life of a Communist woman who is able to be swayed from her ideology by the temptations of consumer goods. It is unclear whether Chytilova in 1966 would have seen either One, Two, Three or Ninotchka -- as American satires on Communism (and Communist women) it hardly seems likely that they would have been accessible to her in Czechoslovakia, but at the same time they appear to bear some relation on her vision of women as robotic consumers of food, and of men. (The symbolism of the scene in which the girls food consists entirely of penis-shaped foodstuffs is so obvious as to make the viewer wonder if the target of the joke is heavy-handed film symbolism rather than gender relations.) In any case, the ambiguous satirical suggestion here that women are identifiable as robots built to consume -- to consume food and men -- may very well have been what caused the Czechoslovakian government to ban the film and punish Chytilova for it. We must recall that whatever the politics (gender-based and otherwise) of this film were intended to be, it was nevertheless read as subversive by the Soviet-backed Czechoslovakian government, who effectively silenced Chytilova as a filmmaker.