SPOILER ALERT.
Introverted girl meets introverted boy. Introverted girl
loses introverted boy to extroverted twin sister. Introverted girl regains
introverted boy (after extroverted twin drowns and introverted twin unsuccessfully
commandeers extroverted twin’s life for a hot minute).
A Stolen Life, which is based on the novel Uloupeny
Zivot by K.J. Benes, is, if I may use a cliché, a movie ahead of its time.
And not just because of the surprisingly sophisticated technological magic
(Bette Davis plays the aforementioned twins, Kate and Pat Bosworth, who
interact physically with some frequency), but because it deals with a topic
that is only now being fully understood, and at a time when there was no
practical vocabulary for it: introversion. That is to say, the vocabulary
existed, it just wasn’t defined properly in popular consciousness, and still
isn’t, entirely. Indeed, in another 1940s Bette Davis vehicle, Now, Voyager,
Davis’s character, Charlotte, refers to old Boston homes as “introverted” in a
rather reductive, negative way (the irony of the [mis]use of a psychological
term in a largely psychological – and otherwise fabulous – film is not lost on
this writer). While Jung’s Psychological Types had been published in
1921, society has continually failed to grasp the deeper meanings of
introversion and extroversion until very, very recently, thanks to Susan Cain
and others.
Yet, despite the
lack of vocabulary, between Catherine Turney’s screenplay, Margaret Buell
Wilder’s adaptation, and Davis’s performance, a sensitive portrait of an
introvert emerges. The dialogue – and its masterful delivery by Queen Bette –
tells us everything we need to know. First, in spite of her profession to the
contrary (“I never was very good at mincing words”), Kate displays the classic
introverted trait of filtering. Second, she is a somewhat solitary figure, tho’
clearly socially intelligent (as evidenced by said filtering). Third, she is
sensitive, empathetic, intuitive, and deep, as well as cautious and reserved.
Every time I watch
this film, I find myself thinking the same thing: “People are always being so
rude to her.” The first few minutes of the film introduce us to a persistent,
but polite, Kate Bosworth, who responds gratefully and courteously to the
less-than-gentlemanly male figures she encounters. First, having missed her
connexion to the island where she is to stay with her cousin, Freddie Linley,
Kate is forced to extract begrudgingly given information from a pinched-voiced,
uncooperative dockworker. Then, when she asks lighthouse worker Bill Emerson
(Glenn Ford), her soon-to-be love interest, for a ride to the island because
she “missed the steamer,” he ungraciously replies, “Well, that’ll teach you not
to be late.” Kate doesn’t respond in kind. Instead, she gently insists, “I’d be very indebted to you,” and when gruffly asked, “Can’t you see I’m full up?” replies with
subtle, in fact, almost imperceptible humor and charm, “I’m not very large.”
This does the trick, and Bill, Introvert #2, allows her aboard and, by
extension, into his life.
During this scene, we discover that Kate is an artist, which
also points to her introversion, as painting/drawing is a largely solitary
activity, and artists are sensitive, often inwardly oriented people. The first
time we see Kate’s work, it’s by way of her sketch of Bill, the aforementioned
Introvert #2. Call it meta-introversion, or something like it: Kate is an
introvert capturing the likeness of another introvert, thereby illustrating, if
you will, the sympathy between them, which she seems to detect almost
immediately.
Eventually, she concocts a plan to see Bill again,
negotiating a deal with Eben Folger (Walter Brennan), Bill’s crotchety coworker, so that she may
allegedly paint the latter’s portrait. Again, we see Kate reacting with plucky
politeness to Eben’s protestations and curtness (“I said, ‘No visitors!’” And
later, “Now, you’re pretty smart, for a woman!”). Introverts filter their
responses because they generally dislike confrontation and unpleasantness; it
takes too much energy to fight (indeed, later, when Freddie tells Kate to
“fight for” Bill, she says, helplessly, “I can’t.”), and introverts’ energy
reservoirs are limited. Furthermore, filtering is often used as a survival
mechanism, as it creates the semblance of a thick skin; introverts are often
extremely sensitive, and their seemingly impenetrable exteriors allow them to
function in and navigate through an insensitive world.
More of Kate’s seeming indifference can be seen in her
interactions with Bill. The latter fails (purposely? Cluelessly?
Self-defensively?) to take Kate’s hint that she’d like to visit a while at the
lighthouse, and takes her words, “Well, now that I’ve lured him into posing, I
guess I’d better go; you’re busy,” at face value, saying, “Yes, I’ve got a
couple of hours work left.” She responds simply, but tellingly, “I’m sure you
have.” Her polite smile and almost flat tones tell us that her feelings are
hurt, but she’s trying to hide the fact.
Another such example of Kate’s feigned impassivity occurs
when she edits her reaction to Bill’s news that he is leaving because he’ll be
“going on to a new job next week” (which, it turns out, is only temporary – way
to scare a girl, Bill). “Well, it’s been lots of fun these past few days,” she says
with unconvincing nonchalance. After having confessed to Bill her plan to get
to know him in an earlier scene, she refuses to expose her heart any further,
as you would expect from any self-respecting introvert.
Indeed, said confession would be a big deal to an introvert,
but Kate must’ve believed the risk was worth it, as she recognizes her need for
an introverted soulmate. During the “confession scene,” when Bill encourages
her to go “right out into” the fog, which she’s a little afraid of, she says,
“It’s like the end of the world,” and finds that it encourages one to say
“honest things,” leading to her revelation.
Just before this, Kate relates, “I don’t mind being alone,
but I don’t like to feel lonely.” Bill, who we’re later told “deliberately took
this job here to get away from too many people,” understands. “There’s a
difference, isn’t there?” he agrees. Indeed, the exchange between these
characters is the crux of the personality portrait:
Kate: “Lonely people want friends. They have to search very
hard for – it’s difficult for them to – to find—“
Bill: “Other lonely people.”
“The fog’s lifting,” Bill says towards the end of the scene.
Kate responds, “It wasn’t the end of the world, after all.” Symbolism, not
psychological terminology, illustrates the point. Introverts enjoy solitude,
but not necessarily isolation; they wish to be understood, to have witnesses to
their lives, and who better to share these lives with than other misunderstood
introverts?
Kate seems quite self-aware in this respect. When her twin,
Pat, asks her if she’d like to date one of her soon-to-be castoffs (the
never-seen Tom Frasier, who owns a “perfectly out-of-this-world yacht”), Kate
shakes her head and says, “I know my limitations, and I’m satisfied to stay
within them.” This simple statement implies many things: Kate acknowledges her
introversion, realizes she’s best suited to another quiet-living introvert, and
embraces her introversion, something introverts are only now being allowed
(even encouraged) to do.
Her declaration is important because it follows upon the
heels of a conversation she has with Introvert #2, which takes place in a spot
on the island that Bill has never brought anyone else to before. He could only
share this special world with someone who would naturally inhabit it, another
introvert. A little earlier, before he shows her “the best spot of all,” in
effect, they discuss, vaguely, and again, without the psychobabble, the subject
of introversion. Bill informs her how sorry he feels for his former university
classmates, who think he is to be pitied, “stuck way off down here.”
Kate gets it:
“You’ve found your right place in the world,” she says, “I
envy you.”
“You know, you’re the first person that’s ever understood
that,” he replies, gratefully.
The conversation, it would seem, did her good. By
empathizing with Bill, she comes to appreciate her nature, and by the time she
gets home, she is ready to declare as much to her sister. Bill’s island is her
island, the paradisaic Isle O’ Introversion. Ironically, once Kate finds
someone to share her island of isolation (aching loneliness) with, it becomes a
symbol of blissful introversion (heavenly aloneness).
And just when Kate has found her psychological sea legs,
having embraced her beautiful, glorious introversion, along comes the
extroverted Pat and pulls the rug out from under her (excuse the multiple
metaphors). Having hijacked Kate’s date with Bill (you’ll have to watch the
movie to find out how!), Bill, thinking he’s speaking to Kate, tells her that
while he knew she was a “swell person,” he’d always felt that there was
“something lacking,” that she was “like… a cake without any frosting.” Charmer.
Pat understands her own superficial appeal, tho’ not much else: “Today, you
think I’m well frosted.” He remarks, “I’ll say.” She chuckles.
“What are you giggling about?” Bill asks.
“Your not thinking I was frosted,” Pat replies.
“I was never more fooled in my life,” says Bill, with a
silly grin.
He has no idea how accurate his statement is. He has been
fooled into thinking Pat was Kate for an entire afternoon, and will continue to
be fooled about Pat’s character -- all the way to the altar.
While it may seem that Kate’s life has been “stolen” by Pat,
there is more role-reversal and life-theft on the way. But more on that, later.
First, we must deal with the visit that sets it all in
motion. While Kate is painting with her new artist friend, Karnock, Bill calls
her to ask if she’d help him choose a gift for her man-stealing sister. She
agrees. During this meeting, Bill reveals that he took on a new job that “pays
darn good money,” cluing us into the fact that his priorities have changed
because Pat is a demanding wife, and that theirs is an unhappy marriage. Kate
says, “Bill, I can’t think of you away from the island, somehow.” (He confirms
our suspicions: “I had to do something to make more dough.”) The island, Bill’s
safe haven, the introvert’s comfortable cocoon, has been abandoned in favor of
the extrovert’s (Pat’s) demands/needs. He is no longer living in his own
peculiar world; he is, to continue the nautical rhetoric, a fish out of water,
and that can only mean one thing: death.
As we might’ve told Kate, meeting up with Bill would not be
a good idea. She returns deflated, and Karnock proceeds to tell her that she’ll
“never land a guy all closed up inside like this,” echoing his earlier words to
her about her work, that, like her, it was “stiff, ingrown, afraid.” Not a
surprising diagnosis from Karnock, seeing as introverts are always being told
that they need to “come out of their shells” (read: become extroverts).
She snaps, “But I wasn’t always like this; people change!”
Again, the vocabulary is nonexistent, but the writers, through Kate, let us in
on something here: Introverts are not necessarily retiring wallflowers. They
can be open, though reserved. The point is that Kate’s introversion has become
a bit more exaggerated because of the pain she has experienced at her
extroverted sister’s hands. She has turned inward because the outside world,
outside forces, are too hurtful and destructive. Living inside herself, her own
mind, her own world, her own personal island, is safer.
In fact, she tells Karnock, “I think I’m going to the island
for a while.” The island Bill abandoned. She has decided, conversely, to put
her roots down even deeper there. Perhaps she feels closer to him there, but
one thing’s certain: She feels closer to herself. She can heal there, by
herself.
Or could have, if she hadn’t arrived to find Pat squatting
on her territory. And stealing more of her life, it would seem. She has now
taken up one of Kate’s passions, sailing, as well as her more casual fashion
sense: “You haven’t said a word about my dungarees,” Pat intones, “I’m getting
to be a big outdoors girl, now.” It’s the kind of smugness that brings out the
pugilist in one.
But it’s obvious that Pat doesn’t really get it. When Kate
asks, “Whatever possessed you to come here,” Pat replies, “Oh, I wanted to see
the gang again.” One comes to the island to get away, Pat, not to socialize, to
connect/commune quietly and calmly with one’s own self, not to take “luncheon…
on Tom Fraser’s yacht.”
That is, perhaps, why the island (or its waters) must
destroy Pat – she not only misses its point, but abuses it, attempts to characterize
it with an opposing nature, giving it a different function. She is trespassing.
So, after declaring that she has taken up sailing because she’d have “died of
boredom otherwise” -- another slap in the face to Kate and her authentic love
of the water -- the sea punishes Pat, who was playing skipper while boating
during a storm with her sister, by swallowing her up, thereby reclaiming its
proper place as a safe harbor, as it were, for the introverted.
Now, it’s Kate’s turn to steal Pat’s life, having survived
the storm and been mistaken for her twin. Davis chooses to show us that Kate is
“playing” Pat – somewhat unconvincingly – and it’s the right choice because it
illustrates the point. Introverts often pretend to be extroverts in order to
get through life, in order to be happy, because, until recently, they’ve been
told that extroverts are the happier, more successful personalities. The
naturally introverted Salvador Dali’s uncle advised him to do just that. I say
it’s no coincidence that our Kate is a painter, too.
“Well, you’re being dreadfully unsocial,” says Kate (as Pat)
to Freddie after he refuses to stay for a drink. Davis and the writers are
pushing the point: Pat is a butterfly, outgoing – “extroverted.” She rather
blithely invites Freddie and Bill to have drinks, to socialize, so soon after
her sister’s death, when she should be in mourning. This insensitivity is
intentionally jarring, for Pat was the extreme type of extrovert – the callous
type, and so, tho’ jarring, it somewhat rings true. Yet, its complete
impropriety also makes the moment feel false because it is: Kate is mimicking –
or attempting to mimic -- Pat, and nothing more. It is a pantomime, not a
conversion. When Kate plays Pat, she doesn’t even try to display sensitivity
because that’s not how she truly perceives her sister to be. Something, we
sense, is off. This sensation is related to that weird vibe that’s created when
introverts try to network – it’s uncomfortable for their interlocutors because
it’s uncomfortable, indeed, unnatural, for the introverts themselves to engage
in self-promotion.
Kate-Pat admits this in a very telling piece of dialogue: “I
know just how he [Freddie] feels; it’s very strange for me without Kate.” On
the surface, she means that it’s strange for a twin to have lost a family
member, but when we remember that Kate-Pat is, well, really Kate, the sentence
takes on another meaning: “It’s very strange not being my (introverted) self.”
The beauty of this plot twist is that Kate, as Pat, soon
realizes that she must start acting more like her real self when she discovers
that Pat’s wild ways have caused a rift in her marriage to Bill. In fact, they
were in the process of divorcing as Pat was planning to wed the married man,
Jack Talbot, with whom she’d been carrying on an affair. Having asked Bill for
a second chance, she now has to conform to the “kinds of things he likes,”
which are the same kinds of things Kate likes. Quite the tangled web.
When Bill returns home, Kate-Pat informs him of their dinner
plans. “Oh, we’re staying home tonight,” Bill says, pleasantly surprised.
“I thought it’d be fun,” she says.
“Why, yes, it would,” Bill replies, with wonder.
Fun for introverts, that is. Clearly, Pat had always
insisted they go out for dinner, to socialize, to be seen, because, as an
extreme, superficial type of extrovert, that was her idea of fun.
Even as Kate pretends to be Pat, striving to be more like
Kate, Kate can’t seem to help being anything but, you guessed it, Kate. In
attempting to save the marriage, Kate handles Pat’s affair with Talbot by not
handling it at all – she, like a true introvert, avoids confrontation. She
tells Bill, “He [Talbot] telephoned me two, three times, and sent me flowers. I
haven’t acknowledged them I – I thought that was the best way to handle it.”
Ironically, this technique is less than satisfactory to Introvert #2. He says,
“Don’t you think you owe it to him to tell him that it’s all over?” To carry
our identity web motif further, we could say that Bill wants Kate-Pat to act
more like Pat-Kate.
The subsequent visit to Talbot’s apartment turns up even
more dirt on Pat. When Kate realizes what a “laughing stock” Pat has made of
Bill with “all the others,” she decides, “I can’t face him,” packs her bags,
and heads for the island, where her trusty cousin is waiting for her.
When she arrives, Freddie comments on the grisly weather,
but Kate says, “I like the fog.” Of course she does, now – it conceals her,
shelters her introverted self, and also revealed Bill and Kate to each other,
and Kate more fully to herself, that night they talked atop the lighthouse.
Freddie, of course, has figured out that Kate isn’t Pat and
scolds, “It’s absolutely unbelievable that you could do such a thing.”
She replies, pitifully, “It seemed my only chance for
happiness.” Again, we see the struggle between her contented introversion and
the drive to behave in an extroverted manner, extroversion being the supposed
key to happiness.
“But you were never a liar, Kate. How did you think you
could live a lie?” Freddie asks. In other words, she had always been authentic,
true to her introverted self and, like many introverts, authentic in the way
she related to others.
Freddie senses Kate’s connexion with the island. In fact, he
reveals that he realized her true identity for certain when she called to tell
him she was coming to the island. While Karnock reproached her for “always
running away,” that proves to be the right thing to do, in this case. In
running away from the house Bill shared with Pat, she runs to the island, and
therefore, away from her fake extroverted self toward her real introverted
self, away from the false world Bill was living in with Pat, toward his real
home.
In returning to her safe haven, she is not only returning to
her own selfhood, but to Bill, who, in the closing scene, we see walking toward
her as she stands, apparently desolate, on their special spot on the island.
“Oh, Katie, I knew I’d find you here,” Bill says. In this way, Bill finds Kate,
even as she has rediscovered herself, on the island and, in the process, finds
himself again: “Oh, yes, I fell in love with Pat, but it was never right, not
the way we were always right for each other. I know that now,” he says.
In returning to their common ground – literally – they embrace
their own introverted natures and can now be together, authentically, because
Pat, Kate’s extroverted and false doppelganger/alter ego, is dead, literally
and figuratively.
“Let’s forget everything that’s happened, as though we never
left the island. Can you do that?” Bill says. Kate nods. I think we may safely
assume that introverted girl and introverted boy live happily ever after. The
End.
