The Rules of the Game, from 1939, is rare entertainment. It is both charming and earnest, light-footed and reflective. Life is always yielding to ideas of life, and vice versa. And Renoir’s themes – class and passion, science and spirit, progress and tradition – resound with vatic relevance almost a century later.
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A pilot lands in an atmosphere of autographs. Through shoulder-claps and spectacle, he searches for a woman, his woman, where is she? Not there. The fourth estate appears instead. How does it feel, a radio journalist asks our man, twenty-three hours across the Atlantic, a record! Oh, the distracted airman answers, the plane did most of it, and anyways, his muse didn’t show.
Why?
Because she’s a lady, his friend Octave explains, and this is a rabble. Her kind avoids crowds. Dignity deters the reckless heart. There are rules.
And there’s Renoir, starting his great film of cusps and frictions, tracking history like the buffalo. The Rules of the Game, from 1939, is rare entertainment. It is both charming and earnest, light-footed and reflective. Life is always yielding to ideas of life, and vice versa. And Renoir’s themes – class and passion, science and spirit, progress and tradition – resound with vatic relevance almost a century later.
For underneath an imbroglio of plots courses a contrast of characters. Two French aristocrats – Christine and her husband, Lord la Cheyniest – decide to host a hunt in the country, and each invite an amorous supplement. Christine’s is that petulant pilot, Andre Jurieux, and Cheyniest’s is a crackling libertine named Genevieve. Neither dalliance is secret; both lady and lordship know all, and this air of open transgression allows Renoir to abandon furtive adulteries for deeper dynamics of affection.
With the couple is their closest friend, Octave, who carries on with Christine’s servant, Lissette. Lisette is married to Schumacher, Cheyniest’s gamekeeper, but prefers to tantalize trespassers and chomp red apples. The Cheyniests” houseguests, as well as house staff, proliferate from there, and it is Renoir’s astonishing skill to depict every character – even the one-liners – with the depth due a frontman. Each inhabits and at the same time annuls type. For imaginative fullness, Renoir rivals the master novelists. His sympathies are so evenly spread, so perfectly suffused, that a comment either way is only a taint on perfection. The right response is reverent silence. In one of the film’s first scenes, Octave encapsulates his maker’s art: “The problem of life,” he says, “is that everyone has their reasons.”
Octave is played by the director, and often distills the dance down to a word. He pals around without background, apart from any caste. He is a friend to Jurieux but a stranger to the pilot’s moods, and while he loves the Cheyniests, he relies on their donations. This combination of intimacy and alienation allows Octave to observe occasions with an artist’s squint, with that special kind of exile’s focus that the fool uses to crack wise about the world. From his lips fall finished marble. His quickness begs inscription.
For Octave sees the tension of temperaments that is in many ways the film’s subject. He sees that beneath the quipping comedy of lovers lies a deeper drama of attitudes. The slow past mingles with the surging future, the old ways meet the new, and we are shown the spirit of each. We consider, in the jumble, what to salvage, what to dump. We wonder where our predecessors were wise, and worth perpetuating, and where worth letting go?
The aristocracy, in The Rules of the Game, is on its last legs. That much is clear. Progress fetes the pilot and his plane. The world supports speed and sanctifies science, and deems the mannered crawl of courtship, as well as the sacral mystery of religion, relics of a hoary elite. And yet the film reminds us of a law, the law of compensation. It reminds us that “every excess causes a defect, every defect an excess.”
What defect, then, of excessive modernity? What loss, from the onslaught of industry?
The answer lies in the quiet quality of class, that brew of allure and tradition that runs through the heart of the film. At worst, the term can serve as a wall, as a form of specious segmentation, but at best, as we see, it is nearer the opposite. It is a kind of catholic possibility, consumed in nuances of conduct. Class, as a personal quality (not a political category), sees human business with religious eyes. It is able, by attention, to redeem our meritless bustle, and reach into the deepest ambiguities of character. At its core, it is simply careful habits. It is vigilance, patience, something like a pause inside oneself, and it is practical for all.
Renoir, given this metaphysics of class, does not merely spoof his nobles (except when they deserve some spoofing), but instead gives them enviable wits, magnanimous minds. The Cheyniests are nothing like the enervated specimens in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, or Antonioni’s La Notte. And they are certainly no kin to the enigmatic bores of Last Year at Marienbad. That group of undead upper-crusters have little in common with Renoir’s cast of characters. “How exquisitely bored and decadent are the Antonioni figures, moving through their spiritual wasteland, how fashionable is their despair,” writes Pauline Kael. Decadence, despair, fashionable lassitude – Renoir doesn’t know the words. His imagination is far too enlivened, far too full of energy, to take the withered side of anything.
Kael in her essay claims the people of Fellini, Antonioni, and Resnais have, “very little personality or individuality.” She claims they in fact have “no convincing existence.” The same cannot be said of Renoir, whose work resembles that of Balzac, where, it’s been said, the very scullions have genius. Never could Renoir be said to stall momentum, or purposely flatten a character, or strain to make a nihilistic point. Every character in Rules is equally alive, irreducibly real. There are no “unmotivated movements”; there’s panache in every monad.
Lord Cheyniest, for example, instead of drolly dismissing the poacher on his land, listens, pities, and even takes him on as a domestic. Though the man, Monsieur Marceau, creates trouble, that’s not the point. The point is Cheyniest doesn’t spit on him. He takes a second to address him, and to hear out his aspirations, while resisting the gamekeeper’s suggestion to drub him. Cheyniest offers Marceau a chance to explain, and then a chance to improve. He thinks past the flatness of infraction (trespassing, poaching), and into the aims of the soul. Marceau respects Cheyniest for his consideration – his class – the whole film long.
In this encounter between Cheyniest and Marceau, we see the aristocracy’s commitment to the spiritual, not material, side of existence. We witness (and watch waning) a type of transcendentalist temper that believes in behavioral ideals, such ideals that can lead to moral negotiation, insight, and a graceful grip of others.
The modern type, Monsieur Jurieux, does not deal gracefully with anyone. When Christine doesn’t call, he crashes his auto. When Octave, his woozy passenger, harangues him in the grass, he cannot comprehend the lecture. Though our pilot is a hit with the people, on the individual level he breaks down. His emotions are undeveloped shouts. With and about his mistress, he is painfully obtuse, peevish, and destructive. He is dull despite his flashes.
Jurieux is a hero, but his glory is the product of Renault. He has been tutored by his tool, remade in the manufacturer’s image. As a result, his native genius has dwindled, his organic response has hardened. Although Jurieux “can cover the ocean in an hour, he can’t cross the Champs-Elysees without a crosswalk.” Like a slavish sedan, he now moves when the light changes, not when life urges. His instincts have become distorted by artillery. They are both overpowered and impotent, explosive and vapid, at the same time.
In The Rules of the Game, the aristocracy represents more than a dated regime. They represent a dying emphasis, a trait and a tradition, fading from humanity. The viewer soon realizes that the sun is setting on idealism, that the world is plagued with errands, and that restraint is in retreat. If the film frets over anything, it frets over this.
The lords might expire, but does their noble theme? Does class go out of style? Do ambitions of the self? All men may ascend to self-control, every adult strive for the good of concentration. To teach id an etiquette, or submit impulse to review – when is this without its uses?
E. M. Forester writes of a character in A Passage to India that “he had gone with his tulips and roses, but tulips and roses do not go.” Great houses are shaken, and nobles obsolesce, but the need for nobleness does not. Class is the tulips and roses, the divinity of man that does not go.
And yet we insist it does, to our own impoverishment. Look around. Progress didn’t stop. We now inhabit a sterile technocracy dictated by greed and an ersatz intelligence. Man worships nothing and games on his phone. The Godardian age of Marx and Coca-Cola has been superseded by the era of Bitcoin and Delta. Our lives have grown gaudy, and global, and empty.
Because we bum-rushed the noose. We read with hasty eyes what required a slower, more spiritual glance. Restructure wealth was the first step. Lift up the left out, no doubt. But the second step would have been to simultaneously save the spirit, perpetuate its prominence, plant class inside the new world’s conscience.
This would have required a double vision, a symbolic sight alongside a political will. It would have meant a kind of poetic upheaval, defiant and devout, inventive and conservative. In essence, the adaptation of Cheyniest’s humane attentions, without Cheyniest. Or a sacrifice in which something survives, like spooning nectar from expired fruit. It seems instead that the world raced to cancel checkbooks, and failed to preserve anything fine.
The aristocracy is far more important in Renoir’s film as the artery of an idea than as an outmoded frill. That idea, once again, is spiritual, for class is only a modified form of religion or philosophy, designed to raise man above the beast, onto a plane of trained reflection. It does so by christening the little acts of life, transforming so-called trivia into opportunities of mind.
The loser of this slide from class is everyone, of course, but in the film it is most notably Octave, a man born into brains, and little else. When you peel back the trappings, the balls and the bird-shoots, you see that the aristocracy works in its ideal form as an asylum for the artist, a peaceful dwelling-place for a nature like Octave’s. In this role, they serve as a sign of the world’s tolerance, its acceptance of variety, its plural concept of being. For a strain of aristocracy in any society expands its notion of success. In a way, European socialism can be seen as a democratic descendant of aristocratic help. Both expand the possibilities of existence, by reducing the press of necessity. Both allow for the emergence of ulterior hopes and immaterial values, inner ambitions with inner achievements.
Octave himself has no material reputation, nor does he seek one. He loves Christine, but knows he could never fund her lifestyle. Lord Cheyniest, too, has nothing to “gain” from his company. And yet both Christine and her husband in many ways defer to their friend. They are sympathizers, sensitives of a sort, who understand their profit is a wealthy mind. Their own aristocratic insistence on patterns of conduct kins them to the pattern-makers of history. Out of the chaos of manners, class; out of the chaos of life, art.
“If it wasn’t for a few generous friends,” Octave says to Christine near the end of the film, “I would have starved.”
It’s here we hear the crux of the film. Above all else, it is the displacement of Octave, of the artist and the artist-type, that Rules cries out against. The oracles, out on the streets – that’s the new world’s woe. Artists unhoused; worse, artists unloved. “Poverty annihilates the future,” says Orwell. Poverty annihilates the poet, too.
Octave’s starvation, implied as he departs for Paris at the film’s conclusion, represents the meanest ill of all. It concerns not only the privation of one man but the imminent lack of those, like the Cheyniests, whose best purpose lies in protecting and providing for such bearers of sweetness and light. The Cheyniests’ passing, and by extension Octave’s, becomes a lament for lost vision, a cry against the false values that consider man only as an efficient, external, and possessive animal.
When a society devalues its seers and seekers, it devalues a lobe of its brain. Man lives or dies by his capacity to appreciate. This is not an economic idea. When Octave is ousted, when the world’s aristocratic will dies off, that same world sadly shrinks.
We need an America friendlier to the artist, assistant to those hard creators that need a few generous friends to pension their enterprise, so that the world’s wisdom can keep up with its winnings. For the degree of authentic aristocraticness present in a society – the degree to which it creates conditions of art and inwardness – gives one a decent sense of its soul. “A perfect republic,” writes Schlegel, “would have to be not just democratic, but aristocratic and monarchic at the same time.”
America certainly has its richest men. There is no dearth of oligarch. And yet our big ministers do not seem to care for culture, or class of any kind. As far as I can tell, Chamfort doesn’t circulate, as it does in the Cheyniests’ drawing room. It’s all Mars, and Meta, and never mind the graces. We detect none of the dignity of the dying Boeldieu, in Renoir’s Grand Illusion, and none of the Cheyniests’ selfless patronage, in Rules.
We should mind. We should picket. Don’t eat the rich, reform them. America – for how long now? – has been an industrial superpower, and a spiritual dunghill. We have the dollar, and not a drop of subtlety. Cash-rich, class-poor. Our modern one-percenters have resources, and no stature. Their wealth is one-dimensional. It is factual, not figurative.
The call, then, is this: to transform America’s executives into America’s patrons. To reinstate the singer, the sayer, the painter, the prancer, and wake up our land’s reflective limb. There must be the conviction among us, visible in our society, that spirit is of equal value to economy. That lucre reaches its limit and then moves on to higher laws. A culture of class must emerge within the head of capitalism, within the body of democracy, and with it will develop culture itself. The barons are financially complete. They must now trade monetary ambition for spiritual initiative, and start supporting the poetic prosperity of the race.
Because the march of progress is morbid if it does not contain a shred of soul. Only through the renewed subsidy of idealism can we combat what Yeats calls “the slow dying of men’s hearts.” Only through tempering invention with introspection, discovery with contemplation, can we be saved from plush damnation. If not, the hollow pageant steams ahead, and we will all live on, as chaff.
An aristocratic idealism must be exhumed from the past and channeled into ready avatars. Nothing less will do to revive humanity from technological torpor. Nothing less will raise us from the grave. Who will it be? Who in America will realize that the stream of progress must include the progress of consciousness, and create a fresh estate of art?
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. Norton, 2001, 139.
Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. Harcourt, Brace, 1924, 106.
Kael, Pauline. I Lost It at the Movies. Marion Boyars, 1994, 181–182, 187.
Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. Berkley Publishing, 1959, 16.
Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. by Peter Firchow, 1971. University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 46.
Yeats, William Butler. “The Symbolism of Poetry,” Essays & Introductions. Collier Books, 1968, 162–163.
