Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Pt. 2: Firing Squads and Flop Sweat
Wednesday, June 22, 2016 at 2:00PM 
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of this Oscar-winning classic, Team Experience is revisiting the picture, tag team relay style. In Chapter 1, Nathaniel discussed our first look at George and Martha as they "welcomed" Nick and Honey into their home for a late night boozy marital bout. The first true bomb had just gone off when George realized that Martha had broken their "rules"... we rejoin the party now as George strikes back.
Pt 2 by Daniel Crooke
My first wallop by Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was in my early years of high school after developing a formative penchant for emotionally explosive character dramas, iconic Hollywood movie stars, and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. Once I learned of this film’s existence, I snatched up the first secondhand DVD I could find. It may have proved a bad role model; I shouted and scowled around the house for days, hunched in doorways with a clinking tumbler full of iced tea. The drama was just too magnificent to leave on the screen and, especially in this section, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton have so much fun spitting poison that their hysterical wickedness becomes infectious.
Through my green teenage lens of inexperience, I thought George and Martha should divorce immediately, move on with their lives, and leave this self-destructive cycle in the rear view. Jesus, can you imagine their Tinder profiles? Now that time and experience have obliterated my preconceptions of the idyllic American relationship, I can plainly see that they need one another to survive. They’ve got an arrangement in their marriage that – however revolting or sadomasochistic it may seem to the outsider – more or less works for them.
32:11 ....As long as they stay within the bounds. [More...]
Martha spilling the beans on their Son is a clear violation of the rules they established earlier in the night. When he answers to Martha’s "swampy" call and returns to her side, she mistakes his arrival as obedience and asks him to light her cigarette. But George, lording above her and eager to puff his chest, is having none of this.
No. There are limits. I mean, a man can put up with only so much without descending a rung or two on the old evolutionary ladder, which is up your line. Now, I will hold your hand when it’s dark and you’re afraid of the boogeyman and I will tote your gin bottles out after midnight so no one can see but I will not light your cigarette. And that, as they say, is that.”
32:47 Even a minor moment, like Martha looking away in disgust from George’s authority-grab, demonstrates how seamlessly the performances intertwine with Sam Steen’s editing, Haskell Wexler’s camera, and Mike Nichols’ direction. At first, Steen’s cut of Martha turning away seems to undermine George's speech by abruptling ending it. But the couch level angle of Wexler’s close-up betrays her position, demonstrating that she is indeed on a lower rung. Taylor’s dogged façade echoes with defeat. The jab landed.
Honey takes one more ill advised sip of that brandy in her own subtly fraught close-up, her shadow about ready to strangle. (But who can blame her? The only means of escape she’s been offered from her hosts or her husband are down in her glass.)
Quick to take back control of the room, Martha begins a master class in emasculation, asking Nick teasing questions about his physical prowess. George is carefully framed right between them in deep focus; Martha may be turned on by Nick’s athletic record, but she’s only asking about it to turn George off. The wunderkind Biology professor takes the bait, stoking the coals by lighting Martha’s cigarette. He ain’t in the Math department but a dizzying insert of his lighter moving to her mouth removes George from the equation entirely. Honey tries butting into the background too but she’s no match for Martha, who fills the frame in monstrous form, her eyes wrapped around Nick like a python ready to squeeze.
Martha [to Nick]: Is that right, have you kept your body?
Honey: Yes, he has a very firm body.”
Poor Honey. This decidedly rigid and unsexy reading is no match for Martha's smolder; it's not even a fight to keep control of her husband. Nick leans forward, blocking Honey from our view just as quickly as Martha edges out George. Martha has all three adversaries exactly where she wants them for her next move: Honey, threatened; Nick, begging for more; George, edged out and castrated. Deliciously drawing a thick line between her husband and the piece of meat to her right.
Paunchy here isn’t too happy when the conversation moves to muscle. How much do you weigh?”
Since Nick used to be a boxer, Martha decides to pick at an old wound and cryptically ask George to tell everyone about the boxing match they had one time.
34:12 But George, in the tightest closeup, has reached his limit with swallowing her barrage of insults and he’s forced to take action.
George walks out, his purpose mysterious, but the sound of Martha’s berating him consumes the hallway as he lumbers down it. We stay on George’s face, imagining the nightmarish expressions to go along with her story in the other room. By the time he makes it to the closet a sudden stack of magazines scattering and the uneasy undertow of the score add to the dread. George finds... the rifle.
POW!”
35:22 I love this dangerous cut from the sleeping gun to Martha’s exploding head, with her exclamation only making matters worse. Taylor brews and bubbles with glee, eviscerating George, oblivious to the menace stalking into the room…
Pow, you’re dead.”
35:57 The umbrella burst of one toy rifle punctuates a swirling symphony of visual pandemonium with relief. Not that it’ll last. Nichols, Steen, and Wexler demonstrate a supreme command of disorder, but this time with a real sense of terror built by jerky quick cuts between frenetic zooming close-ups – especially the one pushing into Martha’s eyes as if to say: I dare you to pull that trigger, you louse. Even with his crafty fake-out, George still exhibits impotency; he’s shooting blanks.
-Did you really think I was going to kill you, Martha?
-You kill me, that’s a laugh.
38:22 What a happy family portrait; finally, all our friends are back together in one big four-shot again. It comes as no surprise that Martha doesn’t waste a second before proffering the idea of Nick taking over the History department in due time. It certainly won’t be Swampy back there. Now, this is a bizarre proposition of department lateral moves – more about the distance between History and Biology later – but whether it makes any logical sense doesn’t matter; it’s another contest Martha’s calling between her bog and her new beau that goes straight to the crotch. Eventually, she’ll have planted enough seeds of competitive virility that her garden of weeds will grow.
When is your son...?”
38:44 It’s fittingly ironic, then, that Honey unknowingly disarms Martha by confronting her with her own elusive offspring.
This glistening close-up of a slurring Honey works as a pitch-perfect segue into the more explosive personal attacks to come; the high-angle warps our sense of balance and every bead of sweat betrays the booze and the rising conflict. The steady proliferation of Wexler’s close-ups sneak up on you as the social bonds in the room fray; wouldn’t you be sweating after some of those wild zooms came for you? While maintaining the organic messiness of the group shots, every isolated close-up is an application of war paint, a reminder that each member of this party are on their own in battle.
39:15 As George harangues Martha at her own game by drilling her over the particulars of their son, they speak so theoretically about this unseen human being that it mismatches the specificity of the lived-in home, like all the overstuffed academic bookshelves that Nathaniel tactfully mentioned. That the topic suddenly hushes Martha makes it that much more unsettling.
40:11 She’s had enough of everyone calling her son “the little bugger” so unsurprisingly, Martha finds her way back behind the phallus guillotine by informing Nick and Honey that she questions George’s paternity. That you’re initially unsure whether this is the first time she’s leveled such a claim in the story gives you the feeling that George and Martha make it all up as they go along, building a broken house of trump cards that they force one another to live inside.
Nick and Honey are flabbergasted. One of the most effective repeat visual devices throughout the film is the reaction shot of these two whenever the hosts say something that’s cruel enough to choke on. The pitch black humor of the film doesn’t go down easy. George refers to their “blonde-eyed, blue-haired son” and nobody corrects his malapropism.
Martha finds it offensive, blonde or blue, because of course their son has beautiful green eyes. This relationship is basically Calvinball.
41:22 Someone get this girl another nipper of brandy for calling out the gender politics of the word “floozy.” I swear, Sandy Dennis is the drunk Glinda to Dorothy Malone’s Wicked Witch of the West of the wasted white girls of Best Supporting Actresses.
42:00 George accuses Martha’s father of having the tiny red eyes of a mouse – or, perhaps, Satan. She doesn’t waste a second before pointing out how he pales in comparison to him. Martha mentions how she and daddy used to have high hopes that George had the stuff before they realized what a loser he was. The family line, ruined by a limpdick. Thinking back to that first viewing, I remembered more direct provocation right before Martha raged into George’s inadequacies but Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is more a behavioral study in the cumulative effect of microaggressions than it is about staging bouts. Its berserk tonal shifts are jarring, as if they’re reactions to earlier moments only just remembered in the drunken haze. I could’ve used this insight when I put on a production of the play in high school and couldn’t pack the proscenium with enough of the histrionics you’d expect from a bunch of seventeen year olds doing Edward Albee – You know what this scene needs? A chair thrown across the room!
I stand warned.”
George tries to stop her one last time with a warning but nothing stands in Martha’s cyclonic path now. The living room is the Risk board of their relationship and the pieces are about to come flying off. So begins a toxic all-timer of the great screen monologues, viciously aided and abetted by Wexler’s deliriously psychological camerawork…
So anyway I married the SOB. I had it all planned out. First he’d take over the history department. Then when Daddy retired he’d take over the whole college, you know. That was the way it was supposed to be. [Aside to George] Getting angry, baby, huh?”
Honey’s sweaty close-up was just the beginning. Wexler’s camera whips around and follows Martha in a tracking close-up as she elaborates on all the dreams that George failed to conceive for them. But she’s too fast for his photography; the shot dips in and out of focus as Taylor storms the lens, the pull damned by her fury. If Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a horror film then this scene is a kill.
As the camera swings back to a confrontational two-shot with George, it arrives with a mouthful of vinegar but Martha’s not even close to spitting it all out yet. She’s got to keep some to swallow for herself.
That was the way it was supposed to be. All very simple. And Daddy thought it was a good idea too, for a while. Until he started watching for a couple of years. [Aside to George] Getting angry?
Until he watched for a couple of years and started thinking that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all...”
Her hair going full Medusa, Martha throttles back to the floor as Nichols guides her in feverish pace. Taylor’s bullying command of her voice keeps me up at night; the cadence of each insult is so uncontainable that you internalize every syllable. Burton plays the moment as faux despondency; he’s barely keeping a lid on it but can’t show his hand.
We cut to reaction shots of Nick and Honey. These are decidedly less amusing now when seen from Martha’s POV. We’ve already lost all eye lines for clear cuts in Martha’s rage, so by jumping the natural line for a cut we’re already about to puke. Nick is paralyzed with disbelief and Honey – captured in full blur to reflect Martha's vision -- has been possessed by a phantom of her own future.
That maybe, Georgie Boy didn’t have the stuff. That maybe he didn’t have it in him. You see George didn’t have much push. He wasn’t particularly aggressive. In fact he was sort of a FLOP. A great big fat FLOP”
For the monologue's climax,to meet Martha’s need for bloodlust and the audience’s desperation for a breath, George breaks his composure and his bottle of booze.
I hope that was an empty bottle, George. You can’t afford to waste good liquor. Not on your salary. Not an associate professor’s salary.”
The bottle may be broken for good but we’re not safe from the shards on the floor; George can’t surrender and let her win just yet.
If you can’t beat em, join em. George drowns Martha out with her own sing-songy flop – “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” – as he drags the camera with him...
...to pull Honey off the couch and swing her around like a rag doll in the world’s most demented game of Ring around the Rosie ever. The visual disorder creates a hurricane and we're in its center; The room is literally spinning.
We leave the circle of Hell to barf along with Honey, who flees with way too much brandy in her stomach. Nick runs after her. Martha walks out without a care, shrugging off the uproar. This leaves George, alone and squinting, just as Martha intended. We’re left in the ashes of conflict, metastasized and consumed through the perfectly constructed style of the freefalling filmmaking and unhinged performances. And this isn't even close to the climax! Within the film's library of rapidly shifting tones, this is just one in a series of rugs being pulled out from under us.
46:23 The arrival of the sparse overture and the dramatic change of location perfectly bridges this scene to the next; an escape to the outdoors between Nick and George. Armed with a bottle of bourbon, Nick ambles out to a tree swing in the front yard where George rides alone.
Now, I realize I’ve spent a lifetime on ten minutes of film, but when they’re some of the most dramatic, nay INSANE, fireworks ever put to celluloid – in terms of symbiotic explosions between actor and actressing, editing, and camerawork – it would be criminal not to luxuriate in its ecstatic ugliness. For these next fifteen or so minutes, we'll keep it more broad, as the tete-a-tete between Nick and George has a lot more mileage to cover in the remainder of the film than this scene alone. But it’s important to note that the vibe of it all is nimbly lugubrious, coasting on the drunk pace and logic that the filmmaking has established. The dark of night surrounds them, adrift in this psychological pit in the wild that they’ve dug themselves into, and the only way out is dick-measuring and over-sharing.
48:12 Unable to take any of the blame, Nick prattles on to George about what a lightweight Honey can be, apologizing on behalf but really pointing the finger. George thinks he’s talking about Martha, and the similarities between their wives and marriage motivations become apparent as the scene goes on.
They’ve both married into money or power in order to enhance their own masculine stature; Nick, robbing the cradle for her rich father and, George, chasing academic influence and credibility by marrying into a university president’s family. In this stark scene of drunken mumbles, one thing becomes crystal clear: Nick and George are one and the same, blaming the wives whom they’ve used up for years while refusing to acknowledge them as the vehicle for their careers.
Nick reveals the reason he married Honey: she was pregnant, but it was a hysterical pregnancy. Segal’s subtle snarl and the way he grips his glass with hard knuckles reveal that the pretty boy may be more of a jerk than he lets on.
She blew up, and then she went down.”
This scene of accidental skin-shedding in particular proves why Segal received the Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. I say "accidental" because George is secretly skinning him for the secrets he's now sharing. He breaks down Nick's guard so thoroughly that the young man laughs at the heartbreaking thought of his wife discovering her child will never come.
50:45 A quick pause to appreciate the direction. For a scene that takes place in one location, with no walls or furniture apart from an oak and a rope swing, Nichols manipulates the geography of the scene throughout by giving his actors organic and occasionally harrowing bits of action to keep it lively despite the small space. For instance, Nick hops into the swing and the movement fills the background of the frame when it’s not on the slow push in on Burton’s monologue.
George sits Nick down for story time and masterfully weaves his childhood tale of young schoolboys going out on the town on the first day of vacation. They sneak into a gangster’s gin joint to get a taste of liquor, to feel like men and drink their potions. They hang out and listen to jazz all night as waitresses fill and refill their glasses, grown-ups and babes at once. One of the boys asks for a refill of “birgin” and everyone laughs, for he meant to say bourbon, and they spend the rest of the evening mocking him in jest. It sounds like the apex of a life and the loss of innocence wrapped up in one. As Richard Taylor tells the story, he’s blotto and transfixing, especially when he gets to the part about what happened to the boy. He was sent to an asylum after killing his mother and father.
You wonder: would George prefer a life of silence in an institution himself or would it deprive him of the essential terrors that feed his existence?
After a tale that ends that bleak, all you can do is keep drinking.
Martha doesn’t have hysterical pregnancies. Martha doesn’t have pregnancies at all.”
57:10 Nick finds himself confused, reminding George that he has a son – a fact he seems to have forgotten, but has a mirthless chuckle about nonetheless.
When George describing his son as a comfort, as a beanbag, and then lunges into Nick’s face to underline the point, I always have a nervous chuckle. The cut on the action is jolting, but the bizarre rhythms of the film’s very specific verbal gymnastics are too amusing not to appreciate on diction alone. Of all the words in the dictionary, beanbag is the least expected and the most perfectly descriptive. Same goes for the turn of phrase, “the apple of our three eyes…Martha being a Cyclops.”
It’s late. I’m tired. I been drinking since 9 o’clock, my wife is vomiting, there’s been a lot of screaming going on around here.”
57:31 Oh, Nick, honey, we only halfway through the movie. George stands up from the swing to offer Nick some man-to-man advice but is interrupted by Martha, standing in the doorway and shrieking.
Ah, forest sounds. Animal noises.”
58:11 Martha calls them back in for coffee but all my attention is on the framing. Way far away in the frame, she’s caught in the middle of the two of them, the distance between the History and Biology departments filling the air. As George tries to get back to his marital advice and Nick immediately rebuffs the idea that their situations are similar, the air grows thicker. George’s wise experience is offensive to Nick’s libido, that he could ever be as noodling as the older man. History sees the breadth of human history and knows the tricks whereas biology focuses on the anatomical bits and trusts their raging prowess instead.
George correctly guesses that Nick married Honey for her money, and then fills his glass to keep sinking the ship with his own loose lips.
59:56 Honey’s daddy fancied himself a prophet from the age of sixteen, baptizing folks and taking their money in the name of salvation. And she inherited all his profits after he died.
My father-in-law was a man of the Lord. And he was very rich.”
1:00:31 Hungry for more, George cozies up on the earth and slithers next to Nick for more fresh dirt. He tells him that Martha’s stepmother was a rich woman herself.
1:02:30 Nick’s game, pointing out the difference between History and Biology and how George’s attempts to win are ultimately ineffectual when he has anatomy on his side. The dark shadows across his face upon the topic of “plowing pertinent wives” to get ahead at the university signals his lingering atrocity; that behind every polite, young man is an ambitious, Machiavellian cad. George eggs him on, playing every sexist string in his body to the tune of camaraderie and male bonding.
I bet you your wife’s got the widest, most inviting avenue of the whole damn campus!”
1:03:36 And now, after our brief sojourn in the wild, the fight for sexual dominance is back on. They stare one another in the eyes, pretending it’s all talk and even cajoling the idea of getting Nick and Martha off for a quick fuck but the stakes have never been higher. Nick tries to run away from the conversation, too scared that he means what he’s saying, but falls onto the ground and crawls through the mud in another hat tip to the horror genre. He’s not running away from George, but the true stalker: his vicious male ego.
For the first time of the evening, the competitors see each other for who they really are ...and they're ready to punch the mirror. It’s a classic example of mutually assured destruction in the name of the Y chromosome.
As the men and women reunite inside the house more charged than ever, where will the party take us next? Continue on to Part Three from Kyle Stevens, the author of a book on Mike Nichols!
Reader Comments (10)
A daunting monologue to write up but thrilling even to read about! I should probably pay more attention in the Burton / Segal scenes.
Oh my God. Your breakdown of history vs. biology is so brilliant. I never would've thought of that but it makes so much sense.
There's a lot of business and reveals in this section but you get to the slithering poison underneath it all so well, Daniel! The blowup gets out of control so fast and I loved how you spoke of it's queasy rapidness. Even the screenshots got me dizzy.
I'm also fascinated by this chair-hurling high school production - I howled. I played the George/Nick scene in college and my scene partner and I reviled eachother. Withering nerd vs. bratty jock was very fittting.
YES --- also howled at the high school production anecdote. love love loved.
I am very fascinated by the fact that words, gestures and expressions can be much more explosive than any Michael Bay bombs ever, as perfectly proven by this movie and also my favorite from last year, 45 Years.
And George and Martha needing each other to survive is just such an ugly truth, but how fitting really.
I always feel the need to take a Dramamine after that sequence hurls me around - glad that came through! Wexler's camera is so dexterously unhinged and all the cuts just jolt you further. The escalation of the staging is a marvel. It's all so fast but feels like forever. No escape!
And oh my god, this is the most attention my senior directing project has ever received. The whole rehearsal process was a mirror of the personal messiness of the play itself; the cast and I were all good friends but we came to verbal blows *frequently* and there was a whole lot of shouting and dramatic finger-pointing at one other from between the stage and where I sat in the house. Most embarrassing touch: I insisted that we set the dancing scene to Chuck Berry's You Never Can Tell because I guess everybody in the audience needed to know that another teenage boy had seen Pulp Fiction recently.
I totally know the "flop" monologue by heart by virtue how of many times I've seen that clip on YouTube.
"I hope that was an empty bottle, George. You can’t afford to waste good liquor. Not on your salary. Not an associate professor’s salary."
The delivery of that line makes my inner "old bitch" cackle every single time.
As good as George Segal is, I always thought it was too bad that Robert Redford was too chicken shit to play Nick. Physically, RR would have been perfectly cast, especially if he would have been willing to play the dark side of his golden boy persona. But as Nichols said, "Even then, he didn't want to play schmucks."
George Segal was a better choice than Robert Redford, (IMHO) simply because Redford has always been just a little too self conscious about how he looks on camera.
But the combination of Taylor and Burton is truly amazing.
Notice how well both of them use their voices, the sheer dexterity, they wring so much out of each phrase.
This film remains potent after multiple viewings, but the stills in these write-ups are forcing me to (re-)admit the one major flaw in the production. Taylor's makeup is so amateurish—the lines on her face look like from a bad high school production (to stay on topic). It doesn't stand out as much when she's in motion, but you can't not notice it in screen caps.