The Gastronomic Grotesque and Feminist Defiance in Daisies
Adriana Kirk
Chytilová uses the characters of the doll-like Maries to subvert traditional ideas of femininity and the grotesque.
“I love eating,” declares the Blonde Marie (Ivana Karbanová) through a mouthful of cake. She gazes directly into the camera with an air of defiance and frosting on her lips. Doll-like, near-perfect, and not unlike those of the era’s fashion models, her body is anything but “grotesque.” Yet, eating and its power to transform the body — something both so primal yet inoculated with fear and anxiety in an image-obsessed society — renders it a grotesque act. In Věra Chytilová’s most notable contribution to the Czech New Wave, Daisies (1966), the gastronomic grotesque functions as a powerful surrealist tool, ultimately used to undermine patriarchal conceptions of femininity. Daisies traces the increasingly destructive antics of two teenage girls, the Maries. While on the surface, Chytilová condemns the girls’ bad behavior and capitalist consumerism, she revels in their chaos just below the film’s allegorical sheen. Although critics often point to the Dada movement as the stylistic source of Daisies’ dazzling collage motif, Daisies is a surrealist film at its core. Often through the contents of the subconscious, dreams and nightmares, surrealism attempts to detach us from our passive, habitual modes of interpreting the world. According to Adrian Martin, “In surrealist cinema, quite simply, reality surprises us” (191). Daisies embodies this understanding of surrealism; the Maries parody a conception of femininity through exaggeration — shallowness, vanity, and a subscription to beauty ideals — invented by a patriarchal society. The film immediately reverses this apparent compliance through displays of the gastronomic grotesque, made shocking because of those very expectations. There’s something celebratory about Daisies that extends far beyond the opulent banquet feast at the film’s conclusion, which led to the film being banned in Czechoslovakia on account of food wastage. Fragmented, delirious, and strangely gleeful, Daisies embraces the surrealist impulse for the grotesque while subverting its precedential manifestation as violence against women, all through food and the act of eating.
The grotesque plays a significant role in the surrealist repertoire. While understood as meaning “hideously ugly” in a literal sense, the grotesque takes on greater meaning in the world of art and film (Naremore 6). The term has entered common art parlance in reference to strangeness and deformity of the body, often involving confusion between the animate and inanimate. According to Chytilová herself, as documented in Bliss Cua Lim’s essay “Dolls in Fragments: Daisies as Feminist Allegory,” the film “is a morality play, a ‘grotesque’ or distorted comedy that [condemns] its unruly heroines on ethical grounds” (38). Despite this public declaration by Chytilová, which was likely an attempt to placate censors and thus restore her ability to continue making films, viewers cannot ignore the thread of feminist rebellion and irony running through the film, nor should they dismiss the Communist Czech government’s strong censorship of the film industry. Alternatively, I posit that the grotesque not only plays a crucial role in deploring the Maries for their moral failings, but also, most significantly, to rail against patriarchal notions of womanhood. According to Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and his World, verbal manifestations of the grotesque — often taking the form of billingsgate and derision — “play an essential role in the system of images reflecting the struggle against cosmic terror” and at the time of Rabelais, were “precisely directed against these superior powers of the sun, the earth, the king, and the military leader” (Bakhtin and Iswolsky, 352). Daisies embraces the grotesque for the purpose of poking fun at social, governmental, or cosmic authority — in this case, the patriarchal powers that be.
Amidst the swirling dream-logic of the film arises one of its most memorable and effective scenes, almost bubbling over with mischievous, feminist glee. The two Maries have hung blue and white streamers in their ever-evolving bedroom. They begin to light them aflame, excitement apparent in their jittery movements and girlish glee. The diegetic sound of the scene quickly fades away, replaced by swelling, non-diegetic choral music. Panning, close-up shots display the result of the Maries’ destructive zeal — artful tangles of twine and scorched sausage links hang amidst burning streamers, visuals that, in conjunction with the choral backtrack, give the impression of a mangled, bizarre still life. The phone rings, interrupting the scene’s lulling, ironically spiritual quality. The camera seems to reluctantly pan away from the burning streamers and sausage links to reveal the Maries answering the butterfly collector’s call (Jan Klusák). The butterfly collector’s overwrought confessions of love for “Julie” overlay the choral music, while the Maries’ dive into a feast of their own design. Using fashioned spear-like utensils and scissors, they begin to stab, chop, and consume a plethora of phallic foods. Chytilová seems palpably aware of the long history of the mutilation or dismemberment of women as a surrealist motif, apparent in works as early as Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), in which a women’s eye appears to be sliced open in the film’s grisly first scene. In Daisies, Chytilová subverts this surrealist precedent, harnessing the fragmentation motif for her own purposes, poking fun at the male, “historic” surrealist’s Freudian fixation on castration (Martin). The earliest surrealists used disembodiment and fragmentation at large to conjure the Freudian castration fear. In Un Chien Andalou, the gruesome, recurring presence of a severed hand — appearing in a box, and later, lying in the middle of the street — couples with larger themes of sexual desire and misconduct to render the hand a stand-in for the penis. Daisies circumvents this coded use of ciphers, instead presenting a comically grotesque and confrontational display of subversion.
In Daisies, the grotesque functions through resonance and suggestion. In a particularly striking close-up shot, the frame contains both the Brunette Marie’s toe (Jitka Cerhová) and a sausage being sliced by the Blonde Marie. As her scissors cut through the sausage, the butterfly collector’s disembodied voice is heard: “Life without you is torture.” Rather than being found in the graphic mutilation of the body, as is the case with some of the earliest surrealist works, the grotesque here arises from the resonances among elements of the mise-en-scène and soundtrack. In this squirm-inducing scene, viewers can’t resist connecting the dots between the notion of torture, human flesh, and the cutting action. The suggestion of violence against the body leaves a twofold impression: on one hand, the shot makes a mockery of male castration fear, while on the other, it reflects the Maries’ role as “meat” in the mind of the butterfly collector and the film’s cast of other one-dimensional male characters.
In the climactic ending to Daisies, the Maries overindulge themselves in a massive, grotesque feast.
The culminating scene of the film is the most gastronomically grotesque of them all. In a sped-up montage, an effect that lends the scene a jittery and frenetic quality, the two Maries gorge themselves on a banquet hall feast, obviously laid out for government officials or an otherwise wealthy assemblage. Triumphant horns blare as the Maries begin frantically rushing around the table, devouring one elaborate delicacy after another. The Maries’ gluttony is incongruous with their physical characterization, a concept rooted in the film’s opening scene, wherein Chytilová mocks a patriarchal conception of femininity through hyperbole. In this earlier scene, both Maries sit against a wall in shallow space, as if they’ve been propped there. Their limbs move stiffly, like marionettes, an effect emphasized by squeaking noises that accompany their movements. This hindered, doll-like state in which the Maries are first introduced contrasts dramatically with the freedom and physicality of the banquet scene, qualities emphasized by the use of timelapse cinematography and the panning, long shot capturing their movements. The camera, positioned above the table, reveals its opulent display of culinary delights in full while emphasizing the Maries rapid, uninhibited lap around the table.
After a joyous food fight, ending with the sound of crashing glass, The Blonde Marie strides to the window and yanks down a curtain in silence. She hops onto the long banquet table, dons the curtain as if it were a haute couture gown, and declares the ensuing scene a “fashion show.” Surf rock music kicks up, and the Maries dance and strut along the table’s surface, crushing any surviving food platters under their high heels. Such imagery crops up often in Chytilová’s work. A former model herself, Chytilová remained fascinated throughout her life with models and, according to Lim, “might well have considered the fashion model an allegorical cipher for superficiality and excessive consumerism…” (Lim 51). In scenes such as this one, the parallels between the Maries and Chytilová’s models are apparent far beyond the “fashion show” phase of the banquet debauchery. The Maries’ model-like status, further signified by their lean, near-perfect bodies and fashionable dress, lends even more dissonance to their gluttonous consumption in the preceding scenes. Chytilová harnesses the way an audience, informed by the consumer capitalist world we operate within, correlates the model with the mannequin.
In short, dolls and mannequins don’t eat. The Maries excessive consumption is fundamentally at odds with their twofold representation as both doll and mannequin, objects meant to remain unchanged and untainted in their artificiality. These objects serve as stand-ins for a shallow, patriarchal notion of womanhood, a resonance that renders eating — intrinsically transformational and sustaining — grotesque and unnatural in the world of Daisies. Hence, this shocking display of the gastronomic grotesque, hinging on the blurring of the animate and inanimate, is rendered a defiant and subversive act.
Chytilová’s Daisies embraces the history of the grotesque as a powerful tool in critiquing authoritative powers. The film’s protagonists spend the better part of their screen time engaged in the gastronomic grotesque, gorging on course after course of culinary delights while their chewing sounds take the forefront in the film’s soundtrack. In Daisies, consumer capitalism is clearly under fire. However, a secondary reading is present, one that accounts for the vein of feminist rebellion running through these grotesque acts of consumption and Chytilová’s reappropriation of key surrealist motifs. Through both the subversion of the Freudian castration fear and the blurring of the animate and inanimate, the commonplace act of eating is transformed into a deeply grotesque, powerful act, defiant of patriarchal sexual politics.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail and Helene Iswolsky. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Lim, Bliss Cua. “Dolls in Fragments: Daisies as Feminist Allegory.” Camera Obscura (2001): 38.
Martin, Adrian. “The Artificial Night: Surrealism and Cinema.” Surrealism: Revolution by Night. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1993. 191.
Naremore, James. “Stanley Kubrick and the Aesthetics of the Grotesque .” Film Quarterly (2006): 4-14.