Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Joanna
A Review
There are films whose premises are so flagrantly idiotic that criticism, if it is to survive with any dignity, must proceed by a kind of tactical surrender. One cannot quite “evaluate” such a work in the ordinary way; one can only describe the strange social and artistic weather system it creates and then report from inside it, like a correspondent embedded with a particularly well-dressed nervous breakdown. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Joanna, the new counterfactual reimagining of Stanley Kramer’s 1967 liberal monument, belongs emphatically to this category. Its central device—that the Sidney Poitier figure, Dr. John Prentice, arrives not with Joanna Drayton but with an inflatable sex doll whom he identifies, without irony or hesitation, as Joanna—is so manifestly preposterous that one expects the film to collapse at once into skit. What is remarkable is that it does not. Or rather, it does collapse, but with such stateliness, such ceremonious self-command, that the collapse itself becomes the subject.
The film’s great inspiration is to understand that the true comic material lies not in the doll, which is after all only an object, but in the bourgeois commitment to behaving as though objects can be reasoned with so long as they are introduced politely. In the original Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, liberal America is confronted with a moral challenge it congratulates itself for ultimately surviving. In this version, liberal America is confronted with something worse: an event for which it possesses no approved vocabulary. It knows how to discuss race, justice, equality, and generational change. It does not know how to discuss a vinyl blonde in a summer dress seated on the divan with the solemnity of a future daughter-in-law. The result is a comedy of moral unpreparedness. The Draytons, who in another film might rise nobly to history, are here reduced to the much narrower and more agonizing question of whether one is obliged to offer canapés to an inflatable guest.
Much of the film’s brilliance lies in its refusal of exaggeration. John Prentice is not played as a lunatic. He is played, fatally, as a man of almost supernatural poise. This is what gives the film its unnerving ballast. Had he arrived ranting or disheveled, the narrative would have some practical place to go. But because he is grave, intelligent, elegantly spoken, and entirely sincere in his treatment of “Joanna,” everyone else is trapped within the etiquette of uncertainty. The film grasps a truth that far exceeds satire: among educated people, madness is most powerful when impeccably mannered. An incoherent man can be removed; a coherent man accompanied by nonsense must be listened to.
The house itself, with its polished surfaces and mid-century confidence, becomes a kind of laboratory for testing the tensile strength of civility. Every room seems designed for adult conversation of a tasteful kind, and the film’s most persistent joke is that each of these rooms proves wholly inadequate to the emergency it contains. One begins to see how much of upper-class domestic life depends on the assumption that no truly disreputable absurdity will ever enter it through the front door. Once it does, the machinery of hospitality—cocktails, seating, tact, lowered voices—goes on operating long after it has ceased to be useful. Christina Drayton’s attempts to make the doll comfortable are among the film’s finest inventions, not because they are flamboyantly funny, but because they are exactly what a certain kind of well-brought-up woman would do when deprived of any socially legible action. If reality cannot be mastered, perhaps it can at least be fluffed.
What the film parodies, then, is not merely one movie but an entire moral style: the American belief that difficult truths are best handled in drawing rooms by articulate people who remain seated. Here the drawing room remains, and the articulacy remains, but truth itself has become vulgar, elusive, and faintly rubberized. Time and again the characters try to elevate the situation into something discussable—psychological trauma, symbolic substitution, modern estrangement, perhaps even a critique of domestic femininity—because the plain facts are too humiliatingly plain. Their error is the classic error of cultivated intelligence: they mistake interpretation for courage. The more they explain, the less they understand. The film might be described, in this respect, as Buñuel by way of Berkeley.
The arrival of John’s parents deepens the satire beautifully. What in the original was a doubling of moral gravity becomes here a doubling of interpretive panic. More respectable adults enter the frame, and so more language is deployed against the unbearable sight at its center. A family drama becomes, by increments, a symposium on denial. The speeches accumulate. Feeling swells. One waits for wisdom and gets only vocabulary. This is not a defect of the film but its point: the rhetoric of seriousness is shown to be one of the principal ways serious people protect themselves from the immediate claims of the real. The doll, mute and smiling, defeats them all.
The eventual appearance of the real Joanna is wisely delayed until the film has nearly exhausted the interpretive resources of its characters. When she arrives, carrying a bag and an expression of dry human irritation, she restores not merely plot but ontology. Her indignation is directed less at John’s grotesque substitution than at the fact that everyone has been politely collaborating with it. This is the film’s hardest and best joke. Absurdity, left alone, is only absurdity; absurdity treated with ceremony becomes culture. Joanna’s speech cuts through the house like fresh air through a stale salon. She names what the others have merely circled. In doing so, she reveals that the opposite of repression is not passion but accuracy.
One should not overstate the film’s ambitions, although the film itself encourages one to do precisely that. Its deeper satirical target is male composure—the educated, accomplished, morally handsome form of composure that can withstand anything except contradiction. John Prentice’s substitution of a doll for a woman who has left him is ridiculous, yes, but it is also a distilled caricature of a more familiar fantasy: the wish that love might remain in place so long as its outward forms are preserved. The dinner will proceed, the family will convene, approval will be sought, and reality, if necessary, can be upholstered. It is an exquisitely masculine delusion, and the film is shrewd enough to let it appear not monstrous at first, but merely composed.
The ending, in which Matt Drayton rises for what seems the obligatory concluding speech and instead confesses bafflement, is nearly perfect. It is the only truly moral gesture in the picture, because it abandons the vanity of moral performance. By then, the housekeeper—who has understood the entire situation from the start with the invincible clarity of those not overinvested in appearing profound—removes the doll under one arm like a decorative object whose season has passed. Few recent images have so elegantly summarized the fate of cultivated nonsense.
One leaves Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Joanna with the odd sensation of having watched both a parody and a diagnosis. It is, obviously, very funny. But its funniness depends on a painful recognition: civilized people are often most ridiculous at the precise moment they believe themselves most enlarged by tolerance. The film’s achievement is to turn this recognition into form. It asks what happens when a society trained to discuss every moral difficulty with fluent seriousness is confronted not with evil, or even prejudice, but with something that is merely appalling and idiotic. The answer, it turns out, is dinner.
