The film inverts the novel’s hierarchy of signifiers and betrays its anti-materialism by imbuing image with a spurious carnality and language with a vulgar transitiveness. For Softley, making the story material seems to have been the point—he is particularly proud of the costumes: P( 214)

The film ends as Merton contemplates—hallucinates, if we infuse with Jamesian intensity this pallid cinematic imaginary—his memory of Milly happy in Venice, lounging, laughing and smiling, a memory shared with the viewer who hears Milly’s voice over images of Densher returning alone to Venice, as if to reunite with this memory. P( 216)

            Merton: I don’t believe in any of the things I write aobut. I fake passion. I fake conviction.

            Milly: I believe in you.

            Merton: Why?

            Milly: I just do. I have a good feeling. [She is smiling.]

            Merton: A good feeling?

            Milly: [sniffs, laughs] Yes. I think everything’s gonna happen for you, Merton. Sooner than you think.

            Merton: How do you know?

            Milly: Ther’er certain people I know. [She begins to cough and splutter.]

            Merton: Are you all right?

            Milly: I was trying to impress you. I’m going to make a fool of myself tonight. I know it.

            a self-duluding enchantment with the representative of everything America has to offer. Exactly what America has to offer remains unsaid – certainly much more or much less than money, although without wealth it might well have gone unnoticed. In any case, whatever ‘it’ may be, it is already becoming a memory.                                                             (283)           P( 218)

Milly represents the uniquely American mystery through which quantity and quality get incarnated together as one in celebrity flesh. She was so ‘big’, so ‘great’, that she ‘exceeded, escaped, measure’ (127, 130). She represents a kind of absolute cash value. As the finest quality product of an ostensibly classless society, Milly embodies antinomial principles, representing both that which stands outside of, is inimical to, hierarchisation, and also that which is consummately hierarchical because it trumps hierarchy itself. P( 219)

That Densher – a literary man of sorts, being a journalist – becomes sensitive to Milly’s ‘disconcerting poetry’ (368) brings him closer to James, for whom, of course, Milly’s chief treasure lies not in her gold, but in what she contributes to the art of the novel, ‘to the gain of charm, interest, mystery, dignity, distinction, gain of importance, in fine, on the part of the represented thing’ (Notes, 77) P( 221)

The tragedy of this novel is not what Milly dies before she has the chance to experience ‘life’, but rather that Densher learns too late to read poetry. The horror of James’s story – what James condemns – is that everyone around Milly reads her complex representativeness reductively, literally, reading the ‘dove’ down from her perch into her sacrificial role. The horror of Softley’s film is that it sees this literalness as sufficient, as centertaining, and takes mere identification with an image to be the ultimate in art appreciation. It commits literalness upon James’s outrageously anti-literal novel. Here again the director’s astonishing superficiality seems peculiarly damning, even if he means to be attributing mimetic desire not to his film but to his characters, when he says: ‘ I told the [film’s costume] designer that I wanted people to want these costumes. If people are saying, “I want to wear that!”, that’s a long way on the road to understanding the characters.’ If neither the film, nor characters in the film, understand themselves, what are viewers supposed to understand? That film directors ‘believe’ in clothes?

What one does know from Sir Luke is that Milly can live, if she chooses to – ‘if I want to live. I can’ (406) – whereas in the film what we learn from Lord Mark is that ‘[s] he’s ill…she’s very ill. Everyone in New York knows about it’, and now so does Kate, and anyone watching. Lord Mark goes on to inform Kate (according to the film this is where Kate gets the idea to marry Merton to Milly) that a marriage to Milly, like Milly herself, will be short-lived: ‘and when she’s gone…’ Lord Mark’s prognosis is confirmed for us when we hear Milly fighting for breath in a quasi-consumptive late-night coughing spasm. When, in the film, Kate tells Merton that Milly has come to Venice ‘to live, not to die’, that ‘she doesn’t want our pity’, but ‘your love’, she does not mean, as does the novel, that Merton’s love could grant Milly new life, but on the contrary that she will soon be ‘gone’. The film obliterates the novel’s romantic insistence – its fantasy – that Milly is ‘living by option, by volition’ (213), that she can do as she likes (316), that her case in fact ‘isn’t a case’ (320; HJ’s emphasis). In the novel, the doctor ‘hadn’t after all pronounced her anything’ (216), but the film never gives Milly a chance. P( 222)

The film, which, being a consummately illusionistic medium could have done otherwise, explores neither the disconcerting poetry of denial, nor the capacity of artful, consensual belief to transform reality. Truth, in the sense of correspondence to reality, or of what will ‘out’, is neither the novel’s ultimate, nor its latent, value. (Pleasure, in the Freudian sense is , as I shall argue below.) P( 224)

The portrayal of Milly Theale in Softley’s film represents an impoverished act of aesthetic literalisation, a pro-foundly uncinematic ‘conversion’ of light and shadow into sex, costume and sentimentality. In James’s novel, Milly tries to convert physical symptom to romance, to which Merton responds by literalising romance back into physical symptom. His anti-representational strategy, his prolonged obliviousness to ‘poetry’ (a kind of auto-immune reaction in which representation attacks itself) is what, in the novel, kills Milly and what, in the film, kills art. Romance could be perhaps defined as the desire to convert the material to the immaterial; belief might on the other hand be defined as the conversion of the immaterial to the literal. The film The Wings of the Dove conflates these two, and calls them ‘American’. In so far as Softley and Amini ‘convert’ the material of James’s novel into cinema, they move in a direction exactly opposite to James, and react back towards the literal. P( 231)

 ‘the contraptions of modern living and the pragmatic materialism that goes with them will quaintly dissolve into a form of sentimentality, like the American heiress, Milly Theale’ (283). James did his best to forestall this particular dissolution, by reacting ‘from the literal’, transforming Milly’s natural slobbery speech into literary language, and by representing romance as coming in two different types in order to discriminate between them. P( 234)

At the end of the novel, Milly has disappeared into the image Kate and Merton contemplate of her as a dove who has ‘stretched out her wing’ to ‘cover’ them. In so doing she becomes at last ‘sexual’, but only by leaving her body to become symbolic, ‘representational’, and thus metabolisable by ‘fantasmatic activity’.

As a representational economy, James’s novel, unlike the film, is entropic in just the same way as is ‘the pleasure principle’ Freud saw as the economic’ law governing human sexuality. Freud theorized that

 the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension – that is, in an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure.                 (Beyond, 18: 7)            

P( 235)

Within the ‘circle of petticoat’s, which Merton Densher believed to be dictating his behaviour in The Wings of the Dove, we can see that ‘the pleasure principle’ is the battery that keeps his ‘remote control’ operating.

       What Freud describes in the passage above as the ‘pleasure principle’ motivating sexual desire could just as easily be called (although the phrase would then lose its lovely irony) the ‘unpleasure principle’. The subject is made sufficiently uncomfortable by sexual desire and the ‘tension’ it creates to pursue some sexual object or activity that will make it possible to release that tension. In order words,  pleasure does not derive from sexual arousal, or even orgasm, but rather from the quiescence which follows orgasm. As Michel Foucault has put it (and although he is speaking of homosexual love I think it is fair and fun to extend his generalisation), ‘the best moment of love is likely to be when the lover leaves in the taxi’. The lover’s imagination is for the most part concerned with reminiscing about the act rather than anticipating it’ or ‘presumably’, Bersani adds, explaining Foucault’s quip, ‘enjoying it’ (Bersani, 219). Merton Densher has pursued pleasure throughout this novel by pursuing  ‘stillness’, James’s word for ‘the lowering of tension’ brought about by sexual activity. It could not be more obvious to the reader that, as exciting no doubt as Merton’s long awaited sex (‘it was only once’) with Kate was for him, his greatest ‘relief’ comes to him when she has left the room and he is free, as Foucault put it, to ‘eminisce’ afterwards in his ‘worn shrine’ (Wings, 423), about the way his desire was ‘converted from a luminous conception into an historic truth’ (399).

He enjoys (somewhat obsessively) the ‘constant still communion’ which signals both the pleasure principle at work, and that which lies ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, namely the permanent equilibrium of death. His newfound stillness becomes a life-style choice, a survival strategy, a serious pro-active addiction to ‘after-glow’ (400) and ‘aftersense’ (465). P( 236)

Trapped between carnality and fatuity, the viewer strives in vain to hear in Milly’s final statement, or read on the reflective surface of the Venetian canals, the play of representation. P( 236)

In the novel, we first met Milly aloft in the Alps. From there she descended into the ‘word’, to rise again after her death at the end of the novel into the heaven which we are to believe is the natural habitat of this American ‘angel’. In the film, by contrast, we first met Milly adrift at sea level, in the ‘great greasy sea’ of London society. From there she rose briefly, dragging her feeble symbolic weight to the top of a church scaffold, only to gasp from the effort and peer down blankly at people in the piazza beneath her. The film’s ending brings her down again and leaves her ‘all wet’ (Nadel, 284), caught in the mizzle of the ‘slipshod and slobbery’ speech which carries the film’s parting message. P( 237)

Softley, Iain, (dir), The Wings of the Dove, writ. Hossein Amini (Miramax, 1997).

___. Interview, Newcity Chicago, 17 November 1997.

http://weeklywire.com/filmvault/chicago/w/wingsofthedovethe1.html.

___. Interview, Weekly Alibi, 24 November 1997.

http://weeklywire.com/filmvault/alibi/w/wingsofthedove1.html       P( 238)