Carnal Knowledge
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This film is well crafted and positions each of the characters on the edge of an emotional breaking point. We watch them come together and eventually implode under the weight of their relationship issues.
The two main characters are almost polar opposites. Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) contantly flashes that salacious grin, but behind the wall of teeth hides a man who feels each woman in his life burned him and stole something precious from him...his youthful vitality & potency. Sandy (Art Garfunkel) displays a desperation and ineptness towards his first girlfriend (Candice Bergen), and she stays with him not because she is attracted to him, but because he is "safe"...a known in a world of dangerous relationships. Jonathan eventually shacks up with a sexy woman slightly past her prime (Ann Margaret). She is his ideal in many ways, but can she continue in an empty relationship built solely on physicality?
As we follow the growth of these men, we peek into their bedrooms and hope to see something titillating and erotic, but instead we're left feeling the emptyness that comes from failure. It is a dark and very honest film.[1]
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(When we sleep together) we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies— all the bits and pieces of our unique existences. --- Angela Carter
Indeed, one might argue that you carry your entire cultural heritage with you. America’s puritan heritage has awarded its male population with a decidedly conflicted attitude toward sex. Being human, they feel the biological imperative to seek sex. However, their collective cultural unconscious tells them to feel guilty about this, so many American men have learned either to repress their desires or to express them in a leering and sniggering adolescent attitude to the act.
It is to the former group that Sandy (Art Garfunkel) belongs. He is driven by a guilty desire for the beautiful, intelligent and seemingly unattainable Susan (Candice Bergen), yet cannot understand why she would consent to have sex, “I mean, when a girl lets you…go all the way…isn't it sort of a favour? I mean, what's in it for her? She's not getting paid or anything." Clearly he buys into the puritanical ethos that “nice girls don’t” yet he is compelled by his innate carnal desires to make Susan be “bad.” Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) belongs to the latter group. To him, women are like butterflies to lepidopterists: targets to be netted and pinned. Sex is not so much an expression of his hormonal appetite as an act of aggression. Women are enemy territory, “ball busters” to be defeated with his phallic weaponry.
Carnal Knowledge is a nasty film about the self-involved and juvenile young men who populate the American landscape – the inheritors of some conflicting worldviews. Their ancestors’ attitudes to the sexual act must vie with the reality that these individuals are about to be handed the keys to the global kingdom of wealth and power, where men are told to take no prisoners in its acquisition. Here women are just another territory to be vanquished.
Jules Pfeiffer’s script is hard-edged and unforgiving of its protagonists, while Mike Nichol’s direction is full of semi-illuminated scenes that speak of the dark urges lurking in his leads. Art Garfunkel’s peculiar face, with its doe-eyed and naive sincerity is put to good use in the role of Sandy, who is clumsy and clueless. Women baffle him. His buddy Jonathan, who treats him more like a lapdog than a friend, also easily dupes Sandy. Jack Nicholson percolates charisma in his tightly controlled portrayal of a young man seething with misogyny. His character is loathsome, yet Nicholson’s native charm keeps us interested in Jonathan long after most other actors would have left us turning away in disgust. Notable in supporting performances are the aforementioned Bergen and Ann-Margaret, whose portrayal of a faded and desperate sexpot earned her an Academy Award nomination.
Carnal Knowledge may seem dated, given its 1970s approach to this battle of the sexes. However, it paints a sadly accurate picture of the decidedly vicious attitude of many men to the realm of carnal desire.
Dan Jardine[2]
