Video Performance of Chucky’s Hunch by Rochelle Owens - The Tenderness of the Snake and the Porcupine

When Rochelle Owens’s play, Chucky’s Hunch, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1981, critics lauded what they expressed as a tour-de-force performance by the actor playing Chucky, and they took the plot at face value.  The play, which is a long dramatic monologue by an aging man triggered by the news that the second of his three ex-wives has won the lottery, takes the audience into a fascinating psychological odyssey.  On the face of it, the play is simply about the embittered rantings of a failed Abstract Expressionist artist whose grandiose plans took him nowhere except into penury and bad health, as he lives with his 85-year-old mother somewhere in upstate New York.  He reads his letters to Elly, his ex-wife, to the audience, and in doing so, expresses a range of thoughts and feelings, ranging from rageful recriminations to sentimental recounting of the times that he and Elly spent together, and his observations of her behavior. The narrative is a straightforward epistolary one, punctuated by a framed tale (The Snake and the Porcupine).  

Chucky's Hunch is featured in this anthology.

However, when looking more closely at the structure of the play, and then relating it to her other works, particularly her long poems, it becomes clear that the structure is one of repetition and interweaving, just as she has done in her brilliant “Black Chalk,” “Patterns of Animus” and “The Aardvark Venus.”  As in those poems and others, there is an apocalyptic intensity that envelopes the reader with a sense of creeping horror at observing the protagonist’s existential nihilism that insists on destructive behavior and an ineluctable journey toward self-erasure. It is good to note that one can read the play for free via the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/wordplays200perf/mode/2up) although it is necessary to create an account and borrow it online.

The release of a video version in 2024, with Charles Berliner as Chucky, music by Marcia Kravis, video editing by Ellen Reynolds, and produced by Rochelle Owens, enables the audience to see a darker and more intimate version (https://youtu.be/OZdRLyXTNbI?si=F5wzMoBLzhhjwnYu).  As a narrator, Chucky could not possibly be more unreliable.  He flings words like the Abstract Expressionist flings paint, and it is necessary for the reader to find the patterns that make the deeper meaning, which is not really about Elly and her perceived slights to Chucky, but more about fatal “dances” (like the fabled Tarantella) of those who fall in love with each other, and in their dance of love, they toy with the parallels between love and death. Eros is held up as a life force in popular culture, but for Owens, Eros gives way to Thanatos, and the death-drive animates the various love dances / erotic tarantellas that weave in and out of the play. 

Love-Death Dance 1:  Chucky and Elly.  Chucky reminisces about his time with Elly and the items of clothing he purchased for her. Their life together was something he now views with a combination of sweetness and bitterness, a relatable pain for anyone reflecting on failed relationships of the past.  Images of a bright-white smile framed by carmine-red lipsticked lips further eroticize the narrative. 

Love-Death Dance 2:  Characterized as an impecunious and unmotivated bum, Chucky mooches off his 85-year-old mother, who horrifies him with the relations she has with Chester, her 82-year-old boyfriend.  Depicted in graphic terms, the discordant notion of a couple approaching death carrying on as though they were teenagers is deeply unsettling to Chucky. 

Love-Death Dance 3:  Mother and son have a close relationship, one fraught with contradictions. Chucky describes how he chews his mother’s food for her as an Eskimo mother would chew food for her baby, which may seem potentially kind-hearted except that she lost her teeth because he hit her. 

Love-Death Dance 4:  Chucky’s only friend is his dog.  The dog was killed, however, because it came between the amorous and deadly contortions of a porcupine and a snake.  Their passion killed not only Chucky’s only living friend, but also each other.  As a female voice narrates the frame-tale, images of a snake about to strike and a young porcupine fill the screen. 

Love-Death Dance 5:  Chucky’s tarantella with his own mind starts at the beginning of the play, and it weaves in and out of a kaleidoscope of emotions.  They take him around in colorful, expressive effusions of emotion and reminiscences, but ultimately, the audience sees him as on a path to madness.  When he disappears without a trace, the tarantella takes its final frenzied spin.  The impressions are emphasized by the juxtaposition of images of seagulls feeding on trash piles. 

Chucky complains that Elly never answers his letters, and he resents the fact that she is not only surviving, but is prospering, thanks to winning the lottery. She has gone on to live and thrive in the modern, changing world.  Chucky’s world is one that resonates with medieval times – with echoes of the earthiness of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the resignation of Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, and the aleatory movements of the Wheel of Fortune. The still photos and collages in the film form a backdrop behind the performer, and they resonate with the words, not so much depictions but visual metaphors. The soundtrack, featuring sombre music, seagull cries, and more. 

In the end, Chucky psychologically juxtaposes himself in a final dance with the memory of the successful Elly, and in that final dance, he generates more self-destructive energy and pathos, leaving the audience staring into the “filthy maw” of an oblivion of one’s own devising, forged from the dances of “love-death” which left him with little more than shame and regret about his life. And thus Chucky hits home.  Chucky is Everyman. 

---Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. 

Marcel Duchamp, Leonardo da Vinci, and Challenging Aesthetic Traditions of Art

By putting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, Duchamp, along with the Futurists and the DaDaists of the early 20th century, questioned the authority of the elite and the prevailing dominant groups in society to set the rules about what can be considered "art" or "high culture."  This questioning had started in the 19th century, with the Realists daring to challenge the established conventions by putting poor people (the gleaners, for example) on a large canvas - a size reserved for "historical" scenes -- heroic or religious.  The Impressionists continued the interrogation of tradition (and the hegemony of "royal societies" and other organizations to dictate what was considered to be "good" or "real." 

 

What I think is a bit ironic of the public's reaction to Duchamp's questioning of the dominant culture's stranglehold on "taste" and "beauty" and what it means for something to be considered "art" is that Leonardo himself was an iconoclast and not a paragon or the apotheosis of conservative, elitist ideas about art, and the appropriate subjects of art.  

 

If you take a close look at his famous painting, "The Last Supper," you will see significant deviations from earlier work, say, from medieval times.  Through his placement of Jesus, the disciples, the sacraments, etc. and his use of light and color, he is incorporating Renaissance and humanist values, moving away from the rigid iconography of the medieval cosmology (derived from strict, hierarchical relations).  If you want to see the perfect illustration of a medieval mindset, and notions of hierarchy (and hence legitimacy), think of the Great Chain of Being, or the layers in Dante's Inferno (and similarly, the rounds in Purgatory and Paradise). 

 

So what could possibly have been subversive about Leonardo’s “La Gioconda / The Mona Lisa” at the time he painted it? First, let’s take a look at what Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the silk merchant and the mother of his five children, known now as La Gioconda, is wearing. It was the norm for a wealthy man who was commissioning a painting of his wife to make sure she was adorned with all the best family jewels and pearls in their possession.  After all, this painting was intended to document their prosperity and well-being. So, let’s take a look. Do you see any jeweled hair pieces, dangling pearl and garnet earrings, bejeweled necklaces, rings, or bracelets? No. Neither do I.  Do you see fancy furs, fur trimming, plush velvets, or fancy gold embroidery?  No. Neither do I.

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (image from Wikipedia)

Finally, where is Lisa Gherardini, La Gioconda, sitting?  She’s not in a palatial garden in front of an elaborate fountain, and nor is she in a room or an alcove where you might see ponderous Doric columns suggesting she is in a palazzo or a large villa. Instead, she is seated in front of a landscape so complicated that it seems to be a dreamscape or even something from a medieval notion of reality, even something you might imagine as a part of Dante’s Purgatory – winding roads requiring the presence of a virtuous woman, Beatrice, to guide you to eventual portals of Paradise.

 

Wives were to be the repositories of virtue in the Renaissance household.  As such, they needed to behave in a certain way. Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti asserted that young women should maintain self-restraint and a “grave demeanor.”  Mona Lisa’s smile flies in the face of that admonition.

 

Nor is the Mona Lisa beautiful.  Beauty was related to virtue, following not only Greek ideals, but also those of Petrarch and other Renaissance writers.  The woman’s beauty was assumed to lift a man up and unite him with the sphere of all beauty and perfection, which was God. La Gianconda has regular features, but she looks nothing like the paintings of other Renaissance artists, such as Botticelli, whose paintings of “A Young Woman” and of Aphrodite rising from the sea, perfectly represent the kind of transcendent beauty capable of lifting up the mind and spirit of a man and achieving unity with the divine sphere (and the source of divine knowledge, the making of intuitive knowledge).

 

So, the Mona Lisa’s smile is subversive, and her plain looks do not elevate. In that sense Leonardo subverts the notion of what kind of emotion a painting of a woman is supposed to elicit – either a serious regard for the embodiment of virtue, or a vertiginous flight of the mind to ideas of eternal, divine beauty, and by extension, knowledge and understanding.

 

How is the Mona Lisa posing?  She is not seen in profile or looking straight on to the painter or viewer. Instead, one shoulder is ahead of the other, and she’s seen in three-quarter view. This pose, new in the Renaissance era, draws the eye in, and makes the subject seem more approachable. The Mona Lisa was one of the first to have the sitter relaxing with her hand resting on her arm, which is on the arm of a chair.

 

There is a rare intimacy in the portrait, to the point that it is almost as though she is asking you to talk to her, and also accompany her as she takes you though life’s winding pathways, depicted in the fantastical landscape behind her.