Five Miles High—John Haskell (including audio reading by the author)

In 1962, Sophia Loren and Anthony Perkins made the movie, Five Miles to Midnight. In it, Tony plays the part of Sophia's boyish and seemingly innocent husband. They'd gotten married in Italy, after the war, and the film begins with Sophia informing him that she’s getting a divorce. Tony Perkins, who made the movie Psycho a few years earlier, carried from that film a slightly demented aspect, a maniacal persona he'd worked out for Norman Bates and now, hearing the news that Sophia no longer loves him, he refuses to listen. That's why I say he's seemingly innocent. In one of the early scenes, when she declares her autonomy, he slaps her face, lashing out like a child at what it cannot have. And although he later apologizes, he feels no remorse. Whatever he wants, he expects to get, and he'd slap her forever if he thought it would soothe him or heal him. Like the character in Psycho, he's nice enough on the outside, but if you scratch the surface, which Sophia did by marrying him, you can see why she can't stand him. Her body tenses when he's in the room. And he's often in the room. Because he's narcissistic, he notices the way she reacts to him, the way her body recoils, and this drives him crazy. It's not the fact that she doesn't love him. What drives him crazy is the fact that she's chosen not to love him, that she's unwilling to participate in the play they both made up but now she's done with it. And after he buys the insurance and boards the plane and after she says good bye to him at the airport, with him out of her life she goes back to her house and she lets herself feel, finally, in her body, what it feels like to be out of a cage. She lets go, finally, of what she's been holding, which is him, the tension and oppression that was gripping her neck, pulling at her shoulder blades, and even the muscles of her hips seem to be loosening. It's a feeling she enjoys, and then she hears about a plane crash, a plane that was going to Casablanca, and Tony was going to Casablanca, and no survivors were found. We see her, walking around the small apartment, not exactly happy but experimenting with happiness, rearranging pillows on the sofa, having a smoke, going to work and meeting a man, and the scene after that is suddenly someone knocking at the back door. Naturally, it's Tony. He’s limping, his face bruised, and we're meant to believe that, although everyone on the airplane died, he didn't. But because the authorities think he's dead, he comes up with a plan. He'll pretend to be dead. That way he can collect the insurance money. But to do that he needs her. He needs her to negotiate with the world, to be his go-between, and even if she doesn't like his plan, and even if she doesn't like him, because she wants to be done with him she agrees to be part of the lie. 

There’s a scene with Tony and Sophia that isn’t actually in the movie. It takes place before the movie begins, after they’d fallen in love, gotten married, and I picture them living together in a small Paris apartment. Finding love was what they'd always dreamed about, and when they found each other they didn't look too closely at what they’d found. Not at first. They were living what seemed like domestic bliss, and I imagine Sophia making breakfast in the kitchen, coffee and toast, and bringing it to Tony on a breakfast tray. The morning sun is shining through diaphanous curtains and Tony is still in bed, sleepy, naked, his hair delightfully tousled. She thought it was delightful, and that he was delightful, and because their history together was just beginning, because she was still giddy from the dopamine, she was happy to make the coffee. Happy to cut the bread and spread the butter, and when she joined him under the covers, lying back against the pillows, the tray on their common lap, they seemed very content, drinking coffee and reading poems. Tony declared his love to be like Dante's love for Beatrice, worshipful and classical, and while Sophia read her poetry you might think that Tony would be looking at her, noticing the skin of her cheek spiraling down to become her chin and neck, and maybe he was. But he was also thinking about bread. He might even have interrupted her reading to mention something about him not minding if she brought him another piece of bread, toasted. He may have kissed her right before he said it, or just after, and because they'd recently made love she didn't mind getting out of bed, walking across the wooden floor to the tiled kitchen. She didn't mind cutting the bread and dropping it in the toaster. She had ideas about how men and women were supposed to relate, and traditionally the feeling of love, and especially of being in love, would be compensation enough for buttering the toast and spreading the honey, and even the housecleaning, of which he was not a big contributor. And you'd be right if you thought that her models of how to behave were outdated, but that's what she had to work with, and that's how it happens. In the beginning you're not paying attention. Because she was young she thought she would never be bored or stuck because that's how you think in the beginning. Back in bed, watching Tony standing near the edge of the bed, arching his back, brushing his fingertips through his hair, she sees it all like a photograph, like a single frame of film that she holds in her mind, preserving it and adoring it, and because it feels like love she doesn't notice the breakfast tray in her lap, rising and falling as her belly rose and fell, and the tray, which had once been on their common lap, was now on her lap only.

In the movie, Sofia is pulled into her role as accomplice. She's the only one who knows that Tony isn't dead, that he's only pretending, and to pull her deeper he lies to her. He tells her he'll leave her alone the minute he gets the insurance money. But that seems to be taking a long time. And in the meantime he’s constantly underfoot, keeping track of where she goes and who she sees, reading her mail, listening in on phone conversations, acting like a child but he’s not a child. His tone of voice is innocent and harmless, but the words coming out of his mouth are venomous, abusive, and that's why she's desperate to get away from him. And sensing that, he gets suspicious. Which makes her more desperate. Which makes him want to hold her down, to tie her down which makes her pull away even more. And they go back and forth like this, or around and around, with him getting more cloying and more clingy and the only thing that keeps her from running away is the thought that this will soon be over, that eventually he will be over. But he's not. He’s like a character in a version of Dante's hell, a sponge-like creature except it’s her hell. The more she helps the creature, the more she seems to owe him, and the camera follows the two of them, him following her around the small apartment, circling from bathroom to bedroom and he won't even let her stand on the balcony by herself. She has no place to breathe. She literally can't get the air she needs to breathe, and in English the movie's title is Five Miles to Midnight, but in France it has a different title, and every time she starts to be free of him the same thing happens, over and over, and the title makes sense: the knife in the wound.

Mithridatism is defined as the gradual inoculation against the effects of poison; the ability to tolerate something. The term comes from Mithridates, an ancient king who ruled in the time when legends were told, and the one that was told about him is that, because of his photographic memory, when he addressed his thousands of troops he addressed every soldier by name. The other legend is about his fear of being poisoned. To protect himself against the outcome of a certain prophesy, he began taking tiny doses of poison, and then gradually larger and larger doses, of all the poisons he knew, hoping that at some point he would inoculate himself and then be able to tolerate an amount that would normally be lethal. At one point, during a battle, he was about to be captured by enemy soldiers, and rather than become a prisoner, he decided to kill himself. He had plenty of poison on hand, but his regimen of poison-taking had inured him to the effects of the poison, and in the end he had to kill himself by falling on his sword.

Sophia was in her late twenties when she made Five Miles to Midnight. She'd probably been in love, and knew what it was to fall out of love, and that's what the movie documents, the relationship of these two people spiraling around until eventually the relationship doesn't exist. And that's when the money arrives, the insurance settlement. About halfway through the movie we see Sophia sitting behind the wheel of a getaway car. She's looking into the rearview mirror, and from her point of view we see a man in the mirror, walking up the sidewalk. The mirror sat on the dashboard of the old Peugeot or Citroen, and Tony, in the mirror, gets bigger and bigger as he comes into focus. He walks to the car, carrying a suitcase filled with the money, and like a person trying not to be nervous he slides into the passenger seat. He tells Sophia to drive. And she does. She thinks she's taking him to a railway station or bus depot but he tells her to keep driving, through the streets of Paris, through a suburb of Paris, past plane trees and gray skies and whether she still believes she’ll ever be free of him, that's when we hear the brakes. There's the sound, and then suddenly we see, not far away, the scene of an accident. A bus has knocked a bicyclist to the cobblestones. People are standing in the street. The rider is wounded, possibly bleeding, and this is the moment Sophia could exit the car. She could open the door, step into the crowd, and without looking back she could disappear into the world of the crowd. But Tony, coiled in his seat like a weasel or a badger, tells her to keep driving. He doesn't tell her to look away but we see her face turning away from the accident, following his orders, and maybe it's not that bad, she thinks. Maybe I can change. Maybe, she says to herself, I can stand this, at least for a while. And her thoughts become like an analgesic, allowing her to survive a little bit longer, to come up for air and that’s how I see her playing the scene, like a woman who wants to breathe but her lungs aren't quite getting the air they need, as if some obstruction is blocking the flow of oxygen, and it's better, Tony says, if you stay with me. Safer. He tells her he's grown attached to her, and it's true, something has grown. Like a seed that's found a place to root, or like a virus, having found a cell to attach itself to, grows and expands, and he makes it a point to remind her that she’s already an accomplice, that she can't inoculate herself because it's already too late. 

You can see, in publicity photos for the movie, what was supposed to be happening. Love and romance, and the biographies of Tony Perkins almost always mention his sexuality. According to them he was gay, and at some point prior to his marriage to a woman, a woman he lived with for the rest of his life, and had children with, he tried to change his sexuality. He tried to change what he desired. Conversion therapy sounds benign but I doubt that it was. And whatever it was, the conflicts that Tony lived with manifested themselves in his acting, in the roles he played and even in the publicity photos. Sophia is wearing black pants, a black sweater, her dark hair falling over her face and Tony, in a sport coat, is supposed to be having fun with her. The camera captures these two young people dancing a dance from the time, the twist or the frug, and we can't hear the music but every so often there's the click of the camera as Sophia, laughing raises her knee or twists her torso, and behind her, Tony, reflected in a section of mirror, is trying to go along with it. In the actual room they were facing each other, but the way the camera is positioned we see them facing us, as if they're dancing with us, and Tony is caught, mid gesture, elbows bent, the tilt of his head becoming part of a movement that had a beginning we didn't see, and we don't know what's coming next but Sophia, when I imagine her, I imagine her getting tired. Either she's out of breath, or sometimes you just get tired, tired of pretending, tired of the lights and the people, smoking and watching, and she wants to take a break but the cameraperson needs a few more shots. So she takes in a big inhalation, filling up the hollow space inside her ribs, pulling the air up into her chest, into her shoulders and her collar bones but still it's not enough and it won't be enough and it feels, to both of them, like suffocation.

What drives her crazy is the fact that she can't control what's driving her crazy. She thinks to herself, if I can just be free of it, if I could cough it out or wheeze it out, and the it is him, but how to expel what's already part of you. And she tries. She tells him that she won't turn him in, that he can have the car, that he can have the money, that he... just let go of me. But that's not going to happen. First of all, he enjoys the power he has over another human being. He enjoys the dominance, the control, the authority he has, plus, he enjoys her suffering. He finds it physically pleasurable. And because he has no intention of losing that, even if she could look into his eyes and reason with him, like the character in Psycho, he'd be unreasonable. Because his desires are unreasonable. When he tells her that she's coming to Belgium with him, what can she say? She doesn't say much. What she can do is prepare herself. Which is why she takes poison. And she does it unwittingly, just a thought coming into her head, the tone of a thought, and then another thought after that, and then another, and that's how she inoculates herself. Each thought is a piece of the poison, and if she takes enough of it, the poison becomes an antidote, that's the theory, and she's willing to try. The sky gets dark as she drives through the countryside, the headlights reflecting off the fog in front of them, past farms and towns and he's curled up in the passenger seat, leaning against the passenger door, trying not to fall asleep but it's late. He's been under a lot of stress lately. Sometimes he can't help but let his eyelids slide down and cover his eyes. He doesn't see the road they're on, or the sign on the road for deviation, which is French for detour, and she follows the directions, following the other cars, taking the first detour, then the second, and then we see a close up of her face. I can't remember if the windshield wipers were swinging back and forth but watching her face you can almost see the thoughts as they pass across the muscles around her eyes, crossing across her forehead as if crossing her mind, each thought repeating the thought that came before but altering it slightly, enlarging it and compounding it, and if we would be able to slow down her thoughts and see them individually, like frames in a movie, we would see the gradual mutation of love. What once had been unthinkable becomes, not quite normal but real and necessary, and she gets used to those thoughts, habituating herself to ideas that ought to be forbidden but now it's too late. When she looks at the sky in front of her, at the stars in the sky, or the clouds blocking the stars, the poison she’s taking is working, and she feels it working, finding a home in her body, and maybe it isn’t a poison. 

When I was younger, in my twenties, people would tell me I looked like Tony Perkins. I was thin, gangly you might say. I worked at a theater so people were more acquainted with actors and actresses. Usually they would say I reminded them of that intense guy, or the actor from Psycho. Perkins is famous, primarily, for the role of Norman Bates, but he played other offbeat characters. And by offbeat I mean not quite keeping the same time as the music. In the Jimmy Piersall Story he played a slightly manic baseball player. And he was manic in Five Miles to Midnight. In the Trial, by Orson Welles, he was manic, but with reason. Tony was raised primarily by his mother, and his roles were often young men, troubled and dissatisfied, and the dissatisfaction expressed itself in their bodies, in their posture and gait, and I didn’t think of myself as dissatisfied, but I’d been told by a poet that I looked fearful, and Tony often looked like he was afraid. He was skinny, agitated. He moved quickly, spoke almost defensively. And for me, constantly hearing about this visual similarity between us, between who I was and this person best known for matricide, although I sometimes pretended to stab the air like Tony did in the shower scene in Psycho, that was a joke, a way of deflecting the effect of constantly being told that I reminded people of someone they didn’t even know, except he was psychotic. And although it was gradual, after a while my resemblance to him began to feel like a weight, like a pressure that had worked its way into my body and had caused certain muscle groups to tense, to protect themselves, working into me not like a poison or a virus, but lodging a seed in my body and eventually it sprouts, growing out of me like limbs growing out of a tree, influencing my body and steering my body and I don't remember fighting it because mostly I wasn’t aware of it. 

Every so often Sofia, driving the car, looks over to the passenger seat and Tony is sleeping, his hair falling over his forehead. Occasionally he looks up, sees they're on the right road, then closes his eyes again. They're supposed to arrive at the border at midnight, the frontier in French, and she's wondering if he's really falling asleep. Or just pretending. Waiting to catch her. And she doesn't even know what she's done to be caught, but she's watching the deviation signs get more and more frequent. And all she can do is try to breathe. She lets her ribs become like a bellows, feeling the oxygen take up space in her chest, and to say she smelled her freedom would be too poetic, but the thing she used to think she needed, now she doesn't feel dependent on that, or attracted to that. But how can I separate myself from what I used to be, that's the question she's asking, and the movie is Knife in the wound because knives are good at cutting things out, cutting things off, and because what I used to be is part of the past she believes she can cut it out and still survive. She can tolerate whatever poison she has to take because she’s already taken the antidote, and whether the wound is hers or the knife is hers, as the antidote gets stronger and more potent she gets more and more used to her new condition, which is more and more separated from Tony, and when the idea of living without him gets strong enough, or necessary enough, when she feels it spread like fluid down her neck and back and her chest opens up, that's when she sees the deviation sign in front of her. And that's why, although the arrow on the sign says to turn right, she turns to the left, leaving the well-worn road and the cars on the road and now she's driving along a deserted path. One lane. No lights because no other souls in evidence. And I don’t remember what song was playing on the soundtrack but I think I remember a xylophone, something jazzy that follows them as they move through the night, and the gears of the car make a sound when she downshifts, slowing down because up ahead she sees a sign for the Belgian border, five kilometers away. 

Desire Under the Elms was a play by Eugene O’Neill, written in 1924 and based on the story of Phaedra, the queen who falls in love with her husband’s son. A movie version was made in 1958 and the stepson played by Tony Perkins. He’s young, handsome, innocent seeming, but as in Five Miles to Midnight, he's not completely innocent. His father, played by Burl Ives, is gruff, domineering, a patriarch who rules his children like a king. And then suddenly the king finds a young wife. She's from Italy, her name is Anna, and she's played by Sophia Loren. The catalyst of the story is the physical attraction between Tony and Sophia, and although it’s illicit, because the old man is oblivious it's easy for the romance to start, for sex to happen, and when Sophia becomes pregnant she pretends the baby belongs to the old man. He’s her husband, after all, and belongs is a funny word because everything belongs to him, and will belong to him, and that’s what she and Tony hate, his power, and a few years later Tony would play the part again, in a movie called Phaedra. It’s a retelling of the old story of mother and son, and although she’s not his mother, at this point he was typecast, and we all get typecast, and late one night in Desire, he and Sofia, fighting against the roles they’ve been given, and against the confinement of those roles, get into a violent argument in which their baby dies, and the father figure banishes them, and there was probably an older version of the story, before the Greek version, and most of them seem to end in death. 

In Five Miles to Midnight Sophia pulls to a stop near a stone fence. She’s been driving for hours and when Tony wakes up she tells him the car has a flat. He rubs his eyes as you would to wake up and he says he'll take a look. For some reason he rolls down his window. His movements seem especially jerky as he opens the door and gets out of the car. He notices the sign for the border and he makes a comment. Almost midnight, he says, and he squats down to look at the tire. We can't see him because he's hidden by the hood of the car, and that’s when she puts the car in reverse. And we think she might drive away, that driving away was her plan all along, to leave his desperate, distorted world and drive back to a world where she can live without him. But there's still the wound. The wound is her inability to extricate herself from a situation that confuses her and gnaws at her and because that situation is Tony, the only way to change it is to kill it, to put the car in gear, step on the gas, and it doesn’t register to him what’s happening. He looks up, caught in the headlights, caught in the middle of whatever gesture he was making and… Honey? He’s half standing, his hands not quite shielding his eyes from the beam of light and, Honey? He calls her Honey. What are you doing? His acting still has a trace of the gangly môtelier in Psycho, still a little crazy, a little fey, a little Frankenstein-like as he waves to her like he's saying hello. We see him through the glass of the windshield, arms akimbo as if he's dancing the twist or the frug, and then she runs over his body. Then she backs up. We see the car bump as her tire rolls over his body, writhing on the ground, twisted, his arm raised like a creature from a dark lagoon, and then she comes at him again, the small sedan knocking him into the ground then backing up over his torso, and although it's a small sedan, she keeps doing it, driving over him, forward and back, and the director, Anatole Litvak, shot the scene multiple times. Tony's body is lying in the wet dirt, wiggling like a worm but unlike a worm he’s able to look up, his hand raised, and anyone treated like that would be dead. And when she runs him over one last time we assume that he is, completely dead. Which is why she took the poison. To change her situation. To be done with him, and her attachment to him, and her memory of that attachment. And it worked. But it couldn't work completely because her attachment was only a symptom. The thing she was trying to change was love itself. 

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John Haskell is a writer of stories and essays. His books are I Am Not Jackson Pollock, American Purgatorio, Out of My Skin, The Complete Ballet. He is contributing editor at A Public Space and Bomb Magazine.
The website is: johnhaskell.net