Materialism and Despair: Emulation and Maturation

By Nick Giorgio

“The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal, and this superiority distinguishes him in quite another way than does his erect walk, for it indicates infinite erectness or sublimity, that he is spirit.” –Søren Kierkegaard The Sickness Unto Death

Lula Mae Burns, portrayed by Audrey Hepburn, is the protagonist in the 1961 film adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She is the literary epitome of the 1960s New York café society girl, a manifestation of an enviable bourgeois lifestyle. Despite her material wealth and lavish mentality, her unhappiness is a fait accompli.

A motif of her story is escape. Lula Mae ensconces herself throughout the story. The most obvious is the guise of her name. She goes about her life under the pseudonym Holly Golightly. The surname Golightly is that of her annulled marriage to “Doc” Golightly (Buddy Ebsen). It is peculiar that she chooses the family name of her ex-husband when she is hiding from her espousal. She is trying to escape the stigma of marriage to pursue a bachelorette lifestyle that hadn’t really been there for her; she married Doc when she was just fourteen years old.

Holly Golightly spends a lot of her time going on dates with different men. In the beginning of the film, she is trying to avoid contact with the man she had been on a date with the night before, Sid Arbuck (Claude Stroud). She returns home after a trip to Tiffany & Co., a jewelry store that she occasionally window shops when she is trying to escape from the anxieties of life (the “Mean Reds” as opposed to the proverbial “blues”), to see Sid had been sleeping in his car all night, waiting for her. Sid catches up to her on her way to her apartment and tries to coax an explanation out of her as to why she left their date so abruptly. Sid is crazy about her and believes, in vain, that the feeling is mutual. She even forgets his name, calling him Harry.

The next morning she meets an author, Paul Varjak. Paul needs to use the telephone. They quickly develop a close friendship. Holly calls Paul “Fred” because he reminds her of her brother whom she has not seen for a long time. Her brother Fred is the source of a great deal of despair for her.

Almost all of the important characters in Breakfast at Tiffany’s go by a pseudonym. The Danish existentialist philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, was an advocate of the use of fake names in order to firmly establish the moral aspects of his writings. He wrote under pen names such as Johannes de silentio and Anti-Climacus as “poetic creations” to be, as quoted in his Journals, “poetically maintained so that everything they say is in character with their poetized individualized personalities”. It is possible that the characters in Breakfast at Tiffany’s went by false names in order to portray their true meanings.

“Johannes de silentio” was the name that Kierkegaard chose as the author of Fear and Trembling. In the section, “A Panegyric Upon Abraham”, de silentio goes on to describe the ineffectualness of words to describe the suffering of Abraham. God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a test of faith. Abraham endured such exhaustive despair because of the paradox of performing an ethically evil deed to show to God, the absolute authority of that which is “good”, that he was faithful to Him. Kierkegaard explains that within the realm of human ethos, it is impossible to interpret what Abraham went through. We lack the words to explain Abraham’s situation. We are left in silence.

There is a scene in Breakfast at Tiffany’s where we see Holly enter her apartment with a man named José da Silva Pereira (José Luis de Vilallonga), and within seconds she is throwing a fit. Paul, who had escorted them to the apartment, immediately walks in and tries to calm her down. He succeeds in putting her to bed only after she has destroyed everything she owns and almost kills her cat (which has no name; she just refers to it as “cat”). It is assumed that José had done something to cause Holly to become so incredibly furious. However, it is discovered that she had received a telegram from Doc that her brother Fred was killed in a car accident. The lone, precious familial aspect of Holly’s life was suddenly taken from her. José asks Paul if it is appropriate to call the police because Holly has performed an act seen as destructive and needed authoritative restraint from capable people. Paul tells José that there is no crime in destroying your own home. Police intervention would only attempt to assimilate Holly’s inexplicable actions with the ethos of people who could never fully understand her despair.

Another book by Kierkegaard is The Sickness Unto Death written under the pseudonym, Anti-Climacus. The “Sickness” that Anti-Climacus is referring to is despair. When people have a fatal illness, they desperately want to live. They are simultaneously trying to go on while they are dying. When a person is sick with despair, however, they are living with a desperate desire to die.

To suffer from despair is to be human. The complex issue of suffering is what differentiates human beings from other, less developed life forms. Suffering comes from our ability to reason and become self-conscious. We often see others living the life we’ve always dreamed of. Kierkegaard proclaims:

Thus when the ambitious man whose slogan was “Either Caesar or nothing”, and he does not become Caesar, he is in despairs over it. But this signifies something else, namely, that precisely because he did not become Caesar he now cannot bear to be himself. Consequently he is not in despair over the fact that he did not become Caesar, but he is in despair over himself for the fact that he did not become Caesar.

For Holly Golightly (and many women of the era), it was the life of the café society girl. She was living the lifestyle, but under false self-awareness. This fake persona disguised her true self: a woman desperately longing for true love. Anybody could see the connection between Paul and Holly, but Holly blindly avoided true love to live a lie. She flirted with man after man, without regard to each man’s feelings, treating each as an object of temporary relief, personifying her relationship with Tiffany’s.

Towards the end of the film, Paul escorts Holly on a cab ride. Holly intends on going to the airport and catching a plane to Brazil where she plans to marry José, who had written her a letter explaining that their relationship cannot continue after she was arrested because of her involvement in a drug ring with Sally Tomato (Alan Reed). She insists on going along with the marriage anyway. She asks Paul to read her José’s letter because she “cannot read without her lipstick”. In the letter, José refers to Holly as his “little girl”, symbolizing her immaturity at becoming self-aware. He goes on explaining his despair at learning that she was not the girl he had hoped she was. He asks her for forgiveness and that God may be with her.

She wants to quickly end her despair by granting death to her single lifestyle. This is paradoxical because she is using the thing that had been causing her despair, matrimony, to end her despair, which had be prolonged by avoiding her true self. According to Kierkegaard, despair is a natural occurrence when the self is attempting to realize itself.

This is a sort of knee-jerk reaction to her sudden need for fraternal love after the death of her brother. Marriage to José would have prolonged Holly’s suffering because she did not truly love him. She was too clouded by ambition to be someone she was not, to marry someone whom she did not truly love, to realize that true love was right in front of her. Of course, Paul was her true love, as foreshadowed by his pseudonym “Fred”, the name of Holly’s brother.

The climax of the film (note that it is not the ultimate climax of despair, which cannot end until death, hence the name Anti-Climacus and the title of his book) begins when Holly has a breakdown after Paul finishes reading José’s letter. She still insists on going to Brazil in order to not “waste a perfectly good plane ticket”. She wants Paul to mail her a list of the fifty richest men in Brazil. Again, she is determined to continue her lavish lifestyle by filling her love void with anyone who can materialistically satisfy her. Paul cannot let her go on because he is in love with her.

The following dialogue brings an important existential theme, freedom, into fruition:

Paul: I love you.

Holly: So what.

Paul: So what? So plenty! I love you, you belong to me!

Holly: No. People don’t belong to people.

Paul: Of course they do!

Holly: I’ll never let anybody put me in a cage.

Paul: I don’t want to put you in a cage, I want to love you!

There is a paradox here. The only way Holly can be free is to submit herself to love. She compares herself to cat. They are both “no-name slobs” who don’t belong to anybody. She “frees” cat by letting him out of the cab, allowing him to chase an unlimited amount of rats (a term she calls the men dates).

When Paul gets out to search for cat, Holly finally realizes what Paul means to her. They wind up searching together, eventually finding cat, and concluding with a kiss. It is only then that Holly ends this aspect of her despair and realizes her true self.

The existential themes of suffering, anxiety and despair are present throughout Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The thematic experience is concurrent with the teachings of the 19th Century philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. The film is an excellent expression of the plight of every person, of trying to discover their self.