美劇《婚外情》裏的性愛與不忠
WE live in a world awash in unreliable narrators.
我們生活的世界裏，充斥着不可靠的講述者。Officials at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital were unreliable narrators on Ebola. The Internet is bristling with unreliable narrators who prefer their takes to the truth. The unsavory husband and wife in the thriller “Gone Girl” are such chillingly unreliable narrators that they easily beat out the undead unreliable narrator, Dracula, at the box office. And let’s not even start on Fox News.
德克薩斯長老會醫院(Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital)的官員在談論埃博拉病毒時很不可靠。互聯網上也滿是不可靠的講述者，他們總喜歡大談自己眼中的真相。驚悚片《消失的愛人》(Gone Girl)裏那對討人嫌的夫婦口中所講的話，不可靠到了讓人脊背發涼的地步，所以票房收入輕而易舉地擊敗了講話靠不住的“活死人”《德古拉》(Dracula)。更別提Fox新聞頻道了。
So now comes the riveting “Rashomon” in Montauk, Showtime’s “The Affair,” with Ruth Wilson and Dominic West offering alternating he recalls-she recalls versions of the same story in each show, as they get swept up in sexual infidelity and a serious crime during a shimmering summer.
現在，在紐約州蒙托克(Montauk)發生的“羅生門”(Rashomon)也登上了電視屏幕。Showtime的《婚外情》(The Affair)中，演員露絲·威爾森(Ruth Wilson)和多米尼克·威斯特(Dominic West)在炎熱的夏天裏發生婚外情，還陷入了一系列犯罪事件。每一集中，兩人都會輪流用男方的版本以及女方的版本講述同一個故事。
I went to Brooklyn to talk to West — the British actor who played the raffish Baltimore detective Jimmy McNulty in “The Wire” on HBO — and the show’s co-creator, Sarah Treem, as they shot scenes at a school there.
劇組在布魯克林的一所學校拍了幾場戲，於是我到那裏與威斯特和這部劇的聯合主創薩拉·特里姆(Sarah Treem)碰面聊了聊。英國演員威斯特曾在HBO劇集《火線》(The Wire)中扮演巴爾的摩一個不羈的警探，吉米·麥克納提(Jimmy McNulty)。West’s character, Noah, is a novelist and teacher who lives in a Brooklyn brownstone with his wife, played by Maura Tierney, and four kids. He’s happily married but feeling insecure about the lackluster performance of his first novel. It gets worse when his wife giggles at his facial expression during lovemaking, and he’s taunted by his arrogant father-in-law, a famous fiction writer who owns the oceanfront mansion in the Hamptons where the family is spending the summer.
威斯特扮演的角色諾亞(Noah)是個教師，也寫小說，與莫拉·蒂爾尼(Maura Tierney)扮演的妻子住在布魯克林的一棟聯排房屋裏。他婚姻幸福，但因爲第一部小說反響平平，所以內心有些惴惴不安。他做愛時臉上露出的表情會讓妻子笑出聲來，這讓他更加焦慮。他傲慢的岳父是一個著名小說家，總是奚落他。岳父在漢普頓(Hamptons)擁有一棟海景大宅，此時一家人正在這棟宅子裏度夏。When West meets Wilson’s comely Alison, a diner waitress and Montauk native who is also married to someone she loves (Joshua Jackson) and also feeling uncertain and anxious, the chase is on.
威斯特遇到由露絲·威爾森扮演的艾莉森(Alison)時，追逐就開始了。生於蒙托克本地的艾莉森是一個容貌清秀的餐廳侍應，她嫁給了一個自己愛的人，但也感到不安和焦慮。But who’s chasing whom? In West’s memory, Alison is sultry and curvy, wearing sexy outfits and seducing him. In Alison’s version, she’s wan and withdrawn, still mourning the drowning death of her small son and dubious about Noah’s aggressive blandishments.
不過是誰追誰呢？根據威斯特的回憶，是性感豐滿的艾莉森，穿着性感的衣服來勾引他的。但艾莉森卻說，她還在爲溺死的幼子而哀痛，所以身心憔悴，不願與人接觸，對於諾亞不斷的奉承也感到莫名其妙。Treem, a playwright and “House of Cards” writer, created “The Affair” with Hagai Levi, with whom she also worked on HBO’s “In Treatment.”
特里姆是一個劇作家，也是《紙牌屋》(House of Cards)的編劇。她與哈蓋·列維(Hagai Levi)共同創作了《婚外情》，二人也在HBO劇集《捫心問診》(In Treatment)中有過合作。Treem said the new show uses sex to illustrate that the characters are “trying to connect and they fail at it all the time. I think we have a lot of sex in this show, but in terms of the sex where they’re actually unified, that happens very rarely.”
新劇集中通過性來表現劇中角色“嘗試‘聯結’起來，但總也做不到”的情景。特里姆說，“我想，劇中是有很多性描寫，但要說到雙方的確能融匯圓滿的性，實際上相當少見。”Treem is a newlywed. In June, she married Jay Carson, a former campaign spokesman for Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton who is a producer on “House of Cards” and the father of Treem’s nearly 2-year-old son. Yet the brainy, alluring 34-year-old has an intriguingly jaded philosophy of romance.
今年34歲特里姆在6月剛剛結婚。她的丈夫傑伊·卡森(Jay Carson)曾是霍華德·迪恩(Howard Dean)和希拉里·克林頓(Hillary Clinton)的競選發言人，也是《紙牌屋》的製片之一。她和卡森的兒子已經快兩歲了。不過聰慧誘人的特里姆，對於浪漫卻有着一種歷經滄桑的解讀，頗值得玩味。“I have this belief that, in all relationships, there’s this long erotic moment that happens at the beginning of the relationship,” she said. “It’s like the pole of a tetherball court, and then everything else is just basically that damn ball going around, winding and unwinding around that one erotic moment, and you’re trying to always get back to that incredible moment of connection with somebody, and it’s gone forever.”
“我有這麼一個看法，就是在一切男歡女愛的關係中，一開始都會有段漫長的情慾時刻，”她說。“它就好像繩球遊戲裏的球杆，其它的一切，無非是那個破球，一會兒繞在情慾的杆子上，一會兒又解開，你總是在設法回到那個與某人情意相連的美妙瞬間，但那瞬間已經一去不復返。”She said they put up a quote by the poet Robert Hass in the writers’ room, the final line of a passage where he describes the sensation of making love to a woman: “I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.”
她說他們在編劇的房間裏張貼了詩人羅伯特·哈斯(Robert Hass)的話，在其中一段的末尾，他這樣描繪與一個女人做愛的感官知覺：“她的存在讓我感到一種熾烈的好奇，就像渴望鹽，渴望兒時的河流，孤立河中的柳樹，遊艇裏傳出傻乎乎的音樂，在一個泥濘的地方可以抓到一種叫‘南瓜種’的橙銀色小魚。不見得一定和她有關。我們說，這叫遙望，因爲慾望有着無盡的距離。”I tell her that Carson asked me if he should be worried, given how knowingly his wife writes about infidelity.
我對她說，卡森問我，他是不是該擔憂，畢竟他的妻子在描寫不忠行爲時顯得見多識廣。She laughed, replying, “I wrote the show when I was still single at 31, so at that point in your life you see a lot of infidelity. You have married men coming on to you. You see your friends already in affairs. From my perspective at that point, infidelity was all over the place. Now, being married, I would like my marriage to work. I love him, and I want to be faithful to him, and I want him to be faithful to me.” But, she adds matter-of-factly, “you probably have a 20 percent chance, maybe a 10 percent chance, of actually getting through an entire marriage with no infidelity.”
她笑了，答道，“寫這個劇的時候我31歲，還單身，在人生的那個階段，你會看到很多不忠的事情。會有已婚男來打你主意。你會看到你的朋友已經開始有外遇。以我當時的視角，不忠無處不在。現在我結婚了，我會希望我的婚姻能成功。我愛他，我想要忠於他，我也想讓他忠於我。”但她又就事論事地說，“整段婚姻真的要毫無背叛地過下來，機率大概是20%，說不定只有10%。”When I ask her if she thinks that men are more prone to cheat, she instantly replies: “Yes, I do.”
我問她是不是男人更容易偷情，她立刻答道：“是的，我這麼認爲。”West agrees that the show may be “a shag-a-thon,” as he merrily put it, but its real subject is meant to be marriage.
威斯特樂呵呵地承認這部劇稱得上“牀上馬拉松”，但是它的真正主題應該是婚姻。“When you have four kids, inevitably your sex life suffers,” said West, himself a father of four. “But, for me, in my 20s and 30s, the stakes are much higher if you’re unfaithful. I feel, as you get older, the stakes get a lot lower. I don’t think infidelity would bother either me or my wife so much as if anything happened to our children, for instance. It ceases to be the primary anxiety.”
“當你有了四個孩子，你的性生活不可避免地會受影響，”威斯特說，他自己就是四個孩子的父親。“但是在我看來，在我20、30來歲的時候，不忠的風險要大得多。我覺得隨着你年紀越來越大，這個風險會大幅下降。我認爲，比起我們的孩子出問題之類的事來，我和我妻子都已經不那麼擔心不忠了。它已經不再是首要的煩心事。”WHEN I mentioned that it was interesting how, in Noah’s remembrance, Alison has fuller breasts, West’s eyes widened in surprise.
我提到劇中的一個有趣的點——在諾亞的記憶裏，艾莉森的乳房要更飽滿，威斯特流露出驚訝的表情。“Does she?” he said, laughing. “Is that right? Well spotted.”
“是嗎？”他笑着說。“是這樣的？好眼力。”The actor said that, after playing Iago and the English serial killer Fred West, he yearned for a more heroic role.
這位演員說，在演了伊阿古和英格蘭連環殺手弗萊德·韋斯特(Fred West)後，他渴望演一個更具英雄氣質的角色。“I was really keen to play a good guy,” he said, with a wry smile. “So this is the good guy I’m playing — a cheating husband.”
“我非常想演個好人，”他苦笑着說。“這就是我演的好人了——一個偷情的丈夫。”
