美剧《婚外情》里的性爱与不忠
WE live in a world awash in unreliable narrators.
我们生活的世界里，充斥着不可靠的讲述者。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.
德克萨斯长老会医院(Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital)的官员在谈论埃博拉病毒时很不可靠。互联网上也满是不可靠的讲述者，他们总喜欢大谈自己眼中的真相。惊悚片《消失的爱人》(Gone Girl)里那对讨人嫌的夫妇口中所讲的话，不可靠到了让人脊背发凉的地步，所以票房收入轻而易举地击败了讲话靠不住的“活死人”《德古拉》(Dracula)。更别提Fox新闻频道了。
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.
现在，在纽约州蒙托克(Montauk)发生的“罗生门”(Rashomon)也登上了电视屏幕。Showtime的《婚外情》(The Affair)中，演员露丝·威尔森(Ruth Wilson)和多米尼克·威斯特(Dominic West)在炎热的夏天里发生婚外情，还陷入了一系列犯罪事件。每一集中，两人都会轮流用男方的版本以及女方的版本讲述同一个故事。
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.
剧组在布鲁克林的一所学校拍了几场戏，于是我到那里与威斯特和这部剧的联合主创萨拉·特里姆(Sarah Treem)碰面聊了聊。英国演员威斯特曾在HBO剧集《火线》(The Wire)中扮演巴尔的摩一个不羁的警探，吉米·麦克纳提(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.
威斯特扮演的角色诺亚(Noah)是个教师，也写小说，与莫拉·蒂尔尼(Maura Tierney)扮演的妻子住在布鲁克林的一栋联排房屋里。他婚姻幸福，但因为第一部小说反响平平，所以内心有些惴惴不安。他做爱时脸上露出的表情会让妻子笑出声来，这让他更加焦虑。他傲慢的岳父是一个著名小说家，总是奚落他。岳父在汉普顿(Hamptons)拥有一栋海景大宅，此时一家人正在这栋宅子里度夏。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.
威斯特遇到由露丝·威尔森扮演的艾莉森(Alison)时，追逐就开始了。生于蒙托克本地的艾莉森是一个容貌清秀的餐厅侍应，她嫁给了一个自己爱的人，但也感到不安和焦虑。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.
不过是谁追谁呢？根据威斯特的回忆，是性感丰满的艾莉森，穿着性感的衣服来勾引他的。但艾莉森却说，她还在为溺死的幼子而哀痛，所以身心憔悴，不愿与人接触，对于诺亚不断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.”
特里姆是一个剧作家，也是《纸牌屋》(House of Cards)的编剧。她与哈盖·列维(Hagai Levi)共同创作了《婚外情》，二人也在HBO剧集《扪心问诊》(In Treatment)中有过合作。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.”
新剧集中通过性来表现剧中角色“尝试‘联结’起来，但总也做不到”的情景。特里姆说，“我想，剧中是有很多性描写，但要说到双方的确能融汇圆满的性，实际上相当少见。”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岁特里姆在6月刚刚结婚。她的丈夫杰伊·卡森(Jay Carson)曾是霍华德·迪恩(Howard Dean)和希拉里·克林顿(Hillary Clinton)的竞选发言人，也是《纸牌屋》的制片之一。她和卡森的儿子已经快两岁了。不过聪慧诱人的特里姆，对于浪漫却有着一种历经沧桑的解读，颇值得玩味。“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.”
“我有这么一个看法，就是在一切男欢女爱的关系中，一开始都会有段漫长的情欲时刻，”她说。“它就好像绳球游戏里的球杆，其它的一切，无非是那个破球，一会儿绕在情欲的杆子上，一会儿又解开，你总是在设法回到那个与某人情意相连的美妙瞬间，但那瞬间已经一去不复返。”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.”
她说他们在编剧的房间里张贴了诗人罗伯特·哈斯(Robert Hass)的话，在其中一段的末尾，他这样描绘与一个女人做爱的感官知觉：“她的存在让我感到一种炽烈的好奇，就像渴望盐，渴望儿时的河流，孤立河中的柳树，游艇里传出傻乎乎的音乐，在一个泥泞的地方可以抓到一种叫‘南瓜种’的橙银色小鱼。不见得一定和她有关。我们说，这叫遥望，因为欲望有着无尽的距离。”I tell her that Carson asked me if he should be worried, given how knowingly his wife writes about infidelity.
我对她说，卡森问我，他是不是该担忧，毕竟他的妻子在描写不忠行为时显得见多识广。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，“写这个剧的时候我31岁，还单身，在人生的那个阶段，你会看到很多不忠的事情。会有已婚男来打你主意。你会看到你的朋友已经开始有外遇。以我当时的视角，不忠无处不在。现在我结婚了，我会希望我的婚姻能成功。我爱他，我想要忠于他，我也想让他忠于我。”但她又就事论事地说，“整段婚姻真的要毫无背叛地过下来，几率大概是20%，说不定只有10%。”When I ask her if she thinks that men are more prone to cheat, she instantly replies: “Yes, I do.”
我问她是不是男人更容易偷情，她立刻答道：“是的，我这么认为。”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.
威斯特乐呵呵地承认这部剧称得上“床上马拉松”，但是它的真正主题应该是婚姻。“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.”
“当你有了四个孩子，你的性生活不可避免地会受影响，”威斯特说，他自己就是四个孩子的父亲。“但是在我看来，在我20、30来岁的时候，不忠的风险要大得多。我觉得随着你年纪越来越大，这个风险会大幅下降。我认为，比起我们的孩子出问题之类的事来，我和我妻子都已经不那么担心不忠了。它已经不再是首要的烦心事。”WHEN I mentioned that it was interesting how, in Noah’s remembrance, Alison has fuller breasts, West’s eyes widened in surprise.
我提到剧中的一个有趣的点——在诺亚的记忆里，艾莉森的乳房要更饱满，威斯特流露出惊讶的表情。“Does she?” he said, laughing. “Is that right? Well spotted.”
“是吗？”他笑着说。“是这样的？好眼力。”The actor said that, after playing Iago and the English serial killer Fred West, he yearned for a more heroic role.
这位演员说，在演了伊阿古和英格兰连环杀手弗莱德·韦斯特(Fred West)后，他渴望演一个更具英雄气质的角色。“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.”
“我非常想演个好人，”他苦笑着说。“这就是我演的好人了——一个偷情的丈夫。”
