The Servant (1963) through the Lens of Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic by April Wu

GCAS MA Researcher April Wu, previously of Oxford University, Music (BA) and Social Anthropology (MSc), offers an insightful analysis of ‘The Servant’.

The Servant (1963) is a masterful exegesis on the paradox of power as at once self-negating and self-affirming, alluring and reprehensible, and ultimately vacuous. Playing on the Hegelian motif of contradiction, the film, dubbed the ‘coldest film ever made’ by a Los Angeles Times reviewer, depicts the self-defeating nature of freedom with a cynicism surpassing that of its conceptual heritage, the Master-Slave Dialectic as presented in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

Adapted from Maugham’s novella, The Servant is the first of the Losey-Pinter collaborations, an early example of the Pinteresque ‘comedy in menace’: power struggles under the facade of domestic regularity; subtle insidiousness that erupts in outright devastation; elliptical dialogues and edgy silences, signaling respectively the coded British rhetoric of class and a psychosexual subtext. Set in the background of aristocratic decline after WW2, The Servant pivots on the relationship between Tony (James Fox), a foppish, wealthy Londoner, and his ominous new servant, Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), with the latter, gradually eroding the master status of his employer as the narrative unfolds, and eventually taking over the household.

As Kojève asserts in his influential study of Hegel, ‘mastery is an existential impasse’. According to Hegel, the slave is dependent on the master but only to a degree, just as the master is autonomous only to a degree. Though proclaiming his superiority by possessing a slave, the master never truly gains an independent self-consciousness, as he would only value recognition from someone who would refuse to give it. The master merely enjoys the work of the slave, and exhausts himself in the immediate enjoyment of the consumption of the thing, while ‘the aspect of [the thing’s] independence he leaves to the bondsman, who works on it’ (190). The master, never feeling the absolute dread the slave feels nor having firsthand experience with independent things, is unable to attain truth, which for Hegel always consists in ‘tarrying with the negative’, in self-negation rather than self-assertion.

Tony displays a key weakness that Hegel attributes to the master: passive consumption (of alcohol, food, and even sex ‘served’ by his servant), which Barrett exploits to the fullest degree. When Barrett inquires after Tony’s needs, he replies: ‘well, you know, everything - general looking after.’ This passivity allows Barrett to subtly replace Tony’s desires with his own in order to advance his own interests. The inversion of the dualist structures that supposedly sustain the master-slave dynamic, i.e. wealth and want, righteousness and shame, knowledge and ignorance, agency and servitude, is already visually coded at the start of the film. The film begins with an aerial shot of the London streets. The elegantly dressed Barrett strides towards his new employer’s house. Once inside, Barrett towers over Tony, who is sleeping off a hangover on a deck chair in broad daylight (Ex.1). Barrett, then, is a resourceful man in the orderly public world, while Tony is dreamy and childish, living in his private world of fantasy. Tony’s ignorance of external reality is paradoxically a result of his dependence on it (a lover, a manservant, a family inheritance), and will eventually lead to the disfigurement of his internal reality.

Barrett’s disdain for his employer is palpable to the audience but not to the clueless Tony, who at one point naively defends the humanity of Barrett. Tony’s attempts to fraternalize are of course interpreted by Barrett as upper-class hypocrisy which only catalyzes his revenge. By hindsight, Barrett’s initial deference and peculiar equanimity—Bogarde being again in his element—are evidence of his powers of manipulation, and he himself embodies the hypocrisy he accuses his master of displaying.

Tony, who we see is already in a state of languid drunkenness at the start of the film, seems unable to prevent his sink into total depravity by its end. By the time he has no choice but to employ Barrett for the second time, it is clear who in the household is the master, and who is the dependent. The macabre black-and-white style, the prominence of mirrors and mirror images (Ex.2), and the eerie apathy (evocative of the Lacanian lack) that pervade through and beyond the screen inspire a Psycho-esque terror that enhances the Hegelian themes of aporia and alienation.

For Barrett, freedom, and agency are achieved only negatively through intrusion, manipulation, and demolition. He sees human beings as instruments that facilitate his despotic, false autonomy. While Susan, Tony’s girlfriend, is immediately alert to the threat that Barrett poses (although she might have only been aware of the sexual threat), she is no rival to the single-mindedly destructive servant. The facade of humble servitude is something Barrett puts up as a shield against mistrust: to Susan’s question of ‘what do you want from this house?’, he replies, in one of the most sinister moments of the film, ‘I’m a servant, ma’am’. 

Barrett and Tony’s dynamic is a dialectical dance of repulsion and seduction, a performance of homophobia characteristic of the period. The homoerotic theme is more developed in Maugham’s original novella, while in the film it is presented negatively as the crucial, albeit unvoiced, dark matter in the fermentation of power.  It is worth noting that in a film released two years prior to this one (Victim [1961]), Dirk Bogarde was starred in the role of a lawyer, the first character ever to utter the word ‘homosexuality’ and defend it on screen. In The Servant, everyone is subservient to power——Tony and Vera to that of Barrett, and Barrett to himself——and therefore everyone loses. This is a gloomier diagnosis of human nature than that of Hegel, for whom the slave seems capable of transcending the vicious cycle of power and being liberated. In the world of The Servant, absolute dread drives the servant to usurp his master’s role rather than motivating him in the direction of self-negation which is constitutive of truth.

Indeed, the film delivers its nightmarish chill not through its inversion of power relations, a common enough trope in the master-servant genre (from Jeeves and Wooster to Downton Abbey), but through the fact that none of the characters are capable of, even interested in change. Barrett only lays open what he has had in mind from the beginning, and Tony only indulges in debauchery to a fuller degree. The servant, in becoming master, becomes as contemptuous as, and less redeemable than him. The master-slave order ultimately collapses and none of the characters wins our sympathy. It is unclear which is the bleaker world: one where it is impossible for one self-consciousness to truly vanquish another while maintaining its integrity, or that of all-consuming post-war hedonism nihilistic about the notions of power, freedom, or truth as long as the alcohol doesn’t stop coming.

Cover art by Zulmaury Saavedra.