“Without names, our knowledge of things would perish,” according to Linnaeus. Linnaeus, an Enlightenment-era scientist, took this idea to heart and invented the modern taxonomic system (the system of giving names to each species on the basis of its genus and specific difference). This system rendered the order of the animate world more visible, and it enabled and drew forth new levels of detail and differentiation in our understanding of that world. The relevance of Linnaeus’s claim about names and the preservation of knowledge to The Lady Eve is made clear in the opening scene, in which we find a scientist, called simply “Professor,” giving Hopsy a snake and a taxonomic name: the snake is newly discovered, and the Professor has given it its name, and name that places this snake within the ordered system of living creatures and that also honors someone who is presumably a friend or esteemed colleague (a Dr. Marzditzia). Hopsy promises to take care of the snake and then adds – and it seems important to him to express this – “I want to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed being on this expedition with you. If I had my way, this is the way I’d like to spend all my time: in the company of men like yourselves in the pursuit of knowledge.” The tone and pitch of this declaration is interesting: it seems very staged, rehearsed, theatrical, and we must wonder, For whom is the declaration important and why? Why did it need to be rehearsed? (This last question assumes that one agrees that it sounds rehearsed; if one disagrees, then I would point to the fact that we are rather explicitly pointed toward Hopsy’s tendency to rehearse and then reuse in his use of the phrase “up the Amazon,” which is used five times (three by him and twice by Jean, who seems to intentionally echo him, likely as part of her seduction), and in his “way back” speech (which Jean, as Eve, listens to as if hearing it for the first time, although she’s already heard it as Jean; whether one believes that Hopsy is authentic or inauthentic here depends on whether one believes that he knows (either consciously or subconsciously) that this is in fact Jean again).)
Right away, then, we are pointed toward taxonomy and to an ordered life lived among a community of men (not women) who, free to pursue whatever they want, pursue knowledge of a certain kind (a taxonomic kind: they wish to discover things and given them a proper name). Hopsy would like to do this too – if he had his way. We are thus forced to yet another question: Why cannot he have his way? Why is he being forced out of the Eden, which Man gives Creatures their Name? The film suggests an answer with the next line of dialogue: “So long, Lulu. I’ll send you a postcard.” The Professor then wishes Hopsy well and is sure to let him know that “[i]f you get a chance to come back, this is where we’ll be.” The suggestion is that the possibility of this supposed Eden always awaits – it is simply, for Hopsy, who seems not to be in a state of full liberty, a matter of chance (not choice).
This theme of naming and knowledge is immediately picked up and complicated when the camera turns to passengers on the bridge of the S.S. Southern Queen. It scans along them and as it does we pick up a string of conversation that seems to run like a single confused train-of-thought among the passengers. The first bit of dialogue is, “There he is!” This seems, both epistemologically and ontologically, like the most basic and obvious of statements. It is, of course, immediately complicated – and implicitly critiqued – by the Babel of dialogue that follows. “You’d think he’d have a bigger yacht than that if he’s so rich,” say the next passenger. This shows that she does not know Hopsy: she has an image – a thought – of him that does fit what he appears to be, as if either the appearance is deceiving (such that he is not really there, in some sense, or at least not what he seems (and what does he seem like to us, the audience?) or her image of him is wrong from the start. We then turn to the name of things. “That isn’t a yacht; that’s a tender,” says the next passenger, correcting the woman who thought that one would think that he’d have a bigger yacht (correcting not her impression of what one would think he’d have but her misnomer). “What’s a tender?” is the reply. Here we witness the basic ignorance of what words mean, which in turn leads to an inability to call things what they are, which then in turn bespeaks an ignorance of what things are.
We then go deeper, as a passenger confuses Pabst with Pike and then another confuses Puke with Pike. And then, again as if this is not a crowd of distinct individuals but a single entity (society itself?), we are carried alliteratively from Pabst and Puke and Pike to “peekaboo”: “Go put on your peekaboo.” We’ve moved from the proper names of people and things to a slang term that arose in the early 1900s: a “peekaboo” is “an item of clothing decorated with a pattern of holes so as to allow glimpses of the wearer’s body; a partially transparent garment” (OED). It is, then, an article of clothing designed to seduce. And so, with the maxim “Go put on your peekaboo,” we have, as it were, followed out the consequences of not knowing what things are. We get just a partial glimpse of things, and we are seduced by the glimpse into thinking that we know what is before us (when in fact we do not), and this partiality is what can lead us astray – out of an innocent relation with things as they are into one that is false. The peekaboo, then, can be seen as a symbol for the sense of the real that dominates in the Cave.
At the same time, however, this peekaboo reflects a deeper truth of both perfectionism and the philosophy of Kant: there is, it seems, no escaping this partial, limited view. For Kant in particular, there is a conceptual schema (“a pattern of holes”) that gives us, if not glimpses of the noumenal, a.k.a the thing-in-itself (the “wearer’s body”), then something similar (the appearance of it as phenomena, which is the only (indirect) glimpse of it that we can get). From a perfectionist standpoint, one wonders if the peekaboo does not describe the future self – and/or our first encounter with another or indeed any encounter with our own self. We adopt forms of life that allow only a glimpse of who we are. This sense of a surface hiding-while-revealing something underneath it connects with the original meaning of peekaboo as “a game played with a young child which involves hiding onself, or one’s fact, and suddenly reappearing, saying ‘peekaboo’” (OED). And this in turn seems to connect with the game that Jean will play with the child-like Hopsy. She appears and disappears and reappears again – and if Hopsy is to be believed, that first appearance was itself a reappearance, as he claims that his knowledge of her goes “way back.” Indeed, after hearing the injunction “Go put on your peekaboo,” the camera scans up a deck, where we meet Jean, who, after an exchange with her father that reveals them as scam artists (in spite of the fact that she will turn out to be good, such that her first appearance to us is itself a kind of peekaboo), she introduces herself by dropping an apple on head of Hopsy, whom we’ll next see reading a book entitled, “Are Snakes Necessary?”
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