Hell Is a Hotel

No Exit. The idea of hell has gradually been going to hell. In the ancient Hebrew tradition it was a bottomless pit where "the fire is sixty times as hot as the fire of this earth." To St. Thomas it was a sort of overheated sideshow that the saints in heaven were permitted to watch in order to "enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly." To the poet Shelley it was "a city much like London." To Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, whose most celebrated theatrical tract can now be seen in a free cinemadaptation, hell is just a cheap hotel room.

Three people are in the room, two women and a man. The man (Morgan Sterne) is a coward who betrayed his revolutionary comrades to torture and death. One of the women (Viveca Lindfors) is a lesbian who seduced a virtuous young housewife and slowly, out of sheer unnatural viciousness, destroyed her. The other is a rich woman (Rita Gam) who drowned her baby and inspired her nice old husband to blow his brains out. Briskly they confess their sins, warily they begin to discover what manner of hell they are in. The coward longs to be saved, the lesbian prefers to be damned, the rich woman wants to be distracted. Each involves the others in a vicious circle of frustration that by its very nature never ends. That, according to Sartre, is the hell of it.

Sartre of course is not really talking about hell. He is talking about existence. Existence, he means to say, is a paradoxical situation in which no man can help another to save himself and no man can save himself alone. Indeed, in Sartre's opinion all communication is evil and love is a kind of murder. Since one existent cannot see another as a subject but only as an object, the "stare" of the other interrupts "the secret state" that to the existent is his existence, and this interruption causes a "hemorrhage" of freedom that drains being into nothingness. Ergo: "Hell is other people." Other people, that is to say, are a man's punishment for not living his own life as truly and as fully as he can. In Sartre's opinion, whosoever shall lose his life shall lose everything. "You are your life," he proclaims, "and nothing else."

The ideas in the drama are plainly paranoid but they are also vivid, and in this competent translation and production they make for vivid theater of ideas. But the drama is diminished at every point to the petty scale of Sartre's vision of reality. It is true enough, even in a religious sense, that man is his life and nothing else, but it is also true that there are more things in man's life than are dreamt of in Sartre's philosophy.

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