2001:

screenplay by George Zuckerman
based on the novel (1946) by Robert Wilder
directed by Douglas Sirk

Criterion #96.

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And the category is: “Things You Can’t Write On.”

Or:

Yeah, the screenplay’s got some problems, but cut the guy some slack! He wrote it on the wind!

More samples upon request.

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It’s commonly noted that this movie is a precursor to Dallas and Dynasty and the like. Someone on the Criterion site comments that more generally, Sirk here establishes the style and technique of TV drama as a whole. That’s well observed, and it gave me some retrospective purchase on All That Heaven Allows.

Sirk’s on-the-nose sense of drama is easy for me to dismiss because I’ve had so much practice dismissing it on TV. But beyond that easy dismissal, I do understand how this stuff is meant to be ingested: as something too homey to be critiqued, too basic to be shaken off. TV is just there, so your guard goes down. It makes you feel safely superior to it: that’s how it gets you.

But the more subconscious the effect, the more subjective the value. A recurring theme around here is that different art is “for” different psychologies. I was moved to devote time to writing about the Twilight Zone because it felt potent to me, which is to say relevant to my personal baggage; meanwhile I can’t imagine watching more than one curiosity-teaspoon’s-worth of Dallas or any other soap opera. (Admittedly I did take in a fair amount of secondhand All My Children once upon a time. And Adam Chandler is only one degree removed from Marylee Hadley. Which makes Stuart two degrees.)

What I’m saying is that it’s not my psychodrama; it doesn’t resemble my private gods. Sex and alcohol and money and oil and power all stand in for emotions, I get it, but I don’t feel it because none of that is in my symbology. All that King Lear stuff about dissolute heirs remains abstract to me. So far as I was engaged by this movie — and I was! — it was by the sheer ritual spectacle of melodrama, the crazy artifice, the shapes and patterns. And, yes, I suppose that makes it sound like it got in below my radar. That’s what I’m saying TV does: it teaches you shapes and patterns seemingly without real emotional weight or consequence, and thereby indoctrinates you to expect them in life. I’m sophisticate enough at this point to slot things into categories according to what prejudices they play to, but that doesn’t mean I’m not also being led around by my subconscious. The same way that reading Twitter makes you feel the general agitas even as you place yourself in opposition to it. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be seeing these characters in a dream some day. Who knows.

But speaking on behalf of my conscious mind: this is mondo schlock from planet schlocko and I felt pretty damn immune to its meanings.

It was perfectly watchable, though. Which is the TV-iest form of praise.

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Lauren Bacall gives a distinct impression of discomfort. In fact I’m not sure she’s even doing the thing the word “acting” usually implies, wherein one attempts to convey emotions held by a fictional character. She seems rather to be giving a series of professional line readings, one after another, without making any effort to disguise her own personal feelings. Am I wrong? The screenplay tells us that she falls for Robert Stack, but it sure looks to me like she hates him. Apparently when Humphrey Bogart saw the finished movie he told her it was no good and that she should never do anything like it again. Maybe he was just nervous that she’d find out about his flirtation behind her back with Bookstore Girl.

Bookstore Girl acquits herself very well here. Dorothy Malone has the knack for extreme exaggeration that the genre requires; she’s completely at ease with her own flamboyance and simultaneously wry about it, which helps to absorb the audience’s insecurity. Once she enters the picture, about half an hour in, I suddenly found that I knew how to enjoy this campy soap opera after all. That alone is an achievement worthy of the Best Supporting Actress award. Which she won. (She died just this January at age 93. RIP!)

Robert Stack on the other hand just locks in his stare and goes as crazy as he can. Not as much for the audience to latch on to there but you can’t help but admire the shamelessness.

Rock Hudson as usual does an excellent job continuing to be Rock Hudson. He nails “what a nice man.” I think I liked him a little better here than in the previous one.

Harry Shannon as Rock Hudson’s father is excellent genetic casting. When they’re onscreen together you believe it.

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When Sirk turns up his style to its fullest force — as when Dorothy Malone is dancing out her debauched soul while her father tumbles down the stairs — the impression, to me, is not just of bold exaggeration but of actually missing the mark. I imagine John Waters et al love this sort of thing because it combines sincere artistic conviction about pain and tragedy with honest-to-goodness aesthetic error. The juxtaposition fundamentally doesn’t work, and the bellyflop makes a spectacular splash. It’s stimulating to watch because it’s not apt, not insightful. The equation hasn’t been balanced.

Similarly those leaves that blow in the front door in the opening sequence, just to make sure you know what “wind” is. They’re like a pun that isn’t actually a pun. The hallmark of the style is fervent commitment to devices that are so hackneyed and obvious that they actually stop functioning.

Here are the lyrics to the title song:

A faithless lover’s kiss is written on the wind
A night of stolen bliss is written on the wind
Just like the dying leaves, our dreams we’ve calmly thrown away
Now they’ve flown away, softly flown away

The promises we made are whispers in the breeze
They echo and they fade, just like our memories
Though you are gone from me, we never can really be apart
What’s written on the wind is written in my heart

Not only do these have approximately nothing to do with the action of the movie, but they also equivocate regarding what “written on the wind” means. Does it mean something that’s shallow bullshit, as in the first line? Or does it mean something that lives forever because it transcends the earthly, as in the last line? Maybe both? Let’s try both?

The only really important thing in this artistic universe is whether it’s delivered with passion. It doesn’t matter a bit to Sirk whether something is actually, as the trailer claims, “THE MOST REVEALING STUDY OF HUMAN EMOTIONS EVER ATTEMPTED ON THE SCREEN.” Clearly, in fact, it’s not, and he never thought it was. What matters to him is that it affects to be the most revealing study of human emotions ever attempted on the screen. He prizes that affectation and takes it very seriously indeed. And that seriousness in turn is entrancing in its guilelessness, as all true seriousness is.

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Robert Stack says that after five weeks of marriage he’s “still up on cloud seven.”

Here’s another thing he says:

This line comes as the culmination of a subplot in which he wants desperately to attend the royal ball but he’s mocked by the king’s courtiers for being too clumsy, so he prays to the tree spirit, who provides him with a pair of magic dancing slippers, but the jealous forest witch hears his prayer and covets the slippers, and though he runs as fast as he can, she chases him all the way to the gate of the castle and just as he’s about to enter, snatches the slippers from his hand.

Actually the funny thing is that what the line really means is: he’s just a moment ago been informed by a doctor that it’s his probably his fault he and his wife haven’t been able to conceive: he might be sterile. Then when his wife asks him to dance he self-pityingly says that unfortunately someone just stole his, ahem, “magic dancing slippers.” That’s someone’s 1956 idea of a semi-entendre of some kind.

The sexual content definitely tries to push the boundaries of the moment, and sometimes the strain shows. The golden statuette of an oil derrick that Dorothy Malone fondles tragically in the final shots is a full-fledged double-entendre. Congratulations to everyone involved in working that one out; I know it can’t have been easy.

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The score is again by Frank Skinner — again an able co-conspirator in reckless intensity — but the above-mentioned title song is by Victor Young, and it drives the ship. In fact I couldn’t find a suitable excerpt from the score that was all Skinner, so I’m just embracing it and giving you the finale and end credits, which is basically a straight-up orchestral arrangement of the song:

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2001: 2014:

screenplay by Peg Fenwick
based on the story by Edna L. Lee and Harry Lee
directed by Douglas Sirk

Criterion #95.

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This and Black Narcissus have both forced me to confront my instinctive assumption that a film photographed with painterly distinction must therefore be a film of depth. Clearly not so!

Or then again maybe it is. It depends on where “depth” lies. In visual art, the literary idea of “depth” isn’t generally what’s at issue. A Renaissance painting is rarely valued for its subject (fruits on a table? The Martyrdom of Saint whoever?); the “depth” is within the domain of imagery itself. Film can be that sort of medium, where a simple or formulaic subject is just a framework for the exploration of sensory values. But it seems to me that All That Heaven Allows was not conceived that way; the dippy screenplay is dense-packed with dippy dialogue and dippy events: whatever deeper resonances it may have, the story does expect to be taken seriously at face value. All the visual richness seems to be an elaboration after the fact: it’s Douglas Sirk seizing an opportunity to explore his own aesthetic ideas on the studio’s dime. It’s a fundamentally insipid movie that’s been forcefed expressionism.

That makes it an interesting object, and it creates an interesting effect. I imagine that if I had come across this movie in full ignorance of its (and Sirk’s) reputation, I would have noted that it casts a very odd spell indeed. It’s simultaneously plush velvet and wet cardboard. It’s a bit like the magical, billowing, dreamy, inviting, obviously-fake, chintzy, disgusting, gooey chemical snow into which Rock Hudson gamely flumpfs.

Maybe such things are best recommended by word of mouth, film-lover to film-lover. “Have you seen Sirk’s color melodramas? They’re really quite something!” Unfortunately, we live in a time where scholars feel a compulsion to take up old films as causes and try to boost their reputations ever, ever upward, into The Canon Of Greatness And Significance — as though that’s the inevitable next step in a virtuous historical process of rehabilitation. It’s an addiction to the idea of giving things Their Due; in its overeagerness it amounts to a form of insensitivity. (Have you noticed the sort of thing the Library of America has been getting itself up to lately?)

Put another way: plain old everyday mediocrity is not something that Criterion is very good at knowing about or delivering. Their pomp and circumstance tends to obfuscate ordinariness rather than elevate it. What the heck is this thing we’re watching? How could it possibly be that this package, this luxe commercial fetish object, contains a half-baked lower-middlebrow romance novel? It starts to seem almost like a prank. The effect they want to achieve needs to be approached from the other side: “this particular half-baked romance novel… is actually rather suggestive and striking, isn’t it?”

The colors! The lights! Yes! The photography is glorious. The film is an exquisite piece of commercial graphic art, no denying. But Norman Rockwell’s work has more feeling and vision in it, seems to me.

I like to get lost in old book covers; think about the way they make me feel — good and bad books alike. I like to touch down, internally, on the time and place they represent, both in real history and in the parallel history of dreams, on which they are a window. If that’s all the Sirk game is, I’m glad to play. Sure, these rooms made me feel things. There’s a hushed, half-awake sensation somewhere in there that I might recognize. But my personal dream, the thing that it’s rewarding for me to explore, doesn’t have the slightest thing to do with the story or the themes of this movie. Deadening conformity vs. self-realization through romance? Pff. As if. I’m busy looking at the lamps, here!

And yet witness e.g. the commentary track. That’s the real Sirk game: let’s talk about the social repressions of the 50s. Let’s look for ways this film is secretly “subversive.” Ah well. We can do that if you want. If we must.

Yes, psychological subtleties of production, design, direction are legitimately there to be noted — “you see, now her costume is starting to match his environment” — but let’s not lose sight of the fact that intricate code is a symptom of repression, not an antidote to it. Critics tend to gravitate to the difficulties, the problem-solving, but problem-solving only arises as a result of problem-having, and is problem-having really such a thing to celebrate? Wouldn’t we benefit from celebrating the art that we aspire to resemble, rather than the art that strains to resemble us? Listening to the extensive appreciation for this stilted melodrama, I felt like I heard a kind of retro-condescension at work: “we like this because it has to marshal so much craft and effort just to hint at things that we all now find easy to take for granted. Look at the brilliant artist struggle against his sad sad era! Isn’t it noble!”

Music is by Frank Skinner, who does a fine job laying down the very thickest possible carpet. Or: making sure every event casts the longest, saddest possible shadow. The piano plays a bass note: oh no! alas! alack! He unabashedly makes Liszt’s Consolation No. 3 the figurehead on his ship, as you’ll hear in the main title below — very much in the manner that Brief Encounter draped itself in Rachmaninoff, and to similar effect. The “kitsch” quotient is obviously even higher here — but when have I ever begrudged kitsch its kitschiness? If art can make me cry about nothing, more power to it. I can’t say this movie or this music wrung any actual tears from me, but I wholeheartedly endorse the attempt. Have at me, boys!

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