Document View

2 For him, melodrama is tragedy whose locale has shifted through the vagaries of history and public taste from the royal courts to the haunts of the middle class: What used to take place in the world of kings and princes has since been transported into the world of the bourgeoisie. The middle class virtues of devotion to work, emotional balance, adjustment to existing conditions and attachment to one's parents are found only in the negative characters, while the sympathies of the director and the sophisticated audience are attached to the torn and unbalanced "degenerated kids."

The films of Douglas Sirk, from Schlussakkord (1936) to Imitation of Life (1958), present a veritable catalog of melodramatic themes and forms. The development of theatrical melodrama, which led to early cinema in general and to the films of D.W. Griffith in particular, was one of the most notable achievements of nineteenth century staging. As Nicholas Vardac pointed out, "The most popular single expression of the combined romantic and realistic theatrical modes of the nineteenth century is to be found in the melodrama."! Although the term "melodrama" is now used primarily in a disreputable sense, Sirk saw it as basically cinematic: "Melodrama in the American sense is rather the archetype of a kind of cinema which connects with drama. "2 For him, melodrama is tragedy whose locale has shifted through the vagaries of history and public taste from the royal courts to the haunts of the middle class: "What used to take place in the world of kings and princes has since been transported into the world of the bourgeoisie." 3

Perhaps best representing Sirk's point of view is his film, Written on the Wind (1956). This picture fulfills many of the tenets of American film melodrama, not only reaching for tragedy, but ironically offering social criticism, which tragedy and melodrama often attempt.

Written on the Wind celebrates in autumnal images the decline of a nouveau riche family of an oil millionaire- the Hadleys of Hadley, Texas. Love and death in the film center on the ostentatious and vulgar family mansion. Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith), the personally weak and ineffectual father, still rules over an industrial empire, while hoping for an heir from his playboy son Kyle (Robert Stack). Kyle, Jasper's only son, feels intimidated by the efficient Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), who has been adopted into the Hadley family since childhood. Kyle evades adult responsibility in a series of juvenile escapades (such as flying his plane to New York merely to have a steak sandwich at "21"). He woos and wins a succession of women, finally marrying Lucy (Lauren Bacali), after a hasty, one-day courtship. Kyle and Mitch both love Lucy, while Kyle's sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone) is hopelessly in love with Mitch. Kyle breaks down under the combined pressures of being heir to a giant corporation, of believing himself unable to sire a child, and through jealousy of Mitch. He becomes an alcoholic (one of melodrama's perennial themes). Kyle dies in an accident- but Mitch is charged with his murder. Marylee testifies in Mitch's behalf, knowing that by doing so she will lose him forever. As a result of Mitch's acquittal, he and Lucy are finally united.

Since melodramatic film leads us back to the theater, Written on the Wind can be considered a bourgeois tragedy, whose fatally flawed protagonist is Kyle Hadley. Bourgeois tragedy, during its naturalistic and expressionistic phases, attacked the self-satisfied middle class, its values and its decaying conventions. This illustrates many of Sirk's opinions, for he favored a haunted Kyle over an insensitive Mitch:

The type of character 1 always have been interested in, in the theater as well as in the movies, and which I also tried to retain in melodrama, is the doubtful, the ambiguous, the uncertain. Uncertainty and the vagueness of men's aims, are central to many of my aims, however hidden these characteristics may be.4

Mitch Wayne thus becomes a secondary character, elevated only by the system of star billing, for in the eyes of the director he is a negative character, designed to be ambiguous:

He is so full of goddam typical American naivete- attractive of course to the sophisticated New York type Bacali plays. Also he is handsome, no doubt he is a good lover. He is the opposite in every way to the Stack character. But he is a negative figure. He is not really a man who has a helpful feeling toward these two degenerated kids, Stack and Malone.5

Sirk has a romantic's fascination with decadence, and he delights in the Fall of the House of Hadley. At the opening of the film, the stage is set with dead leaves whirling through the foyer while mad Marylee stares from her upstairs bedroom window. This house could be called an "obiectification of the personalities of its inhabitants," reflecting the emptiness of the Hadley's lives and their impending doom.*> Lucy, in a characteristic rush of euphoria, declares the house to be "beautiful-and it's home. " Yet it shares the melancholy of Poe's House of Usher and its terrible surroundings. Kyle and Marylee, the "two degenerated kids," inevitably race toward destruction, as did Roderick and Madeline Usher, while dreaming the impossible romantic dreams of a return to innocence and the attainment of love-the most elusive quality in the House of Hadley.

Their healthy counterparts, Mitch and Lucy, find each other in a happy ending, albeit one full of irony. Sirk sees Mitch as insensitive to the needs of his suffering boyhood friend Kyle, and thus as a negative character. Lucy does not fare much better in Sirk's evaluation. He praises Lauren Bacall's face as reflecting at times an "almost designing quality," and mentions her inherent hardness: "She is not a lover."'' Yet, the director unites them in a happy ending, as they drive from the gates of the Hadley mansion, followed by the wistful glances of Marylee, who now occupies her father's office.

The middle class virtues of devotion to work, emotional balance, adjustment to existing conditions and attachment to one's parents are found only in the negative characters, while the sympathies of the director and the sophisticated audience are attached to the torn and unbalanced "degenerated kids."

The world of Written on the Wind is at times emotionally arid (their father's death is apparently unmourned by Kyle or Marylee), and then overwrought-especially in many of Marylee's scenes. It is a world without a mother's love (neither the Hadleys nor Wayne has a mother, and Lucy never mentions hers); without children (an incidental boy on a rocking horse draws a sad glance from Kyle, who was just informed that he will never sire children of his own- and Lucy's pregnancy ends in a miscarriage).

The mansion is surrounded by an industrial wasteland, created by the Hadley enterprises, and only a small place by the river where Kyle, Mitch and Marylee played as children remains as an oasis, a reminder of their pristine past. But only the haunted siblings can hear the voices from the past; Mitch is far too practical (he only remembers injustices inflicted on him by Kyle), and Lucy was not part of their communal past.

Sirk animates the visual aspects of this film through mobile camerawork and an almost pictorial use of color. He thinks visually, claiming a painter's memory with an often convenient amnesia of the verbal qualities of his films: "The place of language in pictures has to be taken by the camera-and by cutting. You have to write with the camera."8 Like Sternberg and Ophuls, Sirk trusts the wordless eloquence of the camera to express essence without being trite: "The camera sees with its own eye. It sees things the human eye does not detect. And ultimately you learn to trust your camera. . .The only thing which never let me down in Hollywood was my camera.''^ His images shape his characterizations and express his social criticism-even his philosophy tends to be visual: "The angles are the director's thoughts. The lighting is his philosophy."10

Throughout his greatest creative period, the 1950's, Sirk worked closely and often intuitively with cinematographer Russell Metty on ten features, including Magnificent Obsession (1953), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Battle Hymn (1956), A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1957),H and his last film, Imitation of Life. The predominant mood created by Metty's lighting in Written on the Wind is a melancholy darkness, invoking echoes of the past as well as casting shadows of future doom; the latter reinforcing the flashback format of the film's narrative structure. As Sirk expressed it: "The use of the flashback allows me to state the hopelessness right at the start, although the audience doesn't know the end. But it sets the mood ."12 The nighttime flashforward (2 minutes, 56 seconds, including the opening credits) balances the daytime epilog (the eighty-second departure scene of Hudson-Bacall under the closing credits), serving as a frame for the film's main section.

The feeling of futility created by the flashforward at the beginning of the film (and the poetic image in the film's title), is counterpointed by its ironic happy ending.13 Since Sirk's basic interest in dramatic material tends toward failure rather than success, it is obvious that the happy ending cannot satisfy, since the wrong couple drives off together. Sirk compared the failure that attracts him to the hopeless situations in the tragedies of Euripides: "In both Written on the Wind and Tarnished Angels it is an ugly kind of failure, a completely hopeless one. . . . There is no exit-there is only, one way out, the irony of happy ending."14

Sirk used irony to rise above certain restraints imposed by Universal-International, allowing him greater creative possibilities in spite of banal script assignments and casting limitations. It also became a tool in Sirk's hands to create social criticism within the confines of the melodramatic form. He disliked the term "social criticism" when applied to his own films; he preferred the creation of "social awareness" in the audience rather than on the screen, attempting to create conditions which would allow for the development of irony in the audience's eye.l«>

Irony provided Sirk with the means to castigate the nouveau riche and the social climbers he so loathed: "My pictures are critical of a certain class of American-whom I do not like. The American in transition from a little guy to a not-yet-big guy ... the small-town, country club American."16

But he was also aware that irony made the reception of a film more difficult for the average entertainment-oriented audience: "Irony. . .that doesn't go down well at all with an American audience. This is not a reproach. It is only that American audiences are generally too simple and too naive-in the best sense of the terms-to be sensitive to irony. They want a cut and dried stance, for or against. But the nuances which handle both at the same time and make Europeans smile are completely foreign to Americans. "17

Sirk's conscious use of irony in Written on the Wind extends into non-realistic characterization; his use of camera, color and lighting impart to the film a surrealistic atmosphere. The characters are not drawn to be realistic, but that is to be expected in a film of this format: "Melodramatic method demands characters of a somewhat abstract and conventionalized sort, so that in the extremeties of the action they become less human beings than loci of the clash of ideas and forces."18 Sirk noted about Written on the Wind, that "the people are heightened versions of reality-not realistic characters." 19 The flat lightning is reminiscent in its simplicity and starkness of the classic expressionistic Ufa film and the use of color harks back to the German expressionistic painters of the director's early years: Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as Sirk himself stated:

The whole picture is in a kind of poster-style, with a flat, simple lighting that concentrates the effects. It's a kind of expressionism, of course like Wedekind, or the late Strindberg, or the early Brecht. And I avoid what a painter might call the sentimental colors-pale or soft colors. Here I paint in primary colors-like Kirchner or Nolde for example.20

Kyle, the protagonist of this bourgeois tragedy-melodrama, is frequently treated as a child by both women: by Marylee with ill-concealed love/hate, and by Lucy, well-meaning as is to be expected of a newly-married woman. When Marylee hears Kyle's sports car in the driveway, she remarks facetiously, "Hark, do I hear the master's kiddy-car?" And Lucy, at the first meeting with her father-in-law, asks him, "give Kyle another chance," like a mother interceding for a delinquent son. Both Kyle and Marylee are dominated by an unvanquished childhood: Kyle is trapped in a festering, resentful sibling rivalry with his "brother" Mitch, and Marylee has never found a life of her own, after the grownup boys left her in Hadley while they flew off to their own adventures. At a riverside picnic with Mitch, Lucy mourned their "desertion," which ended their adolescent togetherness. She feels robbed of both Kyle and Mitch, the two boys she loved, and she wistfully observes, "you didn't take me along."

Kyle and Marylee long for the past, while Lucy and Mitch seem unencumbered by it and are very practically directed toward the future. Since the past is never shown in flashbacks, the audience has to accept Marylee's vision of past beauty and harmony, filtered through her own selective memory. Because of their orientation to the past, both Kyle and Marylee are alienated from the present realities of family, community and the country and its prevailing values.

Northrop Frye defines the predominant traits of melodrama: "In melodrama, two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views to be held by the audience."21 If one accepts Frye's definition, certain difficulties are associated with assuming that Kyle is the real protagonist of the film. Surely Sirk, with his ironic view of American conditions, would not deign to glorify the limited moral views of an audience he certainly saw as inferior. The situation may at once be simpler and yet more complicated; because of their orientation toward the past, Kyle and Marylee represent basic European attitudes, while Lucy and Mitch are the "Americans" of this scenario.

Written on the Wind cannot be understood and explained as beine "of, for and about Eisenhower-America," as Paul Willemen attempted to do in the early 1970's.22 Sirk's implied social criticism is distinctly levelled at the middle class as an international phenomenon, without aiming at a specific nationality. This thematic consistency begins with his Schlussakkord, whose trial sequence is reflected in the climactic trial which acquits Mitch Wayne of his murder charge in Written of the Wind, and continues through the two early Zarah Leander films Zu neuen Ufern and La Habanera (both 1937). Sirk continued the attack on the bourgeoisie launched by Frank Wedekind and continued by the German expressionistic playwrights and later filmmakers.23

The circle of human events closes in Written on the Wind, as in many other of Sirk's films. He chronicles the rise and fall of individual and family fortunes, lingering on the decline, since success stories bore him and offend his dramatic sense: "Echec in the sense both of failure and being blocked is indeed one of the few themes which interest me passionately. Success is not interesting to me. "24

The closing of the circle does not insure comfort and solace to Sirk's audience; it more likely means pain, a repetition of the frustrations felt by the characters or by a new generation inheriting the same human frailties and the same suffering. One such circle in Written on the Wind closes when the man/child Kyle looks into the eyes of the boy on the rocking horse, pitying himself and mourning the boy's fate at the same time. It is the closing of the ring in Schnitzler's and Ophiils's La Ronde, when the last couple of lovers, the Count and Leocadia, look at each other, and the Count kisses her eyes, sadly recognizing that the circle does not end.25 Sirk remarked with romantic melancholy, "I think it is the tragedies which are starting over again, always and always. "26

A circular motif forms the center of the single most important set of the film: the foyer of the Hadley mansion. At the foot of the curved stairway is a huge, patterned circle set into the terrazzo floor. The pattern's rays give the impression that the characters are caught in the web of this doomed house.

Through the audience's cathartic concentration on Kyle as the protagonist of this bourgeois tragedy, and on his suffering and death, the film is elevated above conventional expectations of the genre. Sirk's form ennobles the material. James Harvey remarked on Sirk's ability to transmit the pain of his characters to his audience: "His films have an almost unique troubling force. The relation of Robert Stack's pain to the formal strategies that surround it in Written on the Wind is one of the most disturbing arrangements in modern film."27

The recognition of Kyle's tragic suffering is also connected with Sirk's predilection for the circular, another of his romantic tendencies. He says, "I am interested in circularity, in the circle-people arriving back at the place they started out from. This is why you will find what I call tragic rondos in many of mv films, people going in circles. This is what most of my characters are doing."28

His films abound with reflections, echoes, repetitions and returns. Carefully constructed labyrinths contain his characters, however free and affluent they may appear to be. Mary lee is imprisoned in Hadley in spite of all her wealth, as if she didn't have enough money for a bus ticket to leave town. The predestination in Written on the Wind is as strong as the existential fate of such 1950's European films as Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953). Only the non-tragic characters can escape Hadley (Hades?).

The "happy ending" of Written on the Wind ensures a survival of life, but not of its grander, more daring and tragic figures. It anticipates, if one believes Sirk's faith in an eternal circularity of tragedy, a coming repetition of suffering and pain in which Mitch and Lucy will take their turn dancing a tragic rondo.