Written on the Wind

Sooner or later, I had to get to Douglas Sirk. This is a director of influence, discussed and referenced decades after his passing. I've been putting him off because he worked in a time (the early Technicolor era) and a genre (melodrama) that doesn't appeal to me. But his work is seen as multilayered, with pulp for the matinee audience and cutting social commentary for the dinner-and-drinks crowd, and any student of the art form has to see him sometime. So what did Douglas Sirk have to say to me?

He had to say that America really, really needed rock 'n roll.

WRITTEN ON THE WIND's surface gloss is one of vapidity. It's shallow, finding joy in glittery handbags and hand blown glassware and gauzes and mind-numbingly plastic choral music - it's trying too hard to buy class, when real class comes from within. But look beneath the polish and you'll find all those old needs and emotions which have colored human drama since we figured out to get a steady supply of food, water, and shelter. You can't live on polish - it's too slippery. You need the grit of humanity, the anger and the love and the biology and all the rest. You need to embrace it, because it's the only way to get any real traction.

That's where rock and roll comes in. America needed it because it needed to put aside the postwar happy face and get back to the hard business of living. It needed Berry to remind it how to dance, Elvis to remind it how to love, The Beatles to rejuvenate it, and The Doors to help it find the dark places of its soul. All these things that Sirk criticizes, all these attitudes he laments, all the silliness he lampoons, they needed rock 'n roll to clean them out and ground America in reality once again.

Sirk had a lot to say. I'm glad I took the time to listen.

How to Marry a Millionaire

HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE strikes a blow against the commodotization of women by telling a story about the commoditization of men. While some complain that the film is, in reality, arguing for the former, that notion is subverted by the film's infamous fashion show / Thai whorehouse sequence, in which the lone man in the room is so overwhelmed by the raw power of female sexuality that his only possible response is an emasculated retreat.

In the world of popular culture, women were (and are!) nothing more than the sum of their parts. In HOW TO MAM, the men become nothing more than the sum of their monthly paychecks. Gone are considerations of their intrinsic worth, their honor, or their intellect, or any of the uncountable (in)tangibles that make a man a man. In a bold move that would go unanswered until 1997's IN THE COMPANY OF MEN, women boil men down to the one thing about which the (What's the opposite of fairer - uglier? Harumph!) sex is most insecure - the size of their bank accounts. These women dare to express what every creature on the planet knows: it really all comes down to "What can you do for me?"

Some may argue that HOW TO MAM breaks down at the end, when Lauren Bacall winds up marrying a grease monkey, only to discover that he's a proficient exploiter of the workers of the world's petroleum industry. I say those people focus on the text, the sacrifice and reward, when they should be focusing on the subtext, the alpha female's ability to spot that member of the pack most likely to give her what she needs and to home in on that individual, consciously or no. The film's resolution both rewards that instictive ability while slyly acknowledging its women's understanding of the dynamic and the men's fatalistic acceptance of it.

In a world in which the strong eat the weak, HOW TO MAM reminds us just who is which, and what the stakes are. What a brilliantly subversive little picture.

And don't get me started on that overture.