82: Back to the Past

This weekend I caught a theatrical screening of Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind, a mid-century melodrama starring Lauren Bacall and Rock Hudson as two fundamentally good–and therefore, by the movie's standards, somewhat boring–people whose lives are entangled in the fabulous wealth and ensuing misery of a Texas oil family. I'd seen it once before, five or six years ago, as a baby cinephile with a friend who's loved movies much longer than I have. When we left the theater I told him that I thought I liked it, but didn't know what to do with it. The lush emotions of melodrama were like a foreign language to me, and I wasn't sure how to parse any of the loaded imagery on screen. I left the theater the first time feeling almost drunk with emotion and not understanding how or why. It's that kind of reaction that drove me toward criticism in the first place, although I didn't have the vocabulary at the time to express it.

I came away this time both appreciating more about the movie than I originally had, and also thinking a little less of it. This isn't to say it isn't good; it's just that melodrama isn't really my cup of tea, however fun it might be to watch well-dressed people be miserable in lush and weepy color. Written on the Wind wrings as much emotion as it can out of the red of Lauren Bacall's lipstick, the warm oak paneling of the Texas oil magnate's office, and the cold white of the sculptures that decorate his home. Every vase is filled with a riot of roses.

The central conflict arises from a love quadrangle of sorts. Lauren Bacall's character Lucy is married to Kyle (Robert Stack), the heir of an oil company who'd literally swept her into the sky the first day they met by talking her onto his private airplane and into agreeing to his marriage proposal. Kyle's sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone) carries a jealous torch for Kyle's best friend Mitch (Rock Hudson), who grew up alongside Kyle, albeit on the other side of the tracks. Mitch sees Marylee as a sister and nothing more, and to tangle the knot further, he fell in love with Lucy the very same day Kyle did. Out of respect for his friend, Mitch keeps a respectful distance from Lucy. Everyone lives in tense equilibrium until Kyle, recently sober, starts drinking to assuage his feelings of inadequacy. Kyle might have money–his hometown literally bears his family's name–but he has no respect, and Mitch's quiet competence makes him feel impotent in comparison. The back half of the film, after the tension breaks, is a long slow slide to Hays Code-mandated ruin for the wrongdoers and a lip-service happy ending for pure-intentioned protagonists.

I respect the tenor of the film, although the execution leaves me wishing for a little more. Hudson and Bacall have no chemistry, and their characters are written to be so pure-hearted that I never once believe that they're in danger of crossing any moral or marital lines. Both of them live with their heads in an idealized past, him wishing to turn back the clock so that she'd choose him instead of Kyle, while she wants to return to the honeymoon period with her husband, before Kyle's insecurities crept up on him again. Kyle, too, wishes for that honeymoon period, but not out of altruism; he just wants the emotional security of the happily ignorant playboy he'd been. His sister Marylee longs for the childhood she'd spent alongside Mitch; she's never grown out of a girlish crush on him, and when she isn't trying to shake the boredom in the arms of other men, she's daydreaming about their youth. Living with your head turned backward to the past can feel good as an escape from the disappointments of the present, but it's also a swift slope to stagnation, and the film nearly stalls out when its characters get trapped in nostalgia. I appreciated it more on a revisit. I'm not sure I need to go back to the well again.

What I'm reading:

Over at Seeing & Believing, Kevin wrote a pan of Napoleon. I laughed out loud when I hit the end of the first paragraph; it was a satisfying response to a very unsatisfying movie.

What I'm listening to:

The Spotify recaps for 2023 went up this week. My listening habits are pretty consistent throughout the year: film and video game scores whenever I need to focus, synth pop whenever I need to get pumped up, acoustic singer/songwriters with divorced-dad energy for pretty much any other time of the day. This usually leads to some serious genre whiplash in my Top Songs playlist. Shoutout to Caroline Polacheck's "Bunny is a Rider" for almost breaking the Top 5 songs. I've thought about her record Desire, I Want To Turn Into You a lot this year; Spotify tells me it isn't the album I've listened to the most, but it is the album I've found the most consistently interesting.