Melodrama and its Discontents: WRITTEN ON THE WIND and FAR FROM HEAVEN

The reason I hate STAR TREK is because of its fans. There gets to be a point with certain works - and STAR TREK is definitely one - where you can't see the virtues anymore, just the endless overpraise heaped on by zealous disciples who seem to be incredibly detached from reality. Objectively, I think that few of the STAR TREK movies are really probably that bad, but I doubt I will ever sit through another one voluntary, simply because of all of the baggage.

I mention STAR TREK because it's probably one of the more common examples of a phenomenon in film fandom, one where films are hurt in their perceptions not by their critics but their fans. You can see this all the time in the backlash to good but flawed films that are first overpraised, then overpunished in response to this praise. (The latest victim: DONNIE DARKO, a film that I quite admire, and one that I doubt would attract nearly as much hate if it hadn't had such a positive following. See also: LOST IN TRANSLATION, MAGNOLIA, and most likely SHAUN OF THE DEAD.)

When you rely on reading reviews, criticism and the like to get your viewpoints on something, the traditional response is that a positive review will make you more likely to see it, and the negative review will make you less likely. But, more and more, I find that I'm carefully reading positive reviews and that they're acting negatively for me, while a well-written negative review for somebody who has a fundamentally different worldview from me can be inducement to see a film.

All of which is to explain why it's taken me almost 31 years to see a Douglas Sirk film. For a lot of the time, I had pretty much an acid reflex response to the mention of the word "melodrama", a word that reminded me of soap operas. Over time, my habitual distrust has diminished, through exposure of decent films that are proudly melodramatic: Fassbinder's films (including ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL, a remake/reinterpretatioin of Sirk's ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS) are a prominent example.

But around the time that I was considering taking a full-on dive into Sirk, a celebrated love letter to Sirk acted as a more powerful repellent to exploring his work than any negative review could have. I'm speaking of the otherwise universally-loved FAR FROM HEAVEN, a film that distanced me from the very beginning with a horrendous pink cursive title card. It signalled to me: this film is about quotation, and it is about artifice, and Haynes's endless name-dropping of Sirk in interviews made it clear that he felt his film was appropriating a lot of what he found valuable in Sirk.

The ironic distance that I got from FAR FROM HEAVEN is something I don't tend to find valuable in film, and while I can't call it a bad film, it couldn't have kept me farther away from Sirk if it tried. In fact, arguably shamefully, there's one thing that principally drew me back to giving Sirk another try: The Criterion Collection. I tend to have an innate trust of most any director that Criterion chooses to put in its collection as being worth at least one look (hush, you and your sniggering comments about Michael Bay). So, I decided to pick up WRITTEN ON THE WIND at a trip to the video store.

And now I am faced with a problem: how do I write about this absolutely fantastic film in a way that doesn't distance you from wanting to see it, the same way that the praise of others discouraged me? All I can say, really, is this: it's one of the few films I've seen that never stops working for me on both a dramatic and technical level, and whenever I started getting too infatuated with one side of things, the other one kicked in. Anyone looking to play fun games like "analyze the color scheme" or "look at the use of mirrors as a motif" will have plenty of raw meat here, but even from a non-academic point of view, the technical side of this film is just compelling. I don't see how anybody could look at the compositions of so many of the frames here and not stop short, impressed by the precision and beauty at hand. These aren't just pretty pictures; there's something more going on here, something I'm not even really sure I understand but something incredibly magnetic.

But then, there's the story, pulpy and gloriously extroverted and fun and sad in all the right ways, twisting along in slightly unexpected, tragic, and inevitable directions. This isn't an abstruse art masterpiece that is unapproachable as conventional narrative; in fact, it's so enjoyable as narrative that it almost feels like it should be minor in comparison to some "higher pleasure", more complicated film. But it's not; instead, WRITTEN ON THE WIND is a pure example of film as art without any of the unapproachability that the "art film" stigma typically gives.

A coda of sorts: I followed up WRITTEN ON THE WIND with ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, a film that while still visually impressive didn't have nearly the impact that WRITTEN ON THE WIND did. Perhaps it's because of the limited color palette or the autumn colors of HEAVEN, or because of the relative introversion of the characters in HEAVEN when compared to WIND, or because of the familiarity of the story (having seen FAR FROM HEAVEN and ALI already, both of which use the basic story). But there's a moment in Sirk that's just fantastic, a minor spoiler of sorts that I can't help but share: our heroine, a widowed mother, receives a television for Christmas, which (as has been repeatedly re-inforced) is how she should properly be spending her time as a good widow. And there's a wonderful camera movement in, until all we see is her reflection in the dead television screen, and it's a perfect marriage of form and content, and one striking image doing the work better than any line of dialogue could have. It's the precision in crafting images like these in a narrative context that makes me find Sirk so damn striking, and so worthy of attention of anyone excited by the possibilities of film, even for those who fear the melodrama.

Some suggestions for dealing with Sirk:

First off, I'm glad you got to see both WRITTEN ON THE WIND and ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS.
I like some Sirk films better than others, but his masterpiece and the film that is probably best used as an entree into the "Sirkian ouevre" is his last Hollywood film, IMITATION OF LIFE (1959), itself a remake of an earlier Universal melodrama (from 1934). But what a remake! (Ideally, you should see the remake first and then the earlier film--which is equally fascinating, but just not as fully realized. The two films handle the racial subplot in very different but equally meaningful ways if also, perhaps, equally flawed. But the flaws are very different and quite interesting. The earlier version was directed by John Stahl.)

"Auteurist" fans of Sirk swear by TARNISHED ANGELS, WRITTEN ON THE WIND, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS and MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, all of which offer, I guess, plenty of material worthy of examination and analysis, if that's your cup of tea. But I tend to get greater enjoyment out of Sirk's Universal genre films, things like BATTLE HYMN (1956), CAPTAIN LIGHTFOOT (1955), TAZA, SON OF COCHISE (1954)--which was shot in 3-D, HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY GAL? (a very funny comedy about money, class and greed in 1920s small-town America) and his other real masterpiece, SIGN OF THE PAGAN (1954), with Jack Palance as Attila the Hun on the verge of invading Rome--easily one of the greatest medium-budget studio-bound historical epics ever. I would single out IMITATION OF LIFE and SIGN OF THE PAGAN as my favorite Sirks. THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW and A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE are both pretty good also. I should also stress that BATTLE HYMN, about a Korean War chaplain, and HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY GAL? are particularly interesting.

I've seen some of these on the big screen (including a double bill back in the 1970s of ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS and Fassbinder's ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL) and they really do benefit from a 35mm screening. But some I've only seen on TV. I'd really like to see SIGN OF THE PAGAN and BATTLE HYMN on the big screen.

I've seen only one other film on Sirk's filmography, just SHOCKPROOF (1949), from a story by Sam Fuller. I'd like to see all the others and I may have two or three of the unseen ones on tape.