Reading Hollywood

Spaces and Meanings in American Film

Deborah Thomas

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231851336
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This book examines the treatment of space and narrative in a selection of classic films including My Darling Clementine, It's a Wonderful Life, and Vertigo. Deborah Thomas employs a variety of arguments in exploring the reading of space and its meaning in Hollywood cinema and film generally. Topics covered include the importance of space in defining genre (such as the necessity of an urban landscape for a gangster film to be a gangster film); the ambiguity of offscreen space and spectatorship (how an audience reads an unseen but inferred setting), and the use of spatially disruptive cinematic techniques such as flashback to construct meaning.

1 SETTINGS: GEOGRAPHY. ARCHITECTURE. DECOR

In this chapter we will consider the usefulness of asking questions about the physical spaces within the narrative world, concentrating on spaces accessible to the characters themselves: the settings. At the most general level this will involve geographical location, although there is a sliding scale of generality even here: Europe or the United States, on the one hand, versus Boston or Tombstone, on the other, for example. After the broad geographical spaces have been mapped out, it will prove useful to look at how these places are further subdivided into significant locations within them: town and surrounding wilderness, saloon and church, night-club and courtroom, and so on. Even more specifically, the spaces within any given location will be laid out and individualised in terms of either natural features like mesas, rivers and trees, or architectural features like windows and doors, staircases and corridors – and their distinctiveness will be suggested and amplified by details in the decor. All of these things are worth noticing, although some films treat them more interestingly than others.

Of course it is neither possible nor desirable to match our observations too precisely to what the characters observe. We lack their freedom to walk around within these spaces and choose their own viewpoint. The fact that we are given access to the film’s geography, architecture and decor from a predetermined set of positions inevitably shapes what we, as spectators, see, and influences what we make of it. However, this discussion will not only take account of aspects of the treatment of space which are inaccessible to the characters because we happen to be looking from a different spot, but also those which are necessarily inaccessible to them by their nature as fictional characters. For example we will find ourselves in a privileged position, as film spectators, to take account of effects which are the result of editing or camera position or the composition of the image, of which the characters, as characters, can never be aware. Such effects will be more properly treated in the chapter on specifically cinematic space which follows. However, our insights about the films would be artificially distorted were we to filter such things out, only talking about the film’s world as if it were a ‘real’ physical space and not a cinematic one.

The investigative strategy will be one of selective emphasis rather than exclusion. We will start by asking: What sorts of geographical and architectural spaces seem to be significant in these films? How are these spaces structured and how do they relate to one another: are they seen as similar or as contrasting or as both? What sorts of characters are well-suited to inhabit them, and which are ill at ease? How do the spaces and their treatments relate to the thematic concerns of these films?

My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)

The western is an obvious starting point in any consideration of the significance of geographical settings in American films, and the contrast between the western’s wide open spaces and the social spaces of its settlements and homes has been extensively examined. Nevertheless, a given film may use such contrasting settings of wilderness and society and the boundary between them in very different ways and for extremely complex ends. My Darling Clementine, at first sight, may appear both traditional and schematic; the violence of the murderous Clantons presented as an aspect of that Western freedom from restraint which characterises the space beyond the frontier and which must be tamed by the civilising values associated both with the law – in the shape of Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) – and, more broadly, with the half-built church and the schoolhouse (still to be constructed) which are associated with the town’s ‘decent’ citizens, a decency embodied above all in Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), the woman from the East.

Overlaid upon the geographical structures of East and West and the values associated with each are narrative structures based on journeys and wanderings from place to place. In My Darling Clementine, various characters who have come to Tombstone from elsewhere explicitly question the sort of place Tombstone is and is likely to become (from Wyatt’s recurring ‘What kind of a town is this?’ to the ironic tones of Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) when an English actor comes to town: ‘Shakespeare in Tombstone’). Both Wyatt and Doc are participants in an ongoing debate about the sort of people who belong there or who need to be ejected. For example, Doc’s suggestion to Clementine that Tombstone is no place for her ‘kind of person’ provides a tension with Wyatt’s insistence that all decent people are welcome in the town, although it also provides a counter-current to Doc’s own reaction to the prospect of Shakespeare in Tombstone, a prospect which he both recognises as incongruous and yet accepts gratefully and with dreamy wonderment when he later watches Thorndyke (Alan Mowbray) perform. Doc extends a courteous welcome to Thorndyke which he withholds from Clementine. Geographical and narrative concerns combine to facilitate an exploration of themes like progress and loss, as Eastern and Western values come into conflict, and the uneasy balancing act between them over time.

One difficulty in producing a neat schematic map of the film’s spaces and structures in terms of a straightforward ‘triumph’ of Eastern law over Western violence, however, is that if the Clantons represent all that is worst in the West, Clementine is not a clear-cut representation of all that is best from the East. Her self-possession may suggest a coldness which is much less attractive than the full-blooded passion of her rival for Doc Holliday’s love, the Western woman Chihuahua (Linda Darnell), the relative star-status of the two actresses favouring Chihuahua as well. Nevertheless, both women are vulnerable to humiliation at Doc’s hands, so that their links through gender and their differences from the film’s men provide another schema overlaid upon the film which tempers the structural contrasts between East and West. In any case, the East is more an idea than an onscreen space within the film, its values associated on the one hand with characters like Clementine, Doc and Thorndyke, and, on the other hand with specific settings – the church, the hotel, the barber’s shop – within the growing western settlement of Tombstone in a period of transition from anarchy to law. The ambiguity involved in seeing East and West as, alternatively, geographical locations and sets of values, means that an Eastern character like Doc may be linked to a Western location like the saloon, while a Westerner like Wyatt may be associated with Eastern values like law and order. Both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ locations abound within the western town, like the cattle range and the barber’s shop respectively. To the extent that Doc renounces his Eastern past and Wyatt embraces a future intimately tied to Eastern values, the shift of Clementine’s commitment from Doc to Wyatt is made possible, perhaps even inevitable.

Despite her lacking Chihuahua’s outspokenness, Clementine appears to feel the effects of Doc’s rejection at least as deeply as Chihuahua does, and Clementine’s gentle reproof of Wyatt for his scant understanding of a woman’s pride suggests that her apparent coldness may be more a self-protective strategy than evidence of a lack of passion. Indeed, pride may also motivate the ready transfer of her attentions to Wyatt, Clementine’s request that he take her to the festivities at the church thus allowing her to display herself on his arm in front of all the decent folks in the town after her humiliating rejection by Doc. Ed Gallafent’s claim that Doc’s death at the O.K. Corral frees Clementine for Earp (1996: 305) is not quite accurate, for the transfer has already taken place well before then. Like Clementine, Chihuahua also takes comfort from another man, in her case Billy Clanton (John Ireland), after Doc has told her to leave him alone, although this is much less public than the transfer of Clementine’s interest from Doc to Wyatt and thus implies a motivating physical desire on Chihuahua’s part, rather than a need to save face.

A small detail from the film’s decor may be taken to corroborate this sense that Clementine’s lack of emotional expression may be calculated rather than naturally occurring: when she first catches up with Doc in the kitchen behind the bar, after trailing him from town to town, a pot is boiling on the stove behind her as they talk, its steam emphatically contrasting with the understated coolness of her manner yet, at the same time, encouraging us to be mindful of the emotional turmoil her measured delivery may be concealing, as she tells Doc she loves him and he insists she leave town: ‘Very well, John,’ she tells him without histrionics as they finish their conversation outside, ‘I’ll go’. So ‘civilised’ values of restraint and control are one thing for Wyatt and quite another for Clementine, who is so much more vulnerable as a woman on her own, and more needful of her pride and self-containment if her self-respect and ‘decency’ are to be preserved, thus making her a victim of such Eastern values as much as their champion. Where Wyatt, at least at the conscious level, seeks only to control others, the overwhelming object of Clementine’s control is herself.

FIGURE 2 A pot boiling on the stove

Taking notice of the contrasting geographical reference points in My Darling Clementine provides us with a useful starting point in sorting out its thematic terrain. However, detailed analysis may uncover other categories of sameness and difference (such as those of gender) derived from the film’s narrative or its larger ideological context. These may be found to overlay the geographical reference points in ways which do not simply reinforce those implied by the generic setting alone but which may complicate and undercut them. Some examples of this have already been seen. To see how this works in more detail, close analysis of specific moments or sequences is essential; it will be useful to formulate more precisely the ways in which Doc and Wyatt are differently embedded in the spaces of the settings through the film’s use of mirrors and reflections.

Chihuahua and Clementine have much in common – as women whose status depends at least in part on the patronage and protection of men – despite their initial associations with different geographical spaces (the West and East respectively). Clementine’s tentative smile at Chihuahua when she first sees her in the saloon implies some awareness on her part of a potential alliance between them, despite Chihuahua’s more guarded lack of response – her experience of making her way in the world not having prepared her to trust such disinterested gestures of friendship, and her precarious situation with Doc putting her on the alert for possible rivals. It may be useful to consider whether Doc and Wyatt are similarly linked through gender, although their respective relationships to East and West are harder to pin down. Doc Holliday is an Easterner who has lived for some time in the West and has abandoned many of the markers of his Eastern origins – such as his respectable profession as a doctor and the prestige that it entails – while Wyatt Earp was Marshal in Dodge City (another Western town somewhat further to the East) and is now a cattleman on his way to California (in the West), who resumes the role of lawman when his brother James (Don Garner) is killed. The film prepares the way both for Wyatt’s alliance with Doc – by stressing shared aspects of their attitudes and positions within the film’s patterns of symmetry and difference – and equally for Wyatt’s ability to keep in some sort of balance the values of both East and West which, in Doc, produce irresolvable conflict.

One way in which the film links the two men is by making each of them the recipient of one of Chihuahua’s songs, which she addresses to them in separate scenes in the saloon where she works, the words of the songs making pointed reference to their respective situations. The song she sings to Wyatt about ‘cattle straying’ after his herd has been rustled by the Clantons links gambling halls and cattle ranges in its lyrics shortly after Wyatt has agreed to be Marshal and has been asking questions about who controls gambling and cattle in the area (Doc and the Clantons respectively, thus linking Doc to the saloon within the town and the Clantons to the open range outside). Much more to the point, the line ‘In gambling halls delaying, ten thousand cattle straying’ may be a painful reminder to Wyatt who, after all, is playing poker while she sings. He too appears in no hurry to track down the rustlers who not only stole his cattle but killed his youngest brother James. This may explain his reaction as he listens and looks increasingly ill at ease, rather than any sense of suppressed desire for Chihuahua, as Gallafent argues (1996). In fact, the picture on the wall behind Wyatt of a boxer with fists raised in Chihuahua’s direction suggests that, if anything, he is keeping his hostility towards her, rather than any amorous wishes, in check at that point, a hostility partly triggered by her song’s reminder of his dereliction in his duty towards James. The ease with which he has fallen into a comfortable game of poker – taking his pleasures rather than doing his job – may remind us of Wyatt’s earlier indulgence of his desire for a shave and a beer which led to James’s death in the first place, when he was left behind to guard the cattle on his own. In contrast, Chihuahua’s song for Doc, in a later scene, is explicitly about kisses, although its refrain that ‘the first kiss is always the sweetest’ is double-edged: since their relationship is long past ‘the first kiss’, what the song intends as an enticement – and which is performed as such – becomes just as strongly an admission of his waning interest in her and her probable impending loss. Indeed, it immediately provokes Doc’s hurtful response, ‘Why don’t you go away? Squall your stupid little songs and leave me alone.’

Another link between the two men is the transfer of Clementine’s interest from one man to the other (first Doc, then Wyatt), echoing and reversing Chihuahua’s flirtatiousness towards each man in her musical numbers (first towards Wyatt, then Doc), again underlining that the women are symmetrically positioned as well as the men. This point is further emphasised in the scenes where Doc introduces Wyatt to each woman, in both cases discovering that Wyatt has met her before. Yet, despite such echoes and the symmetries between Wyatt and Doc with regard to the two women, as well as the ultimate alliance between them – where their potential antagonisms and rivalries are directed outward against the Clantons – an intractable difference between them remains which we can initially approach and try to understand in spatial terms.

In order to do this, it is useful to concentrate on two paired moments in the following sequence of scenes:

1 Clementine catches up with Doc and he tells her to leave town.

2 Doc stares at his framed diplomas in his darkened room and throws a glass at his own reflection.

3 Back in the bar, Chihuahua sings to Doc and he tells her to go away. She throws a glass at him and leaves, he continues to drink heavily and shoots at a lamp, and Wyatt knocks him out and drags him to his room.

4 Wyatt looks at himself in the barber’s mirror, then at his reflection in the window outside. He is joined by his brothers (and, briefly, by some passing townsfolk on their way to church), his brothers leaving as Chihuahua walks by.

5 Chihuahua makes sure that Clementine is packing and then goes to Doc’s room, where he decides to marry her.

6 Clementine asks Wyatt to take her to the celebrations at the half-built church.

A fade separates the first three scenes – which take place more or less continuously – from the next three, which also form a continuous block. The fade provides a transition from the evening before to the following morning. Retrospectively, we discover that the fade also functions to conceal within its darkness the beginning of Chihuahua’s relationship with Billy Clanton, while she is on the rebound from Doc (who is unconscious in his room). These offscreen events provide the implicit spine of the sequence around which the explicit scenes before and after that night’s events revolve. These six separate scenes can be paired in a variety of ways:

1 and 3 Doc rejects Clementine and Chihuahua respectively.

1 and 6 Doc rejects Clementine, Clementine pairs off with Wyatt.

2 and 4 Doc and Wyatt each stare at their own reflection.

3 and 5 Doc rejects Chihuahua, then decides to marry her.

5 and 6 Chihuahua and Clementine are paired off with Doc and Wyatt respectively.

In addition, there are more minor links (for example, Doc throws a glass at his reflection in 2, Chihuahua throws a glass at Doc in ...