Douglas Sirk

Filmmaker and Philosopher

Robert B. Pippin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350195677
• eBook ISBN: 9781350195691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

It would be easy to dismiss the films of Douglas Sirk (1897-1987) as brilliant examples of mid-century melodrama with little to say to the contemporary world. Yet Robert Pippin argues that, far from being marginal pieces of sentimentality, Sirk's films are rich with irony, insight and depth. Indeed Sirk's films, often celebrated as classics of the genre, are attempts to subvert rather than conform to rules of conventional melodrama. The visual style, story and characters of films like All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life are explored to argue for Sirk as an incredibly nuanced moral thinker. Instead of imposing moralising judgements on his characters, Sirk presents them as people who do 'wrong' things often without understanding why or how, creating a complex and unsettling ethics. Pippin argues that it this moral ambiguity and ironic richness enables Sirk to produce films that grapple with important themes such as race, class and gender with real force and political urgency. Douglas Sirk: Filmmaker and Philosopher argues for a filmmaker who was a 'disruptive not restorative' auteur and one who broke the rules in the most interesting and subtle of ways.

1

Introduction:
Irony as Subversion

The characteristics we associate with film melodrama, a form traditionally taken to be a demotic or ‘low art’ form, are feverishly intense suffering, overwhelmingly of women,¹ expressed around a great emotional crisis, usually involving romantic and/or familial love. In many stock melodramas there are clearly identifiable villains and victims, but in many others, like those by Douglas Sirk that will be discussed in this book, there are not. That is, the suffering is caused not by villains but by those who love each other. This is all presented in a cinematic style in which such crises are given expression in a way that seems to many viewers hyperbolic, excessive, overwrought, obvious (particularly in the musical score), something that usually prompts complaints about simplification and manipulation. When we point to such excess, we mean that the expression of emotion in film melodrama goes beyond what we find ‘appropriate’. ‘Don’t be so melodramatic!’ almost always has the same practical force as ‘You are over-reacting’, and we often mean to imply neurosis, childishness, self-indulgence. In the simplest sense this excess in movies embarrasses us. In Sirk’s films, this heightened emotionality is expressed by an unusually intense, bright colour palette in sets and clothes (and so are characterized as anti-illusionistic), sometimes almost garish lighting, hyper-sharp, deep focus, frequent close-ups of such expressivity, a lush, romantic and quite unsubtle sound track, and, at the very least, ambiguous happy endings.

Modern melodramas in novels and dramas, considered as a narrative style, or, as Peter Brooks has argued, ‘an imaginative mode’, and an ‘inescapable dimension of modern consciousness’,² have a historical origin too. In the late eighteenth century, more and more small local theatres in France proliferated in and beyond Paris, and the French court began to lose their hitherto strict control of permissible theatrical content. Tragedy as the dominant dramatic genre began to be displaced by a new genre. The term ‘melodrama’ was apparently coined by Rousseau to describe his dramas accompanied by music, and he is sometimes given credit for the first modern melodrama, his Pygmalion, written in 1762 and staged for the first time in Lyon in 1770. By the nineteenth century the genre was well established and from 1800 to 1830 the most popular dramatist in France was Guilbert de Pixerécourt, and his plays were clearly recognizable as melodramas. In terms of plot, a typical melodrama described the suffering of women; very frequently a working-class or middle-class young woman or girl subject to unwanted attention by an aristocrat, who eventually forced himself on the girl, after threatening to destroy her entire family financially. Often a pregnancy and a suicide would then ensue; sometimes a last minute rescue by an admiring young man from the village. Another typical plot depicts some great sacrifice required of a woman, as in films like Stella Dallas, Now, Voyager and Letter from an Unknown Woman. But there were many different such plots, full of clear and often simplistic differentiation between good and evil characters, undeserved suffering, and an intense emotional tone very obviously aimed at provoking pity, outrage and tears from the audience. Most importantly, while in classical and neo-classical tragedies, heroic characters were extraordinary people, usually aristocratic rulers on whom the fate of the nation depended, and who represented vast ethical and historical forces like the family, the city, the divine, fate, most melodramas concerned ordinary bourgeois commoners. This was a reflection of the view of democratic egalitarianism.³ There are no such superior beings; everyone is subject to the same joys and indignities of ordinary life. And there were no such historical or universal forces at stake, much happened by blind chance, and if a victim was saved at the last possible moment by some deus ex machina intervention, it meant nothing beyond the contingent frame of the play, a mere happy ending. Melodramas could thus be said to begin the exploration of human self-understanding in a disenchanted, secular world (this is Brooks’s view), as well as raising the question of whether great art that could rival past masterpieces could be made within and about such an ordinary world. (In film melodrama, it is often the use of cinematic and musical means to suggest the enormous significance of the ordinary that risks the ridiculous, an almost comically exaggerated significance that is more than the ordinary can bear.) Or characters over-invest so much and so desperately in romantic and familial love because of the ever more apparent banality, repetitiveness and enormous pressure for conformism in the new form of capitalist life. The excess is not merely a formal feature of the art form, but an expression of a form of desperation, and the theatrical, public expression of such emotions is a sign of the futility of such feeling; they have no other ‘outlet’. (If we are now largely unresponsive, it may not be because we are cooler or hipper, but because such desperate resistance has gone dead; the intense yearning has been co-opted. Perhaps that is the mark of being cooler and hipper.) One possible explanation for the excess and hysteria could stem from characters expecting far too much of romantic and familial love, the only arenas available for any individual expressiveness genuinely one’s own, even if inevitably disappointed. That inevitable disappointment is our theme below, but again, Sirk’s apparent pessimism about friendship and love is deeply historical and locally inflected, as any interrogation of friendship and love should be. It was in the American world of the 1950s, the world of a market economy and the system of wage labour, the nuclear family, romantic love and eventually mass-consumer societies, where such failure might be expected. The ordinary familial and romantic dramas of life were the subjects, but, as it were, ‘supercharged’ with intense even hysterical emotionality; hatred, jealousy, avarice, lust, usually expressed with a marked theatricality.⁴

Melodrama is also an artistic genre, and this negative attitude about excess in emotional responses often carries over to assessments of works in that genre. The criticisms are just as familiar: moral simplification, excessive emotionality, shameless and ‘cheap’ attempts to manipulate audience emotions (it is no great accomplishment to make any audience very sad by showing the suffering and death of a child), unbelievable plot coincidences and a somewhat primitive style, a lack of refinement in what was presumed to be entirely commercial work, aimed at the ‘lowest common denominator’. That is certainly true of very many melodramas, perhaps the overwhelming majority, but to appreciate Sirk, I think we need first to attend to a distinct sub-genre of film melodramas. It is an elusive, unusual category, so it might be best to begin with some examples.

At the end of King Vidor’s 1937 classic melodrama, Stella Dallas, one of the four or five best instances of the sub-genre, Stella, played by Barbara Stanwyck, having sacrificed or given up her daughter, the core of anything meaningful in her life, to her ex-husband and his new family so that she could be raised in a wealthy and cultured environment, watches from outside a large window the wedding of her daughter to another swell in the same society. It is rainy, miserable weather. Stella is treated by a policeman as just another curiosity seeker, and, intensifying what is already a humiliating situation, has to plead with him to remain a few moments longer. (Image 1.1)⁵

Image 1.1

After the wedding she then turns and walks toward the camera, drenched and excluded from her daughter’s life, but she walks in a way that visually signals pride, triumph and great joy. A happy ending. (Image 1.2)

Image 1.2

But the scene is also suffused with what seems wholly unnecessary pathos and suffering. While the new step-mother (Helen Morrison, played as saintly by Barbara O’Neill) has taken pains to make sure the curtains of the large window are drawn open, as if it had been planned that Stella must watch from the outside, the gesture only forces us to wonder why Stella, who had raised the daughter Laurel (played somewhat cloyingly by Anne Laurel) could not be present at the wedding, must watch in the rain, as if she were watching a film, and in just the sense that critics speak of an ontologically distinct, scree...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Irony as Subversion
• 2 Love and Class in All That Heaven Allows
• 3 Misplaced Moralism in Written on the Wind
• 4 Living Theatre in Imitation of Life
• Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright