Category Archives: Movies

DIETRICH AND VON STERNBERG

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There are few films as entertaining and as beautiful to look at as the series Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich in Hollywood in the 1930s. It would be wrong to see them — or, God forbid, dismiss them — as exercises in camp. They are not ironic send-ups of the exotic romance film — they are in fact attempts to take the exotic romance film as far into the realm of delirious sensuality as it can be taken.  They treat romance and Eros absolutely seriously, as long as we admit that play and perversity are serious elements of romance and Eros.

At heart they are sweet films — films about people disillusioned with true love who somehow find a way to believe in it again.  On the surface, however, they seethe with pure carnality, unfolding in a thoroughly eroticized universe, and it’s Dietrich’s persona and Von Sternberg’s visuals which do the eroticizing.  Dietrich usually starts out world-weary and skeptical of men, but the pose never becomes totally cynical.  Her characters hold onto the fun of sex if nothing else, and the loving, elegant way Dietrich is lit and photographed suggests that there’s a deep and transcendent nobility in her characters’ wry good humor about it all.

The narratives of the films, often quite preposterous, are mere pretexts for a celebration of female sexuality — the mad images of an utterly artificial world are no more than window dressing for the mad game of sex, but the mad game of sex is always ultimately about love.

William Blake wrote:

There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which these two smiles meet.

This is Dietrich’s smile in these films — bewitching, beautiful, mysterious and profound.

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THE WIZARD OF OZ

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Poster for the 1902 stage musical, which had at least as much influence on the 1939 movie as the books they were based on.

Many of the musicals Arthur Freed helped create at MGM were derived from the theatrical world of his youth, which he delighted in magically summoning back to life.  He would have been eight in 1902.  He would have been ten in 1904, the year in which Meet Me In St. Louis is set.

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TEMPEST TRACK BY TRACK — TEMPEST

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In the chaos and horror of the sinking of the Titanic, there is a watchman aboard. He’s asleep — dreaming of the disaster befalling him and those he’s charged with watching. “The watchman he lay sleeping, the damage had been done — he dreamed the Titanic was sinking, he tried to tell someone.”

This figure is Dylan, I think — Dylan the prophet. He sees what’s happening to himself and his country and his world, but his vision is like a dream, and that’s all he can testify to. “I had this dream,” he says. “Maybe it’s important — maybe it means something.”

You decide.

Cameron’s film Titanic is one of the most important works of art of our lifetimes.  It looms as large in the culture now as the actual sinking of the actual Titanic.  Dylan’s song is as much about this film as it is about the real ship that sank.  The song is a conversation with the film.

It was a conversation Cameron started, putting lines from Dylan songs into the mouth of Jack, the film’s protagonist.  “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose,” Jack says in the poker game in which he wins his passage on the ship.  “I’m just a tumbleweed, blowin’ in the wind,” he says to Rose.

People criticized Cameron for this, calling the lines anachronistic — though of course the lines were as old as the hills when Dylan used them.  Now, in Dylan’s account of the sinking of the Titanic, he references Cameron’s film repeatedly.

He creates his own climax, however, but it is in many ways the same as Cameron’s climax, in which death and loss are redeemed by sacrifice.  Jim Dandy in Dylan’s narrative smiles ruefully when he realizes that the ship is sinking, because he doesn’t know how to swim.  He has a place in a lifeboat but he gives it to a crippled child — and then when death has its triumph, Jim Dandy’s heart is at peace, untouched by the horror.  He has defeated death by sacrifice, just as Jack does in the film.

What’s left is meditation on the apocalypse — and Dylan gives that to the ship’s captain, facing his end kneeling before the wheel:

In the dark illumination
He remembered bygone years,
Read The Book Of Revelation
And filled his cup with tears.

You will remember that the priest in Cameron’s film quotes from Revelation when the ship goes down:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Or so the watchman dreamed . . .

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