Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Wednesday culture

Yes, it's a new idea for an ongoing series of posts. This blog is primarily a way to focus my thinking and I liked writing the film noir reviews so much over the summer that I think I'll keep up with one essay on some movie or book or such thing every week. And today it is,

Meet Me in St. Louis
I've seen this before but never really watched it. My mother and my sisters watched it every time it was on TV and I was there somewhere but whatever I was doing, I wasn't paying attention to the television. I remember nothing about the plot or the music in the thing. My only memory was hearing my mother and my sisters endlessly commenting on and analyzing the thing much the way the Serpentine One and I do when we watch girlie movies together now.

And, oh yes, this is a girlie movie but let's not start there. Instead lets start with la belle epoque.

One of the big literary and cultural motifs of the twentieth century is the belle epoque as seen through the eyes of children.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
And you have all the same elements in Eliot (who lived in St. Louis during the time this story is set), in Proust, in Waugh, in Fellini and here in Meet Me in St. Louis. You get a story of two stages of youth told against the passage of time according to some formal structure such as the passage of the seasons. The normal fears and pleasures, victories and losses of childhood are made more poignant because of our awareness that machinations in the adult world that are only dimly understood by youth will bring the whole thing down.

Dramatic irony is a key part of the story telling. We know things that the characters do not, lending deeper meaning to what they say than could have been understood by the character themselves. Perhaps the key line is when Tootie, played by Margaret O'Brien sees the wonderful buildings at the fair says, "They'll never tear it down." The movie audience of 1944 would all know that the whole thing was long gone just a short while after the fair because the whole thing was built of what was for all intents just plaster and was intended to last only the length of the fair (not unlike a movie set).

An odd consequence of this sort of story telling is that the problems that trouble the characters face are all diminished in our eyes because we know these people will live through two world wars and the great depression compared to which having to move is small cheese. There is a mocking tone to the story telling that is not unlike (and certainly is descended from) the dramatic presentations given in Minstrel shows. It allows us to pretend we are different from characters whom we actually have a lot in common with.

Now as much as I love literature, I have to admit that movies have a huge advantage over literature in telling this sort of story. A movie can put us in into a childlike perspective that literature can never achieve. As a consequence, movies revisit this genre over and over again. Two of my favourite examples are Queen of Hearts and Amarcord. Fellini's Amarcord  is, for all intents and purposes a remake of Meet Me In St. Louis set in a small town in Italy.

Girlieworld
This is a woman's movie through and through. The men have their moments but they are silly and ineffectual bit players in the women's stories. The two characters that make the movie are Tootie, mentioned above, and Esther, played by Judy Garland. One of the most heartbreaking things about the movie is to be reminded of just how spectacularly talented Garland was.

This world may be innocent of adult motives but it is not innocent about sex. Right from the opening scenes in which younger sister Agnes, played by thirteen year old Joan Carrol, comes in from swimming her underwear see through from being wet.



Later, Esther is being squeezed into a corset by her older sister. The "pain" noises Garland makes sound more like she is simulating orgasm and I don't think that is an accident. And the most famous scene in the movie, where Judy sings Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas to poor Margaret O'Brien who is crying her eyes out (reportedly because director Vincent Minnelli told her dog had just been killed by a car) features a strong supporting but unsupported appearance from Judy's beautiful right breast which gets as much lowing attention from the camera as either of the girl's faces do. I suspect that more than one young male viewer keen to not make a bad impression on his date was grateful that he could put his hat over his lap after that scene when this movie was in the theatres.



That capture doesn't even begin to do that breast justice. On screen it is, by far, the most animated player in the scene: it moves, a lot!

And while you may think this is my usual prurience at work it is actually very much to the point as one thing this movie is very much about is sex and the challenges faced by young women to get boys to notice them sexually. The goal is not actual sex nor, perhaps surprisingly, is it marriage. We see the latter when Esther achieves what we might imagine to be her goal of getting the boy next door to propose and immediately starts getting ready to gently let him down. These girls are not sexually innocent but they are still girls and not in any hurry to grow up.

An interesting subtext is that Vincent Minnelli was at the very least bisexual and probably homosexual. The challenges of a gay man in a society of the time were not unlike those of young women in that he would want to signal to other men that he wanted their sexual interest without being explicit about it. Either despite or because of this, it's one of the best movies about sex and sexuality that you will ever see. It's a brilliant movie in every sense of that word: very highly recommended.


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