 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
Splendor in the Grass
|
 |
|
1. Encyclopedia Entry 2003
From the first notes of David Amram’s intense score and the
opening image of Bud (first-timer Warren Beatty) and Deanie (Natalie Wood)
kissing in a car by a raging waterfall, Splendor in the Grass sums up
the appeal of Hollywood melodrama at its finest: the passions repressed by
society (the setting is Kansas 1928) find a displaced expression in every
explosive burst of colour, sound and gesture.
Repression is everywhere in this movie, a force that twists people
in monstrous, dysfunctional directions. Men are obliged to be successful and
macho while women must choose between virginity and whorishness – as is the
case for Bud’s unconventional flapper sister, indelibly incarnated by Barbara
Loden.
Director Elia Kazan, like Arthur Penn, worked at the intersection
of studio-nurtured classical narrative and the innovative, dynamic forms
introduced by Method acting and the French New Wave. Here, collaborating with
the dramatist William Inge, he achieved a sublime synthesis of both approaches.
The film offers a lucid, concentrated analysis of the social
contradictions determined by class, wealth, industry, technology, moral values
and gender roles within the family unit. At the same time, it is a film in
which the characters register as authentic individuals, acting and reacting in
a register that is far from the
2. Notes from a 1982 Lecture
Splendor in the Grass sits astride two
great decades of film style, the 1950s and the 1960s. We tend to think of
style, reductively, as decoration, ornamentation, flourish, mere effects. Pure
surface overlay, like a varnish. Even some scholars fight shy of the word,
because of these enduring associations. When, in fact, style should imply form, expression, genuine
and full substance. This is why the common expression of “that
movie is all style and no substance” is so stupid. Style is substance in cinema – or, at any rate, it can be, and often is.
As Richard T. Jameson suggested in a sturdy 1980 Film Comment piece, it’s a matter of fiddly “style” versus real
style.
Splendor in the Grass is a tremendous,
positive example of real style. Kazan’s film is a melodrama; in fact, it is among
the greatest screen melodramas. Melodrama is tied to a certain exaggeration –
of traits, of forms, of emotions. It is often described as histrionic, and that
can be a useful descriptive term, not an automatic put-down.
But histrionics is not only about what fictive
characters do and feel. In melodrama, the entire film is an embodiment, an
expression, of energy (see Thomas Elsaesser’s landmark essay “Tales of Sound
and Fury” for more on this) – an energy that can go in many directions. In Kazan (as
in Douglas Sirk or Vincente Minnelli), the melodramatic style itself aims to
unleash and unbind this energy, to provide an ultimately reflective and
critical channel for it.
What is the thesis or argument of Splendor in the Grass? It concerns neurosis, somatisation,
internalisation – a veritable energy crisis! The body is marked by the social
problems existing outside of it, and then it convulses in hysterical reaction. This
is a Freudian, psychoanalytic schema of the hysterical symptom (you can read
about it in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Stuart Cunningham, and elsewhere). Such symptoms are a wild,
unfocused, only half-rational expression of resistance to the ills, miseries
and oppressions wrought by the social system (almost any existing social
system!). This world is – to refer to Glauber Rocha’s Brazilian masterpiece of
the 1960s – in a trance, in an uncontained, somatic flux. Michael Walker (in an
unpublished draft) speaks of “the psychic interplay of inner reality and a
whole culture”. Such is the terrain of much screen melodrama.
In Kazan (as in our lives), a nodal point of this
process is sexuality: what is repressed inevitably returns, in a displaced or
distorted fashion. Robin Wood has written much on this idea. Look, for
instance, at how Splendor in the Grass plays on the literally “fantastic” possibility of parent-child incest. As a
perversity that cannot be openly acknowledged or thought about, it emerges as a
cry, a dare, a horrific apparition, as Deanie hurls the sight of her naked body
at a scandalised mother, or Ginny drunkenly embraces her father. (Michel Ciment, in his entry on the film for the
Casterman Dossiers du cinéma anthologies of the early 1970s, notes the material’s intriguing
autobiographical elements: Kazan was as old as his central characters in 1929
and, at the moment he made the film, his children were in their early 20s.
“These details would be negligible”, Ciment suggests, “if the work did not
revolve around the theme of family, which is the central notion in the
director’s reflection on the world”.)
The film portrays a society based on both drives and crashes – in a time of vast economic crisis and depression. The
personal mirrors the social, while the social projects the personal. A key
theme is the way that money debases and corrupts human feeling. Ciment notes
that “it is surely not coincidental that Freud’s major work Civilisation and its Discontents is
published just one year after the great fall of capitalism [i.e., the Wall
Street Crash], a book in which humankind’s neuroses are viewed in relation to
the renunciation that society demands of its people”. Ciment also extends the
Freudian reference to its development in Wilhelm Reich and his 1936 book The Sexual Revolution, in which the
authoritarian (patriarchal) family is described as “the conveyor belt between
the economic structure of conservative society and its ideological
superstructure; its reactionary atmosphere must needs become inextricably
implanted in every one of its members” (p. 72 of Orgone Institute Press edition
translated by Theodore P. Wolfe, 1945).
There is an entire bodily code at work in Kazan’s
film. Each character is typed by particular physical reactions to their social
environment: squirming, hitting, falling, drowning, taking out frustrations in
metal work (a memorable moment that startles some viewers). These movements can
be fast or slow – they vary enormously in their nature and character, and that
is Kazan’s gift as a director, to invent this variety of externalised,
melodramatic gestures upon the basis of William Inge’s probably more naturalistically-pitched
screenplay (cf. his work in the filmic adaptation of Picnic [1955], for instance).
What is film style for Kazan? The book Kazan on Directing offers many clues.
Each character is typed, identified, placed, rendered significant within a total
film system via all the signs they bear and which surround them. This system is
founded on the following (non-exhaustive) list of elements: movement; décor
(fitting into or clashing with it); costume; colour (note the blue in the final
sequence); voice, its accent, pitch and rhythm (overlapping, whispering,
shouting); the role of food (as prepared, consumed and refused); the human body
(the father’s “crook leg”, for instance).
This extraordinary work on mise en scène – the 1950s legacy – extends to the use of the camera
in its framing (through windows), and eventually even the editing; the various
processes and phases of direction, from script input to final edit and mix, are
interdependent, as Jean-Luc Godard argued back in 1956 (“Montage, My Fine Care”).
This is cinematic classicism at its greatest, collective height of both craft
and expressivity.
In screen melodrama, all conflicts are externalised,
projected outwards, in a clash of formal elements – in that regard, melodrama
is the natural successor to Expressionism in its historic German incarnation
(and there is no lack of Expressionism in the work of émigrés to Hollywood including Sirk and Robert Sidomak). Kazan
works, in this manner, on differences of class, of gender and of “sexual style”
– as in the party scenes (see Barbara Loden’s role as Bud’s sister).
The narrative structure, too, is melodramatic. Splendor in the Grass is full of rhymes
and symmetries between events, incidents, situations. We see this in the
mirrored reactions, from the first half of the film to the second; in the way
Bud’s mother complements (in structural terms) Deanie’s father; and in the
twinned obsessions over money. On top of that, there is the motif of the double (for Deanie), and the recurring
theme of transformation triggered via
imagery (and sounds) of doorways, mirrors, and especially water: above the
water is sex, below the water is death.
In Kazan’s work, there is a delicate relation between
personal fulfilment and social engagement. Desires, taken as the most intense
reality by those who live them, can turn out to be mere illusions. Life is
compromise, an “arrangement” (the name Kazan gave to one of his novels, also
adapted by him into a very fractured, ‘60s-style film) that is both necessary
and tragic. Guilt, shame, remorse, regret, wilful self-scotomisation (blinding
oneself to the truth): these are powerful emotions in Kazan (both as a person,
and as an artist).
At the end of the film, what is really happening? It
is a haunting, unresolved scene of fleeting “reunion”, long after youthful
passions have been quashed, repressed and redirected by social pressure and
individual choices. As Joan Crawford says in Johnny Guitar (1954), now there’s only “ashes”. Ashes – and
memories, impossible to entirely erase from the unconscious. Again, the
repressed is bound to return.
What is being given positive value in this scene, and
what is being criticised? Is renunciation of desire a good or bad thing? It’s
hard for any cinephile to remove from their minds the extraordinary glimpse of
Bud’s wife, Angelina (Zohra Lampert, later in Cassavetes’ Opening Night [1977]), now alone in the frame and the kitchen
décor, and her pained silent, “Well, that’s how it goes” gesture. It is a
gesture of resignation, a heavy emotion but performed in a light way – but
resignation for what, over what? Settling to forever be second-best in someone
else’s affections, their fungible-but-never-erasable, sentimental inner-life?
Also to be taken into any consideration of this
overwhelming finale is the fact that nature – the poetically evoked (via
Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood”) “splendour in the grass” with its organic, universal life-cycle –
with its associated theme of maturity (growing older, becoming wiser, etc.), is
no less criticised by a film that is so insistently focused on such “socially
constructed” aspects of experience and feeling. Where does human nature leave
off and socialisation begin? It’s a tough question for us all to grapple with.
Ultimately, in Kazan’s crowning masterpieces (this and Wild River, 1960), we can gauge the immense intelligence
inherent in that “decade of style” bequeathed by classical Hollywood in the
1950s. The intelligence is centred not in this or that reduced, abstractable,
detachable “theme” per se – theme as “take away” message, proverb, bottom-line
summary or whatever, which is a pitiful way to conceive this process – but in
the energies that are embodied, and the complex ways the film can thus move us,
both involving us and distancing us critically.
Kazan himself went in a contrary direction in the
post-classical era. He embraced the cinematic liberations of the cosmopolitan
‘60s in America, America (1963) and the
aforementioned The Arrangement (1969).
His The Visitors (1972, written by
his son Chris) is a tough, conflicted, low-budget, independently-made, searing
report on the psyche of Vietnam-era USA. His final film, The Last Tycoon (1976) adapted by Harold Pinter from F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, is partly a return to the classical style (and
to the studio system he experienced first-hand), but within a modern Hollywood
(the cinema of Martin Scorsese & co.) that has, in the meantime, become a
very different beast. The film, at times boldly stylised and at other moments
confused and legless, displays all the signs of this historic sea-change, as
fitfully grasped by a director then approaching the age of 70. It’s a
fascinating and strange adieu. Not at
the height of his genius of art and craft mastery. For that,
we’ll always have the brief but extraordinary period encompassing Wild River and Splendor in the Grass.
© Adrian Martin April 2003 / 27 July 1982 |
