Written on the Wind: No Good End

After the flash-forward, the film starts its story with Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall). As an executive secretary at the Hadley Oil Company’s New York office, she is busy setting out some mocked-up advertisements. Company geologist Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson) enters in search of her boss. The display stand between the actors obscures Bacall except for her legs, peeking out from a gray skirt. Hudson leans back and cocks his head; his brow wrinkles; the tips of his mouth curl just a little. When he sidles up and says, “Hello,” it comes out like a come-on. Bacall turns and blinks three times. Her lips part, but she doesn’t respond. Hudson keeps coming.

This is the way it’s supposed to go in Hollywood: the beautiful man and woman lock eyes, and it’s over. The problem is evident from the get-go. Mitch can’t take his eyes off Lucy, but once his best friend since childhood, Kyle Hadley, has seen her, neither can he. Kyle immediately tries to woo her. Being rich as sin helps. He whisks her to the airport, up into a private jet, and then down to Miami all in the same day (with Mitch along for the ride). A lush pink suite, he figures, will tie the knot on the bow. For much of the film, Kyle and Mitch appear nearly in love. Theirs is not the blessed sort of union that belongs to the romantic comedy but a long relationship nearing its end. Years have passed, and history has accumulated, adding weight to the love and the fury, and all of it is now so heavy that it makes a break impossible. Kyle and Mitch have made each other the men they are. Had they room to breathe, the discord might dissipate. But circumstances are not otherwise: Kyle looks into Lucy’s eyes, and their whole world falls apart. The movie merely describes the time it takes this cursed gang to notice their own destruction.

In Miami, while waiting for Lucy to get dressed, Kyle and Mitch spar lightly, in a way that makes it hard to tell whether the blows are supposed to land. “Sounds like a crack,” Kyle warns. “No, just a dent in my armor,” Mitch says. It must be as apparent to Mitch as it is to us that this whole sequence began with Lucy’s interest in him, not Kyle. If she were actually any different from the other women Kyle has bowled over with his family name, Mitch tells him, she’d have “spit right in your eye.” By the next scene, Lucy is gone. She is different, it seems. But it doesn’t take much to get her back, and in a more binding way. Set up in opposition to those other women—fleeting pleasures, all of them—Lucy winds up tied to Kyle and his insecurities through marriage. It is a strange sequence of self-delusion—a malady that afflicts most everyone in the film. At the hotel, she tells Kyle “how ugly” this life would appear to her in the morning, and then promptly immerses herself in it, until death does them part. There are few doors open for a woman in midcentury America, and she knows it. She told Kyle on first meeting him that her future held marriage and a mortgage. He assured her she was too good for that, and then he weds her anyway, though presumably the Hadley land is all paid off.

What follows is a descent into the kind of madness that families breed. Kyle works hard to suppress his alcoholism and his jealousy of Mitch, the amiable he-man Kyle can never hope to be. Marylee, who has been in love with Mitch since childhood and longs for their old closeness, tries to deny the pain of that loss through a string of hookups. When those don’t soothe her heart, she turns to provocation, nearly bringing everyone down with her. Lucy plays the dutiful wife, though every scene she shares with Mitch feels too charged for us to buy the act wholesale. Mitch came from the other side of the tracks and rose to his present position thanks in large part to the largesse of his friend’s family. He and Lucy are disciplined and decorous, which sets them apart from the degeneracy of the American aristocracy as represented by the Hadleys. They carry themselves well because there may not be anyone to catch them if they fall. Of course, they have fallen, for each other, yet, incapable of adultery or rupturing their familiar ties, they choose to suffer. But something is in the air, and Marylee and Kyle are not so stupefied that they cannot sniff it out. The threat becomes undeniable when Kyle discovers he may be impotent. The moment is played as a personal psychotic break, but it represents an existential threat for the Hadley clan. Jasper (Robert Keith)—the frail, old patriarch of the family—will soon pass his empire to two irresponsible children with no heirs of their own. The dynasty is on the verge of collapse.

Melodrama runs so close to Greek tragedy that, even in less capable hands than Sirk’s, the parallels would be obvious. Its plots are as salacious and its structures as indebted to artifice—a quality often described as a fault in the younger genre. For Sirk, an erstwhile director of Bertolt Brecht’s plays, that was a benefit. “In Written on the Wind,” he said, “the whole story is artificial . . . Every artist today must proceed with a certain artificiality.” Beyond Brechtian distancing effects, Hollywood melodramas of the mid-twentieth century offered a particular form of experience. “Even if the situations and sentiments defied all categories of verisimilitude,” Thomas Elsaesser wrote in 1972, “the structure had a truth and a life of its own.” The genre had its lazy practitioners, but it was “a stylistic principle that carried the distinct overtones of spiritual crisis [by which artists] could put the finger on the texture of their social and human material.” Elsaesser draws his examples for melodramatic techniques not from cinema but from some of its literary antecedents, including the work of Franz Kafka, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Written on the Wind matches the distancing effect of its florid artificiality, in all its glorious shades and hues, with an intense intimacy with the spiritually sick. Each member of the quartet—Lucy, Mitch, Kyle, and Marylee—is so wrapped up in their own soul’s dark night that they can’t quite see the crisis of their social situation. The ruling class is no longer merely exploitative. It is a poisoned orchard, its trees rotting at the roots, their branches bearing nothing at all. But these characters all desire so specifically and with such heat that they each careen toward their own kind of immolation.

Marylee is destabilized by Mitch’s presence and his absence, but she is the only one who sees clearly. In her vicious single-mindedness, she moves through the film like a femme fatale transposed from the city’s shadows to a Texas mansion. She plants the seed of doubt in Kyle’s mind, telling him that Lucy and Mitch are having an affair. Kyle is misled, but only just. His best friend and wife are in love with each other, even if they are determined to repress the feelings. Rather than spend years suffocating beneath the weight of temptation, Mitch decides to exile himself. “You ever heard of Iran?” he asks, by way of explaining his plans. The midcentury southwestern oilman had the whole world at his feet. No need to consign himself to the arid plot of land where all his heartache had been sown. When Lucy comes to Kyle with the news that she is finally pregnant, he sees no cause for celebration. She believes she has saved him, their marriage, and the Hadleys. All he hears is proof of a brutal deception. He resorts to violence and drunken dissolution.

In Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone says that she is “carried away with longing.” Longing may be Sirk’s great subject. To be “carried away” by it can leave you undone, gasping for air. That is not always so terrible, but things do not end well for Antigone. In Written on the Wind, everything from the sets to the costumes, lights, and performances gives off that sensation, infused with a doomed ecstasy. In Sirk’s early American film Summer Storm (1944), after a series of tempestuous upstairs-downstairs affairs, police search the body of a man they have shot and killed in a bar for identification. They find only a card bearing the words I love you. An officer tosses it to the floor. A man at the bar instructs the musicians to play something now that the gunfire has stopped. A janitor sweeps away the card. A bitter end.

“Now let the weeping cease,” the chorus says at the end of Oedipus at Colonus. “Let no one mourn again. / These things are in the hands of God.” Let no one mourn again? An obscenity. An impossibility, even. There is another play in the trilogy, after all. Sirk understood that just as one has to live through to the end, his films would have to play out to their conclusions too. Desire, love, regret—they lodge themselves in our memory. They do not fall away just because the music swells and fades. The night may close over our fantasies and thereby provide some bitter reprieve from the mania of need or guilt, but time makes fools of us. The night passes. There’s always tomorrow.