Faulkner and Sirk, "Pylon" and "The Tarnished Angels," "melodrama" and "art"

I went on a bit of a Faulkner read­ing jag recently, look­ing into As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Pylon for the first time since col­lege at least. The exper­i­ence was both exhil­ar­at­ing and dis­quiet­ing. I had for­got­ten what a stone mod­ern­ist Faulkner was, and I was a little unpre­pared for both the work’s swamp­i­ness, and the sharp focus of what Faulkner adap­ted from Joyce into an entirely American idiom. The com­pound words of Pylon, and there seemed to be at least two per page, are con­found­ingly invent­ive and/or unself­con­sciously bizarre (plucked at ran­dom, from the first chapter: “mur­al­limning” and “shad­owlurked”). It was a pleas­ure to immerse myself in his mul­ti­valent style, and even­tu­ally I felt in a bet­ter pos­i­tion to appre­ci­ate it than I had been in the past.

Same for Faulkner’s acute under­stand­ing of alco­hol­ism and the alco­hol­ic brain. It’s a funny thing: of course there are events in Sanctuary and Pylon, indeed the events in Sanctuary are/were pretty infam­ous, but there’s no way that you can cite these nov­els for their nar­rat­ive momentum, nor call them plot-driven. For every one incid­ent that occurs, there are pages and pages depict­ing drunk­en para­lys­is. Temple Drake wakes up in a strange room and it takes her a whole chapter to get to the oppos­ite corner of the room. And it’s a small room. I’m exag­ger­at­ing of course. But not much, I think.  I was often struck by what I per­ceived as Faulkner’s per­son­al tragedy: that his pro­found under­stand­ing of alco­hol­ism came so early and was of so little use to him out­side of his art. 

Of course hav­ing fin­ished Pylon I was com­pelled to rewatch The Tarnished Angels, the 1957 film adap­ted from that 1935 nov­el, dir­ec­ted by Douglas Sirk. (Sirk would dir­ect only two more fea­tures after this, both mas­ter­pieces: A Time To Love And A Time To Die, and Imitation of Life.) In the book Sirk on Sirk, the dir­ect­or cites Faulkner as “a very early influ­ence on my out­look” and says that he had a yen to adapt Pylon dur­ing his days at the German stu­dio UFA. Working in Hollywood gave Sirk the chance to adapt the American book as an American dir­ect­or, to retain some of the idiom of the ori­gin­al.  But a literal-minded movie ver­sion of Pylon was of course an impossib­il­ity in the Hollywood of the 1950s. But I think, I hope, we know this already. The point is that the Hollywood “auteur” of the era in which Sirk was at his most pro­duct­ive and most elo­quent was a prag­mat­ist as well as an artist.

And so, Sirk seem­ingly cheer­ily admits to his inter­locutor Jon Halliday in Sirk on Sirk, “the story had to be com­pletely un-Faulknerized, and it was.” A very literal-minded per­son may well ask at this junc­ture, “Well what’s the point of mak­ing the film from the book, then?” And here is where, with­in the sys­tem in which Sirk labored, the per­son­al meets the prag­mat­ic. Here, actu­ally, lie the roots of what is some­times called “the auteur theory.”

In his essay on the com­ed­ies of dir­ect­or Allan Dwan, Kent Jones describes a mode of Hollywood movie­mak­ing he calls the “proto-sitcom.” He calls the major­ity of these pic­tures “attempts to mass-produce the form of romantic com­edy that Cukor, Capra, Lubitsch, Hawks, et. al., had per­fec­ted in the 1930s” and notes their “new kind of imper­son­al zip, air­i­ness, and light­ness.” Allan Dwan, the crit­ic con­tin­ues, “may have been the only dir­ect­or who knew how (or had the inclin­a­tion) to har­ness this indus­tri­al beauty […] [b]ut, very unlike the afore­men­tioned machine-tooled items, Dwan’s movies are inflec­ted with little grace notes—sudden tiny shifts in speed or per­spect­ive or visu­al design that gives the films a hum­ming beauty.” “Grace notes”—that’s an import­ant phrase.

A ver­sion of what Jones is talk­ing about applies to Sirk, and it par­tic­u­larly applies to Sirk wheth­er he is adapt­ing Faulkner or Fannie Hurst. In his chat with Halliday, he notes that “while the book is com­pletely trans­formed, the char­ac­ters in the film are pretty close to Faulkner’s.” This might not seem read­ily appar­ent. The unnamed report­er co-protagonist in Pylon is described as look­ing like a ghost, and has a sham­bling, zombie-like air to his move­ments; The Tarnished Angel’s report­er is giv­en the studly name of Burke Devlin, and is played by Rock Hudson. (It’s worth men­tion­ing that Hudson gives one of his most sin­cere and dir­ect screen per­form­ances here, and is very fine indeed.) But leav­ing aside the mat­ter of sur­face appear­ances, Sirk is cor­rect. In both the book and the movie, the report­er gives a speech to his edit­or in which he con­foun­dedly describes the aer­i­al barn­stormers whose story he’s dying to write as “not human.” That is, as all too human in their isol­a­tion from them­selves and from each oth­er. And Sirk con­veys that in the most refined but potent cine­mat­ic means avail­able to him. 

There’s also the mat­ter of the grace notes. “Having revealed how much you can take out and still have rock and roll, they now explore how much you can put back in and still have Ramones,” Robert Christgau wrote of Rocket To Russia in 1977. Having de-Faulknerized Faulkner in the script­ing pro­cess, Sirk judi­ciously chooses moment of pure Faulknerian pain and places them at key junc­tures in the pic­ture, cre­at­ing a net­work of exposed nerve end­ings. The first is in the “who’s your old man” taunt­ing of the young Jack Schumann—whether or not he’s the child of pilot Roger Schumann is an issue in both the book and the movie, and the early rev­el­a­tion of the play­ful cruelty of this world is a defin­ing one. Sirk frames young Jack’s trauma eco­nom­ic­ally, in one unflinch­ing, per­fectly framed shot in which the kid (beau­ti­fully played by Christopher Olsen) flays at the right side of the frame with his short arms, sob­bing and yelling, his face dis­ap­pear­ing and reappear­ing in flashes as his head ducks and his arms fly before him. It’s a remark­able dis­til­la­tion of the scene as writ­ten in Pylon. 

Sirk and screen­writer George Zuckerman also intro­duce a fas­cin­at­ing bit of inter­tex­tu­al­ity, some­thing not in the book, hav­ing Devlin and Jack’s moth­er, Laverne (Dorothy Malone, bril­liant and altern­at­ing between hag­gard and rav­ish­ing, some­times with a mere turn of the head), bond over Willa Cather’s My Antonia. “My Antonia, there’s anoth­er influ­ence,” Sirk said to Halliday, in the late 1960s. “As I remem­ber it, My Antonia is a nov­el about cir­cu­lar­ity; the hero comes back to the place that he star­ted out from. Today it would look passé, per­haps. But there was a time when I was deeply in love with America, a love that was shaken, though, to a degree, by wars and by Hiroshima, and by the things that happened after­wards, McCarthyism and so on.” Though it is itself set in a time behind 1957, in The Tarnished Angels Devlin says of Cather’s book, “Nostalgia in Nebraska. Lost farms and faded loves.”  Laverne coun­ters, “It brings back memor­ies of home. How I was. And who I was. When I first star­ted read­ing it. Twelve years ago.” She takes up the book again, to fin­ish it, and the below shot is, in the con­text Sirk cre­ates for it, heartbreaking. 

As it hap­pens Cather was an import­ant influ­ence of Faulkner him­self; in her excel­lent study of Cather and her crit­ics Joan Acocella notes that Faulkner “con­sidered her one of the fore­most American nov­el­ists.” Whether Sirk was aware of that is maybe besides the point, and in fact if the con­nec­tion is a happy coin­cid­ence that only bol­sters a par­tic­u­lar sense of affinity.

These oth­er shots of isol­a­tion (above the act­or is Robert Stack; below, Malone is seen with Robert Middleton) are exem­plary minor-key grace notes that under­score for me the impres­sion that while The Tarnished Angels can­not trans­pose Pylon, it authen­tic­ally hon­ors that book, and Faulkner’s par­tic­u­lar tra­gic, humane vis­ion.  The movie in its entirety, aside from being a beauty in and of itself, is also, alas, an object les­son that when crit­ics throw around the term “Sirkian” nowadays, almost none of them actu­ally know what that word means. 

Auteurism as for­mu­lated by Truffaut and Sarris and oth­ers instruc­ted cinephiles not to be enslaved by genre hier­arch­ies, and that’s one thing. Current muta­tions of this per­spect­ive seem to be tend­ing to a con­clu­sion that qual­ity itself is a hier­arch­ic­al con­struct. As a non-academic, I can­’t speak to the extent to which this notion is use­ful on the high­er plains of the­ory. In prac­tice on the lower plain of film writ­ing on the inter­net, it enables a par­tic­u­larly glib kind of per­versity. In March of this year, the writer Calum Marsh con­trib­uted a piece to Film.com entitled “Tyler Perry’s Defense: Why The Filmmaker Deserves Our Respect.”  The chatty essay leaves any num­ber of ques­tions unanswered, includ­ing “what do you mean ‘Our’?”, and, “what it is about the pun­it­ive sex­ist mor­al­ism of cer­tain of Perry’s film’s is worthy of respect?”, but the issue of imme­di­ate con­cern is Marsh’s declar­a­tion that Perry at his best is “mak­ing some of the strongest melo­dra­mas since Douglas Sirk.” Again, we leave aside the curi­ous fact that in seek­ing to legit­im­ize Perry’s work, Marsh tries to put Sirk back into the pigeon­hole that auteur­ist crit­ics removed him from.

It does not take a par­tic­u­larly acute crit­ic­al sense to under­stand that any pos­ited equi­val­ence between Tyler Perry and Douglas Sirk is a false one. It only takes a func­tion­ing pair of eyes, and a func­tion­ing pair of ears. Perry’s actu­al cine­mat­ic fore­bear is Hugo Haas, a film­maker I daresay many young cinephiles of the vul­gar auteur­ist inclin­a­tion are not famil­i­ar with. They might want to look into him. But this kind of false equi­val­ency is not good for film stud­ies stu­dents and oth­er liv­ing things.