“Melodrama as a genre, and the ‘melodramatic’ as a stylistic choice, are now widely accepted by intellectuals as legitimate modes of artistic expression within the classical Hollywood cinema, but general viewers persist in finding them embarrassing and ridiculous. The ridicule is, of course, a defence against the embarrassment, and it is the embarrassment, above all, that makes melodrama so interesting. I have argued elsewhere that the excesses of the melodramatic style are the expression of hysteria (always an embarrassing phenomenon), and that the source of hysteria is the feeling of powerlessness…. I also suggest that the star image of Jennifer Jones is centred on hysteria, whether she is playing Ruby Gentry or Saint Bernadette (which is why her mere presence has such a disruptive effect within the otherwise thoroughly conservative and conformist Since You Went Away, 1944). Jones is clearly crucial to Duel in the Sun: one can imagine other stars as Pearl (Gene Tierney, for example), but none would have brought to the role quite such a hysterical edge, from her opening dance to her bloody demise. Hysteria must be seen as a form of active, if impotent, protest; if it lacks revolutionary effect, it has revolutionary meaning. Duel in the Sun, however, is not simply a film about a hysterical protagonist: by virtue of its melodramatic excess it must be considered one of Hollywood’s hysterical texts. Looked at superficially, Pearl is a fairly typical representative of the ‘bad girl’ stereotype, the girl from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’, who- from a combination of ignorance, unrepressed energy, and a ‘bad’ environment- must, whatever her intentions, wreak havoc on bourgeois security and be punished for it, leaving the hero and the entirely boring ‘good girl’ to their supposedly contented but uneventful future of domesticity. But the film is emphatically and demonstrably on Pearl’s side: her hysteria- its disruptive influence, its revolutionary implications- pervades every aspect of the film, determines its style, produces its storms, its lurid sunsets, the intolerable heat of its sun, and finally precludes any possibility of that satisfying and pacifying sense of resolution that is supposed to be a permanent and necessary feature of traditional narrative. If she had survived the final duel, she might well have declared, amid the ruins of ideological coherence, like Medea in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s great work, that ‘Nothing is possible any more.” –The Movie Book of the Western.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 20:43:56 +0000
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