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tions of European high art to satisfy new leisure-time demands and consecrate a new technology with the astonishing power of melodramatic excess.
This chapter addresses the question of how Interrupted Melody met these principal expectations and how the film enlisted the female voice and Wagner’s music for the culture wars between cinema and television.
r e c u p e r at i n g t h e f e m a l e vo i c e The Hollywood cinema of the 1940s, according to feminist film scholarship, largely did not allow women to speak from outside the diegesis or to become autonomous agents of signification. In the opening sequence of Curtis Bernhardt’s 1947 Possessed an unconscious woman (Joan Crawford) is injected with a powerful drug designed to make her talk again. Drunk with his power to generate a woman’s voice from a position of discursive mastery, the male doctor comments: “No matter how many times I do this, I still get the same thrill.” Hollywood films of the 1940s sought to extract woman’s speech from her body. They emphasized the grain and texture of her voice so as to refuse her access to discourse and meaningful communication and to emplace her even more firmly in the interiority of the diegesis.
The Hollywood cinema of the 1950s, in the critical perspective of Amy Lawrence, refined the mechanisms by which the previous decade had orchestrated the female voice. Examining the role of Rita Hayworth in Bernhardt’s Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), Lawrence comes to the conclusion that “[t]he convulsive repressiveness we saw in response to women’s efforts to speak in the films of the forties went underground in the fifties, camouflaged by spectacle on the one hand or transmuted into hysteria and melodrama.”14
The casting of Marjorie Lawrence’s voice in Interrupted Melody seems to follow this formula closely. In what is perhaps the film’s key sequence—
Bernhardt considered it his favorite scene15—Dr. King subjects his wife to an uncompromising therapy that aims at restoring the prima donna’s voice as much as her physical mobility. Against Lawrence’s explicit will, King plays a record of Lawrence’s performance in Samson et Delila to the paralyzed opera star. “Turn that off,” Lawrence demands. “Turn it off yourself,” King responds and leaves the room. Devastated by the sound of her former grandeur, Lawrence manages to crawl across the floor and knocks over the turn-table. Delila’s aria comes to a sudden halt, and King returns to the room, embraces Lawrence, and proclaims passionately: “Marjorie, you’ve done it!
You’ve moved!” Lawrence in this scene takes the first step toward her resurrection. She silences the echoes of the past to recuperate—under King’s supervision—the spectacular presence of her voice and body.
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The vocabularies of psychoanalytic and feminist film theory suggest the following reading of King’s intervention. An individual who earlier in the film clearly struggled over the meaning of his own career in light of Lawrence’s celebrity, the Glenn Ford character allows the viewer to project
“male lack onto female characters in the guise of anatomical deficiency and discursive inadequacy.”16 The film in the above sequence obliges the female body and voice to display lack in order to protect the male subject from knowledge about his own fragmentation and castration anxiety. King may try to restore Lawrence’s voice but only according to his own conditions.
The phonograph in fact situates King in proximity to the cinematic apparatus. Like the doctor in Possessed, King assumes the role of the director’s spokesman. King engineers the woman’s voice as a sign that communicates her body as an object of male desire and control. He confers plenitude and coherence to the male subject so as to gloss over the lack he cannot tolerate in himself. Learning how to master the apparatus, King reconstitutes Lawrence as spectacle in order to camouflage his own role in the process. As King forces his wife to overcome Delila, the intrigant and femme fatale, and resurrect herself as Isolde, the film engages Richard Wagner in a project in which spectacularity expands from the woman’s voice and body across to the cinematic apparatus itself.
This is not the place to probe the plausibility of this kind of reading. Suffice it to say that the film itself renders King’s project transparent and that Lawrence’s comeback clearly exceeds the terms of King’s agenda, leaving the doctor in the end as powerless, marginalized, and “castrated” as he is in the film’s beginning. I am more interested in the implications of the above argument for our understanding of Hollywood’s appropriation during the 1950s of European cultural material in general and Wagner in particular. It is interesting to recall in this context that Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Delila, in spite of the composer’s efforts to fuse French operatic traditions with the Wagnerianism of his day, after its premiere in 1877 fared badly in both France and Germany. Whereas in France Saint-Saëns’s opera was viewed as simply too German, in Germany Saint-Saëns was seen “merely as a virtuoso of the composer’s trade, capable of assimilating any style because he possessed none of his own.”17 Prompting Lawrence to defeat the curious hybridity of Samson et Delila and to resurge as Wagner’s Isolde, King’s project of physical reeducation urges us to ask a number of questions that echo many of the issues addressed earlier in this study. Does Bernhardt’s film, in simultaneously replacing the “false” Wagner Saint-Saëns with the real one, and the record player with the here-and-now of the female voice, engage the viewer in a cinema of German audiovisual attractions similar to the one
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that Nazi film theoreticians and practitioners—as we saw in part 1—had envisioned during the 1930s? Does the film’s musical therapy, by at once producing and containing Lawrence’s body and voice, secretly replay the methods of Nazi filmmaking, of folding desire and discipline into a single mechanism? Does Bernhardt’s film, in fact, as it hails the power of sound as a conduit to corporeal self-assertion, recall the anaesthetic project of films such as The Tunnel and the way in which Bernhardt’s earlier film obliterated the private body—whether male or female—as an autonomous site of desire and experience?
The following three sections will reject the suspicion expressed in these questions, not to disarm any feminist critique of Interrupted Melody but to challenge the parameters according to which many postwar intellectuals and filmmakers have flatly equated Hollywood filmmaking and the Nazi culture industry. Carrying out my argument in three consecutive steps, I suggest that neither a thematic nor a stylistic nor a culturalist reading of Bernhardt’s film can substantiate the proposition that Interrupted Melody would resurrect Nazi cinema amid the shifting landscapes of classical studio filmmaking. As the film draws our attention to the historicity of different stylistic expressions and modes of spectatorship, it urges us to resist any facile leveling of differences and to recognize modern culture as necessarily multiple and contested.
p o a c h i n g o n wa g n e r
Richard Wagner was celebrated by Hollywood practitioners during the 1930s as a dynamic film composer avant la lettre, yet his status in Hollywood underwent dramatic changes in the course of the 1940s. In Robert Siodmak’s Christmas Holiday (1944) a performance of Tristan und Isolde sets the stage for a twisted tale of desire and murder. Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (1947) presents an American penitentiary in likeness to a Nazi concentration camp and features Hume Cronyn in the role of a Hitler-like prison war-den who listens to Wagner while tormenting his prisoners. Turning the essentializing tropes of Nazi Wagnerianism upside down, postwar Hollywood reified Wagner as an unmistakable symptom of sickness, death, and totalitarian control. Whoever listened to or was musically associated with Wagner had some affinity to Hitler’s willing executioners. Wagnerian music drama, according to postwar Hollywood sound tracks, in fact expressed nothing less than the putative essence of the German soul and its innate penchant for romantic mysticism and authoritarian cynicism. Seen as deeply pathological, Hollywood’s new Wagner epitomized what was seen as the eliminationist
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predicates of German culture, that which obstructs any progressive movement of bodies, emotions, goods, values, and meanings.
Bernhardt’s Interrupted Melody simultaneously challenges the view of Wagner as essentially German and as essentially decadent. The film employs Wagnerian music as a metaphor for disease and stasis, but it also presents this music as a cure that allows Lawrence to recuperate her body and voice.
Interrupted Melody suggests that there is no single way to understand the master’s music, that it is neither the music nor the man but how one makes use of them that determines their relevant meanings. Accordingly, the film exposes Wagner’s music to a creative process of reception in which present itineraries actively shape the understanding of the past just as much as past expressions can be used to change the present. Bernhardt’s Wagner thus exists only in the plural. The meaning of his music depends on how people choose to piece together their “own” Wagner— even at the expense of textual integrity and hermeneutic interpretation. Rather than providing a canonical sense of essential beauty, Germanness, virility, or decadence, Bernhardt’s Wagner demonstrates the productivity of reception and the negotiated character of cultural meaning. As the film fuses nineteenth-century expressions with twentieth-century practices, it creates a texture of symbolic references in which overlapping cultural codes potentially decenter naturalized conceptions of history, art, and identity.
Lawrence’s performances as both Brünnhilde and Isolde neatly illustrate the film’s emphasis on negotiated meaning. Of all possible operas that are part of the diva’s repertoire, it is Wagner’s Götterdämmerung that introduces Lawrence to the New York audience and lays the foundation for her American triumph. During the rehearsal Lawrence challenges the Met’s conductor, Leopold Sachse (played by himself), over the staging of the Ring’s final scene. Although willing to allow a horse onstage, Sachse wants Lawrence/Brünnhilde to lead her horse into the fire, whereas Lawrence—
shown in the film’s first sequence as a skillful equestrian—suggests she ride the horse. “This is Götterdämmerung, not a circus,” Sachse insists in his thick Teutonic accent: the point is not to imitate jockeys, but to sing well. Lawrence, on the other hand, demands a more spectacle-oriented and in fact literal interpretation of Wagner’s music drama, which indeed called for Brünnhilde to mount the horse and leap “with a single bound into the blazing pyre.”18 Sachse’s highbrow view of opera as a cultivated presentation of song and music, not of bodily motions, prevails at the end of the rehearsal.
But Lawrence violates the conductor’s will in the actual performance and thus emancipates Wagner from his own historical transformation into an
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icon of bourgeois respectability. At the end of a two-and-a-half-minute operatic interlude we witness Lawrence/Brünnhilde as she straddles her horse and maneuvers it into the pyre while the famous Valkyre motifs thunder through the auditorium. Similar to the ways in which literary modernism once advocated a charismatic interruption of bourgeois culture,19 Lawrence challenges in this sequence the institutionalization of Wagner as a token of bourgeois self-representation and detached contemplation. In contrast to most representatives of aesthetic modernism, however, Lawrence’s spectacular performance also aspires to blur the boundaries between modernism and mass culture itself. Following Wagner’s lead, which according to Adorno assimilated high culture to popular taste, Lawrence wants to make art popular and sensual again. Pitting Wagner against his own history of reception, Lawrence turns opera into what contemporary standards of respectability denigrate as mere vaudeville, as inauthentic diversion.
Lawrence’s electrifying performance in Götterdämmerung actualizes Wagner’s original design and, as we will see later, attunes the sensual spectacle of nineteenth-century opera to the perceptual novelties of the widescreen format. The two performances of Tristan und Isolde, by contrast, clearly run counter to the ideas Wagner originally assigned to his music drama. In both interludes Bernhardt in fact overwrites Wagner’s text. The film punctures the flow of Wagner’s endless melody with gaps and silences, infusing it with alternative interpretations. In the first staging, which leads to Lawrence’s dramatic breakdown onstage, we hear the diva intone the following passage from Isolde’s last aria:
