staying
alive
by Douglas Messerli
Curtis Harrington
(screenwriter and director) Picnic / 1948
In several of gay film
innovator Curtis Harrington’s early works there is a dream-like desire for the
normalization of life. Picnic of 1948, despite its obvious satiric
depictions of that life, almost appears to deify it, beginning with the family
arriving in what appears to be at different moments a desert rock formation, a
Russian-like tundra, and a seaside cliff near the ocean, the wind fiercely
whistling and whipping through the rocky landscape so intensely that it pulls
at the dresses of the central figure’s mother and sister, hardly permitting
them to lay the tablecloth upon the sand let alone open their white
paper-wrapped sandwiches.
Almost before the family is seated in the
sand—reminding one vaguely of Albee’s play of 11 years later, The Sandbox
sans Grandmother—the son turns away from the family (played by the
director’s own family) to scan the horizon of the beach where he is intrigued
by the sight of a woman dressed in a white gown literally leaping down the
strand, almost—for those of you who have seen the director’s 1961 film Night
Tide—like a land-bound mermaid, disappearing into the perspective.
The handsome young man in a white open
shirt impetuously chases down the beach after her, but pauses as a man, dressed
all in black and carrying a closed umbrella, passes him. For a few moments our
hero seems intrigued and turns back to observe the man moving down the beach in
the opposite direction, the highly distressed string music of composer Ernest
Gold that has been accompanying the young man’s actions coming to a crescendo
as the young man discovers that in the meantime the rising tide, with the white
foam of its waves, has begun to encircle his shoes.
Looking up he sees a high cliff which by
stretching out his hands above his head he miraculously climbs with the help of
the imposition of his image against the rock formation by the camera.
When he finally reaches the top, he turns
back to look below, again observing the man in black, this time with an open
umbrella ambling down the beach.
Continuing on his adventure, the young
man wanders briefly through what appears to be sand dunes or, given the
intentionally overexposed black-and-white image, might be a snow-covered
outcropping of rocks. Either way, it is almost uninhabitable territory until he
reaches what appears to be a wooded area, where he is now forced to climb
through brambles. As he reaches open space, he looks down a hill to again
witness the woman in white turned away from him, her hands opened outward
almost as if she were leaning upon an invisible ledge.
He walks down the stairs of what might
almost be an excavated ruin of an old mansion, finally joining her, witnessing
her face shaped by her blonde hair for the first time, a face that looks
suspiciously like the sister he has left behind in the picnic scene. He kisses
her on the cheek, and, as if she were sleeping beauty suddenly awakening, she
takes hold of his hand.
Together the two trip through a misty
landscape before they join both hands and spin about several times, quickly
turning faster and faster in an almost comic mania that might remind us of the
pop-satire of anything and everything, Airplane! in which Julie Hagerty
and Robert Hays become so caught up with the disco gymnastics of the Bee Gees’
“Staying Alive” that Hagerty rockets her spinning partner Hays into outer
space.
They immediately stop, both facing a
small pit below where, when the mist clears, they see the open umbrella planted
in place. Clearly, their little orgy of pleasure was too much for her, she
releasing the boy’s hand and rushing off, this time as if Cinderella has just
heard the clock strike midnight. Rain instantaneously begins to pour down from
the skies, flattening the formerly erect umbrella.
Through a nearby window the young man
glimpses his princess now lying upon a bed, her hands clasped together as if
she were dead. He turns away from her, the camera catching his beautiful face
in silhouette as tears gather under his eyes.
When he turns back she is no longer
there, having been pulled out the window and, soon after, being carried up on a
long staircase by a man, also in black, but this time appearing eerily to
resemble, from the back, Frankenstein’s monster (Harrington was a great fan of
horror films and helped to get James Whale’s The Old Dark House restored,
becoming a friend of the Frankenstein director late in Whale’s life and
advising director Bill Condon on his film about Whale, Gods and Monsters).
In one of the most remarkable scenes of
this dream-play the hero leaps out the same window and chases the monster and
his “bride” up the seemingly endless staircase. A first he seems to be able to
quickly sprint the stairs, but almost immediately after falls flat and is
forced to climb the stairs on his belly, painfully moving up the vertical
expanse a bit like he had previously done with ease earlier on when he
cinematically climbed to the top of the cliff.
But this time there seems to be
something almost dragging him down, preventing him from following the monstrous
figure holding the woman in his arms. Perhaps her once innocent mien now
corrupted by death holds him back. Perhaps he has simply lost interest in his former quarry
and is struggling against his own self in his attempt to reclaim her. It hardly
matters since the figures he is chasing have now reached the plateau.
As if released from the chase, he
suddenly regains his footing and races up the remaining steps to reach their
end only to recognize that he now momentarily balancing himself at the edge of
the cliff before falling through space into the ocean. The man in black, his
umbrella again closed, is seen once more walking away to the left of our
viewpoint.
Our hero’s prone body can be seen
rolling in with the tide the way it previously roiled about his feet. Three men
come rushing to the rescue, bearing his body back toward the picnickers in a
manner that reminds us of a pietà —surely Harrington’s personal reference to a
similar scene from his
friend Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks,
released a few months earlier.
The screen goes dark. When the light
returns we see the young man lying in what appears to be a coffin, flowers
surrounding the corpse around whom his family has gathered in what appears to
be their house. The woman in white, her veil flowing in the wind, is turned
away from him looking into a mirror since she has no longer anyone else to
admire her. We see the man in black, for the first time witnessing his handsome
visage at the front door as he rings the doorbell.
Is the man in black death or a potential
male lover arrived too late? I read it differently: the dead boy is the young
man of the past who attempted to embrace a conventional sexuality he was unable
to, symbolically killing his old self in the process. The gentleman caller at
the door represents a new lover for the son who his family members and former
girlfriend will never know and henceforward they will never be able to
visualize him as he was. Like Christ, our hero has been resurrected into a holy
life of the ever after. He has had to die in order to stay alive. The figure at
the door may even be the young man himself come to redeem his own body.
If my reading may sound a bit like an
answer to a riddle, forgive me. For Harrington’s films, if attended to
carefully, are as apparent as a dream consciously imagined. And all of this
accomplished, amazingly, in only 22 minutes.
Los Angeles, December
11, 2020
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).
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