A Stolen Life (1946)
A perfect ‘woman’s film’— or a perfect film for anyone, if men would only come clean about their feelings. The following fantasy obviously obsessed women in the 50s (and I think it does now): if I wasn’t beautiful, would you still love me? Or (to put it in another way) can the unattractive girl get the man? Well of course she can. A Stolen Life tells us yes, yes yes!; it’s the neoplatonic idea that love comes to those with inner beauty — which radiates, eventually, to the outside. Bette Davis is insanely adept at playing twin sisters. She manages to impersonate two very different but very identical women without overplaying their personalities. Pat is wilful and passionate and a bit cruel — i.e. the Bette Davis we’ve come to know and love, whereas Kate is the inner Bette — kind and a bit unsure of herself. The wilful sister marries the man they both love — the perfect lighthouse keeper (Glenn Ford, looking fine, but as if he knows he’s in a ‘woman’s film’). Co-incidentally, sexy Pat then drowns on a boat ride with her quieter sister, who then decides to take on her sister’s identity. However that doesn’t fool Glenn, really, but it’s fine, because the unprepossessing sister deserves him. In the midst of it all these captivating plot reversals the less attractive Bette Davis has a flirtation with a tortured rude young painter (Dane Clark) who tells her she’s a cold potato and therefore not a real artist. Glenn Ford describes the difference between the two women like this: Kate is “the cake without the icing.” But from the way the men look at Pat it’s clear that the cake is what some women call ‘the divine feminine’ — a connection to sort of animal magnetism that draws all creatures male. It’s terribly engrossing and all has very little relation to reality. But a conversation between Glenn Ford and Bette Davis caught my ear. They are chatting during a heavy fog at the lighthouse (which is where they fall in love for the first time). Bette’s speech is worth quoting in full: “It’s like the end of the world. I don’t think I’d be frightened if it were. I wonder what people would do if the world were to end like this. Then they’d have time to say all the things they always wanted to say. And they’d have the courage to say them.” As we are ‘kind of’ at the end of the world right now — if we are to believe the pundits on CNN — one would think the same logic applies. (I see no reason — at last for the space of this blog— not to take it for granted that COVID-19 means the end of the world. It would be a relief to just relax into into it, rather than battle the apocalypse — which I’ve been doing lately with little success). So the fiction we are presented with is that COVID-19 is the end of the world as we know it, and now must be the time when we, at last, can deeply communicate, confess, tell all, relate. That is what I am trying to do in this blog. But this doesn’t count because I am not speaking to a live human. (Unless of course you are there. Or am I imagining that too?.) So here we are, at home with our ‘loved ones.’ So now’s the time for profound chat. Or is it? Perhaps we need some help with this end of the world feeling. There are race riots in The States — might that help? I had a drink with a woman and her daughter — and another woman from next door who dropped by. They are all very attractive — two of them 40ish and one 23. All were breaking up with their partners. With two of them this appeared to be COVID-19 related. One (and she was kind of a performer herself, in that she kind of performed her pain at high volume) said she was a horrible person because she had driven away a nice guy, and that’s her m. o. — she starts fights and alienates good men. But then she mentioned they used to go out to bars and restaurants before COVID-19, so the pandemic put a lot of strain on their relationship — as they were not able to go out anymore. And it struck me that it it’s not possible to really look at any relationship during COVID-19, as we have not yet entered the ‘new normal.’ The 22 year old’s boyfriend had finally decided to dump her because she was not Jewish— which is hardly the fault of COVID-19. But then again maybe it is, because as I pointed out, why did her family decide to ban her unJewishness from their household at this particular time? All of which brings me to the point of this blog— can we really treat this as an end of the world moment? Perhaps we should take this question to the powers that be at CNN — tell them if they want want people to ‘have the courage to finally say the things they’ve always wanted to say to each other,’ this had better really be the end of the world, and not some cheap imitation. Then there are those who take the oppoiste tack: ‘look at all the good that will eventually come from COVID-19!” I wish I could say they annoy me because they are being callous in these tragic times, but, so far, I have only known one family that has suffered from COVID-19, and they said it was as if they all had ‘a tickle in their throat’ — so I’m not going to go on about the unbearableness of it all. No, I say it because — first of all — do you think people are going to stop polluting the planet or flying planes because they learned from COVID-19 to make the world cleaner and safer? Not likely. Although I do think we will finally transition to a cashless society. But does that make it better? Well perhaps for the megacorporations, and for 20 year olds who rather just tap their cellphones in the vague direction of the cash register and run. Speaking of which, maybe the brilliance of COVID-19 is that we will at last become one with our computers. We will download our souls into them when we die. And to prepare, we will imbed them in our brains when we are alive (like the computer chips in cats). And computers will always give us the stuff we want. We won’t even have to tell them (like we do humans, I mean what a waste of time!). Because computers will just know. How’s that? What a nice outcome from COVID-19, eh? Like Bette Davis, I am compliant (when I am not my wilful twin sister) willing to agree to almost anything, except the much vaunted forthcoming end of sex. But we’ll talk about that later, I’m sure. I mean I will talk about that later, all by myself. Sorry, I thought, for a moment, that you were really here.
