Clash by Night (1952)
This is a terrible movie; it should be taught as an example of bad writing. Marilyn Monroe’s brief appearances are enchanting though — apparently she didn’t get along with Fritz Lang because she insisted on having an acting coach on set; but she is absolutely real and certainly a breath of fresh air in an otherwise preachy, plodding melodrama (and her boyfriend in the film Keith Andes is distracting eye candy). But Clash by Night is about the ‘cynical’ Mae Doyle, played by Barbara Stanwyck, returning home after the death of her husband. The conflict before her is is one that affects all of us, especially in the time of COVID-19. Should she do what she wants, or do her duty? I was on her side at first, when she said things like —”if I ever loved a man again, he could use my teeth for watch fobs” — and “I’ll always pick the man who’ll kick the door down.” First she meets Paul Douglas — sweet — and about as attractive as a used milk bottle, then Robert Ryan appears, and not only does he look good in a wife-beater, but he gives every indication of being one: “Someday I’m going to stick her full of pins and see if blood runs out.” But Stanwyck marries Paul Douglas and has an adorable child with him (they’re always adorable, until they grow up). But soon Ryan’s in the kitchen grabbing her — “I need you, I’m going crazy with loneliness.” You know she’s up for the shenanigans because a) she puts his hand between his wife-beater and his back and b) she keeps looking out at the ocean and the waves are always crashing on the rocks — and we all know what that means. Douglas discovers the affair and Stanwyck has a choice; is it the brutal/love/sex thing with the feckless Robert Ryan or self-sacrificing motherhood with the used milk bottle? Well this is Hollywood, 1952, and when Robert Ryan says to Stanwyck: “You feel guilty? That’s the way they want you to feel, the world, all the people who don’t have the guts to do do what they want to do,” and then Paul Douglas yells at them — “What are you animals?” — the end is nigh. So Stanwyck understands finally that what she has with Ryan is only “a trick to avoid the responsibility of loving someone,” it’s “love because we’re lonely, love cause we’re frightened, love because we’re bored.” Well nobody talks like this; not even me when I’m with my most philosophical and romantic female friends. No, no, no, this is platitudes, and generalizations, and noble thoughts in grandiose language. So how did Shakespeare get away with it? First of all he was a better poet, but secondly, his characters were not always saying what was on their minds — often we don’t know what’s on their minds, and they are saying precisely the opposite — or, more importantly, Shakespeare’s characters are distinctly unreliable moralists. When Cleopatra praises the dead Antony, audiences at the time would have viewed her as an old whore praising an old sissy she had unmanned by divesting him of his armour; and on top of that her vision of him is most likely deranged: “Think you there was or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of? / Gentle madam, no.” Shakespeare offers us an enfeebled fantasy by a temptress of ill-repute— Clifford Odets gives us ‘the truth.’ The choice offered by Clash by Night is between self-sacrifice and lust. Come on, every high school girl has faced the choice between the bad boy with the dreamy eyes and the chest hairs peeking through the zipper of his leather jacket, and the dowdy nice guy with the paunch. More power to you if you like paunches, or actually fall in love with them. More power to you if duty is not a sacrifice, if raising a kid is actually your ultimate pleasure. But not all of us face the false dichotomy between duty and self sacrifice — nor should we. What I’m speaking of here is hypocrisy, and it drives me crazy, it just makes be bananas. How can I get this across to you? Of course you should wash your friggin’ hands and not blow your germs in somebody’s face, but the fantastically — mind-numbingly, redolent dilemma set before us is as concocted as Stanwyck’s choice between Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan. If only —for one thing — people were either good or evil — but thank God they are not. And if only we knew what good was, that is if only we knew anything about this bloody disease called COVID-19 that now rules our every waking moment, and our dreams, most of all our nightmares. And they’re telling us on TV there’s a new strain? More infectious? Practically everyone’s getting it? And it’s less lethal? But who says so? And what about ‘COVID Parties’ where crazy immoral teenagers try and get it?’ And there’s some handsome young medic in a clip they show over and over on CNN saying 'Today I had a horrible choice, two sick young people came into the emergency —I had to decide which one would live and which one would die!’ Who were they? When? And how do we know you didn’t just make this up to get on TV? Well Clifford Odets wrote a silly play — just as moralistic playwrights have been writing silly plays since the early 1700s, making up this lubricous crap, demanding we fawn over it, and we do. Don’t lie, soon you’ll be begging to sit six feet apart from somebody, in a live theatre, all to watch some masked actor talk about how badly they have been treated because they are ‘trans’ or whatever the fashionable pain is today. Do you think my plays were about the horrors inflicted on gay men? My plays were about how horrible gay men are, and how horrible people are, and if they weren’t then they were bad plays. But the computer you are probably reading this on (if you are reading it) is the drug Aldous Huxley warned us of in Brave New World. It was created to steal your money, and your brain, and your will to live — but most of all your will to think — it is such a magnificent metaphysical manipulator of mellifluous magic that you need no more make any decisions, just be enraptured by the tantalizing, twinkling truth it displays in HD. Because if you are listening at all to that tortured young intern on the news it isn't because of what he has to say— it’s because-- if you’re a girl -- you wanted to kiss his eminently kissable lips, and --if you'r boy -- you wanted to BE him. And if you’re me (sorry, Sigmund) it’s both.
