D-Day the Sixth of June (1956)
This is a war film for women. Dana Wynter is in love with Robert Taylor (who is wearing too much eye makeup because he is really too old for the part) but she is married to Richard Todd. Both men are on a battleship headed for Dieppe and death. Fortunately Richard Todd is killed, so Dana can now be with with the man she loves. “You’ll never know how much I love you” is playing behind them (they’ve removed some of Taylor’s eyeliner —because he’s supposed to be sick— and it’s a flattering shot, so he almost looks kissable). But, amazingly, Dana doesn’t tell him her husband is dead. So he goes back to his wife in the USA. It’s all pretty heartbreaking, but that’s war, which is a lot better than COVID-19 —because, as couldn’t possibly be more clear than in movies like this — war gives people permission for infidelity. Someone muses: “What are we going to do when the whistle blows, and the war’s over, and we all have to go home to our own husbands and our own wives?” Dana Wynter’s peerless, martyred nobility means she must sacrifice her one true love in order to save her own true love’s marriage. This redeems her. What about me? Well I don’t understand how men can be brave, how they can run up a hill with guns cocked and literally hurl themselves into the face of death. I stayed home for the Vietnam War. True, some thought it was a worthless cause. But what about Hitler? Neil Manly (yes that was his name) punched me when I was eight years old; I didn’t fight back then and I haven’t fought back since. You should stop reading this now, because it’s just a depressing spiral of self castigation. By any masculine standard I am as useless as tits on a bull; actually I am the dictionary definition actually of that very thing. All that might possibly redeem me is that now and then I try and write something that I hope might divert you; but how often do I actually succeed? Okay, here are the facts. A man should be able to make children with a woman.and defend from harm the family he has created. I am not capable of either of those things. So out of my worthlessness I try and create a tower of words and fantasy of something better. Something better? More valuable? More beautiful? The truth is, I wouldn’t be alive to masturbate in my own aesheticism if men hadn’t acted like men — and defended us from the pure evil that was Hitler. So how do I climb out of the catastrophe that is my own selfish, inappropriate, femininity? I know, I could say that war is evil and created by men who want too much to be men and it’s phallic worship and I’m feminine and the opposite of all that. But let’s face it, I’m no Dana Wynter. In my drag photographs I look like a halfback in a dress. No one is ‘fooled.’ And what about when the good and the innocent must be protected from blatant savage violence and I am simply nowhere to be found? If this whole COVID-19 is a battle then maybe I really am a coward in the face of it, because I’m simply too frightened to stay at home and face my own thoughts. Maybe I’d want to stay home if I was a normal man who had impregnated a woman. But there are no children to dangle on my knee and show-off to others in Facebook videos. So instead I whine and try and convince everyone that COVID-19 is a fake when in reality all I’m really doing is defending my own cowardice, which is the direct result of my own perversion. I’m actually an evil man. Dana Wynter asks: “Are we really sinners by just by being lovers?” And Robert Taylor says: “You’re probably the most beautiful sinner in the whole wide war.” and she says — “And you’re the most exciting.” But evil is not exciting, and sinners are not beautiful. That’s cheap movie romance and all of my life I’ve fallen for what is again, in fact, not harmless treacle or even bilious bilge but instead a penultimate and putrefying propaganda, pickled in blood. And there is such a thing as the truth, and the truth is I am a useless piece of you-know-what. I should have died when I was born. Instead my lonely, alcoholic mother mistakenly nurtured me to excess, and waited breathlessly for my every precious word, and inculcated in me the bizarre notion that I am special. And as I get older and older it becomes clearer and clearer too everyone else and now me that I am nothing more than a garrulous gasbag obsessed only with endless self-agrandizement. I don’t deserve to live, so I should by rights — at the very least — just shut up. Dana Wynter is walking between two very long buildings that are makeshift army hospitals. She has very brown hair and very pale white skin. Her name is spelled Wynter, not Winter. She’s thinking about the little holy place she will always have in her heart for Robert Taylor. And as long as nobody knows about it, and as long as she is a good wife, she can think about him in the depth of night, whenever she wants. So when she wakes up in terror, and suddenly remembers there is such a thing as death, all she has to do is remember when she said to Robert Taylor ‘I have a fire in my room’ — which didn’t mean her room actually was on fire, but then, in a way, it did. I have a place to go, and it’s called my imagination, and even though I tell you a lot, I don’t tell you everything. And in that imaginary place I am Dana Wynter and it’s alright for me to be who I am. It’s that expression on her face when she is waiting for Robert Taylor, and she reaches for the window in those white pajamas, wide-eyed, expectant, simply wishing to believe that everything is for the best.
