Movie Review: Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947) I heard about a famous scene in a movie called Possessed with Joan Crawford. I watched it but the scene wasn't there. Strangely, it turns out that there are two films by this title, both starring Crawford, telling different stories. The one I watched is a melodrama/film noir. Crawford plays Louise Howell, a steady nurse in charge of a rich matron whose mind is failing. She croaks under mysterious circumstances and eventually the husband pops the question to the nurse. But her marriage is just a ruse to make an ex-lover jealous. When he doesn't respond as she thought, she starts losing her mind. As the stakes keep getting higher and her step-daughter is drawn into the maelstrom of lust and deceit, Howell spirals down into hallucination and clinical psychosis. This well-crafted film is worth watching for several reasons. The emphasis on Freudian mental health and the panacea of psychiatry is a nifty little time capsule recalling Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). There's a brilliantly campy scene in which Howell, now a semi-catatonic mental patient in a bare cell, narrates her sordid past to two male shrinks who've injected her with sodium pentathol. Then they withdraw to confer, clicking their tongues as they deplore her "classic schizoid symptoms." Thus female desire is pathologized. But make no mistake: Possessed is a dark film that goes beyond revenge and murder to question the integrity of work and even the family in post-war America. In the final act, especially, it becomes clear that Howell is in a race to understand herself and her proper female role before she goes mad. There's an amazing sequence where Howell, claws out, has a blazing row with her step-daughter. The accusations and jealousy keep ramping up, until we seem to see a murder (reminiscent of the death of detective Arbogast in Psycho). The image dissolves and we understand that it was all one of her hallucinations. This device became common enough in films 30 years later, but here it's way ahead of its time. The fact that so much of the descent into madness is set in a beautiful Los Angeles home made me think of David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997). As another example, Bernhardt uses hand-held subjective shots to take us through the dark house. Hand-held shots in a 1940's studio picture! As in Lynch, nothing happens, but it's somehow terrifying to be confronted with the ground zero of domestic life. As a self-conscious "woman's picture" of Hollywood's golden age, this film recalls others such as Mildred Pierce (1945). Again, the Crawford character is headstrong and engagingly bitchy as she overcomes menial work and sexism to marry up—only to face a string of betrayals. In the world of these films, material success seems a little too easy to achieve, but then again the threats of downward mobility, madness and the heroine fooling herself into believing her own female performance are intensified. So the moral calculus works itself out. Highly recommended.

I let a friend of mine talk me into starting my own blog. So far I don't seem to be Luddite-stupid enough to plead that I can't figure out the technology, but I won't rule it out for the future. So here we are. I'm going to start out, on the principle of so-far-out-it's-in, skylarking as a Stalinist apparatchik. But is this anything more than an irrelevant joke, in my trademark dubious taste? What is it that attracts me so much to the propaganda of the past, the more blatant, the better (e.g. my collection of vintage guidance counsellor films)? I suppose it lets us imagine that there were times of greater certainty. Also, pat as it sounds, there are parallels between the intellectual culture of Stalinism and today: elected officials seem more and more interchangeable, castrati with their arias of impotence. The debate is not between ideologies as such but rather a debate about whether ideology should matter at all, since we know all the answers, we've reached the end of history, there's just a little tinkering left to do, etc. However, like any kidnapping carried out as a practical joke, one could take this comparison too far. By "New Socialist Realism," I mean two things: 1) to evoke nostalgia for the officially sanctioned, carefully censored, utilitarian and universally comprehensible culture of post-revolutionary Russia and China. There anyone could get a decent job writing about how production was booming. And 2) to denounce all plagues of formalism, vanity, ass-kissing, obscenity, decadence and elitism. I've recently started a new teaching job: introducing young college students to literature. I tell them to read (doctrinally sound) stories and then I ask them what they think and they giggle. For this they pay me. In the field of indoctrinating our youth, production is booming.

Until next time, comrades.