PART ONE: AN ANTIDOTE

A FEW WEEKS ago, Compact Magazine published an interesting-but-gloomy essay by Matthew Schmitz, “Heteropessimist Horror,” on the state of relations between men and women among the new generation in this country. The sexes are portrayed as moving ever farther apart. Are things truly that bad? Are there solutions?

Reading the article, I thought immediately of a movie sequence I’d posted about here: “Remember the Forgotten Man.” Filmed at the depths of the Great Depression, when many thousands of World War I army veterans were homeless, with no safety net to catch them. The attitude of the women in the sequence, particularly the character played by Joan Blondell, is protective and caring. The lines recited, in tone and mindset, are a universe away from that described in Matthew Schmitz’s essay.

A BETTER EXAMPLE might be the 1946 Academy Award-winning classic film, directed by William Wyler, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” about returning World War II American veterans who’ve been damaged, physically and psychologically, by their war experiences. The crux of the plot is the readjustment and tension between three men and the women in their lives.

Obstacles? You want obstacles? Yet the men and women are on a path toward the inevitable union of souls embodied in marriage. Concerns which Schmitz raises about “economic and social conditions” are addressed, big time– but women finding men they “can look up to” comes down to matters of character, integrity, and humanity more than the amount of money they make, what background they’re from, or what brand of car they drive. Four-plus years of fighting a war for the soul of the planet, and the rationing and hardships that went with it, had given most, if not all, Americans perspective on what truly matters.

Both films are examples of FDR-style populism, which during the Great Depression, and through the Second World War, was the prevailing cultural aesthetic in this country, spur to artists of every variety.

A movie produced at the tail end of the era was “Westward the Women” in 1951. Scenario by Frank Capra, directed by William Wellman, the film is a celebration of the settling of the American West and the role of women in that historic accomplishment. Which makes it, from today’s vantage point, an unusual hybrid of what’s now considered “left’ and “right”; feminist and conservative. 140 mail order brides begin the trek westward in Chicago, though warned that one-out-of-three of them won’t survive the journey. Their goal is marriage. Shocking! The underlying theme is similar to that of “Best Years”: approaching union. In this case, across a couple thousand miles of hyper-arduous territory. By the end, even the misogynist trail boss leading the wagon train is converted, as is his chief antagonist, a former prostitute.

THE HAPPY ENDING

The template for the happy ending, as in so many things, came from Shakespeare, embodied in his play “As You Like It.” Men and women without money– though some are aristocrats in disgrace or disguise (we’re all aristocrats in disguise)– are thrown into a tumultuous, lawless world. By the end of the story mysteries of identity are solved, plot lines resolved, at a wedding ceremony. (Was Jane Austen influenced by Stratford Will? Whaddya think?)

Similar to the Arden Forest setting of the Bard’s play is Sherwood Forest, home to a notorious English outlaw who according to legend robbed from the rich to give to the poor. (A legend which according to all reviews is trashed in a new version of the story.) The best film version of the classic medieval tales is “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” one of the first Technicolor films, made in 1938 and starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland as Robin Hood and Maid Marian. After encountering the requisite cruelty of evildoers, the pair are united at the end, with the blessing of King Richard himself in what has to be one of the greatest of happy endings, given the magnetism of the two leads, of their evident chemistry together, which like a lab experiment explodes off the screen.

Classic happy endings, such as in this movie and the other films mentioned, come after much hardship, and are always tentative: the individuals involved understanding, based on past experience, that more hardship lies ahead. As the Dana Andrews character in “Best Years Of Our Lives” says at the powerful ending of that film, “It may take us years to get anywhere. We’ll have no money, no decent place to live. We’ll have to work, get kicked around. . .” Which expressed the attitude of the entire country after years of hardship: the longest and deepest economic downturn in the nation’s history, followed by the most devastating war the world has ever known. Perhaps because of this attitude, the best years of American history lay directly ahead.

At some point, maybe because life became too easy, and people became jaded, or because the technique was overdone, happy endings fell out of fashion. Became, in fact, scorned. Still, following the adage there’s someone for everybody, this aspect of populist optimism offers a pathway out of society’s dilemmas. A healing alternative to the cultural negativity and madness imposed on us the past so-many decades, and which is so evident now.

After all, what better options are there?

-Karl Wenclas