Scarlett And Melanie
Scarlett O’ and Melanie,
presenting the dichotomies
of feminine near-felony
and law, would need lobotomies
to reconcile. If, frankly, dear,
you give a damn, you must decide
to which of them your heart is near,
allowing it to be your guide,
for if you choose them both the wind
will see that you are gone. Life ain’t
like Hollywood. If you have sinned,
don’t try to make out with a saint,
because there always is a clash
when opposites attempt to meet,
and if they do they tend to crash,
since those who cannot change must cheat.
Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of Molly Haskell’s “‘Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind’ Revisited” (“Frankly My Dear: ” NYT, April 24,2009) :
Just as the dichotomy between Scarlett and Melanie, Rhett and Ashley gave the movie a classic bipolar architecture, so Cukor and Fleming became, in Ms. Haskell’s words, the movie’s stylistic “yin and yang”: Cukor providing “the delicate gradations of feeling between lovers and family” while Fleming supplied the movie’s “bold, sweeping movement through time and history.” At the same time, Ms. Haskell observes, the art director William Cameron Menzies endowed the sprawling opus with a visual coherence: “The expressionistic landscapes and character positionings designed by Menzies and his staff keep certain images as touchstones, in the forefront of consciousness — like the horse collapsing on the bridge, the fire in the background, the use of the new moon, ” even as his masterful use of the new process of Technicolor worked to heighten the drama of the story. In the end the real reason this movie with too many cooks miraculously worked, Ms. Haskell says, was “the fire and desperation of three people with strangely overlapping tastes and eccentricities”: “In ‘Gone With the Wind, ’ Mitchell’s only book, every crisis and trauma of her life is transmuted into narrative; Selznick seized the reins and threw himself into the making of the movie like a man possessed; and Leigh, whose casting was less accidental than legend has it, invested Scarlett with something beyond beauty, something altogether uncanny — a demonic energy, a feverishness that would later tip over into illness and pathology.” All three of these people, Ms. Haskell argues, were “possessed of fire-and-ice opposites that they projected into their lives and careers”: “Leigh, the mesmerizing mixture of bawdy sexpot and exquisite doll, echoed the Scarlett-Melanie sides of Margaret Mitchell, flapper turned matron. Mitchell, in turn, was attracted in fiction and in life to male opposites: the blackguard and the saint (she created one of each; she married one of each) .” As for Selznick, Ms. Haskell says, he liked to cast his protégées as “wide-eyed innocents” or “palpitating sexpots, ” who in turn were attracted “to good boy-bad boy opposites.” “The intensely personal energy of this dividedness, the deep-down tension in Mitchell, Selznick and Leigh between vulgarity and refinement, ” she concludes, “is what gives the archetypes in ‘Gone With the Wind’ their extraordinary human resonance, ” and thanks to the way the three of them threw themselves into the project, “that historical ‘costume’ story” never feels remotely past.
4/24/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
Added by Poetry Lover
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