Rabid Dad

Bigger Than Life

Have you ever seen James Mason act? He’s pretty fantastic. He’s forever Humbert to me, so his projection of the platonic poppa was at least a little skewed from the start. Mason is kind of an odd choice for Nicholas Ray’s study of suburban american fatherhood. He’s english after all. Ray makes him every man by setting him far apart from every other man – because, who doesn’t see himself as a man apart? The villain in Bigger than Life is the experimental drug, cortisone. I agree with today’s critics who say the film would age better had its writers replaced cortisone with a fictional drug whose dangerous portrayal in the movie could not be compromised by facts.

NOTE
Actually, “frank psychotic manifestations” can occur through the misuse of cortisone, according to its entry in the Chemistry Hall of Fame. (!)

Whatever you call it, Nicholas Ray’s “cortisone” is the shit, turning the intelligent but un-actualized protagonist into the title character, a man unafraid of his ambition and ability. That sounds great! Besides making a superman of a man barely able to provide for his family, the miracle drug is also the only thing standing between him and a very early death. All the added energy provided by the $2/day pills means more time to tutor and play ball with the boy. It also gives him the guts to buy new dresses for his wife; dresses that make her look more like his babe coworker. If the film were made today, he’d probably go after the coworker directly – or better yet, one of his students. That’s how American Beauty did the re-write at least.

NOTE
There are many hints in American Beauty that its filmmakers are not unfamiliar with Bigger than Life. Cortisone could be seen as a symbolic prop for “fucking incredible mid-life crisis”.  Beauty took a different route to its traumatic ending, less campy, but also less honest to the work as a whole.

The ways that the drug improves the previously likable, modest, admirably normal Dad are seriously a good sell – he is clearly energized, his confidence is tremendous, he has good ideas that he goes after unapologetically. As a (possibly) likeable, modest, admirably normal dad, I can tell you I’d trade those descriptions for the benefits provided by “cortisone” in a heartbeat. But like any good just-say-no after school special, the glorious and beautiful pillbug honeymoon is awfully short-lived.

So, here’s the BIG question with movies like this and many other 50’s american movies I’ve seen – Is Bigger Than Life as prescient and precocious as it seems to today’s audience, or do we see more in it now, from our perspective of “understanding”? I know there are those (mostly religious, I guess) who look back on the 1950s as a time of great innocence – an innocence they’d like to return to-, but to most, the era is seen as a falsely charmed period of shallow tranquility. Smiling mother baking cakes; the Beav dreaming of holding hands with a girl that looks like his smiling mother; and dad always calm, understanding, and authoritative. There’s a feature on this DVD with the author Jonathan Lethem discussing the movie. He makes some really great points that seem evidence to Nicholas Ray’s knowing exactly what he was doing. First, he plants some “subversive” characters: a single middle-aged man and a single middle-aged woman.  These elements could certainly not be used in the same way now, but in 1950s suburban USA, something just ain’t right. Lethem’s observation that Walter Matthau’s character, the gym coach, is gay, seems to me now, though I completely missed it in my viewing, a perfect touch.  Presenting this so subtly means that the audience feels some discomfort, something out of the norm, without getting a definitive sense of why the frame is crooked.  This discomfort, along with some other hints, do make it hard to deny that Ray was after something.

The mother here is smart and strong, and these qualities in her also force one to consider the morality of the times. If she is smart and stong, why does she allow her husband’s irresponsibility – even as it approaches cruelty? She stands up for herself, sure, but she also knows her place, right up to the bizarre climax. This aspect reminded me of The Shining, but here we have an implicit criticism, not really of mother, but of the role that mother is supposed to play.  She is clearly wrong in her passivity, but something is keeping her (as I said, a smart and strong woman) from doing right. The idea of an objectionable (criminal?) patriarchal order is alluded to directly as Mason goes Abrahamic on his family. In the case of Abraham, “God was wrong,” he says. Was god wrong because of an
unwillingness to fully endorse the absolute rule of the father? Maybe, but Ray definitely paints a picture of a neat-looking middle class USA with a very troubled soul.

I know some fools who see a lot of these same types of ahead-of-the-times social criticism in the films of Douglas Sirk. His movies do make statements, but they don’t seem to transcend their time.  Bigger Than Life really does appear to hold the “1950s suburban american dream” with the same cynicism and disbelief most of us do now.  Visually and stylistically it could almost define widescreen, technicolor 50s cinema. This is getting long-winded, I know, but I find a lot to talk about with this movie. I’d never heard of it before its recent DVD release and I’ve only seen the most famous of Nicholas Ray’s other movies, Rebel Without A Cause.  I’ve taken up enough blob space for now.