With cold winds rolling in, it’s becoming the perfect time to cover up and watch movies. While there are still many films premiering in the next few months, the weather forces most film enthusiasts like myself to stay inside and pore over our collections. At this period where autumn is slowly turning into winter, I often turn to a film that reflects this transition: Douglas Sirk’s masterpiece All That Heaven Allows. Not only is the film shot in gorgeous Technicolor and filled with impeccable compositions from beginning to end, but the themes on display truly run the gamut in terms of gender, class, individualism versus community, and more. The film’s richness cannot be fully digested in just one viewing, and, in holiday fashion, it’s truly a gift that keeps on giving.
Throughout his career, Sirk showed an intense interest in the different types of love people share with each other and with themselves. This is not to say that the films are without conflict, death, illness, and all manner of different tragedies, but rather that they examine love in spite of those aspects of existence. All That Heaven Allows is no exception: Sirk crafts a film that dissects American perceptions of self, community, class, parenthood, and many more issues. However, at its core, the film is about a woman taking control of her life amidst a period of familial turbulence and strangling societal expectations. While the romance between Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) and Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) is one for the filmic ages and merits many theses, an important reason All That Heaven Allows sustains itself is due to Sirk’s attention to Cary’s relationship with herself.
Prior to delving into Cary’s selfhood, some plot should be established. At the beginning of the film, Cary is someone who is pining for, well, something. She doesn’t seem to recognize what she wants, but she definitely senses a lack. This lack is juxtaposed against Cary’s station as an affluent suburban woman, which reveals the hollowness of her life up to this point, or at the very least a recent shift towards some type of despair. Cary soon meets Ron, a gardener whom she employs, and while Cary’s friends and children accept Ron as a person, they keep him at a distance. He is not a part of their world, and there is disapproval over Cary and Ron’s eventual romance. This is also due in part to Cary being older than Ron, an age gap that Cary’s peers find untoward and inappropriate; there are parameters for Cary’s love being set by everyone but herself. Ron shows Cary a different world, one filled with nature and self-reliance emulating Thoreau, someone whom Ron holds in high esteem. We soon learn that Ron was not always the outdoorsman, but became one in order to reject materialism and modernity. He is pure passion, something lacking in the high society Cary occupies.
One of the more famous scenes in the film involves an item many of us have in our homes: a television set. Cary’s children have purchased the TV in hopes that it will function as a type of mate for their mother. Already we can see a disconnection between parent and children in terms of how they perceive interpersonal relationships. Cary’s son Ned (William Reynolds) and daughter Kay (Gloria Talbott) are both overjoyed with the prospect of their mother having something to occupy her, while Cary is distraught. With this suggestion, Sirk shows that the relationship the children have with their mother does not include Cary as an active participant; rather, she functions in a way to help them see themselves: things are done to and at her, but not with her. This becomes especially evident when one considers that Cary has ended her relationship with Ron ostensibly at the behest of her children shortly before the television is gifted. At this point in the film, we know that there are other factors involved in the dissolution of the romance — societal pressure, class and philosophical differences, the difficulty of letting go of the past — but Cary seems to place her children’s reservations above these other concerns. To pressure their mother to dam up an avenue to her happiness and then abandon her for wealth (Ned) and a romantic relationship (Kay) shows what little consideration the children really have for Cary.
The evidence of this neglect abounds in almost every scene including the children. Prior to this emotional matricide via the boob tube, Ned attempts to fulfill the traditional “man of the house” ideal vacated by his father upon the latter’s death; he’s bossy, knows what’s best for his mother, and is interested in amassing as much capital as possible. Ned interacts with his mother in such a way that reveals Cary’s lack of agency in the home as it has functioned, and her daughter Kay espouses various cookie-cutter feminist ideals at Cary at such a rapid clip that Cary can barely keep up, even though she is undergoing her own awakening in terms of self, sex, and romance. This makes the gift of the television all the more perfect in the children’s eyes, because it is just something else that can and will project onto their mother. The children view the television as a proper source of companionship because they just see two objects. The television will provide a window into the world, as it is often advertised to do, but it’s ultimately fake and mediated. How do her children help her in the real world? How will they, now that they are done with Cary?
This objectification of Cary is already a fantastic move that Sirk employs, but then he takes it a step further in one of the most famous shots of the film: Cary sits, an expression of sadness — one that would obviously indicate her despondence to her children if they gave a damn about her — radiating off of her. Sirk then pushes the camera towards this image reflected in the television screen, framing Cary perfectly so that an image of herself is what is being projected at her. The children, in their sterile attempt at gifting companionship, have provided Cary with a projection of herself that she can actually use; she is not being acted upon, but in dialogue with herself. Ultimately, seeing herself (perhaps for the first time) moves Cary to tears; perhaps this is because of her realization of the above objectification. This moment is truly haunting and quiet in its destruction. Seeing this image of Cary all dressed up with nowhere to go and only the TV for company is then coupled with Kay amending her previous assumptions regarding Cary and Ron’s relationship; interestingly enough, in this same scene Kay seemingly rejects her previous foray into pseudo-feminism as kid stuff contrasting Cary’s eventual evolution. Up until this point, Kay has valued education and rationality over the “feminine” emotions her mother seems to be under the spell of. In other words, until Kay has felt a romantic love, she treats it as lesser and an impediment to her progress as a woman. Perhaps this is Sirk showing that one can have all the logic in the world, but still succumb to love and passion.
Eventually, Cary does exactly what someone with a renewed sense of self would do: she takes control and goes searching for the one person in the entire film who understands her. However, when she reencounters Ron, he has been injured by the natural landscape that he has the utmost love and respect for. The two seem to reconcile at the end of the film as both characters appear to make a home for themselves, but we can’t be sure. This is the strength of Sirk’s film: we are given hope, but can we believe it? Should we?
In an interview conducted late in his life, Douglas Sirk stated that he always trusted his audience to have imagination; moreover, he put forth the idea that “the moment you want to teach your audience, you are making a bad film.” Film, or art writ large, should involve some semblance of disbelief. Leaps of faith should be encouraged rather than overt exposition or didacticism; unfortunately, current films seem to be moving away from ambiguity towards more concretized but ultimately hollow “meanings.” By making a film exploring a lack of connections as much as it dissects those connections themselves, Sirk shows the seemingly limitless possibilities that film as a medium can undertake. The television scene itself is a clear instance of the thesis-antithesis binary collapsing on itself, but the ending really functions to dissolve finality writ large. As such, All That Heaven Allows, and particularly the ending, reminds us to look for our own conclusions and not simply trust what is on the screen at face value despite certain cues that evidence a certain determination. By placing so many intertwining — and sometimes battling — forces on the screen, Sirk sets the stage for a battle of myriad topics: age, class, gender, etc. More importantly, by not giving a clear conclusion, these terms, many of which are often conceptualized only as a part of a binary, are further enhanced and explored as unique things in and of themselves. They burst forth at the seams, revealing new methods of comprehension, new questions to be asked that show there cannot be a thesis-antithesis model for examination; dialectics are needed to suss out what these terms bring to the fore.
