Dark Victory

            This week our movie is Dark Victory, a famous Bette Davis melodrama from 1939. It’s a Warner Brothers movie, and Warners of all the major studios had the reputation of efficiency and speed—efficiency during the production process and crackling pace on the screen. The fast-moving gangster movies of the early 30s were a Warners specialty, but the quality of brisk plot development and a constant, smooth forward momentum through scenes extended to their other films as well—and you can certainly see it in this movie.

            Of course Dark Victory is far from being a gangster movie. It’s a romantic melodrama, a weepie, what used to be called a women’s picture because it had a female central character, a domestic or romantic plot, and was made primarily for a female audience—actually a majority audience according to the studios’ own research. It was also a Bette Davis vehicle—Bette Davis the studio’s biggest female star, who had just won the Oscar the year before for the movie Jezebel and would be nominated again for her role in this movie—Bette Davis whose whole image was based on strong, slashing emotionalism and whose personality, onscreen and off, was always the furthest thing from the passive glamour that attached to so many of the other stars of the period. Her many admirers used phrases like “searing commitment” and “dramatic truth” to describe her work. Those who weren’t so fond of her talked about her chewing up the scenery and going over the top. But there’s one thing for sure about any Bette Davis performance—you’re sure going to notice it, it’s going to be rather amazing whether you love it or hate it.

            Dark Victory belongs to that very specific subgroup of melodramas whose spectacle is that of a person with a fatal disease. It’s a plot-type that’s firmly rooted in the nineteenth century and that appears persistently in movies of every period—through the box-office monster Love Story twenty years ago and right up to more recent examples like Philadelphia and My Girl. But this story-type goes particularly well with the female melodrama. Women’s pictures so often have subjects involving self-sacrifice, the necessity of women to give up what they really want and to do the right thing. Whether it’s giving up the man of her dreams for his sake or because he’s already married, or sacrificing for her children, or agreeing to be overlooked or stepped on for some higher good, women in these movies are always getting, and taking, the short end of the stick. It’s only logical that this tendency would culminate in a story where the woman effaces herself to the ultimate extent by actually dying.

            The pattern in these narratives is first pathos—extended, painful, tearful pathos—and then uplift and inspiration. The female character with whom women in the audience are meant to identify is intensely sympathetic and deserving, and the brutal injustice of her sad fate is always compensated by the wonderful nobility of her soul, and the sense that those who truly know her (of course including the viewer) understand how really wonderful she is. Nowhere in all of fiction is that perenniel emotion of self-love and self-pity, “they’ll miss me after I’m gone” more openly expressed. The tearfulness, the luxurious emotional indulgence, of these stories, is their essence. But since the price to be paid for such a good cry is the death of the subject, it may seem that the feeling has something masochistic about it.

            Anyway, Bette Davis fought hard to get this role, and delivers one of her meatiest performances in it—and that’s saying something. Her transformation from a hysterically impulsive and independent society girl to a serene and happy housewife under sentence of death is really very memorable, and the final scenes of the movie, which reach all the way to spiritual epiphany, are deservedly famous—though whether you’ll be able to swallow them whole is another question.

[screen movie]

            What is this movie really about? Certainly it’s not about actually getting a fatal disease, especially one with no physical symptoms whatever. No wasting away, no increasing unbearable pain, just ten minutes of darkened vision and then a peaceful end—that’s a little convenient, don’t you think?

            So if Judith Traherne’s fatal disease isn’t really a disease, what is it? Well, clearly what’s wrong with her at the beginning of the movie is that she’s too headstrong and self-indulgent, too independent. Too independent for a woman, that is. Her manifestoes of defiance and autonomy are blazed off like gunfire. “Nobody owns me, nobody controls me, nobody tells me what to do” is her creed, and she emphasizes it with a life of smoking and drinking and sexual freedom and mastery of horses. Her style is aggressive and brazen, and accompanied too by a kind of hysterical insistence. “Hysteria,” well, that’s a good word to describe a condition which is only proper in a woman who’s contravening social conventions to such a degree—and for that matter it’s a good word to describe the whole story, which is trying to do something about that intensely problematic creature, the independent woman.

            To put things rather too simply, what she needs is a man. And not a man like the Ronald Reagan character, who’s just hanging around waiting to be consumed by her at her whim—and also not a man like the Humphrey Bogart character, who would be a kind of impermissable lower-class sexual adventure like something out of D.H. Lawrence. No, a strong, solid, reliable man like the George Brent character Dr Steele, a mature, older authority figure who would know what’s good for her when she didn’t know herself and would take care of her whether she wanted to be taken care of or not. A man to whom she could surrender her hysterical independence as to a benevolent and wise father.

            You notice, incidentally, that Judith’s real father is missing from the story. However much it might admire and find attractive and fascinating Judith’s wild independence, the movie in the end has to say it’s a tormenting curse, and what she needs is a patriarchal male to relieve her of its burdens. And in this process she has to become a little girl again, to be relieved also of her adulthood and her mastery of herself. Or you might say that her dramatic independence is revealed to be an immature outburst like a child’s temper tantrum, and she needs to understand—as in fact she unconsciously wants to understand—that she is only a little girl and she needs to do what her daddy tells her to. All the early scenes between Judith and Steele move in this direction, and they culminate in the hospital scene just before the operation, when Steele sends her to sleep like a child, by calming and cajoling away her fears and getting her to put herself entirely in his hands. That scene is like a death-scene, too, even ending with Steele’s crossing Judith’s hands like those of a corpse after she falls asleep. It previews Judith’s acceptance of her actual death at the end of the movie.

            The disease is a brain-tumour, and a lot of emphasis is placed on this disorder in the brain, in the actual seat of the personality. Well, it’s extremely appropriate, isn’t it, since Judith’s real problem of too-much-independence is a disorder of the personality. “What makes normal healthy cells go berserk and grow wild?”, Steele asks, in effect about Judith’s brain, and he might just as well be asking “What makes a normal healthy woman whom nature intended to be passive and well-integrated go berserk and grow a wild and monstrous freedom and self-sufficiency?” This wildness of hers is a fatal disease, she can’t live with it, she needs to be cured of it. She herself even understands this subliminally, since not only is her personality a schizoid mixture of defiance and uncertainty, but one of her medical symptoms is seeing double.

            But maybe the most interesting thing about Dark Victory is that even though Judith wants to be rid of her distressing adult self-mastery and freedom, and even though she discovers the perfect gentle patriarch to undertake the operation of lobotomizing her problem and becoming her loving husband, the operation is not a success. That is, she can’t be rid of her actual self, that self that refuses to conform to the role society prescribes for women, even though she wants to. Judith Traherne the happy, well-adjusted, serene housewife is finally an impossibility. She’s too good to be true—that is, the solution of making her well-adjusted is too easy and too pat. To look at it from another angle, the movie simply can’t give up the masochistic pleasure of watching her sacrifice herself. All the tearjerking scenes in the film fundamentally rest on the fact that the women in the audience know at some level that they just can’t be given some kind of curative treatment to remove their own troublesome selves and become totally happy and well-adjusted in their social roles. “If only I could be a happy zombie!”—that’s the wish of the movie, and the wish of the probably not-so-happy female viewers of the movie. Fortunately or unfortunately, though, they can’t.