When a Woman Ascends the Stairs/What's wrong with
Harriet Craig? What is her trip?
Harriet Craig (1950) is a melodrama starring Joan
Crawford in the title role. Harriet is a woman who
leaves a
successful (unnamed) career to enjoy domestic
bliss with electrical engineer Walter Craig in circumstances of postwar,
high-bourgeois, proto-Eisenhoverian plenitude. She's
one of those women who is going to “have
it all”--but in her own special way, regardless of an outward appearance
of strict adherence to convention. Harriet will fail. She has a tragic--or
at least pathetic--flaw. Obsessed to the point of mania with household
management and, by extension, controlling other people’s lives, Harriet
destroys her seemingly perfect life.
The camp account of Joan Crawford contains the above narrative with almost
alarming ease. As we all know from Faye Dunaway's portrayal of Joan
in "Mommie Dearest" (1981), Joan Crawford was a lunatic of cleanliness
who battered her children to pulps in the pursuit of her deranged needs.
This is the Joan
of No-Wire-Hangers-Ever. But with metaleptic irony, the film implies that
perhaps Christina Crawford simply watched all of her mother’s old
movies and made up her story out of that.
Disregarding the obvious camp value of the movie, I found myself taking
Harriet's
dilemmas seriously. She, the villainess, I empathized with, intensely.
The other
characters were with few exceptions just mulch. Walter (Wendell Corey),
the moronically good-guy, wronged husband of Harriet, is the worst. Nevertheless,
I felt an unease with respect to my feelings about Harriet? Why is she
like
that, I asked myself? Am I like that? Harriet Craig offers to some the
thrill of a sudden and disquieting identification.
Harriet does terrible things, to her servants, her family, and especially
her husband. But Harriet's actions are secondary to her affect, a tyrannous
miasma of punctilio and order. She enforces an ethic of hostility toward
ordinary expressions of warmth. A neighboring widow's gift of a
basket of the first roses of summer is dismissed by Harriet as the stratagem
of a conniving woman
determined to introduce this floral virus into the Craig house. She's
a paranoid, but not a passive paranoid, cowering in the shadows while waiting
for the worst to come.
She takes action. Was it not a commonplace of the youth of the sixties
to assert that paranoia is simply heightened awareness? One discovers
the most unlikely
affiliations. There's a certain radicalism sunken inside Harriet--an
opaque refusal.
Just as much as Harriet Craig is a movie about marriage and individual
psychopathology, it is also profoundly one about interior decoration. The
art direction cannot
be faulted. The decor of the house is itself a major character, evincing
its own craziness. Certain vistas and objets are haunted. The chatelaine
has no
doubt substantially remade the Craig family manse--oh, retaining many fine
old pieces, of course, but enriching it with examples of her own taste.
I imagine that Harriet is largely responsible for the
orientalia, given the fetishistic value she invests in the Ming vase filled
with rice, the vase that according to legend Chinese wives filled with
rice from their wedding feasts as magical protection for their homes. Or
the Tang
horsemen rewired as lamps. Lavish draperies, lacquered screens. I am also
very curious about the art in the Craig household: a Marie Laurencin of
a girl with
a mandolin, and one of the very most saccharine of Renoir's little-girl
paintings. Laurencin's innocent girl recurs in several scenes: staring
out of the picture, she's a mute witness to domesticity as terror.
Harriet is a pure example of the divided self. She wants something, she
can achieve it, and yet through some deformation of her character she
is compelled
to annihilate it. Maybe she secretly hates it all anyway. Fassbinder, in
his essay on Douglas Sirk, writes: "As a viewer I'm with Douglas
Sirk on the trail of human despair. In Written on the Wind everything
good and 'normal' and 'beautiful' is
always very disgusting, and everything evil, weak, and confused makes you
feel sympathy." Could something similar be at work in Harriet Craig?
The movie's peripeteia discloses the sources of Harriet's madness,
and predictably childhood trauma is at the root: She walks in on a philandering
father with liquor on his breath and a cheap vulgar blond in his lap. He
abandons Harriet and her mother to a life of drudgery and desperate struggle.
"We almost starved." (This is, by the way, the standard Joan
Crawford narrative in fiction and in life: an unshakable drive to claw
herself out
of poverty
and anonymity; the drive to find herself ensconced on Flamingo Road.) The
almost comically obtuse husband sees his wife clearly for the first time:
"I believe what you say about your father, and I feel sorry for you.
You hated
your father and you hate me. You hate and distrust everybody. You're
at war with the whole world."
Our last close-up image of Joan shows a shaken (a few tears dampen her
face) yet resilient Harriet. She straightens her back and ascends the
grand staircase
which has loomed throughout the movie as a presiding symbol: a fanfare
of wealth and grandeur, obviously, but also a spiral of futility. The
futility
of love
and trust and real estate and paintings. She climbs the stairs accompanied
by her lengthening shadow. What happens to her when she reaches the head
of the stairs? She’s got the house. A pyrrhic victory? This could
furnish material for another story, another movie.
©1998 David Rimanelli |
