Prompting mostly lukewarm, but some ‘vicious’ reviews (Taylor 1992: 16), Always proved modestly successful, with grosses of $43 million domestic and $77.1 million worldwide against a $29.5 million budget (Freer 2001: 181, 189). The first of Spielberg’s five-movie package for Universal under new president Tom Pollock, who as Lucas’s lawyer had brokered the Raiders of the Lost Ark profits agreement, Always gained coverage for being apparently disowned by its director and cast. (Most snubbed its London Royal Command Performance, although this may have been more Hollywood politics than commentary on the film.) Perhaps the frenetic cartoonish elements, along with fetishised old military aircraft, prompted strategic distance from a comparative failure that superficially recalled 1941 as well as Empire of the Sun’s disappointing performance and uncomfortable reception. Unlike the notorious earlier comedy, Always is generally written off as Spielberg’s forgotten film (Freer 2001: 190).
Reviewers repeatedly caricatured Spielberg as Peter Pan, inept at dramatising adult themes or emotions. ‘Most critics cringed at fey whimsy’, and at least three British broadsheets likened Always to a marshmallow (Skimpole 1990: 9). Others succumbed to temptation, prompted by a scene in a sun-drenched wheat field, to proffer puns typified by the Sunday Telegraph headline: ‘Hepburn Up to Her Knees in Corn’ (Tookey 1990: 28; Baxter 1996: 351).
Undoubtedly this loose remake of A Guy Named Joe which had preoccupied Spielberg for years (Fleming’s 1943 original appears on TV in Poltergeist), presented inherent difficulties both artistic and commercial. The central problem of ‘letting go’ after a lover’s sudden death and the theme of inheriting responsibility and living up to another’s heroic sacrifice (later Saving Private Ryan’s premise), while integral to the collective experience of wartime, lack contemporary resonance. As Ralph Novak in People expressed it,
A Guy Named Joe responded to a most particular need. Coming in WWII, when young loves were so palpably precarious and the need for comforting illusion so great, it had a ready audience. These were Americans who, if not more naïve than we, were at least more willing to suspend their cynicism. (Quoted in Brode 1995: 190)
Pauline Kael, in the New Yorker, noted an embarrassing sexual awkwardness: ‘Now that Spielberg is no longer twelve hasn’t he realised there is a queasiness in the idea of playing Cupid to the girl you loved and lost, and fixing her up with the next guy?’ (quoted in Freer 2001: 189). More is at stake, however. John Baxter diverges momentarily from pop psychoanalysis of Always as reworking Spielberg’s marital problems and relationship with Holly Hunter, to quote pertinently from James Agee’s reviews of A Guy Named Joe. The issue is what the Hays Code in the 1940s prohibited and what Spielberg, in a more permissive era, glossed over: ‘Pete and the audience are spared what might have happened if [Dorinda] had really got either frozen or tender with [Ted], while Pete looked on.’ Agee compares Fleming’s movie with James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’: for as
the jealousy of a living lover for a dead man made one of Joyce’s finest stories, the emotions a ghost might feel who watched a living man woo and cajole his former mistress seem just as promising to me … but to make such a film – above all at such a time as this – would require extraordinary taste, honesty and courage. (Quoted in Baxter 1996: 353)
Restraint attributed to Spielberg is integral to the narrative. This, I argue below, inadvertently skirts subject matter that psychoanalysis considers latent in all storytelling but which in this instance manifests uncomfortably near the surface.
Unconsciously and for its impressive technique, Always – a typical Spielberg movie in terms of perceived weaknesses as well as pervasive style and themes – is more interesting, complex and sophisticated, but also problematic, than most reviews suggest.
Postmodern pastiche or marketing mongrel
Described by Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland as ‘a thoroughly classical contemporary filmmaker’ (2002: 17), Spielberg in this instance, as elsewhere, throws such terminology into question. On one hand, Variety considered Always ‘the kind of film he would have made if he had been a studio contract director during Hollywood’s golden era’ (Anon. 1989: 22). On the other, in characteristic postmodern fashion, Always’ polysemic signifiers connect across the text, forming transient, synaptic webs of meaning, only some directly supporting the causality, continuity, invisibility and imputed realism of classical conventions. When the New York Times’ Janet Maslin complains, ‘Always is filled with big sentimental moments [but] it lacks the intimacy to make any of this very moving’, she judges according to melodrama expectations while ignoring action-adventure, special effects, fantasy and slapstick. To argue, as Maslin does, that ‘Always is overloaded. There is barely a scene that wouldn’t have worked better with less fanfare’ (quoted in Freer 2001: 189) is, irrespective of whether the movie succeeds, to monologise a multi-accented text.
A Jeep speeding towards a bomber recalls ‘scrambles’ from World War Two movies – except this is not a war movie. It is, however, in part romantic drama, as Maslin recognises. Yet that genre, Steve Neale observes, lacks specific iconography (2000: 16). If, as Neale also writes, ‘genres do not consist solely of films. They consist also of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema and which interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing’ to ‘provide … recognition and understanding’ (2000: 31), it follows that expectations and hypotheses originate elsewhere.
They inform the narrative image in epitexts such as posters and press packs. The production notes’ first sentence tagged Always ‘both a love story and an adventure’. The title logo, uniting posters, press materials and opening credits, comprised elegant calligraphy associated with female genres. The posters, of a couple embracing against a distant conflagration, recalled Gone With the Wind. This interpretive framework compensates for the romance’s lack of iconography, while targeting women and couples and downplaying comedy and aerial adventure. Yet the gentle love story promised by advertising copy – ‘They couldn’t hear him. They couldn’t see him. But he was there when they needed him. Even after he was gone’ – may have caused confusion like Maslin’s and consequent poor word of mouth. For all its bittersweet complications, emotional restraint and tightly controlled direction, Always is excessive, a cineaste’s ebullient celebration of entertainment.
That the production notes sought to specify a genre hybrid indicates perceived difficulties, possibly confirmed by test screenings, in marketing a diverse product. Usually two of three potential attractions – genre, stars and, in some cases, a well-known director – are sufficient and necessary to secure go-ahead. Spielberg’s profile and Hunter, Dreyfuss and John Goodman’s commercial stature, not to mention Audrey Hepburn’s presence, would preclude consideration of genre – unless Spielberg’s reputation had ebbed. Furthermore, Rick Altman (1999) shows, it is small independent companies that conceive and promote movies generically because they have to identify them to distributors; formerly to fit ready-made slots, such as double bills, nowadays presumably to find niche audiences. Big studios, however, hardly used generic terminology: marketing unique, prestigious pictures, they highlighted differences from films of their competitors. The reason simply was major studios owned theatres and could guarantee exhibition. In the post-studio era, the close relationship between industry sectors has changed little. Just as, when double features became common in the 1930s, majors ascribed their own B movies genre labels but refused to apply them to prestige films, so in the New Hollywood it is imitations – consider straight-to-video movies – that are strongly identified generically. Consequently, genre often has been (and is) utilised pejoratively. (Critics dismiss Spielberg as a ‘science fiction’, ‘children’s’, or indeed ‘genre’ filmmaker.) If prestige pictures were ascribed special qualities, genre films represented lower production values and lack of originality. Contrary to received wisdom – that genres help audiences select – it was prestige films, not generically labelled, that attracted audiences. Empirical research in 1997 confirmed that filmgoers continued to use genre negatively: to avoid the kinds of films they dislike (Altman 1999: 113).
Altman compares film with other commodities to show that genre is less significant than often assumed (1999: 113–21). Anybody can compete by meeting demand for products similar to those that already exist. However, challenging brand leaders proves difficult. There are plenty of vacuum flasks, only one Thermos; many vacuum cleaners, only one Hoover. Successful products have exclusive brand names. Some, such as Nescafé, Tampax, Kit-Kat and Coca-Cola are worth more than the entire stocks of the products they denote.
Similarly, any film company can produce a thriller or a musical. But only one enjoys a special relationship with Nicole Kidman’s agent, or has created a popular character such as Freddy Kruger, or owns the rights to a Steven King novel, or knows how to carry out particular processes, such as Industrial Light and Magic, or has a repeatable title such as The Godfather or The Blair Witch Project (1999), or an established studio image, such as Disney, or a product franchise, such as Harry Potter. Or has a contract with Spielberg. These are valuable because nobody else can offer them. They are brands that label subsequent and subsidiary products. Genre becomes important only for imitators trying to cash in. The original texts’ producers avoid emphasising genre because it both narrows the potential audience and eases the way for competition. Thus genrification of Always is anomalous, again suggesting the Spielberg brand temporarily lost favour.
As well as generic affiliations, Always evokes specific 1940s intertexts. A Matter of Life and Death (1946) featured another doomed pilot’s romance with a radio operator, glimpses into the afterworld and ghostly visitations. Pete’s friend Al likens the setting to ‘The war in Europe … It’s England, man. Everything but Glenn Miller.’ He continues with an explicit reference to movies: ‘There ain’t no war here. This is why they don’t make movies called Night Raid to Boise, Idaho or Firemen Strike at Dawn.’ Dialogue remains from A Guy Named Joe, unchanged. Other films from the period involving ghostly intervention include It’s a Wonderful Life (Pete tells Dorinda, ‘You’re gonna have a wonderful life’ after Al observes Ted has ‘got wings’) and Blithe Spirit (1945) (which contains the song ‘Always’).
Part of the excess of Always is the shift from comedy-adventure, when we see Pete’s engine burning after he has extinguished Al’s, to horror as his plane explodes. Ironic excess defines the banality of the Hereafter, comprising Hap, in white cable stitch sweater, in a golden-tinged oasis of grass, leaves and daisies, reminiscent of a knitting-pattern cover. Self-conscious dialogue narration in the same scene betrays Stoppard’s uncredited contribution:
| Hap: |
|
Where was I? |
| Pete: |
|
Time is funny stuff. |
| Hap: |
|
It is. Space has its points too. Anyway, in the five months since you crashed – |
| Pete: |
|
I thought you said it was six months. |
| Hap: |
|
Yes, but that was then. You see, I’m telling you everything in the wrong order. |
Also beyond love story and adventure narrational requirements are anti-realist, cartoon-style touches: the business with oily marks on Al’s face after Pete’s first landing; Looney Tunes voices produced by helium inhalation; a sideways track over Al’s radio, his laden icebox, then up his four-foot drinking straw to bring him into frame; the absurd causal chain from the faulty ‘Follow Me’ truck to Al’s cigar bursting into flame and the would-be fire-fighter, Ted, failing to extinguish with coffee the garbage can he also ignites; the extraordinary detail of trainee pilots bursting into song and dance, complete with red, white and blue umbrellas for the line: ‘You must have showers.’
Red, white and blue dominate throughout, contrasting flames with clear Western skies, connoting life’s warmth and deathly chill. This macro structure repeats fractally in countless details of art direction. Other artistically motivated devices, exceeding narrational or generic requirements, include elliptical cuts bridged by dialogue, imitated from Citizen Kane. An effect is reconstructed from Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940) when, inside Dorinda’s crashing plane, water irrupts through the windshield in one continuous take. Characters, played by film stars, do impressions of film stars – one very badly, yet sufficiently recognisable that the audience shares both Pete and Ted’s incredulity at Dorinda’s inability to identify John Wayne.
Doubly-voiced discourse, such as Dorinda’s advice to Ted over a chicken dinner – ’Anything that flies it’s OK to pick up. Even in a good restaurant’ – in which she inadvertently corroborates Pete’s account of how he first met her, underlines the movie’s insistence on textuality and rewards looking beyond realism. Allusions to other Spielberg films include the Close Encounters theme as Dorinda throttles up before flying to rescue the smokejumpers (having missed Pete’s declaration of love before his fatal mission), repeated at the end as she leaves Pete for a future with Ted. The same scene features the Sugarland Express – airfield emergency vehicles, lights flashing – before Pete’s ghost (played by the same actor as Neary) disappears down the runway towards distant light. This finale recalls the Close Encounters poster and – in Pete renouncing Dorinda for a higher purpose – Casablanca.
Fred Pfeil identifies as postmodern in mainstream movies the chronotope, in Bakhtin’s phrase (1981), of two distinctive settings within the same diegetic timeframe. In Always, Pete occupies space inhabited by living characters, without their knowledge; in other words, the film coincides ‘spaces whose distances from one another are not mappable as distances so much as … measurable in differences of attitude and intensity’ (1993: 124). To stretch the conceit: Spielberg’s typical chronotope, exemplified in Always, consists also of overlapping diegeses invoked by multiple allusions.
Promotion involving genre – and the dual structure of goal-oriented and romance plots, epitomising Hollywood classicism – hardly encourages viewing habits implicit in this reading. Nor, however, beyond formal conventions, does Always relate to realism, even while, like The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun, it exceeds family action-movie expectations accrued to Spielberg’s name. ‘That the film eschews even a nod towards reality in favour of movie patois and emotions may have accounted for its failure to find a really big audience’ (Freer 2001: 191).
The medium is the message
Always begins by announcing, through auto-citation, a mode of address and preferred reception. An almost self-contained gag that conveys little narrative information, it seeks architextually to align expectations with ‘the peculiar in-joke self-reference (or deconstructive logic) of the “New Hollywood”’ (Elsaesser & Buckland 2002: 132); specifically, those appropriate to auteurist reading of a Spielberg movie.
Two anglers relax on a mountain lake. A seaplane descends towards their dinghy. Foreshortening renders the huge plane uncomfortably close. Extreme perspective compresses its propellers alongside the nose. The effect: a face. The engines resemble eyes – fanciful, if such a visage did not grace a robot in Short Circuit (1986) and an alien in *Batteries Not Included (1987): poor E.T. imitations, but Spielberg-produced. Just as Duel’s truck appeared sentient, the menacing plane, prow raised as it takes off again, re-enacts Jaws. Indeed, one of the fishermen, abandoning their boat in panic, is Ted Grossman, whose oarsman in Jaws lost all but his leg to the shark (Freer 2001: 188).
Convoluted allusion and celebrity intertextuality, combined with spectacle and humour (not serious on any level, it contains Chinese boxes of in-jokes from the obvious to the obsessively arcane) forge a postmodern moment that justifies the epithet ‘post-classical’ but at the same time adheres to classical principles. Always exemplifies the point that post-classical Hollywood is better understood not as spectacle’s triumph over narrative (a frequent assertion), but as ‘“excessive classicism”, rather than as a rejection or absence of classicism, or as moments in a classical film when our own theory or methods appear in the film itself, looking us in the face’ (Elsaesser & Buckland 2002: 18). This is particularly true of self-reflexivity. Indistinguishable from narration in that it occupies the same semiotic material, yet identifiable in that its potential effects are describable (from any other camera position the seaplane would be merely a seaplane), style reinforces narrative but in this instance also provides simultaneous commentary.
Immediate transition from clear water and blue sky to a forest fire continues the red, white and blue colour scheme inaugurated by the seaplane’s intrusion. Maintained throughout, until Dorinda clears a path to the river to rescue smokejumpers from flames and Pete relinquishes her in a cool, blue underwater scene, colour imagery underscores Al’s speech to Pete about love: ‘There’s flash fire that flames and burns itself out and leaves nothing. Then there’s the long burning. That’s nature’s burn. When you think it’s out, the forest floor’s still warm to the touch. That’s the kind you and Dorinda got.’
An establishing close-up on a ‘Fire Eaters’ decal motivates camera positions outside the aircraft; an archaic touch (from Only Angels Have Wings (1939), for example) that underlines artificiality but institutes an internal norm that becomes important by inscribing a transparent screen between character and spectator. Pete’s bravery as he denies seeing obscuring smoke contrasts with what is patently visible; an ambivalent positioning and focalisation in which the image’s intermittent obliteration sporadically illuminates the blank screen. Crosscutting to a flaming forest implies co-presence of another World War Two movie, Bambi, just as the airfield resembles a war movie, with Dorinda, off-screen, announcing ‘Cavalry coming up inside four minutes.’ A helicopter takes off and we see Dorinda anxiously holding her desk microphone, the counterpart of June in A Matter of Life and Death as she swivels on her chair into the foreground, an entrance inspired by Citizen Kane.
The entire opening, from birdsong metamorphosing into a fishing reel to a heliumenhanced rendition of ‘The Woody Woodpecker Song’ is unremittingly busy, allusive and jocular. Pete and Dorinda’s wisecracking squabbles, recalling His Girl Friday (1940) and Hepburn/Tracy comedies, accompanied by Al’s cartoon-style boxing commentary, set the pace for the visuals. In the bar, showing Dorinda a stylish time, Pete magically pulls a tablecloth from a laden table. Lanterns backlight the fluttering cloth momentarily, while a minor character projects a shadow figure with his hand: seemingly incidental, yet highly choreographed, detail, reminiscent of Citizen Kane when Susan calls the protagonist/director a magician. A lamp behind Dorinda fixes the metaphor of projected desire as Pete produces his birthday gift.
Projector beams realise Pete’s desire and Dorinda’s fantasy during their endless role-playing, symptomatic of Pete’s inability to express love directly, as when Dorinda orders beer in a champagne glass. They are emphatically evident as she feigns self-mockery, imploring: ‘Tell me you love me. Please, please, please’ – a fact he has acknowledged to Al. The romance’s artifice and fantasy coincide with those of the diegesis, reconfirming Spielberg’s style as focalisation expressing characters’ solipsism. The couple dance silently. Pete observes: ‘It’s too bad we don’t have a song. You know how couples say: “Honey, they’re playing our song”? Why don’t we try that bit, that signalling to the band bit? Hey, it works in the movies. Guys –’ The camera tracks in on the band, who play ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. There could hardly be clearer indication not that life resembles movies but that these characters inhabit one. The trope continues: Al addresses Southern-accented Dorinda as ‘Scarlett’ before literally sweeping her off her feet. Pete, holding towels so that fire-fighters can wash before dancing with Dorinda in her new dress, performs an Italian comedian routine straight out of 1930s musicals. Al gets on down to a hot and funky dance solo. Cut to Pete, white towels thoroughly blackened. A non-diegetic cartoon sound signifying stretching accompanies Dorinda bent backwards in an over-enthusiastic tango. Several of her partners still, comically, wear hard hats and goggles. Such implausibilities construct a montage illustrating Pete’s immature disengagement from social and emotional reality as he looks down from a balcony with a light before him, as though directing or projecting the entire scene. When eventually, for the first time and unheard, Pete shouts his last words on earth, ‘Dorinda, I love you!’, he is seen through a spinning propeller, imposing both a flicker and a whirring projector-like sound.
After Pete’s death, Al joins Dorinda looking out from the control tower. The camera remains outside, emphasising the screen as separation, looking in voyeuristically, as Pete does later. Here there is no visible light beam, although Dorinda’s hair moves, conforming to Spielberg’s solar wind motif, and wind is heard during dissolves to a smoke cloud and a smouldering forest that recalls Al’s comment on her and Pete’s relationship. Pete saunters along, whistling, then sees a stag, reinforcing the Bambi allusion.
Hap produces a sheet to cut Pete’s hair; bizarre, were it not related to Dorinda muttering ‘Haircut!’ in her dreams. Pete’s presence henceforth enunciates not his experience but Dorinda’s fantasy, at once comforting and nightmarish as Bambi’s loss and separation are to a child. Pete, remaining as she remembers him, in her fantasy relinquishes her to Ted, a rationalisation to mitigate guilt about transferring her affections. This explains Hepburn’s casting, whose radiant, backlit image reinforces already heavily marked self-reflexivity that identifies the movie’s textuality with characters’ subjectivity. The moment Hap pulls off the sheet, Pete’s shadow, rear-projected onto it, covers the cut to the cornfield. She, through condensation and transference, partial substitution for another Hepburn (‘Hap/burn’?), personifies cinema, no less – transporting the narratee (Pete and Dorinda interdiegetically, and the spectator) instantly between locations; another cut takes us to the centre of the airfield for the narrative’s continuation. ‘When you get the hang of it [communing with the living] they hear you inside their heads’, Hap tells Pete, ‘as if it were their own thoughts’: apposite description of suture in the classical system.
Cinematic motifs proliferate. Pete continues playing director, sadistically manipulating a happy sweeper into looking into a mirror and occasioning emotional change by suggesting, ‘I think you’re a pretty silly-looking guy.’ The sweeper parallels the spectator’s narcissistic identification with the on-screen image. Just as Dorinda was filmed from outside the control tower, although interior sound continued, so that glass reflections inscribed a screen – a trope reinforced by other characters peering through binoculars at Pete’s hazardous landing, emphasising vision in Spielberg’s trademark composition from The Searchers – and just as Pete removed his glasses to watch Dorinda’s dreadful landing, so too the flying school class is behind a window as Ted enters: this screen is followed by another as Pete visits Al’s office, also fully glazed. Pete conflates spectator and director, observing externally yet transcending the screen barrier to enter the scene. Intervening for his own amusement, he (disembodiedly) embodies spectatorship’s fantasised mastery, while an inscribed audience multiplies our position, reinforcing the community on which comedy depends, as students spectate through the screen from the classroom.
Bravura shots, possibly utilising invisible special effects, emphasise textuality for those not trapped in a realist mindset. One sequence begins with a pan from distant planes flying left to right. This continues with a close-up of a boom box carried by a man climbing a mound, whom the camera cranes up to follow. It then meets Al under his parasol as the planes pass behind, in a seemingly unbroken shot. This is a complex variant on Spielberg’s signature crane shot that peers over a ridge to reveal low land beyond. Here Al, with cigar, shades and baseball cap, instructing and correcting the planes by radio from his canvas chair, is explicitly coded as a director. Spielberg must have given identical orders to achieve the shot. But also, continuing to comment on the action while not communicating with the pilots (‘That’s it. Beautiful. Bring that fat bomber in here’), Al parallels an engaged spectator or indeed embodies the director’s expectation of audience reaction. Combined pans and curved tracks coordinate background action and foregrounded reaction, framing spectacle and spectator together. A cut to Pete and Ted in the air, where the windshield frame inscribes an internal screen, emphasises Pete too as director – recall Taxi Driver when Scorsese participates from the back seat – a role Pete alternates with spectatorship, here controlling Ted’s slapstick mayhem. The gag culminates in a characteristic Spielberg metonym, a narrational indirectness learnt from Sergei Eisenstein and David Lean, as we see the boom box and ice box swept over, the parasol and chair abandoned on the horizon.
Light beams penetrating the bar from outside reinforce Rachel’s desiring gaze at Ted as he voices his love. Pete, as director, comments, ‘I think you’re overdoing this’, unaware that Ted is speaking about Dorinda. As Ted looks up, off-screen, his eye-line matches a shot of a flying plane as the sun flares directly into the lens. Al exchanges information with an air traffic controller who turns out to be Dorinda, intently watching a screen in the dark. The next scene, as Al laughs exaggeratedly to encourage her as she impassively watches TV, contrasts the different intensities of cinematic vision and the televisual glance associated with Dorinda’s depression.
A later shot of Dorinda through her plane’s cockpit canopy, the reverse of a crane in on Pete, again inscribes a screen as Pete and Ted fly away. When Ted makes a forced landing, a searchlight’s circular glass, from which the camera tracks out and around, artistically frames his plane. Ted follows a light as hanging objects swing in the foreground, signifying, as in Close Encounters and E.T., a strange presence, associated with ‘solar wind’. As he edges into a darkened hangar, the light flickers, accompanied by a projector-like sound and what resembles a turning reel (actually a wind-powered vent). Light beams illuminate a Howard Hughes-like eccentric. (Resemblance to a visionary associated with film and aviation, about whom Spielberg had long been developing a screenplay, eventually Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004), hardly seems accidental.) This shaman – or indeed, medium – can hear Pete’s words. These he echoes as Pete speaks out loud to Hap and then, consciously through the old man, to Ted. This instances a recurrent Spielberg motif, interpretation. The medium, however, repeats selectively so that Pete inadvertently persuades Ted to return for Dorinda. The situation recalls an editing exercise demonstrated in Lianna (1983), in which writer-director John Sayles played a film professor who illustrates, using words, how selection and reordering can reverse meaning.
Cinema from the outset carried supernatural connotations. It mysteriously captured appearance, creating a perfect double yet eerily lacking the vitality of sound and colour, and in darkness summoned forth images luminescent and translucent. A reviewer at the Lumières’ first screening was impressed less by motion or realism than the thought that ‘death will cease to be absolute; it will be possible to see our nearest alive again long after they have gone’ (in Christie 1994: 111). This is not unlike the comforting function of 1940s ghost movies alluded to in Always. It is also the reverse of Pete’s situation: he sees Dorinda, and expresses through actions love he never communicated in words, after he has gone. Yet ability to impart ‘a kind of presence and immediacy to the world unparalleled elsewhere, and undreamt of before the cinema was “invented”’ (Elsaesser & Buckland 2002: 1), is, like Pete’s comforting presence as guarantor of Dorinda’s ultimate happiness, predicated upon absence, central paradox of ‘The Imaginary Signifier’.
On Ted’s return, initially represented by Rachel looking off-screen yearningly – Spielberg’s recurrent Searchers allusion – Pete approaches Dorinda’s door, filmed from inside; the shot refocuses, causing a hitherto invisible fly screen to break the image into pixels, bridging the cut to the interior (now filmed from outside) so that Pete penetrates both the diegetic screen and the metaphorically signified movie screen. Voyeuristically watching, Pete directs Dorinda, making her brush her hair from her eyes. Seated in the background, reacting to and laughing along with their dialogue, he remains as a spectator throughout her meeting with Ted.
When Ted impresses Dorinda by resuscitating the school bus driver (a confla-tion of scenes in Duel and Empire of the Sun) the swerving bus first appears through the wide-screen windshield of their land cruiser. The driver joins Pete, spectator from outside, continuing the trope of death as a screen separating a diegetic from an extradiegetic state. At dinner, Dorinda notes how Ted plucks his eyebrow as Pete used to. Pete, internally framed as if through a screen, does the same, emphasising character/spectator empathy. Light from behind Dorinda bathes Ted as she falls for his charms.
As smokejumpers seek rescue helmet-lights represent inscribed projectors. Ted’s illuminated plane on the runway later becomes Dorinda’s object of desire as she purposefully approaches, with light behind her. Pete, light behind him, watches. Separate windshields frame them as Pete enters the cockpit, trying to convince her of her inadequacy. She repeatedly pushes her hair back – signifier of better vision – as he instructed earlier. Pete (like Spielberg on Duel) now directs from the back seat. Helmet-lights probe up towards the plane. After crashing into the lake Dorinda decides to drown, but Pete takes her hand, reminiscent of the E.T. poster and anticipating that for Schindler’s List, returning her upwards along a light beam, to life.
‘Girl clothes!’
The ‘Fire Eaters’ emblem makes the anachronism of Always immediately apparent: a sexist 1940s comic-book vision of a scantily-clad, leggy redhead. Gender becomes an issue from the outset. Dorinda begins as typically female: grounded, subservient, worrying and complaining while her man enjoys daring adventures. She one-handedly knots a spoon, indicating unreleased frustration – but also enormous strength. Always dramatises Dorinda’s struggle to negotiate competing feminine discourses. Its seemingly old-fashioned qualities belie her journey from definition in relation to Pete to fulfilment of autonomous desire.
Pete responds patronisingly and dismissively to her concern for his safety: ‘I love you in the kitchen, baby. You know that.’ While she is determined to ‘show him’ by putting him through similar anxieties – action contingent upon confidence that he loves her – his reaction, while confirming that love, remains self-centred, ignorantly or wilfully indifferent to her. He relishes directorial control in extravagantly hiring Ted to deliver a birthday message, yet mistakes the date.
Camerawork several times effects a somewhat odd (and technically elaborate) transference from aircraft to Dorinda as object of visual desire, as in the opening sequence when a pan with a plane on the runway continues, following Dorinda inside the control tower. Later, after Pete’s emergency landing, she strides purposefully towards him in a lateral tracking shot past several aircraft. This transference, embodying adolescent ambivalence that parallels Pete’s attitudes and vision, recalls similar obsessions in Empire of the Sun. The dialogue emphasises it when the airfield commander warns Pete against irresponsibility:
Pete: C’mon, Nils. You know women.
Nils: I meant your plane.
Dorinda rejects Pete’s birthday present and both emit raucous cartoon laughter as she mocks his unreconstructed sexism. Yet after he jettisons the box across the room, where the white garments tumble out, glittering in the projection beam of his desire, she looks over her shoulder and gasps, before advancing along the light beam to embrace them. Pete watches adoringly, though a low-angle shot imparts menacing power to his gaze, and as part of an inscribed audience. To his triumphant observation, ‘So you do like dresses’, she replies: ‘It’s not the dress, it’s the way you see me.’ She is flattered to be more than a pal. Yet he offers a pre-existent image, independent of any personal identity, that she can don to fulfil his desire. ‘Nobody dances with this dress’, she says later, effectively subsuming herself in the masquerade, ‘until they’ve washed their hands’, and is almost knocked over in the bathroom stampede. In a slower, less manic movie, this subjugation of female identity to projected masculine desire might more evidently recall dark undercurrents in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
In a shot/reverse-shot series that constructs Pete’s point-of-view, the camera follows Dorinda upstairs, only for Al to enter the frame in close-up and displace the emphasis back to boyish matters with World War Two quips. Heavily underlined by camera movement, no fewer than seven reaction shots of an astounded Pete, Al and assorted fire-fighters herald Dorinda’s return. She remains off-screen or fragmented into close-ups of her extremities, before the crowd parts like theatrical curtains, revealing her alluring splendour in a skin-tight, diaphanous, sequined dress, with one bare and one long-sleeved arm and shoulder. This cinematic fetishism, as theorised by Laura Mulvey (1981), compounds at least five looks: the camera’s, the spectator’s, the inscribed audience’s, Pete’s and Dorinda’s, who has internalised his gaze. Although Dorinda complains, ‘You never laugh at my jokes’ (unlike Karl the barman), stressing the sadism in Pete’s attitude, she returns his gaze and his banter as they begin dancing. The intense visual pleasure expresses genuine desire, but is redefined quickly as another game in their protracted courtship.
In her cottage, Dorinda, wearing a pyjama top that recalls the dress, broaches becoming a tanker pilot like Pete. When he paternalistically denies permission, she delivers her ultimatum: retire to run a flying school or they are finished. Her mythical woman’s intuition insists, ‘Pete, your number’s up’, just as her later observation of her cat’s uncharacteristic acceptance of Ted aligns her with instinct and superstition. Pete’s response expresses arrogant, patriarchal assumptions in an intensely performed and finely balanced scene that articulates female discourse:
Pete: I think you should be at the funeral. Y’know, crying and looking terrific. Before you enter the nunnery.
Dorinda: I’ve got better things to do and better men to do them with.
Pete: Why don’t you forget about those other men, Dorinda? You’re never gonna be with another man
Dorinda: I will too and he’ll be tall.
Pete: No, no, Dorinda.
Dorinda: What makes you think so?
Pete: Because you won’t get over me.
Dorinda: I love you, Pete, but I’m not enjoying it.
After explaining her feelings, Dorinda wins the argument, effecting reconciliation. Subsequent events provide a metadiscourse to confirm her version, even though Pete’s agency plays some part.
Superficially, Pete’s patriarchal control continues from beyond the grave, paralleling other female-oriented movies made around the same time: Ghost (1990), Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991) and Titanic. He tells the grieving Dorinda, as if granting consent: ‘You’re gonna go to bed happy, you’re gonna wake up laughing, meet people, have fun. You’re gonna have everything. Including love.’ But the film’s gender relations are ambivalent, not least in linking consummation of desire and acceptance of an adult relationship to Pete’s death. As this immediately follows Dorinda’s acceptance of his idealised image of her, one might recall Mulvey’s observation that ‘the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox’ (1981: 209).
When Ted inadvertently plays ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ after kissing Dorinda (not having heard Pete’s jealous warning), Dorinda dismisses him gently. She dons the dress to dance alone to ‘their’ song. Unknown to her, Pete joins in. There can be no physical contact while, desiring a former state of unity, he subjects her to his gaze. Intriguingly, in the earlier dance, the chief smokejumper tells Dorinda, ‘Hey, you look like an angel.’ In this context – an overwhelmingly male private flying operation distanced from mainstream American society – the reference to Only Angels Have Wings is unmistakable, and pertinent to the Mulvey passage on the female protagonist’s subjugation (1981: 211), quoted earlier in discussing Temple of Doom.
Although that process is broadly pastiched over their last evening, Pete now, like Metz’s spectator condemned to watch from elsewhere, cannot possess Dorinda. Pete might be watching a film, ‘a hermetically-sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy’ (Mulvey 1981: 207). He is invisible in the next shot; this, while restoring the scene to Dorinda, simultaneously – as Mulvey describes – sutures the spectator into the absent position and makes Dorinda the fetishised object (1981: 214). At the end of the song, however, she blows out her candle – exorcising him (a notion supported by her cat being called Linda Blair!). When, later, Pete confesses, ‘I [unlike Ted] never laughed at your jokes but you were always very funny’, a dissolve returns Pete to Hap’s oasis, where it emerges that Hap had sent him back to say goodbye to Dorinda, thus freeing him. That Dorinda, although sleeping, finally hears the words she awaited, strengthens the impression that Dorinda is enunciating.
This possibility surely redeems Brad Johnson’s widely criticised performance as Ted, who, according to Variety, ‘comes off as the male equivalent of a dumb blond with a great figure’ (1989: 22). Dorinda, after all, describes him as ‘all twisted steel and sex appeal’ – hardly a rejection, more in fact a comparison with Pete, even if it denies immediate attraction. While reversing the gaze is limited in progressive terms, because it leaves the structure intact, it does contain the earlier patriarchal discourse within Dorinda’s.
Towards the end Dorinda occupies a conventionally masculine role, taking Ted’s plane to effect a heroic, potentially suicidal rescue, even if, along the way, Pete – now perhaps little more than a guilty conscience ready for release – tries to convince her she is ‘not good enough’. Eventually she hears him say: ‘There’s the rest of your life, Dorinda. I want you to go to them. I’m releasing you.’ If this is Dorinda’s enunciation, reliving the trauma of Pete’s accident completes exorcism of his defining discourse from her construction of self. If it is Pete’s enunciation, remember that, while he has guided her, it is through her skill and determination she survives – unlike him, whose masculine adventure proved fatal.
Harvey Roy Greenberg employs statistical content analysis to contrast Spielberg’s alleged sexism with real fire-fighting, in which over a quarter of smokejumpers were female (1991: 170, fn.7). This bias, despite detailed advice from official agencies during the movie’s production, is explicable, however, in narrative rather than personal terms. As Mulvey observes, some masculine texts, especially westerns, eschew marriage to the ‘princess’ – assimilation into the Symbolic – for ‘nostalgic celebration of phallic, narcissistic omnipotence’ (1990: 28). Always resolves its romance strand, centred on female experience and therefore requiring only one female protagonist, by forming Dorinda and Ted as a couple. Yet the action strand, characterised by masculine ‘play and phantasy’, denies the ‘Oedipal trajectory’ of narrative (ibid.) that would require a female object of desire. Hence the symptomatic displacements between woman and aircraft and critical and popular dissatisfaction with a film that avoids the two strands’ usual interdependence.
Always subverts Hollywood’s ‘Oedipal trajectory’ by transposing Pete as ‘father’ (older man, Dorinda’s first ‘possessor’ and, as ghost, Ted’s mentor) and Ted as the bigger, stronger male who, ‘possessing’ Dorinda, makes Pete jealous. Pete’s acceptance of castration assimilates him into the Symbolic, expressed as binary oppositions: his eventual relegation to the realm of the dead restores equilibrium. Ted as John Wayne – underlined by physical stature, slow, loping movement and social awkwardness – recalls films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), which similarly, as Mulvey discusses, tears the heroine between two men. In another of Mulvey’s examples, Duel in the Sun (1946), the men represent not a divided hero function but personification of a split heroine, who has to choose between regressive tomboy freedom and a socially viable masquerade as a sexually passive, respectable lady (1990: 32–3). Dorinda, by contrast, remains tomboyish but also plays at domestication (throwing flour around to deceive Ted she has cooked a ready prepared meal) and retains both possibilities in her union with Ted. While this perhaps precludes ‘having fun’ – an expression characterising her relationship with Pete, although Mulvey quotes it in relation to the Stella Dallas (1937) itching-powder scene (1990: 33) – Dorinda is neither, unlike Stella, melodramatically excluded from society nor, unlike Pearl in Duel in the Sun, melodramatically destroyed by an impossible dilemma.
The Montana base’s ‘frontier’ setting, with individualist heroes riding airborne steeds, masculine behavioural codes and canteen as saloon, contrasts with Dorinda’s feminised cottage, surrounded by a tended garden, and the stultifying ‘civilisation’ of a flying school or air traffic control. The masculine Oedipal narrative evoked is thwarted, yet fulfilled vicariously by Dorinda. So too in Always, as in double-hero films Mulvey examines, identification with the heroine dramatises contradictions within ‘the female spectator’s phantasy of masculinisation at cross-purposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes’ (1990: 35). Always, from a director popularly associated with the masculine genres of action and science fiction, is Dorinda’s movie.
Psychoanalysis
In his production notes, Spielberg ‘wanted the story to be somewhat timeless … like it’s set in the 1940s, but, in fact, is set today’. This leaves Always exposed as postmodern whimsy – a re-run Twilight Zone, as Douglas Brode suggests (1995: 189), ‘resolutely ignorant or uncaring about actual history’ (Greenberg 1991: 166). But timelessness also implies archetypal qualities. These condense in the phallic joke of the collapsing windsock as Pete comes in ‘dead stick’, tanks empty. Al blows towards the limp cylinder while Dorinda mutters, ‘Please’: inscribed spectators, wholly involved yet helpless. Ted, incompetently crossing Pete’s flight path, creates turbulence, providing lift, enabling Pete to glide to a perfect touchdown. The sequence invites psychoanalysis of spectator/text relations and narrative conflict centred on Dorinda.
A central light beam illuminates the canteen as Ted’s entry transforms Pete and Dorinda’s relationship into an Oedipal triangle. Along with this narrative trajectory, however, the hermeneutic pulls the spectator into a series of shifting subject positions, involving several perspectives and potential identifications. Pete discovers it is not Dorinda’s birthday. Dorinda realises Pete has remembered it wrongly. Ted looks on, crestfallen, as they kiss and slow dance. Al watches, amused, dunking a chicken leg in his beer.
These perspectives motivate differing tones and emotions. At Pete’s death, it is Al, comic sidekick and detached bystander, whose reaction we see in close-up, his breath occluding the cockpit window, inscribing a screen that is both vision and barrier. At what is thought to be Ted’s farewell shindig, light beams from outside concretise Rachel’s desiring gaze. Light shines from behind Ted as he melancholically reviews his options. Pete laughs manically as he realises he cannot break through to tell Ted about Rachel’s attraction. As Pete recalls first meeting Dorinda, beams project from behind his head. Ted and Pete’s affinity, like secondary identification between spectators and characters, is clear when Pete acknowledges separation from the world by ironically pretending to order a martini while Ted orders root beer, and they simultaneously request an olive. Then Ted looks up, demonstrating this imputed identification through focalisation as he, and we, see Dorinda dancing in a light shaft before a window. As Philip M. Taylor argues, ‘By pointing light directly into his camera lens … Spielberg forces audiences to scrutinise his images more closely and … thereby pull[s] them into the story’ (1992: 29). The camera tracks forward, aligning itself with, and underlining, the characters’ gaze, as both Ted and Pete sit enthralled, lights behind them. As the woman approaches, she turns out to be someone else – a trick accomplished previously in Duel, Jaws, Close Encounters and Empire of the Sun, but no less effective for that, such is the power of identification.
Always – Al as inscribed director and spectator
Pete and Dorinda, alone, appear mutually aware, although in Dorinda’s case this may be projection of Pete’s (and consequently our) desire. However, until Pete demonstrates the love he could never express, by respecting her abilities and finally freeing her – in other words identifying with her – she remains unreachable. Again the rift recalls film’s characteristics as a medium predicated on ‘loss, absence and desire’ (Ellis 2002: 23-4).
This includes loss of self. The spectator accepts an Imaginary subject position: ‘film is like the mirror’, claims Metz. ‘But … there is one thing … never reflected in it: the spectator’s own body’ (1975: 48). Pete, although we see him, is never there when observing Dorinda. ‘The spectator is absent from the screen: … he cannot identify with himself as an object, but only with some objects which are there without him’ (1975: 50): the music on Dorinda’s stereo, the empty space Pete occupies as she dances, actions he believes other characters perform at his bidding (illusory mastery), finally Dorinda herself.
Pete, in the diegesis yet not of it, inhabits ‘a primordial elsewhere, infinitely desirable (=never possessible), on another scene which is that of absence and which nonetheless represents the absent in detail, thus making it very present’ (Metz 1975: 62). Moreover, he possesses an ideal ego in Ted, the bigger, younger, handsome suitor whose experience he shares vicariously. As he does exactly what Pete wishes but is unable to do, in returning for Dorinda, light shafts radiate onto Ted; now confident, he wears a baseball cap and aviator sunglasses, the image of Jim’s fictional hero, Ace, in Empire of the Sun. Ted’s extinguishing practice fires with complete accuracy accomplishes Pete’s identification with him.
‘Deprived’, unlike theatre, ‘of a real or supposed consensus with the other’, according to Metz, ‘cinematic voyeurism, unauthorised scopophilia, is from the outset … in direct line from the primal scene’ (1975: 64). Here Metz invokes Freud’s notion of the child fantasising its origins by imagining parental copulation. If Dorinda is Pete’s lost object, substitute for the Imaginary mother, his vision of her with Ted is a regression through the mirror phase. Metz explores further similarities between spectatorship and voyeurism, in terms accordant with Pete’s position. Spectatorship is typically solitary, in contrast to community in legitimate theatre. The object is unaware of observation. Screen space and auditorium are irreducibly segregated. Like the primal scene – formative fantasy rather than literal memory – ‘film unfolds in [a] simultaneously quite close and definitively inaccessible “elsewhere”’ (ibid.).
Ted successfully challenging Pete follows the Oedipal scenario of Hollywood narratives. Yet Pete’s and, possibly, I have suggested, Dorinda’s, focalisation accesses it, not Ted’s. Moreover, as also suggested, the main characters’ relative size (Pete’s smallness emphasised against Al as well as Ted) and Pete’s jealousy and powerlessness when spying on Dorinda with Ted, counter Pete’s seniority and Ted’s gaucheness. This arguably produces confusion at an unconscious level, compromising the movie’s pleasurability, combined with conscious distaste of the kind Pauline Kael articulated. Multiple identifications enable various interpretations. Yet a film that dramatises Dorinda’s narrative is misrecognised by Pete, and probably actual spectators, as his. Eventually he releases Dorinda and merges with the Imaginary, personified by Hap – but not before, at the height of Dorinda’s exhilaration with Ted, Pete, in close-up, interjects, ‘Don’t forget – you’re still my girl’; a chilling moment, even if he exists only in her thoughts. When, finally, he bestows his blessing – ‘That’s my girl. And that’s my boy’ – he asserts patriarchal authority that the narrative simply contradicts.
Air/craft
Confused and confusing though it may appear structurally, Always remains a technical tour de force. So busy and smoothly accomplished are its details that surface brilliance is easily overlooked. Metz writes, ‘To adopt the outward marks of theoretical discourse is to occupy a strip of territory around the adored film, all that really counts, in order to bar all the roads by which it might be attacked’ (1975: 23). However, my aim here is not necessarily to defend Always but to describe the kind of artefact it is, to understand better how Spielberg’s output fits together.
When Pete opens Dorinda’s fridge, icy blue light saturates him, which, when she wakes, concerned, expresses her dread in a point-of-view shot while she remains lit by her fire’s golden glow – symbolism motivated purely naturalistically. Equally unobtrusive is an earlier transition from the dance sequence that sees Pete and Dorinda walking together between bushes in a scene modelled from It’s a Wonderful Life. Pete moves into the ghostly blue floodlighting that, behind Dorinda in the reverse shot, reinforces the image as her focalisation, her projection, before the film’s first dissolve. This superimposes crackling flames, reminiscent of forest fires already shown, over her close-up: intellectual montage, expressing her premonition, and a simple temporal ellipsis to logs burning in her grate to inaugurate cosy domesticity in which the couple negotiate their future.
Other shots involve astonishing coordination or disguised edits, such as the rapid pan to show Dorinda’s plane landing, which stops on Pete and Al perfectly framed in the foreground. Even more impressive is the extended camera movement in Dorinda’s rented house under the flight path. This follows Al, pacing decisively down the hall to the phone, then stops panning to frame an approaching plane through the window, before tilting upwards and over, combined with a 180-degree roll, to follow the plane passing overhead through a skylight and then catch Al again in a continuation of the same shot, finally resuming its leftward pan to Dorinda in the doorway, more or less where it began. There are, too, extraordinary incidental details. Ted bangs his head on a hatch as he first enters the canteen from the food counter, emphasising both his dumbness and his stature, while Al’s hand enters from behind to steal a drumstick from his plate. A graphic match links Dorinda’s bike wheels to the propellers of Pete’s plane. Dorinda and Ted’s dinner begins with Ted and Pete outside, then leaves Pete as the camera tracks and pans from the door to the kitchen to disclose Pete already standing there.
Whatever its faults or merits as entertainment or ideological mechanism, Always confirms Spielberg as a directors’ director. Its significance lies in claims it makes for itself as a purely cinematic exercise. While remaining mindful of Metz’s warning that ‘discourse about the cinema is too often part of the institution, whereas it should be studying it [and] writings on film become another form of cinema advertising’ (1975: 25), Metz, nevertheless, can provide the last word on the audience the film proposes yet appears to have missed:
As for the fetish itself, in its cinematic manifestations, who could fail to see that it consists fundamentally of the equipment of the cinema (= its ‘technique’), or of the cinema as a whole as equipment and as technique? The cinema fetishist … is enchanted at what the machine is capable of, at the theatre of shadows as such. For the establishment of his full potency for cinematic enjoyment (jouissance) he must think at every moment (and above all simultaneously) of the force of presence the film has and of the absence on which this force is constructed. He must constantly compare the result with the means set to work (and hence pay attention to the technique), for his pleasure lodges in the gap between the two. Of course, this attitude appears most clearly in the ‘connoisseur’, the cinephile, but it also occurs, as a partial component of cinematic pleasure, in those who just go to the cinema. (1975: 72)