Merrily We Go to Hell (1932)

Passed, which makes sense.  But this is a movie about alcoholism, infidelity, and emotional abuse.  There's also an off-camera dead baby.  The movie actually gets quite dark.  Nothing is visual, but the more problematic parts are all through discussion, which makes sense considering that this is a Dorothy Arzner movie.  

DIRECTOR:  Dorothy Arzner

We can thank Andor for my break from writing.  Trust me, I don't mind.  The only thing that it made happen was that I feel like I have to relearn how to ride this bike.  I can't imagine how many words I've written for this blog because my blog entries tend to be way too long.  But I'm excited.  As much as I love having a topical movie like Thunderbolts* at the top of my page, I feel like having something like Merrily We Go to Hell at the top to give this page a sense of gravitas and authenticity.  It's mostly a sense of snobbery, but I've never denied that I'm comprised of a good deal of snob DNA.  

I have two ways to start, so I'm going to have to sacrifice one of my babies.  Let's start with my biggest concern with this movie:  "What the heck is the tone of this film?" (I'd also like to point out that I decided on "heck" instead of "hell" even though the word "Hell" is in the title of the film.) I've seen a lot of movies from this era.  The Great Depression through the '40s loved the notion of the charming, upper class alcoholic.  Heck, he's a staple for the rom coms from this era.  And, to be honest, I often fall for this archetype.  There's something so fun about devil may care attitude that accompanies the rich alcoholic.  Jerry Corbett, on paper, checks every box when it comes to that archetype.  The weird part, in terms of the tone of the film, is that Jerry is much closer to the real world version of an alcoholic.

I mean, it's hard to call Jerry completely realistic.  I mean, there's some over-the-top stuff happening in this.  Arzner is riding a weird line here.  She's calling back to the tried-and-true by giving the character "bits."  Like, Jerry leans on the horn when he kisses the girl.  He's witty and charming when he's drunk.  But this is a picture that is meant to have a bit of a backbone.  It's an air raid siren for all the women who have been taken in by the charming alcoholic.  The weird part is, this movie comes across like a screwball comedy for the first third of the film.  There's tap dancing.  Jerry screams around a crowded club looking for a baritone so that they drunken four can make a barbershop quartet.  When they do get a baritone, Jerry has some witty comments of how the bartender is neither a baritone nor a gentleman.  These are bits!  They're silly bits!  We're meant to ship Jerry and Janet.

But the movie foreshadows that this is all going to go downhill.  Honestly, it's either Dorothy Arzner is the most self-aware director that ever lived and she's writing a satire of the dangers of the Hollywood narrative or she's trying to juggle a lot of things in the air as both a commercial artist and a voice for the oppressed and kind of failing to strike a balance, but I'm afraid it might be the latter.  I want to love this movie so much.  I've always been in the camp that art should say something and that thing should be controversial to some extent or another.  Dorothy Arzner is making a movie about emotional abuse and alcoholism in 1932.  She's the only female director making any kind of dent in the industry and this is a movie that punches hard.  The problem is that she's also trying to be commercially successful with this movie, even though the word hell is in the title. I don't think these things work together.

Okay, let's say that the screwball element of the movie is meta.  There might be some evidence towards this because of the humor kind of falling flat.  Honestly, all the things that happen are funny.  The delivery and editing edges a lot of the humor out of these moments.  It's like we have a team that is really good at drama not understanding why some things aren't funny.  But if there is this meta element, it kind of makes sense.  The same things happen with the jokes on Kevin Can F**k Himself, that is aware of the paradoxical elements of emotional abuse with the screwball comedy.  (Only with Kevin --coincidentally another show with vulgarity in the title --there's no doubt that the very specific tone that they hit is self-aware.)  Now, I think that I could applaud the deconstruction of the comedy into an intense tragedy...

...if the ending didn't exist.  This is a pre-code movie.  For those unaware of the Hollywood code, there was an attempt to self-regulate questionable moral content in film.  Heck, the MPA / MPAA is also self-regulation of content, but the Hollywood code was far stricter. There were rules on what could or could not be done in movies.  Now, Merrily We Go to Hell has the "Passed" certificate at the beginning of the movie.  There was an attempt to release this movie the proper way, in line with the standards of Hollywood.  But pre-code movies technically didn't have to follow the standards.  And the standards that I'm talking about are the role of virtue.  Evil must be punished.  Good must be triumphant.  Now, let's jump back to Arzner's world.  She's writing about a bum of a husband whose been a real heel since the opening shots of the film.  But this is also a world where the sanctity of marriage must be upheld.  The notion that Joan might get out of this toxic relationship is a foreign concept.  

But this movie ends with the most mind-boggling ending ever.  Joan has moved on from Jerry.  She advocated for herself.  Now, you could look at this movie as a criticism of polyamory and that feels like an inherently 21st century read of the moment.  But if I applied the same lens over this film, you have to argue that Joan is being manipulated into accepting polyamory.  This was not her choice.  Instead, old values are forcing her to adapt to a world that is not what she wants.  (Real update:  I am on the struggle bus for writing all day.  This has taken so many hours just to knock this garbage out.  I don't know how much I'll have left in me.) Again, I just accused the reader of putting 21st Century values on the movie and I suppose that I'm doing the same thing myself.  Again, I'm stuck in this weird position of not knowing the intent of the director.  Does Dorothy Arzner want to tell a story of a woman freeing herself from the oppressive selfishness of her husband or is this a story of the importance of fidelity, come Hell or high water?  Because there's a real chance that the studio said that the two had to be together at the end.  

That ending, I'm not going to let go of it.  Because the last line of the movie is Joan taking Jerry back.  That's incredibly frustrating. But really, the whole final five minutes is frustrating because it seems like Joan gains agency when she leaves Jerry, refusing all of his flowers and weak attempts to say "I love you."  But when we find out that it is actually Joan's father who is pushing Jerry out of the picture, that's a very different narrative.  Again, I have to give the movie the credit for being incredibly rebellious for 1932, but making Joan's father the agent of change i the story is heart-breaking.  Part of it comes from the fact that Arzner puts all of these crumbs leading to the end.  Vi regularly warns Joan about the dangers of trying to change someone.  Vi is the morality play that Joan needs to listen to.  Vi married someone who didn't change.  When that marriage fell apart, Vi became this shell of a person, who gets drunk with Jerry and Buck.  Now, Vi at least has the presence of mind to draw an ethical line of what she will or won't do.  She sees that Jerry is toxic and scolds him for his behavior (while, admittedly, enabling him for most of his alcoholic bouts). 

But if I want to give Arzner the points for being explicit with her feelings, Vi also serves as a warning about the dangers of divorce.  As much as Vi's thesis statement is that women can't change men and that marriage won't remove the monster from the husband, her misery might be implied to be from the fact that she is divorced.  The fact that the movie --while not having a happy ending --leaves the viewer optimistic that Jerry and Joan have turned a corner, there's no actual evidence that he has.  After all, Jerry went cold turkey before and the second that he saw Claire, he --with the mildest of pressure from Claire --went on a bender.  The only reason that he really goes after Joan is because she rejected him.  Honestly, much of Jerry's motivation isn't because he loves Joan (although he probably believes that).  I see his motivation as the fact that he got a good scolding and lost one of his few concrete things in this world.  It's less about Joan and what Joan represents.

The reason I say that?  He was overly content about Joan becoming polyamorous.  He was almost happy that she was willing to become a different person because it freed him from any moral responsibility to the fidelity of marriage.  So if he was really in love with Joan and wanted her back, he should have been fighting for her then. But fighting for her only when she physically leaves seems more selfish than anything else.  Had he loved her in the way that he claims, watching her spiral should have been the red flag.  I keep putting the morality of today on this older movie, but I also can't deny that I really want these two separated by the end of the film.

Maybe it's because the movie is so muddy that it doesn't affect me as much as it probably should.  I like morally gray stuff as much as the next person.  And I applaud the darker moments in the story.  But trying to combine all of these disparate elements without a clear and explicit message is troublesome.  Because I don't want to support the message "stay with your abuser".  And a lot of this movie kind of has that vibe.  It's so unfair to the film that I have this response because this was a revolutionary film that just seems backwards by today's standards.