"Wings"

I want to praise “Wings'', the silent war movie that was released in 1927 and won the very first Oscar award for best picture, not because the movie offers hidden depths despite what popular culture offers as fluff and evasions, rewarding audiences a faux tragedy when it is really a melodrama, nor because the movie can be “unmasked” so as to reveal how a popular product has been concocted to “fool” its audience so that the audience feels pleased with itself so that it had a few laughs and a few smiles without getting into anything but an illusion of love and war, a way to pass the time while eating the popcorn, “Wings'', all in all, a childish “art”.  Rather, “Wings'' is genuine at being what it is: a set of straightforward feelings of sexual attraction, male friendship, the dangers and ironies of war, and a final reconciliation, so that this is the way life is lived however much the rough spots have been smoothed out, and so worth calling “art” even if it is less falutin’ enough to think it more closely akin to vaudeville than to the great tragedians-- except that Shakespeare was, in fact, quite adept at tugging heartstrings and having an audience hiss the villians. “Wings” has scenes and images and plot lines that move the audience and remain with them and make them the better for having done so. The movie accomplishes simplicity, which is no mean feat, given the turgid and muddied plots seen in any number of novels and movies where things take a long time getting started and are left in their lumpiness, as is the case with the Oscar nominees found in this present year, including “Nomadland'', which is about losers glorified by the actors and screenplay, or “Manx”, which tries and fails to be like Orsen Welles. 

There are any number of memorable moments in silent war movies. “The Big Parade”, in 1926, in that brief epoch of great movie making before sound made silent films obsolete, however much Charlie Chaplin tried to buck the trend, included scenes such as the tapping feet whose music made young men enlist, and the shots of truck lines moving to the front in preparation for the big battle, and the poignant movement whereby the hero, his foot hobbling, slowly comes across the hill to the French woman to whom he is returning, and, of course, the Odessa steps whereby the baby carriage hurdles downwards in “Potemkin”. “Wings” has some of these visuals. There are airplanes just seen in silhouette before the young volunteers first go into flight training. There are the Gotha bombers, gigantic with their three man crews and their stairways between levels. There is the shooting down of observation balloons. More than enough of the spectacular.

Most of all are the faces or, to paraphrase Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard'': the silent actors didn’t need words; they had faces. There is, in “Wings'', the stoical father in his wheelchair, his difficulty never explained but just part of getting old. There is a cameo of the young Gary Cooper, already, as many critics have said, already destined to stardom, his already laconic face chiseled, his character already present as intelligent and a bit bemused. And most of all, the appeal of Clara Bow, rivalled in the silent only by Mary Pickford and Louise Brooks, who can change expression in a moment, and tell a story in her expressions from love to resignation to renewed interest, from joy to anxiety to sorrow and back again without needing words. She steals the show from the two male heroes. She is the young girl whose nextdoor neighbor prefers his speedster to her charms; she is the confident ambulance driver at the front, all laced up in military boots that make her sexy; she is the glamourous Paris damsel who her boyfriend is too drunk to know is his next door neighbor. She ties together the battle scenes, even as dramatic and visual as these were, audiences still not familiar with skies of clouds and overcoming and seeing great distance, as well as dogfights conducted in three dimensions rather than the two dimensions employed by silent movies about roadways.

The movie has a double climax, one of love and one of war. The ambulance driver is in Paris and wants to warn her boyfriend he still doesn’t see her as romantic that the big push is on and all soldiers are to join their units, though MP’s are sure to cover the party makers. He is drunk and flirting with some woman and Clara Bow dons her party rags so as to get him to go back to his air base. There is a nice image of champagne bubbles to emerge first with one woman and then another so as to show which one of the two have more sex appeal. The erstwhile girlfriend drags his aviator to a hotel room where the MP’s do arrive but take the two as an assignation and so she will be returned to the homefront in disgrace because the ambulance corps will not allow such things, while he goes on to join his flying corps for the big battle scene. The good girl is disgraced even if the cover is that the two were never consummate, so as not to discredit the lead female character. Even silent movies thought women were treated by an unfair double standard. 

There are a few pivotal lines offered in the few and non-taxing titles within the flow of the action and the play of faces. Cradling his friend who is dying, he says that friendship is deep. And after returning home to his childhood female friend whom he now loves, the transition so short that you might think there would be some tension from the two moving from buddies to lovers, though, thankfully, there is no tension, he does say that he had a thing in Paris and doesn’t even know who it was, not knowing it is her, and she says that she too has been to war and so there is no need to forgive anything, she to keep her lifelong secret that she was her boyfriend and soon to be husband’s lover, women keeping secrets so as to tidy up a man’s history. Ever is the woman. The sordidness of wartime lust is lightly handled. The last scene of the movie shows the two kissing. The trajectory of the two stories finish their arcs. The two rivals and then their friendship has one kill the other inadvertently and even the gold star mother says that it is an accident, an event of war, rather than malice, which is the message of war, that bad things happen, though the movie does not show death as very bloody, not even having blood come out of their mouths when one pilot is shot by a combatant, and love is like a shooting star, which is the name of his speedster and his plane in combat, the two finally meant to be happily ever after, just as a moviegoer would think that the two would wind up together from the first shots of the two that were seen early on in the movie. Finis.

The sense of the movie is not superficial even if the movie is arranged so that it will have its clear plot arcs and the movie also provides relief from the tension of warfare by shifting once in a while to a comedy concerning romance. Moreover, the moral points are clear and the characters poignant; they are straightforward enough so that the audience can read them clearly and so are superior to the characters on the screen because of their own acumen about, for example, who really are meant to wed, even if the audience is inferior to the actors , they having superior good looks and are provided dialogue that is taut and penetrating. That is just what movie goers want from the kind of entertainment: engaging and vicarious and morally lifting so that only through noting the persistence of these images and themes does an audience come to appreciate how deeply a movie has taken hold. That got so deep, this interaction between audience and movie, the audience morally uplifted and aesthetically satisfied, that Louis B. Mayer thought that MGM had gotten the American people through the Depression and the War, which he had, a fellow major mojo along with FDR, Ike and Admiral Nimitz, (the one who ran the Pacific Fleet). Filmdom had also done that during the Twenties when the silents relived the First World War so as to encompass it, to make that war into history.

By the time of “Wings”, during, let us say, in the five years before the talkies, there was an efflorescence of great silents such as  Keaton’s “The General”, Lang’s “Metropolis”, Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush”, and Gance’s “Napoleon''. Americans had become well incurred to their movie going habits. Families came once a week or more to see entertainments in their movie palaces. Old and young people and people of various social classes all went to the movies, including the Harvard philosopher/historian Harry Wolfson who took time off from Spinoza and went to see the movies so as to appease his personal loneliness. The only comparison at the time was baseball, also appreciated by people of all ages and social classes, in that professional as opposed to college football was not important until after the Fifties. What joined this common experience, people talking on Monday around the water cooler about what they had seen on Philco Playhouse dramas on live broadcasts the night before, was the commonality of content in that melodrama was the genre that prevailed. From the Twenties through the Eighty there were comedies and there were melodramas, but very few attempts at tragedy, except that Lawrence Olivier did a number of Shakespeare films, and Orsen Welles had adapted Shakespeare. The classic and well known and also popular movies were all melodramas. That included “Gone With the Wind'', Casablanca”, “The Best Years of Our Lives”, Bette Davis movies (a subgenre all her own), and the Godfather movies. They were tragic because they were sad rather than because they were existential. Michael Corleone having twisted himself from a young man who had escaped the mob only to be drawn into it because of the attempted assassination of his father and then the new godfather becomes overwrought about everything he had had to do now that he was part of it, that  including killing his own brother because of his brother had betrayed him. But while Macbeth is heightened in his stature as a demonic force while he goes ever more deeply into blood, Michael becomes pathetic in his evil, filling out his suits with the obedience of others as he diminishes as a character, a man not of reason nor even of vengeance, but simply fruitlessness in that he drives away a wife and is left with a sister who cares for him even though he had killed her husband. Lurid and sad, overwhelmed by having not quite made the jump ahead of the upwardly mobile Italians and so become a Senator rather than a manipulator of Senators. Less than tragic circumstances in that the doings have to do with changes in family loyalty and the change in ambitions through the generations, but most of us nevertheless more real than Lear storming about what it all means.

Since then, in this century, people have gone into their cultural silos rather than just their political silos. Partly, there is streaming, and so there is no need to go to the weekly movie house. But mostly it is by the development of subgenres as the subject matters and treatments that are different from the classic previous movies about families dispersed or sustained that were the basis of melodrama. Even “The Terminator” was about trying to assemble and protect a Holy Family, with Linda Hamilton as a Mary impregnated by a man from the future. Instead there are horror movies, i caped superpower heroes, and other what in phonographs were called specialty items, such as the movie “Nomadland”, which glorifies losers. I don’t know how to deal with my or our need for family except by rereading Jane Austen. 

The melodramatic point of view, what with its highly inflected emotions and simple morals, perhaps best exemplified by most of Charles Dickens, is not limited to war and romance (neither of which are not of great interest in Dickens). The melodramatic point of view is also the most accurate way of understanding everyday journalism and has the advantage of avoiding attempts to make characters heroic rather than themselves, imagining people as triumphing over events rather than being overcome by events. I notice that commentators this past week try to cast George Floyd as heroic in that he fought against addiction and that he loved his girlfriend and so should have been left to pursue his life in dignity. But Floyd was just pathetic. He was multiply addicted and during a minor crisis had gotten hysterical and exacerbated the situation to the extent that he died in short order. He had deliberately or not passed a counterfeit twenty dollar bill and when confronted by an officer first refused to get out of his car, moaning about possible mistreatment, and when out of the car refused to go back into a police car and was struggling with the officer, a bystander telling him to calm down and he would then get through the ordea. But struggle he did, and Derek Chauvin, whether because he was stupid or had malice or both, treated the encounter as understanding Floyd to bedeterminedly resisting an officer, and so took countermassures which out of spite he continued to persist even though in violation of professional procedure because he regarded Floyd as trying to be a beligerent man throwing his weight around and so Floyd needed to be punished, and so he died, when all Chavin needed to do was to give him a desk appearance while Floyd was thrashing away while still in his car. As the common expression goes these days, then both people, cop and perpetrator, get home safely at the end of the day. These events are sorrowful even if Floyd wound up dead, and Chavin, who may well distrusted or stereotyped black people in the neighborhood, probably deserves to be convicted of second degree murder, in that his intent was to do damage though not necessarily to kill him, but he was clouded by his anger to persist with his illegal hold. This is a sorry business and the context of racism is real, and to be thought either as a peripheral or the central episode of the incident. What is also clear is that melodrama is the prism through which the elements of the event are rightly separated from one another.