Fred Camper wrote:

>
> >Who wrote the line you quote?
>
> I made it up, sort of as a self-parody that's probably closer to what I
> think than I'd like to admit.. Sorry to make all this so public; I'm
> working on something on Minnelli.

When we had our long correspondance about Sirk c. 1997 you were
reluctant to speak of discursive content...

> >There's a certain type of critic who finds "profound" and
> >"anti-bourgeois" to be indistinguishable.
> >
> >
> True, but that doesn't mean that a great film can't also be
> "anti-bourgeois,"

Sure, a great film can be anti-bourgeois. Balzac was anti-bourgeois,
but the term had a precise sense then and he went to great trouble to be
precise in his aims. Such has seldom been the case during the last half
century.

> just because the description has been much over-used.
> (I would love to see a paper, especially an academic paper, that praised
> the aesthetic beauties of a great Hollywood film while also showing how
> it is "pro-bourgeois.")

I did write a long paper about Sirk (which you read) which praised his
aesthetic beauties and argued that he was frequently "pro-bourgeois"
(albeit not that term), e.g., Has Anybody Seen My Gal.

> I do think it's unmistakable that Sirk was
> making some sort of commentary on American materialism.

How many filmmakers can you name who have not done so? How many French
or Italian or German or Spanish or British filmmakers have not made some
sort of commentary on their national materialsm?

> And not that
> what an artist thinks he is doing necessarily proves anything, but I
> Sirk did think he was offering some sort of commentary on people he felt
> a certain critical distance from.

How many filmmakers anywhere can you cite who have not made some sort of
commentary on their characters and felt a critical distance? (How can
they NOT feel a critical distance?)

> Confirming when I spoke with him that
> he had used 50s interior decorating magazines as a source, he said, with
> what I took to be a certain amused detachment, "I knew these people"
> (emphasis on "knew"). The definitive scene here (though about something
> a little bit richer than "bourgeois") is the entrance to the the hotel
> suite Kyle has provided in "Written on the Wind." You can argue that
> that isn't such a key scene, that the film is really "about" something
> else (though I probably would not agree), but I don't see how one can
> deny that that scene, visually as well as in the narrative, comments on
> some aspect of American materialism.

We agree the hotel is total barf. We agree characters confuse
materiality and happiness. But why is this specifically American?
(Doesn't Sirk make similar distanced comments on his characters in his
films set in Germany, Australia, Russia, France, Italy and ancient
Rome?) And the materialist character here in fact is not bourgeois,
he's a billionaire. And the woman who rejects his materialism is in
fact bourgeois (and also American). So the scene can be equally read as
a rejection of American materialism by the American bourgeoisie.

> Indeed, it's pretty acidic: the
> close-up of Lucy handling a purse resonates phallic-ly across the film
> with Kyle's feelings of his own sexual inadequacy: he substitutes for
> the power he thinks he lacks by "throwing my money at you."

True. But this doesn't mean that Sirk is anti-bourgeois or
anti-American. If you want a director who REALLY goes after
specifically American culture with an ax, there's John Ford. Sirk, it
seems to me, finds infinitely more to praise and admire (with distance!)
in American middleclass culture than he finds to despise or lament. Not
so Ford.