Performing Madness in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind

In the 1956 melodrama Written on the Wind, director Douglas Sirk introduces the spectator to a Texan oil family, the Hadleys, matched in their wealth only by their dysfunction. Opening on a sports car speeding through dark, empty roads against a skyline dominated by oil wells and derricks, one by one we meet the main characters as they react to the arrival of Kyle Hadley, the drunk driver of the car. Moving from the bright yellow sports car that overloads the frame, to the husband who drunkenly spills off frame, Sirk’s camera cants at a low angle, causing the Hadley mansion to hover eerily above the spectator: the scene is a surreal combination of vibrant colors and abundant shadows that haunt the filmic frame, in the dramatic gusting wind and leaves that herald the entrance of the alcoholic husband, Kyle, and in the amplified melodramatic codes that set the stage for spousal betrayal. Surrounded by spectating characters who trace Kyle’s path of destruction, Sirk’s swelling soundtrack emphasizes performative spaces dominated by wind and dying leaves, reminding the spectator both on and off-screen that “a faithless lover’s kiss is written on the wind [and] just like the dying leaves our dreams we’ve calmly thrown away.” Cutting from a shot of the dutiful and frightened wife, Lucy, struggling weakly from bed, to her concerned love interest and honorable best friend, Mitch, and Kyle’s sultry, nymphomaniac sister, Marylee, in her nightgown, Sirk balances his key characters in a series of consecutive, fixed framings that build an ominous narrative tension at odds with the melancholic non-diegetic score. A gun fires. A woman falls. Throbbing with a sense of otherness in its emotional excess and artificiality, Sirk sets the stage for a critical examination of the American family and postwar materialism. This stage, I argue, escapes the narrative drive of the film to become something else in its delirium – a performative space that allows the spectator a different type of emotive entrance into the cinematic frame. Rather than a conventional understanding of melodrama as a dialectic of excess, where emotion builds and collapses in a process of catharsis, I contend that melodrama enters into a realm of invisibility through the embodiment of the spectator within performances of violent emotion. These heightened emotive moments of the spectator – both within the screen and in the audience viewing the film – allow for the fleeting visibility of the