The Empty Nostalgia of ‘The Sound of Music’
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
My tldr: the author Kate Guadagnino describes her changing assessment of TSOM from being obsessed with it to being dismissive of it.
The obsessive stage included being hooked by the songs' earworms and reading a book bio from the actress playing the oldest child. [js2 corrected]
The dismissive stage is noticing that the Nazi depiction is too tame and not historically accurate of all their evils. In other words, she now sees the movie more like critics who derided it including Pauline Kael and Joan Didion.
I think I've captured the essence of her essay but I didn't find it to be interesting. Perhaps other readers who upvoted the story to the front page can tell me if I missed something.
To me, an analogy would be writing about not listening to Prince's song "1999" because she's come to the realize that annihilation from nuclear war is a terrible thing. She saw the photos of Hiroshima victims and was horrified by the layers of burned skin peeling off. Therefore, to write a song that has bouncy major chords with a dance beat about nuclear destruction is "empty". Even though she loved the song as a teenager, she will now bid "farewell to '1999'" and tell us all about it.
Or one could write an essay about no longer visiting the Disney amusement ride, "Pirates of the Carribean" because it trivializes the real violence in the 1500s[1] of slavery and murders (including beheadings).
I think the author wants to convey that switching the perspective about TSOM from the naive innocence of "songs with hooks" to a more enlightened criticism of "inaccurate Nazis" as a maturation.
I disagree and think it's perfectly reasonable for people to continue watching TSOM reruns for the "doe a deer a female deer" and not care that it doesn't try to be a Ken Burns documentary film.
The piece in fact, is more about the author than the film. :-)
Also, the book is by Charmian Carr (Liesl). The lead actress is of course Julie Andrews.
edit: I want to thank you for your tldr. I'd initially only skimmed the article, but your tldr got me to read through it in earnest and I'm glad I did.
In addition to the politics, the author did appear to at least want to comment on art too, how art is made and consumed right now. For whatever reasons, maybe too nervous to try such a thing on the Paris Review Crew readers who know better, beyond a couple "ironically" mild suggestions on passivity and "art being good is not the same thing as art doing good", the author doesn't say much about TSOM or art in this thing.
I kind of feel bad for her (assuming it's a her), she seems to still like/want keep watching this movie "in spite of herself" and the political climate notwithstanding. I guess it's all fun and games, until people you don't like get elected. VonTrapped is right.
There is a whole loathsome, solipsistic genre like this. E.g. novels about wealthy privileged young authors living in Brooklyn struggling to find meaning in their lives, written by---you guessed it---wealthy privileged young authors living in Brooklyn struggling to find meaning in their lives.
The Paris Review is just one of many participants in the proverbial plays-about-playwrights game.
I can believe there are wealthy privileged young authors living in Brooklyn struggling to find meaning in their lives. What's the problem?
Sounds like "The Great Gatsby". Or art in general: isn't the author supposed to write for what they know and from the point they stand, even if they are "wealthy, privileged and young"?
At that point most of the abhorrent things we now know to have been committed by the German regime hadn't actually happened, so I don't see how they could have been bolted onto the film. Or if they were, presumably one should also show the city being bombed by the USAAF in 1945?
To leftist, progressive, and jewish journalists. The general public, and especially the upper classes, concerned with the thread of communism, were much more sympathetic. And much more antisemitic as you say. When Charlie Chaplin wanted to make the Great Dictator, for example, he received numerous threats and indignant messages from within the US.
>What's true is that mainstream sentiment in the US was more sanguine about antiSemitism in 1937 than it is now, or, for that matter, than it would be after Kristallnacht in 1938
Well, even later. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
The America First Committee was a different animal than the German American Bund or the homegrown Fascists, and they were far more powerful. These were Americans from many different backgrounds who shared a desire to end the war with Germany and Japan, but not out of any pacifist streak. The most prominent member to us today would be Colonel Charles Lindbergh, an internationally known figure due to his solo flight from New York to Paris in 1927. Along with Lindbergh, other prominent members of the Committee included: World War I air ace Eddie Rickenbacker, industrialist Henry Ford, Thomas McCarter, the Director of Chase National Bank, Robert Wood, Chairman of Sears Roebuck, Douglas Stuart, a member of the Quaker Oats family and owner of the Fascist publication Scribner's Commentary, and even Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt's socialite daughter and a distant cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. At its peak, the Committee boasted a following of 5 million members. (Higham 1985, 13) They had friends in high places, too; from Senator Wheeler, who supported the America First Committee by selling them a million franks (the free postage given to Congress and Senate members), and from Senator Lundeen, who was later killed in a mysterious plane crash with the FBI man following him. Lundeen had hired George Viereck as a speechwriter; Viereck was later convicted as a Nazi agent. (Hoke 1946, 105, 108)
George Viereck was also linked to the publishers of the Fascist Herald and Scribner's Commentary in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Scribner's published articles by Lindberghs and many other Fascist apologists, and when the FBI raided the Lake Geneva complex, Fascist Ralph Townsend disappeared into Canada, while several German agents were arrested. (Hoke 1946, 158) The future members of the Committee were not detered. In November 1939, Charles Lindbergh wrote the following for the Reader's Digest: "Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; on a strength too great for foreign armies to challenge; on a Western wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German airforce, a French army, an American nation, standing together as guardians of our common heritage, sharing strength, dividing influence...we can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races." (Seldes 1943, 149)
The Reader's Digest, not surprisingly, was owned and published by the pro-Fascist and anti-labor DeWitt Wallace. (Seldes 1943, 175) Among the other right-wing, if not outright pro-Fascist publications were the Chicago Tribune, the Hearst newspapers, the newspapers of Frank Gannett, the Scripps-Howard (later UP) Syndicate, and the Washington Times-Herald. (Seldes 1943, 208) Throughout the 1930s, the Chicago Times offered rewards of $1000 to $5000 to prove that certain items in the Tribune were NOT lies. The rewards were never claimed. President Roosevelt himself denounced William Randolph Hearst, the UP Syndicate and the Chicago Tribune for their support of Hitler. (Seldes 1943, 223-224)
It's hard for you to make the case that the inevitability of war with the Nazis was in the zeitgeist and that America as a whole supported Hitler.
As you point out, all this stuff needs to be understood in the context of the Great Depression, concerns about Communism, and the general acceptability of anti-Semitism at the time.
People don't go into The Sound of Music expecting realism, they are expecting escapism.
I would go a step further and say this is like writing a review of Schindlers List and saying you don't like it because it didn't have any singing and dancing. It is what it is and it's not fair to apply a critique to it that doesn't fit what it is.
I think there's a strong criticism to be made for media-as-escapism in pretty much any sphere, though. Escapism, especially the pervasive escapism available today, is...troubling.
My own opinion: still a great film even while acknowledging this perspective. Mashing it up with The Pianist would not have made it a better film.
I was really confused by what the author was trying to say. TSOM is a family-oriented movie and, while we can all agree that the Nazis were more terrible than the movie presents, I don't think it's fair to criticize the movie for sparing children who might enjoy the musical from the atrocities of war. You're not suddenly more wise or more mature because you recognize the naiveté of the film (meaning the author, not OP). You're just pointing out the obvious decision the filmmakers made to keep the tone of their film.
This is not a living memory. Nazi Germany is.
> Thinking it was a real folk song—and the Austrian national anthem to boot—Reagan famously played ["Edelweiss"] for the Austrian president at a White House state dinner in 1984.
It turns out this is at least a gross exaggeration, as Reagan's remarks at that dinner show:
> Your visit is a celebration of something real, tangible, and enduring: the friendship between the people of Austria and the people of the United States. At one point in "The Sound of Music," the character who plays Baron von Trapp sings a song about the edelweiss, an Austrian flower. And before the song ends, the lyrics become a prayer for Austria itself. It is a prayer Americans join in—"Blossom of snow, may you bloom and grow—and bless your homeland forever." - http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=39575
It's true that the Nazi regime got worse (very) shortly after 1938, but it's not true that Nazi Germany prior to 1938 was only superficially bad. The history of the era suggests that Nazi Germany in 1938 was like North Korea in the 1970s: a functioning murderous fascist dictatorship.
But, as you point out, they were very bad very early -- Roehm and the Sturmabteilung were purged in 1934 (!), and Kristallnacht was late 1938 (while restrictions on Jewish store owners etc. were earlier). "North Korea in the '70s" sounds about right -- I'd underestimated just how quickly things happened with that regime. The mere "no gentleman" phase was probably over before they came to power...
I don't like when people say eg: "Most people didn't know slavery was bad". It reflexively axes all the victims from the category of "people".
The film may clearly have that importance for others, but hasn't played that role for me. Which makes me curious what other art/media are important enough to stand in as a cultural literacy requirement?
Perhaps, "The Matrix"? I've used it as an entry point for real conversations.
The cultural cannon is rather large and you're likely steeped in it whether you realize or not! Pierre Bayard rather humourously explores this in "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" https://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-Read/dp/15969..., to wit:
The important thing behind the cannon isn't that you necessarily have consumed every bit of the media but that you at least know what position it occupies in the culture and your position relative to it - what signals your peers send when they discuss a given piece of art.
The most accessible example of this is watching The Simpsons or Family Guy: most of the time you see them make pop cultural references they're, arguably, pointing to entries in the cannon.
The escapism of TSOM is still apropos, especially during times of conflict. If you believe the world is a hard, cruel, unjust place, why would you only watch movies or read books that feature hardbitten themes and tragedies? Wouldn't you want to take a break and forget and clear your mind for a while? It was the WWII generation's proximity to struggle that made them susceptible to escapism.
> Most likely I will not watch The Sound of Music again for a long time, four or maybe even eight years, and that’s okay.
Ahh, I see, this is about president Trump. It's remarkable how much people will let an election define them and dictate how they will live and entertain themselves. Scratch that, it's not remarkable, it's absolutely crazy.
It has the nazi connotations (Edelweiss being a Germanic name for flower that grows in the German speaking countries --including Germany--, and being modeled after Austrian/German folksongs, the lyric "Bless my homeland forever", the impassionate delivery, etc) and the anti-nazi connotations (from its function in The Sound of Music).
Here's an article examining it in this context: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/ede...
This is so perfectly Trump.
I've only seen it once under considerable protest and after quite a few glasses of wine, but I detested The Sound of Music. If I need "the vague threat of Nazism" and the golden age of something or other, I'll take Casablanca any day.