7.6.09: GILDA

GILDA (Columbia, 1946)

dir. Charles Vidor; starring Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready

Full disclosure: Gilda is my fourth favorite movie of all time, and my favorite noir. I'm going to cop out a little here and just use something I wrote about Gilda a few years back, since after re-watching it, I think it's still true. Before I do that, however, a quick note on something I thought about a little bit on previous viewings but really hit me this time:

This movie is full of audience surrogates. You have Uncle Pio, the lower-class bathroom attendant who watches and comments on anything. He categorizes, criticizes, editorializes. He always talks about how, to him “comes all the gossip,” and frequently and vocally enjoys watching the unfolding drama. He tells us that “the worm's-eye view is so often the true one,” and we do get the sense that he sees the drama in the way that only an audience member can, privy to every scummy detail. You also have the police detective, Obregon, who appears less often than Pio, but often says similar things about watching, enjoying the drama. It struck me odd to have two surrogates in this way, to have two characters who are not only external to the noir entanglements of the narrative, but actively observe and comment on them.

Even stranger is the ending, when these audience connections are corrupted, broken, betrayed. Pio suddenly sees Johnny Farrow, the conniving and manipulating protagonist, as a gentleman and a hero, rather than as the peasant Pio has called him throughout the film. Obregon appears as a deus ex machina, tying up all troubling loose ends and actively encouraging the heroes towards a happy ending. But we cannot truly see this as representing the audience's mind, can we? There is no way the audience can actually make the switch Pio does, suddenly believing in Johnny. There is no way we can actually, truly want a happy ending for the lovers as Obregon does, not if we understand what they are really like. The movie has constantly shown that anyone who claims to be “no past, all future” is lying, and yet our audience surrogate is telling the lovers that they can escape the past and live free. What are we to make of this?

Ultimately, this further cements my reactions to the ending of this film. Either it is brilliantly ironic and subversive, painting up a happy ending when, in fact, we are meant to see all these red flags telling us that it is a lie, a lie, and there is no joy here; or it is genuinely meant to be a happy ending, and represents one of the most disingenuous, simpering concession to Hollywood unreality in the entire noir canon. I cannot tell. I hope it is the first, but I cannot tell.

In order to really unpack why the ending is so troubling, I'll segue into my old writing to explain how Gilda gets where she is at the end. Essentially, Gilda is my favorite noir woman, hands down. She talks the talk, which in noir, is literally equivalent to walking the walk. Her mastery of noir tropes and style allows her to dominate the men in this male-dominated genre, causing permanent tension and instability as long as she exists in her natural state. The only way the movie can end the way is does is by subtly, subversively, and terrifying destroying everything that gives her real power:

As Gilda opens, the dominance of males over their surroundings is impossible to deny or ignore. The opening shot pans up to Johnny, pauses, and then pans further up to reveal that he is surrounded by men. Soon after, Ballin appears and saves his life. In the alleyway conversation that follows, there is immediately an understanding between the two of them. When Johnny claims that his assailant wouldn’t have killed him if Johnny had given him the money, Ballin replies, “But you wouldn’t have given him the money” (3:20). They have just met, but their status as men allows them a certain insight into what the other is thinking, an insight that allows the two of them to converse in double entendres and unsaid implications. Their talk of illegal casinos and making one’s own luck is indicative of noir discourse, in which the information transmitted is hidden between words rather than in them. The two of them smoke Ballin’s cigarettes lit by Johnny’s match, and a partnership is formed. At the casino itself, women coexist with men, but the attitude towards women in general is made explicitly clear by Uncle Pio when he informs that a woman in the crowd is “a harpy” (5:00). The woman is walking away from Johnny and remains faceless, allowing Pio’s condemnation to become universal. However, the male-female dynamic is solidified when Johnny agrees to work for Ballin, telling Ballin that he’ll be “faithful and obedient” (12:22). In direct response to this, Ballin asks if there is any woman in his life, claiming that “gambling and women do not mix” (12:36). However, the implicit meaning of this is that women do not only compromise gambling but also the faithfulness and obedience of men towards other men.

However, despite Ballin’s insistence to Johnny that there be no women to interfere with their relationship, it is Ballin who soon afterwards brings Gilda into the picture. In Gilda’s first scene, she is undeniably a threat to Johnny, only willing to approach him with a lit cigarette in hand. As Ballin and Johnny speak to each other, the camera frames Gilda for a moment as her false smile fades and she slowly breathes smoke in Johnny’s direction. From this moment onwards, Gilda is coded as a capable player in the world of noir, both in her mastery over the noir trope of cigarettes and the ability to switch between public and private emotions in an instant. This latter ability is one of the main elements of Gilda’s personality that makes her dangerous to Johnny, as he later refers to Ballin’s sword-cane as a woman “because it looks like one thing and then right in front of your eyes it becomes another thing” (25:50). Although Ballin takes this as a sign of instability, Gilda’s ability to manipulate the way she appears to the world gives her strength. This strength is seen in her very first scene, when for nearly two straight minutes, Johnny and Gilda do not break eye contact, even when Ballin walks directly in front of them. Although Gilda is cloaked in sexuality and femininity, her strength matches that of Johnny.

She proceeds to challenge Johnny’s masculinity, telling Ballin to tell Johnny to come to dinner, which even Ballin can see is less of a request and more an order. Finally, she refers to Johnny as “the hired help” (18:45), the comment that finally forces Johnny to break away from her gaze. Later on, Gilda calls Johnny both “beautiful” (24:56) and “very pretty in your nightgown” (50:50). During the casino’s carnival party, Johnny’s power over the arrangements is nothing compared to Gilda, as Pio explains that it is her party, “all the way. She has changes the decorations, she has changed the orchestra, it isn’t too much to think that she will change…” (58:09), implying that she will change Johnny, forcing the male image to be shaped by the female will rather than vice versa. Throughout the film, Gilda’s comments about his social status pains him even more than when Uncle Pio calls him a peasant, since Gilda’s comments are more than just petty insults; they threaten to overwhelm his masculinity by asserting feminine power over his world.

Over the course of the film’s first half, Gilda is a true femme fatale, displaying a number of traits that she shares with typical male noir heroes. These traits are what allow her to maintain a degree of control over her own fate, since by understanding the rules of noir, she can exploit the world of noir. Most notable is her outward disdain for love and marriage, as she dances and stays out all night with other men while telling Ballin she loves him, maintaining her ability to switch personas as it suits her. When Johnny intercepts one of her dates, he tells Gilda that she must tell Ballin that she went a picture show by herself that night. Gilda, fully immersed in noir vocabulary at this point, glibly replies, “Really? Would you like to know whether I enjoyed it?” (47:00) Far from intimidated by Johnny, she makes use of the same double entendres and implications as Johnny and Ballin. Her mastery over language allows her to keep her thoughts hidden, better than even Johnny can, as she replies to his comparison between her and Ballin’s laundry by telling him that his “thought associations are very revealing” (47:48). Also, before the party, she reformulates Maria’s explanation of carnival, saying “In other words, make hay while the sun shines” (61:18). Maria calls attention to her phraseology, calling it a “strange language” (61:22), but the moment also recalls an earlier scene between Johnny and Ballin, in which the two men repeat the phrase, “In other words, you’ve/I’ve changed the subject” (24:43). Gilda also knows how to change words, and like the other men in the picture, Gilda is able to pick up the meaning hiding between words.

Versed in noir language and conventions, Gilda poses a significant enough threat that the other men all recognize the danger she poses. Even the police officer, who theoretically qualifies as the main antagonist in the conspiracy/anti-trust plot, agrees that “women can be extremely annoying” (27:41). Ballin, when informing Johnny of his plot for world domination, asks Johnny, “You are on my side, Johnny?” (44:10) When Johnny confirms his loyalty, Ballin replied, “And Gilda?... Women are funny little creatures, Johnny” (44:13). Johnny keeps telling himself that his hatred for Gilda is in the defense of Ballin, and that “all his plans, all his dreams of greatness would be wrecked because of what she was doing to him… I had to get rid of her, for him” (72:27). However, Gilda’s analysis of his laundry simile reveals to the audience that his hatred is due to the way she makes him feel. His attraction to her makes him disloyal to Ballin, which makes him hate himself as well as Gilda. He hates Gilda because of the danger she poses to male unity. What allows Gilda to keep her strength despite the collective suspicion of men is her total awareness of the hate directed towards her. She even invites the hatred upon herself, toasting herself as the woman of Johnny’s past and saying “let’s hate her” (26:10) and even “disaster to the wench” (31:54). Her repeated performances of “Put the Blame on Mame” support this ironic invitation of hatred. Perhaps the reason that she is able to handle the hate directed towards her is because of the hatred she herself feels for Johnny, telling him that “I hate you so much, I would destroy myself to take you down with me” (53:10). This self-destructive impulse that Gilda displays by inviting hate while simultaneously wallowing in it only serves to make her more typical of noir protagonists.

If a large part of Gilda’s power lies in her knowledge of noir language and attitude, it is only fitting that the threat she poses to men diminishes when she indulges in romantic language and attitude. When she and Johnny dance at the carnival, she tells him “as long as I have my arms around you, I have to keep talking, or I might forget to dance, Johnny” (64:21). As the dance continues, she very clearly tries to seduce him, and Johnny begins to relent, despite his hatred for her. Her romantic language makes her more appealing to him as it maintains her femininity without reminding him of her strength. However, when she return to the language of double entendres, telling him that she “could help [Johnny] get in practice again… dancing, I mean” (65:06), Johnny pushes her away, repulsed. However, after Ballin’s departure, Gilda’s romantic side takes full control of her persona. As a result, she loses her knowledge of noir mentality, and when Johnny asks her what kind of a guy she thinks he is, she replies, “I don’t think anyone really knows that but me, Johnny. Not even you” (79:02), an assessment quickly proved to be completely wrong. Because she has abandoned her hate, she also abandons all the qualities that made her a femme fatale, including her resistance to the hatred of men and her ability to know what men are thinking. Even Johnny recognizes that “she didn’t know then what was happening to her. She didn’t know then that what she heard was the door closing on her own cage” (80:24). Johnny removes her agency by making her a literal prisoner to him and a figurative prisoner to Ballin’s memory.

In Gilda’s broken state, her domestication strips her of the power she once held. Contrary to her opening scene, when she approached Johnny with a cigarette lit by her own hand, Johnny stands still with a lighter, forcing her to come to him so he can light it. Moreover, Johnny will not even give her the dignity of being told outright that she is a prisoner, but forces her to “swallow her pride” (82:47) and come to Johnny for an explanation, a moral victory for Johnny that he calls “wonderful” (82:51). Even when she tries to escape Johnny, “Put the Blame on Mame” is replaced with another musical number about love, and she meets another man. Predictably, this romantic escape is an impotent failure, and Johnny’s lawyer tells her that “wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tied to [Johnny]” (90:27). She is shocked when the lawyer betrays her to Johnny, as her romantic persona cannot understand that men are loyal to men first, even if it means betraying a woman. In fact, it is this loyalty between men that provides Johnny with a justification for his treatment of her, as he wants Gilda to repent for hurting not just him, but Ballin and all the other anonymous men she has hurt. She is imprisoned for the crime of breaking men’s hearts, and Johnny is there to uphold justice for all his fellow wronged males.

This dismal state seems ill-suited to a happy ending, but the final scene of the film includes a number of moments that prepare the film for such an ending by erasing Gilda’s previous power, thus making her deserving of happiness. In the end, the police officer pursuing Johnny admits the irrelevance of his own plotline, telling Johnny, “you didn’t hear a word of it, did you? All you could think about what the way Gilda looked at you when you struck her” (98:17). He later assured Johnny that “Gilda didn’t do any of those things you’ve been losing sleep over… It was just an act” (100:13). This retroactively claims that Gilda’s romantic side was always her true one. Gilda herself seems to rewrite history, telling Johnny “no one has to apologize, because we were both such stinkers” (102:28), when, at least in the events of the film itself, Johnny has clearly treated her much worse she has him. The film seems to openly acknowledge these odd reversals when Uncle Pio insistently refers to Johnny as “the gentleman I always said he was” (104:53). With Johnny and Gilda’s sin seemingly erased, they walk off arm in arm, and if Pio’s claim that “all bad things end up lonely” (101:30) is true, then Gilda cannot be bad in the film’s eyes. However, the Gilda of the first half of the film could never have deserved this happiness. Despite the film’s apparent sympathy for her misery under Johnny’s subjugation, it nevertheless makes the claim that only the domesticated, romantic Gilda can be allowed happiness by the men around her.