BILLY WILDER

"I am Scheherazade," Billy Wilder says, defining his own style with typical wit and precision. Survivor, storyteller, trickster, closet romantic, a macho male with a surprisingly androgynous heart--Wilder is one of the most complex, clever, and deceptive of Hollywood auteurs. There is always more going on in his films than at first meets the eye.

Wilder (b. 1906 in Galicia, raised in Vienna) is a passionately political filmmaker but not an ideologue. His films are moral parables, each with a take-home lesson (often directed at himself), but he disdains didacticism as assiduously as he avoids obvious artiness. A consummate craftsman with a strong desire for complete semiotic control, Wilder excells at transforming ready-made commercial material into private statements whose metaphorical implications often subvert the obstensible meanings of his texts. A quintessential Hollywood director, in harness to the big studios throughout much of his career, he likes to work against the grain of traditional genres, introducing light into darkness and darkness into light. Paradoxically, his comedies are often more painful than his tragedies, and his tragedies illuminated by an essential upbeat energy and optimism.

The ur plot of Wilder's films is "Cinderella," as reshaped by the masquerade traditions of the Viennese carnivale (Fasching), a festival of misrule during which normal puritanical values were inverted and scullions made queen-for-a-day. The shape of Wilder's stories is influenced Von Hofmannstahl and Molnar, among others, especially Der Rosenkavalier, in which a boy becomes a man by first pretending to be a woman, and The Guardsman, in which an actor cuckhholds himself by masquerading as a rival lover to his wife. Wilder, like Molnar, uses role-playing to explore the relationship between behavior and emotional knowledge and to argue in favor of a larger, more flexible and androgynous definition of personality.

In Wilder's films there is always a crucial connection between the art of acting and the art of living. Trying on a new set of clothes often involves trying out a new set of feelings as well--as Jerry/Daphne discovers in Some Like It Hot (1959). Over and over again, Wilder's characters are able to move toward a richer emotional life by first acting out that life in cynical pretense. Thus Georges Iscovescu in Hold Back the Dawn (1941), who at first only pretends to love Emmy Brown in order to get an entry visa to the U.S., ends up by falling in love with her for real; in Midnight (1939) Eve Peabody's fake marriage to Tibor Czerny anticipates their real marriage at the end; even steely Phyllis Dietrichson goes through a sudden Damascus conversion, just before Walter Neff shoots her to death in Double Indemnity (1944). Wilder's cynics are often really not cynics at all but apprentice lovers who have to practice an emotion before they can feel it. The disguises and role-playing which seem to armor these characters against love secretly work to prepare their hearts for love.

Wilder's scenarios are parables of innocence and experience. He often begins by pairing off two opposite human types, a Saint and a Shit, a Virgin and a Whore [e.g., tough-talking Sugarpuss O'Shea and shy Betram Potts in Ball of Fire (1941)] or by creating a triangle--a Saint, a Shit, and sombody in the middle who can go either way [e.g., John Pringle who is like both Erika von Schluetow and Phobe Frost in A Foreign Affair (1948) or Sunset Boulevard's Joe Gillis poised between Norma and Betty .] Wilder uses the devices of masquerade to move seemingly antithetical characters toward each other onto common ground. Through role-playing, the excessively innocent learn how to protect themselves and the excessively protected learn how to let go and enjoy their vulnerability. This process frequently culminates in a love match [Love in the Afternoon(1957)]; but not necessarily so; sometimes a more abstract fusion of identities occurs in which estranged parts of single psyche turn toward each other, recognize, and embrace [e.g., Ace in the Hole (1951) in which the hardboiled Chuck Tatum weeps and bleeds for vulnerable Leo Minosa). Whatever the precise endpoint, the essence of Wilder's narrative style is psychological movement, transformation--the Cinderella story.

Wilder restores the crude vitality and anger which Disney bowdlerized from "Cinderella," originally a peasant story of revenge and underdog one-upsmanship. In Wilder's version, the passive victim and the transforming Fairy-godmother are recombined into a single powerful Trickster. Wilder's Cinderellas are survivors on the make--gigolos, con-artists, filmmakers down on their luck, and initially their morals are often as low as the figure in their bankbooks. Even the sweetest and most honorable of his characters [e.g. Ariane Chevasse] are capable of artful disimulation. Often in Wilder's films, everybody is manipulating everybody else, as in a carefully choreographed dance.

Wilder's Trickster Cinderellas are continually negotiating the cost of their glass slippers, trying to decide whether there is anything they won't do or sell in order to get ahead. (There always is.) In the end, they usually decide that love and intimacy are as important as success and fame--but not more important. Money, or the lack of it, is crucial in Wilder's films. He is never sentimental about poverty. His films are essentially love stories, but they take place in the real economic world where there is no free lunch. His protagonist's need to make a buck is often the central motive which drives the plot. Characters are forced into disguise or role-playing simply in order to survive--Susan Applegate in The Major and the Minor (1942) or Jerry and Joe in Some Like It Hot.

Wilder's identification with the Trickster is, in part, an expression of his heritage as a European Jew. But although he tends to side with the prolitarian underdogs against the plutocrats and aristocrats, he offers no brief for social revolution--or even social reform. (Frank Capra's wonderful little populist towns are nowhere on Wilder's map.) Wilder's politics is descriptive rather than prescriptive. He understands the pathology of power, especially the stylistic connection between puritanical repression and dictatorial opression, that is, between a desire for excessive self-control and a need to control others. But his stories also tend to suggest that you can't beat them without joining them. That moral is illustrated very directly in The Apartment (1959) in which C.C. Bud Baxter at first tries to make himself into a carbon copy of J. D. Sheldrake, the Nazi-in-a-gray-flannel-suit who runs the ruthlessly impersonal insurance firm for which Bud works. In the end, Bud stands up to Sheldrake--but not to lead a revolt. He tunes into love and drops out the the rat race altogether.

Like Bud, Wilder's protagonists usually transcend their class rather than represent it. They do not change the world; they change themselves. In the end, the bravest of them achieve a kind of separate peace which allows them to cope more sanely and joyously with an hypocritical and essentially crazy society. For Wilder and for his characters, living well is the best revenge.

Stylistically, Wilder is a kind of professional trickster himself who learned from his mentors, Von Stroheim and Lubitch, how to epater the Booboisie and titillate them at the same time. Von Stroheim was a cautionary tale for Wilder but also a model of mordant, deliberately self-conscious wit. [The foolish wife in Von Stroheim's Foolish Wives (1921) reads a trashy novel entitled "Foolish Wives by Erich Von Stroheim."] Even Von Stroheim's renouned self-destructiveness had a certain panache--conning the lugubriously Catholic Joe Kennedy into bankrolling a film about a seduction in a nunnery starring Kennedy's own mistress, Gloria Swanson. [Wilder doubles and redoubles that joke in Sunset Boulevard, a film that literally and metaphorically is a hall of mirrors.] Like von Stroheim, Wilder tends to create illusions and break them at the same time, to cast from life, often sadistically. [His orginal choice for Joe Gillis in Sunset was Monty Cliff who was then living with Libby Holman, a woman old enough to be his mother; the aging roue in Love in the Afternoon (1957) is played by an aging roue, Garry Cooper, etc.] Visually, too, Wilder's style generates complex double images and trompe d'oeil surfaces. His careful, painterly compositions often use windows, doors, and mirrors to create multiple frames within the frame.

Like von Stroheim and other of the Hollywood Hapsburgs, Wilder crams his frame with physical ojects. His obsession with with props and set decoration is not a mere quirk of personality; it is a kind of phatic "thinking in things." Ernst Lubitch modeled this technique for Wilder, showed him how to manipulate props to maximize the metaphoric capabilities inherent in the medium. In particular, he taught Wilder how to talk dirty without talking at all, how to use composition and cutting to create visual double entendres which would not only pass the industry's censors but would pass the American audience's censors as well. For both Wilder and Lubitch, Hollywood filmmaking was thus a kind of elaborate practical joke based on the premise that naked is the best disguise. They contrived to please the populace one way while pleasing themselves another--to make money and to make art at the same time, the former being the necessary requirement for the latter.

The emotional tone of Wilder's films differs markedly from Lubitch's, however. If Wilder is the light side of von Stroheim, he is the dark side of Lubitch--Lubitch mit angst. His style is characterized by a rhythmic movement between extremes of personality, from neurasthenia to ebullience and back again. The most idiosyncratic moments in his films are essentially surreal because there is so much oscillation between comic and tragic perspectives. Sometimes the surrealism is overt and intentional --e.g. the end of Irma La Douce (1963) in which Nestor and Nestor-disguised-as-Lord-X appear simultaneously in the same scene or, more famously, in Sunset Boulevard in which Joe Gillis does the voiceover narration while floating dead in Norma Desmond's swimming pool. [Gillis has "gills," a nice bit of metaphysical wit.] Other times, Wilder's transitions are less artful, and there is a jarring shift in mood. For example, the lovely, lyric opening sequence of Sabrina (1954) ends with David (William Holden) sitting on a pair of champagne glasses and lacerating his ass. This sudden juxtaposition of pain and pleasure, of sweetness and scatology is a hallmark of Wilder's complex psychological style, often misunderstood as simple cynicism.

Wilder is regarded as as cynic primarily because he is openly intolerant of sentimental American puritanism and refuses to be solemn about sex. ("I don't mind being called vulgar. It just means I'm on the side of life.") Wilder's delight in his own libidinous imagination, his penchant for double entendres, his private reputation for profanity and womanizing have convinced many reviewers that he, like Lubitch, is rather casual about sexual love. A close examination of the structure of Wilder's films suggests the opposite, however. Wilder is a romantic, not in the Harlequin tradition but in the Lawrencian tradition. For Wilder, as for Lawrence, sexual passion is essentially sacral, and thus the American cult of innocence, its preoccupation with virginity and kissy-face foreplay is not only silly but genuinely obscene. [Wilder's surrealistic send-up of Lady Chatterly's Lover in Irma La Douce is a back-handed hommage to Lawrence.]

Paradoxically, Wilder is also something of a puritan himself--compulsive, hyper-controled, incapable of direct emotional expression. He is a fierce opponent of the authoritarian, judgmental culture in which he was raised and of its American counterpart, but his own habits of mind are often authoritarian and judgmental in the extreme. Wilder's deceptive, sometimes perverse style as a filmmaker is, in part at least, a product of these tensions within his own personality, of an uneasy collusion between extreme puritanical control and explosive sexual energy. Not surprisingly, his plot structures tend to be incestuous and psychomachical.

Wilder's films contain much more emotion than at first meets the eye, but the emotion is often bizarrely displaced. Big feelings are rarely contained in big speeches but, rather, in small, silent subtexts conveyed by gestures and fetishized props. A master of rapid-fire dialogue, Wilder delights in engaging the ear in order to fool the eye. Words often cover the real source of emotion rather than express it, just as a magician's patter disguises his legerdemain. [See the file-drawer scene in A Foreign Affair (1948).]

When Wilder does use words to express emotion, he often employs a typically Teutonic inversion code ["Fuck you!" means "I love you"] or uses a verbal equivalent of the Purloined Letter Strategy --i.e., puns or little throwaway lines which mean exactly what they say and therefore, perversely, don't seem to mean what they say at all. The tag-line of Double Indemnity (1944), Neff's "I love you, too," is that kind of a line, the verbal equivalent of the match-lighting ceremony which immediately precedes it.

By manipulating props and gestures, Wilder is able to say more than a commercial story line would normally allow, is able to articulate complex, often contradictory emotional states. (I am guilty; I am innocent.) This semiotic gamesmanship is especially apparent when Wilder approaches material that is emotionally loaded for him--the Holocaust, for instance.

Wilder's problematic relationship to his own ethnicity is typical of his paradoxical, deceptive style as a whole. At first glance, he seems to be a completely secular filmmaker whose painful personal experience of the Holocaust [his mother was murdered in Auschwitz] is mysteriously absent from his art. But it is not absent; it is merely disgiuised--well-hidden by being hidden in plain sight, among the props and the jokes.

Throughout the films Wilder made from the late 1930's through the early 1950's, his personal loses and guilts appear as attenuated shadows in otherwise impersonal stories. In Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, A Foreign Affair, and Ace in the Hole, Wilder creates a visual equivalent of his tortured mood [the film-noir style] which at once defines a new Hollywood genre and affords psychological expiation and relief.

In a typically reticent way, all of Wilder's films of this period display a ritual religious subtext: The fedoras which Wilder's males, like Wilder himself, habitually wear indoors, are Yarmulkas in disguise; Walter Neff's confession into the hollow horn of his dictaphone announces the High Holy Days (Double Indemnity); Rommel's dinner table question and answer game and the spilled salt on the map of Egypt perversely commemorate the Passover Seder in Five Graves to Cairo; Lost Weekend is built around a masochistic joke whose punchline is: Yom Kipper.

In these films, Wilder's absent mother often appears subliminally. [The wooden Indian in Lost Weekend and the Indian painting over Norma Desmond's mantle silently remember her, who loved Karl May's "Old Shatterhand" tales, eg.] From Hold Back the Dawn (1941), with its sight/blindess, madonna/child, incest/incest motifs, through Ace In the Hole (1951), in which ostensibly Christian crucifixtion imagery embodies the plight of a tortured Jew, Wilder silently indicts himself even as he dutifully fulfills the dictates of Paramount's production chiefs.

Occasionally, the psychic strains in Wilder's game show too plainly. In The Emperor Waltz (1948), for example, the tension between Paramount's polite public intentions and Wilder's private angst tear the structure apart even as Wilder is trying to put it together. The result is an odd, almost surreal film--the real "Springtime for Hitler"--in which helpless puppy dogs act out a parable of the Holocaust while Bing Crosy wears lederhosen and croons soothingly to Joan Fontaine.

Wilder's latent oedipal/survivor's guilt surfaces dramatically in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and its companion piece, Ace in the Hole (1951), both films made during the time when Wilder was simultaneously ending a secure but perhaps claustrophobic relationship with his co-writer of the 1930's and 1940's, Charles Brackett, and beginning a risky though ultimately enduring marriage with Audrey Young, many years his junior. The vulnerabilities involved in this complex breaking away from the past are expressed and analyzed rather directly in these two films, which together form the pivot point of Wilder's career and, perhaps, his finest achievement.

Wilder's greatest strength as a director, his ability to engineer the structure of his films both above and below the waterline, is also his greatest weakness, however. Although he is able cleverly to exploit the properties of the film medium to create dense, privately meaningful subtexts, he often becomes so busy with his semotic game that he forgets that most of it is invisible to most of his audience. A careful analysis of Wilder's notorious Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) reveals it to be a rather sweet paean to the vulnerabilities of married love, but it is understandable that American viewers of the period found it incoherent and aggregiously obscene and cheered when it was condemned by the League of Decency and withdrawn from circulation, a crushing failure which limited Wilder's ability to raise money for future independent productions. Sometimes Wilder was simply too clever for his own good.

If Wilder's career was undermined by his cleverness and emotional reticence, it was also limited to some degree by a curious lack of confidence in his own ample resources. Wilder was always aware of his essential vulnerability as an artist in a commercial medium, aware that even as a producer he did not own the means of production. He was haunted by the fate of Von Stroheim and Preston Sturges, haunted by the fear that one day the corporate money men would take his camera away.

Because Wilder needed to make movies the way Don Birnam needed his next drink, the threat of being cut adrift shaped many of the important aesthetic choices he made in his career. In his 80's, Wilder is still one of the most distinctive, self-assertive personalities in the business, the kind of personality that leaves the imprint of its psychic style on everything it touches; and yet he always reined himself tight in his filmmaking, was always careful to work within the constraints of the marketplace. He not only distrusted the industry; he also seems to have distrusted himself. Although he was perhaps the most brilliantly adaptive writer ever to work in Hollywood (not excepting Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov), he never wrote alone, partly out of a desire not to be lonely and partly out of fear that he would make some embarrassing error in English or fall into artiness. Most of his best work is based on original material, [Midnight, Ninotchka, The Major and the Minor, A Foreign Affair, Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment], but, especially after the commercial failure of Ace, he apparently felt safer when he adapted old material to new purposes. Ultimately, Wilder's fear of failure became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Wilder's last great film, Fedora (1979) is a wry comment on that failure and a self-staged retrospective of his greatest hits, especially Sunset. Once again, it is a story of disguise and transformation, a Cinderella story, but this time the masquerade goes awry, trapping the tricksters forever behind their masks. One of the most poignant moments in the film comes, not in the big climax but in a little scene early on in which "Antonia," disguised as her star/mother "Fedora," pleads desperately with "Theo" who supplies her with the drugs to which she is addicted. He offers them to her, but she has no cash, so he snatches them back--hidden inside three boxes of Kodak film. "When you can pay." Later, the failed producer Barry Detweiler [sic "Getweiler"] and Fedora (disguised as the iron-willed "Countess") reprise the moment in a Sherlockian style joke:

You know what she wanted?

She bought film.

Film? How odd.

Yes, I thought [$100] was a lot for three rolls.

What's even odder is that she doesn't have a camera. . . .