the Sound of Music as a film about

[sab]

need to do a re-edit of the famed Richard Rodgers documentary, but that's not the point right now.

It opens with Julie Andrews in the apron and the nunnery's underdress in the hills outside Salzburg, the hills are alive...! and I know everybody says it but it's true, it's true, The Sound of Music is possibly the finest film ever made.

Got this title I keep wanting to use, for a story some day. "The Sound of Music as a Film About Nazis." Except I'm dubious about using Nazis in a title anywhere. but it's a reading, you know: "looking at Casey as a sex object was like looking at the Sound of Music as a film about Nazis." Or "seeing Scully be vulnerable was like looking at the Sound of Music as a film about Nazis."

Because when we were little it was a movie about kids singing, and then we grew up and it was this wrending love story: "you can't very well marry one person when you're...in love with someone else" and then we're fourteen or fifteen and we start to catch those looks Ralph gives Franz, the flag with the black spider that makes people cross, "we came home as quickly as we could" from Georg to Max, tearing down the swastika.

"I have no doubt that when the Anschluss does arrive, you'll be the entire trumpet section."
"You flatter me, Captain."
"How silly of me." Those wicked, powerful, marvelous eyes, that twisted smile. "I meant to accuse you."

Because we saw them clutch at one another, and if we didn't believe it as a love story we believed it as a family, holding its own in the face of encroaching darkness. the children as metaphor. "We'll help them, they'll be all right."

It didn't hurt, of course, that Christopher Plummer was gorgeous and raspy and wise and cruel, didn't hurt that Maria had confidence in sunshine. Didn't hurt that Liesl needed a governess, or that Louisa could make it up the drainpipe with a whole jar of spiders in her hand. Didn't hurt that Kurt was incorrigible or that Marta had a sore finger because it got caught ("in what?" "Friedrich's teeth!").

we saw the appeal of the Aryan boot through Ralph who promised he was older and wiser and would "take good care" of us. We saw Max's complicity, Baroness Schrader's utilitarian bourgeois entitlements, the shape of a city changing under the anschluss it didn't want and couldn't stand up to. Not Vienna, not the crystal spires and blonde churches. Salzburg, downhome and studded with forget-me-not flowers. "The Austria *I* know." The Third Reich even more insidious because all we knew was that the family wasn't singing the same songs anymore.

Edelweiss, Edelweiss, bless my homeland forever.

This is my favorite painting. Homesickness, by Rene Magritte (with their dog after the war). it's "la mal du pays" in French, missing his homeland, Belgium, after the Nazis came. The lion from the old flag.

Ask me what I know. I don't know much. I know from books about army nurses, the Asian theatre, early helicopter war. I know from Spielberg movies and Tom Hanks' retrospectives. I know about St. Crispin's day, we band of brothers. I know about my Jewish ancestors lost.

but you ask what's insidious, what's cruel, what's real, and it's not till I'm grown up and able to look at it, just that flicker in a smile, that pain. "We came back as soon as we heard." Edelweiss. Homesickness. So long, farewell, auf wiedersen, goodbye.

See? The Sound of Music as a film about Nazis.

Comments

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

Ah...

I think that's the best explication I've ever seen of "The Sound of Music" and also of war movies, as a genre.

Thanks for that...

The only bad thing?

Now I'll be singing Edelwiess all day.

[ropo.livejournal.com]

Hey.

Did you ever get that war-type thing I sent you? I think it might have gone to your parents' house in the end.

And Fi says you sent a tape to her through me, but I have seen no tape. Where did you send a tape? Because I have moved. Although my mail is forwarded. So.

[tangleofthorns.livejournal.com]

First of all, word on the fantastic explication, and it really is a great movie, and when I was little I thought Captain Von Trapp had killed the first wife because he scared me, but now I find him a lot more appealing.

Secondly, I think "The Sound Of Music as a film about Nazis" would make a good summary more than a title, but hey.

Thirdly, as I sit here, "Do-Re-Mi" came on this episode of Kids in the Hall. Look at that, a power you didn't even know you hand.

[qowf.livejournal.com]

Funny. I watched this not long ago because I had to own the DVD and now I watch it over and over. And I thought this. And you wrote it better than I thought.

I love that movie. It's about Nazis. It's about giving up your country because you can't bear to see it change. It's about change itself. Everyone changes and not always for the better. The moment with Rolf in the cemetary creeps me out every single time, watching the little boy duke it internally out with the fanatic and the fanatic wins.

I always worried about the nuns, too. What repercussions they faced from sabotaging the car. It was the Nazis. They weren't going to take that lightly.

Maria sacrifices God, the Captain sacrifices the Baroness and they all sacrifice Austria. The happiness in the Captain's face when he hears the children sing. The look on Maria's face when the Baroness gets her to leave.

Have you seen the documentary about the making of it? It's on the DVD and it's amazing. Julie Andrews talks about all the good times and Chris Plummer talks about how drunk they all were all the time. They had to film the gazebo love scene where they sing "Something Good" in the dark because the actors couldn't stop laughing. They just kept cracking up and ruining take after take after take.

So, they turned the lights out. Now, that's film making at its finest.

[iamsab.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it. that's reason #2 to get a DVD player. I need that in my life, I've worn through 2 VHSs of the TV cut and one double-VHS of the director's cut already.

Re:

[qowf.livejournal.com]

You so need a DVD player, girl. The collector's edition of this is beyond worth the money.

[barkley.livejournal.com]

Why do you people do this stuff to me on the very day I sent my Sound of Music DVD to reside with my brother for a few months. I still haven't watched the extras on it, and right now I'm longing for Adelweiss.

[se-parsons.livejournal.com]

My family watched this movie together every time it was ever on television. I wore out two copies of the soundtrack album before I was eight.

It was always a movie about Nazis. What an insidious philosophy of superiority can do to a beautiful and happy place. How good people must either stop them, or flee. I can't remember ever not hating Nazis and their ideas. This wasn't the only place I felt it, but maybe it was the first. Nazi was a synonym for evil in my house, probably because my parents remember WWII. I don't remember ever having to ask questions about what made Nazis evil, or ever loving Rolf. Maybe it was because of all the war movies we were allowed to watch, too. Maybe it was the Captain America comic books. But it never entered my mind that the Sound of Music wasn't about Nazis.

At least the last third of it, anyway.

And I have to love the creators for showing how overnight Austria went from somewhere familiar and kind to a nightmarish world of intrigue and spies. Where your friends rat you out and where your children are hostages. Where your only hope is to flee so you aren't forced to become part of the nightmare.

It's so important for musicals to have a happy ending, don't you think?

[nestra.livejournal.com]

That scene in the gazebo is one of my all-time favorites in any movie. "But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, there must have been a moment of truth. For here you are, standing there, loving me, whether or not you should..."

[wearemany.livejournal.com]

you know, i thought a lot about them, and the alps, that day. about the parts they left out, about being cold and having frozen toes and still you keep walking, you always keep walking because what's on the other side is the rest of your life.

and it wasn't the st. crispin's day speech, but it wasn't bad.

[corianderstem.livejournal.com]

My favorite movie. My heart breaks for them watching their homeland change. My favorite scene is at the music festival, when Captain Von Trapp sings "Edelweiss," and can't go on ... and she comes and joins him, and the audience sings along. His fellow Austrians understand, and it never fails to make me cry.

And of course, right before that, when Max mentions the Third Reich, and there's all this grumbling: "mumble mumble Third Reich mumble mumble." I love the mumbling.

Alicia

[iamsab.livejournal.com]

My favorite scene is at the music festival, when Captain Von Trapp sings "Edelweiss," and can't go on ... and she comes and joins him, and the audience sings along. His fellow Austrians understand, and it never fails to make me cry.

my favorite part too. That and the one where Georg yells Ralph off his property and Ralph has nothing to say but heil hitler. And then we knew -- like there was ever any doubt -- that Georg is the bigger man. That ideology (at least for this movie-musical) will prevail.

[furies.livejournal.com]

even when i was little it was a film about nazis. because they left in the darkness to cross the mountains, and mother superior said so early on, "climb every mountain." how do you solve a problem like maria? but the problem was never maria. and rolf looked at them, loved them, and blew the whistle. part of me always thought they never made it across the alps. it seemed too easy. there was too much evil.

i know that america refused to admit refugees from europe. i know that while britain was taking in children from the continent, we were closing our doors. i know that the administration knew what was happening at auschwitz, at bergen-belsen, at dachau, and refused to bomb the railroads. i know that 420,000 hungarian jews were transported out of the ghettos in one day. i know that it really started in 1914, in 1919, in 1924, 1933, 1936. i know that america waited until the last possible minute to aid europe, let the soviets deal with death, so focused on japan, the pacific, free trade, oil. i know we were all selfish.

the statistics, the facts, are easy. it's looking at the eyes that's hard. it's knowing liesl will never really understand. it's knowing how much everyone knew, and still there was hope, right until the end. because you don't know if they made it safely, if it was cold and dark, if they got lost. but they believed they would make it, in spite of everything, and they left it all behind.

[quasiradiant.livejournal.com]

so, honestly, haven't seen sound of music in its entirety since, uh, ever, really. i suppose i really should rent it, though.

but it's just like in the middle of cabaret. i saw it, and it was all well and good til we got to "if you could see her," and from the first i realized it, and then as the song ends, a few people laugh and then stop, abruptly. "if you could see her through my eyes," he says, "she wouldn't look jewish at all." and then that abrupt and painful silence, no clapping or movement or anything. it's an audience-wide moment of understanding.

and with the current broadway direction of the ending, it's just-- it's terrible, and of course, it's the shoah so it's supposed to be terrible, but with the rumbling and the lights and the concentration camp uniform pointing the emcee out as a homosexual and a jew.

that's when you really realize. there was no hiding.

strange.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Waaaaahhhhhh! Well put. Very well put. I'm inarticulate right now, so I can't say more.