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.