It feels pointless to aim for some new insight in regard to Magnificent Obsession. As the title suggests, Sirk’s melodramas, particularly those he made in the 1950s, are objects of obsession for scholars and fans of films alike. Their lush imagery, dancing on the tenuous boundary between theatricality and realism, imbues their portraits of a culture in crisis — sexual, economic, and racial politics are their lifeblood — with a wrenching irony. To say Sirk was a cynical man is probably not quite right, but he was keenly aware of the ways in which the rules of society ruined peoples’ lives, and few films render those ruins in such exquisite, extravagant detail.
The 1950s was a decade defined as much by its progress as by its repression — and Sirk was one of its most vital chroniclers. Magnificent Obsession, then, a film as much concerned with the minutiae of a woman’s unmoored inner life as it is with the frameworks through which the human race grapples with the uncertainty of existence, feels like one of the decade’s truest representatives. Its narrative is about as improbable as anything to come before it, but by tying the trajectory of the film’s plot to wild and sudden twists of fate, Sirk draws explicit attention to the mechanics of storytelling and, in turn, to the many ways in which people make sense of their lives.
Textually, the film has a deeply convicted religious center. Rock Hudson’s Bob Merrick, a selfish, thrill-seeking playboy, goes on a long and winding journey to a kind of unspecific, yet unabashed, spirituality after he inadvertently widows and then blinds Helen, the wife of a local beloved doctor. When he crashes his speed boat he kicks off a series of almost too improbable-to-believe events that prompt him to change his life completely, to devote it to selfless acts of service that will square his debt to Helen and her family and reform his careless ways.
The film’s obsession with light, not just because of Helen’s blindness, speaks to its spiritual underpinnings. To see the light, to be enlightened, is one way to describe Merrick’s turn of character, and digs at what ultimately makes Magnificent Obsession such a rich text. At every turn, the film sets up different frameworks through which one can understand the world. Merrick and his money, corrupting and superficial; Dr. Philips and his charity, selfless but reckless. Even medicine and its comforting logic has its limits. As Helen loses her faith in medicine, Merrick’s only grows stronger. A mid-film climax sees him show up unannounced at Helen’s Swiss apartment (where she has been seeing specialists for her vision, all paid for in secret by Merrick) and takes her to a nearby town where they encounter villagers performing a ceremonial witch-burning to ensure a good harvest. It’s strange and delightful, and ironic, of course; in true Sirkian fashion, to see such a blunt display of non-traditional spirituality through such gleeful eyes as Helen’s and Bob’s clarifies everything the film is trying to express about faith. Like the townspeople, they are trying to perform a miracle in restoring Helen’s eyesight. They look upon the village’s strange ritual with well-meaning but patronizing disbelief, as if willing a good harvest into being is a fool’s errand compared to restoring one’s sight. Yet they don’t judge it. They dance under the light of the flames as they lick the witch’s feet, their love solidified even as hope for sight is lost.
Magnificent Obsession is dripping with cruel ironies and twists of fate, all of which are in service of stylizing the everyday. Sirk talked about the role of art in Hollywood, recalling in an interview conducted at his Swiss home in the 1980s that executives never wanted a motion picture to be art — that was for the artists. An arty film was a different matter; what made films (and he means his own) arty is a kind of populism with style. Sirk maintained this approach in Magnificent Obsession through a perfect marriage of soapy narrative and otherworldly visual dressing. When Merrick visits Randolph, a painter and friend of Helen and her late husband, he says, “As far as I’m concerned, Art is just some guy’s name,” thus setting up the framework from which it is necessary to view all of Sirk’s Hollywood films, particularly those made in the 1950s.
It’s difficult to talk about the ending of Magnificent Obsession. This piece hasn’t described its style with nearly enough passion, for one thing, or chronicled the events of the narrative in enough detail, to ensure that the transcendent finale feels anything other than ridiculous. One assumes that’s how a lot of people feel about the ending, because it is. When Helen, having spent a few years abroad, falls into a pneumonia-induced coma, it’s fate, once again, that unites Helen and Bob, with his graying temples and humble disposition, at the little New Mexico health clinic.
Unlike the Swiss doctors who were unable to cure Helen’s blindness, Bob’s new medical expertise is legitimized by his spiritual purity, which, in the expected Hollywood ending, has the capacity to restore Helen’s sight. But because this is Sirk, we can never be too sure. It may be too much to read this into the final moments of the film, but they’re played with a shocking amount of ambiguity that it’s a fun experiment. After surgery, tentatively resurfacing to consciousness, her eyes blinking open to the world, Helen says things you might expect to hear on a deathbed: “It doesn’t hurt so much,”; “I’m glad you’re here with me”; “I can see some light”. Is it too far-fetched to suggest, in a film already spilling over with symbolism, that Helen doesn’t come back to life at all? There’s pleasure, and perhaps some thematic sense, in the idea that while Helen may not die, she doesn’t return to the world of the living. Armed with the right framework to make sense of the world, for once, and maybe fittingly, after everything has happened, something preposterous actually seems possible.
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