Off the Deep End Far from Heaven: Social Topography in The Reckless Moment

WILLIAM PAUL Off the Deep End Far from Heaven: Social Topography in The Reckless Moment hile The Reckless Moment (1949) remains one of the most difficult to see of Max Ophuls' films, two contemporary films have evoked it, The Deep End (2002) by supposedly drawing on the same source novel and Far from Heaven (2003) by parallel lines of dialogue, a maid named Sybil, and at least one shot that explicitly echoes the Ophuls film. As is typical of contemporary filmmaking, the newer films are both shot on location, although a New Jersey town stands in for Hartford in Far from Heaven and the Hudson River for the Connecticut . The RecUess Moment does make use of location shooting in a manner that became more common for Hollywood films in the post-World War II period. This is to say, we see these locations mostly in establishing shots and transitional moments, while actual scenes for the most part play out in studio sets or against back projection. Both of the later films feature a spatial metaphor in their titles, appropriately since their use of setting is chiefly metaphorical. In The Deep End, the Lake Tahoe setting is real enough, but it is also something of an inside joke similar to giving the name of the James Mason character in the Ophuls film (Donnelly) to a different character; in the earlier film, Lake Tahoe is where mother Lucia tries to send daughter Bee after Darby's death is discovered. The Hartford of Far from Heaven is a fantasy world at two removes, Todd Haynes' dreamworld vision of Douglas Sirk's dreamworld Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 5, Special Issue 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 610 W 44 William Paul vision of the 1950s. In both, metaphor is key: the images of drowning facilitated by Lake Tahoe in The Deep End to signal the characters' sense of being overwhelmed, the autumnal beauty of Far from Heaven to play off and with the characters' sense of loss and regret. By contrast, although the title of The Reckhss Moment focuses on the temporal, both the reality of space and the specificity of location are central to the Ophuls film, granting it a sociological density I think lacking in the later works. I can perhaps get at this by looking at a brief scene in Far from Heaven, where social tensions are explicitly invoked. A long panning shot at the start of the scene establishes the two key locations, a car wash which stands opposite a restaurant. By virtue of its continuity, the shot also establishes the physical reality of this location, but there is no indication of how it relates to the rest of the city, a crucial omission since the car wash and the restaurant will finally seem to belong to different neighborhoods. After a disastrous attempt to make love to her husband and his inadvertently hitting her, Cathy seeks solace by an afternoon out with her African American gardener, Raymond . In this scene, Raymond takes her to a restaurant which caters to black patronage. As they get out ofhis pickup truck to enter the restaurant , Mona, something of the town gossip and dressed in clothing that shows specific upper-class markers—fox stole, hat with veil, long black gloves—is waiting for her car at the car wash. While the long black gloves in daytime would be a faux pas for a woman ofthis class, they are only part ofa list of incongruities around this character. Mona's number is called out, she runs and waves her ticket, shouting "yoo-hoo!" to let the workers know she is there to get her car. As she gets into her car, she spots Cathy and Raymond walking into the restaurant together. She lifts her veil to stare in disbelief, but her initial look of amazement is soon replaced by a smile, a superior shake of her head, a laugh, and a quietly uttered "My God!" There is, in truth, much to be amazed about here. Although Mona is expensively dressed and although she drives an expensive car (an Edsel, an additional sign of her foolishness, but also of the...