What Would Marlene Dietrich Do? (WWMDD?)

So, a few of you have complained that my past few postings have been less personal (less snarky, really) and far from entertaining. For those who do read what I write then, this entry is dedicated to you. Both of you. Although its content does not pretend to be entertaining (and by Mike's definition of entertainment as "waiting for tea water to boil," I'm not sure what standards I'm being held to here) this post is certainly a return to my recent preoccupations and musings, muddled and abject as they are. And I promise to avoid using the word "monumentality", even if it means revising my entry and editing the word out, like a two-second long bleep on the Jerry Springer Show. So here's today's treat for you...

The 1930s moving picture Morocco, by director Josef Von Sternberg, is probably one of the most visually stunning films I've seen. And I don't just mean that Marlene Dietrich is a bombshell, which she is (and a sexy tuxedo-dressed woman, too), but that the film itself is a mesmerizing work that makes you think technicolor cinema has its disadvantages, as if the eye were being robbed of seeing something greater by becoming saturated with a spectrum of reality. But I promised no "theoretical" musings today. And so...

The story begins as we are introduced to an aloof cabaret singer, Mademoiselle Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich), whose nightly performances draw a full house in Mogador's most attended nightclub, most certainly to see the seductress steal the show with her stage presence and emasculating banter with the soldiers in the audience. Clearly this woman, either due to a habitual dosage of valium or mere apathy, is "tired of playing the game" with her many backstage suitors, until an unlikely encounter with Légionnaire Tom Brown (Gary Cooper) leads her to fall slowly and rather unexpectedly in love. Their relationship is one of two damaged people discovering to what ends the other would go in order that they might one day be together.

The story takes a turn for the worse, however, when we learn that Tom will be sent into the desert at dawn, charged with a dangerous mission from which he may never return. In this moment, our cabaret prima donna has two options-- stay in the club where she may never find love again, or renounce her whorish ways and follow her soldier into the desert, leaving her life of glamour and recognition behind. In the final scene, after her character's final goodbye with her lover, Marlene performs an aggressive act of determination when, staggering off into the desert heat, she kicks off her high-heeled shoes and, joining the soldiers' harem of gypsy women, she yanks the leash of a goat tied with a rope to its neck thereby taking her position among the band of women who will follow their men into the abject heart of war in the deserts of Morocco.

Some might call it love.