Written on the Wind

Director Douglas Sirk's 1956 social melodrama Written on the Wind reflects the ideology of its period, but the film may also be seen as a criticism of American dream of materialism. Film critic Roger Ebert called Sirk a sly subverter of American postwar materialism" whose sly subversion skewed American popular culture, and helped launch a new age of irony (Written on the Wind). The 1950s United States is often referred to as a period of stifling conservatism and sexual repression, a time of faith in the greatness of material goods, in the nuclear family (and fear of the nuclear bomb) with father as the head of household and woman as mother/homemaker as reflected in 1950s TV shows such as "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best." But it was also the period of rock n'roll, of civil rights protests, of Playboy magazine, the Kinsey reports, the pill, and the start of serious questioning of traditional gender and sexual roles. Viewed today, Sirk's "narrative attitude in its balance of style and story in Written on the Wind seems less florid melodrama and more a criticism of American ideology of the 1950s (Schatz 246). According to Ebert, Sirk's style conceals the film's message.

The basic plotline and characters are melodramatic, but the themes of romantic love and the American success ethic are approached with irony, making the subject matter not "a celebration of the American dream, but as an articulation and ultimately a criticism of it" (Schatz 246). Sirk used the melod

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course would not commit adultery. The film is told in flashback. It opens with a drunken Kyle driving home and staggering into the house. A shot is fired off-screen, and the rest of the film depicts the characters' relationships as well as a trial scene. The audience has not seen who fired the shot that killed the heir apparent to the Hadley family fortune. Sirk then is able to use the film to examine the basis for the Hadley's decadence and the reason for Kyle's death. This technique injects "an underlying theme of hopelessness" and also makes the audience "turn its attention to the how instead of the what the structure instead of plot (Halliday 119). The main narrative issue is not who killed Kyle, but who killed the American dream of great wealth and power (Schatz 256). Sex and gender roles, however, form the main emotional issues. Although there has always been working women and independent, sexually liberated women, the liberated woman was not considered the proper role for a 1950s woman. Many women worked, for example, during World War II but in the postwar period, there was a move to get women back into their place in the home. The Madonna/whore, good girl/bad girl conception of women was prominent in the 1950s. In Wri

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