Blue Curtains

There’s a movie I can’t get out of my head. Not because I think it’s a great movie (though it very well may be (I’d have to get back to you on that)); it’s more like when you’ve got a song in your head and all you can remember is the chorus and maybe a riff or two, and if you don’t sing about it (or, in this case, talk kind of adjacent to it), it’s just going to get worse.

The movie in question is The Other Side of the Wind, the last film by Orson Welles (now available on Neflix!). It’s a frenetic piece; its conceit is that it’s footage from a bunch of cameras all trying to get a hot new scoop on a Hollywood director on the night of his seventy-fifth birthday. What I can’t get over is how prescient it is for being shot in the 1970s.

But let’s take a step back for a moment. The title of this post is based off a tired joke that goes a little something like this:

An author, in a fit of self-indulgence, decides to sit in on a class teaching his own work. The professor goes into a long, impassioned speech about the curtains in a scene. “The author made the curtains blue here,” the professor says, “because it symbolizes the purity of the scene, while also foreshadowing the tragedy to come.”

Upon hearing this, the author shouts “The curtains are blue because I like the color blue!”

This was also at the heart of The Beginner’s Guide, the subject of a Raindrops on Roses post I made a few months back. In that game, Davey, for as much as he tried to demonstrate his understanding of Coda’s games, didn’t know Coda as well as he thought he did and so ruined their friendship because of it.

But there’s something wrong with both of those conclusions, right? The term “Death of the Author” still has meaning, right? Like, I remember discussing the briefcase in Pulp Fiction with a friend. We were both talking about what we thought was in it and I said, “Well, Quentin Tarantino says…”

He interrupted me with “I really don’t care what Quentin Tarantino says.”

I feel much the same way about The Other Side of the Wind. Taking it as a 2018 movie about 1970’s Hollywood makes it very much a period piece in the same way that Barton Fink (directed by Joel and Ethan Coen) is. It certainly helps that many of the characters are played by their inspirations up to and including John Huston in the lead role.

What makes it prescient, though, is how little some things have changed in the intervening years between filming and release. For example, sex and sexuality is one of the themes that permeates throughout the movie; one of the things all the cameras are trying to figure out is the relationship the main character has with the women in his life. But as the movie goes on, it’s revealed that not only is that kind of a touchy subject, but shades of modern-day’s difficulties with sexual assault begin to crop up as well.

Another example would be the opening monolog, especially as this one was added near the end of the arduous editing process and by making mention of otherwise anachronistic items like cell phones, it only adds to this bridge between the old and the modern.

But, again, these interpretations on certain contexts were certainly not Orson Welles’ intention. Sometimes the curtains are just a nice shade of blue. But I never really liked how that joke villainized the professor. They’ve presumably developed their own context for the piece after years of study, and suddenly someone shouts back a retort with nothing but some perceived authority. And in most cases, I find it actually weakens the piece. The Other Side of the Wind goes from a period piece spanning multiple periods to its own inside joke that the audience can never be a part of.

-F