Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Meet Me in St. Louis
1944 · Vincente Minnelli · Meet Me in St. Louis on Sightlines
A painted card of a house on a summer street, the kind of thing that used to sit on a mantelpiece. It holds still long enough for you to register that it is a picture. Then the paint loosens and you are inside the house, where four people are talking at once about nothing much.
Minnelli does this four times. Summer 1903, Autumn, Winter, Spring 1904, each season opening as a still genre painting in the Currier-and-Ives manner and dissolving into live action.
Start with that card, because it is doing something an MGM picture in 1944 had no business doing. It asks to be read before it can be watched. Deleuze has a word for an image like that: a lectosign, an image that has lost its automatic sense, so that instead of simply following it you have to decipher it. A still print contains no action. Nobody in it can move. Then it thaws, the year begins, and before a word is spoken you have been told that what you are watching is a year that is already over.
What follows the cards is not a plot. It is a dinner and a long-distance telephone call, a trolley ride out to the fairgrounds, a Halloween expedition, a Christmas ball. Louis B. Mayer thought this was a defect and said so; the picture was plotless. The father's plan to move everyone to New York does not arrive until late, and when it does it produces no suspense at all. It produces dread, which is a different thing. Deleuze's term for the stretches of a film where nothing advances is temps mort, dead time, the everyday simply held. In most movies dead time is the gap between events. Here it is the film. The calendar does the work that cause and effect normally do: one thing follows another because it is November now, not because anyone decided anything. Little Women (1933) had already proved that a house of daughters and a run of seasons could carry a picture without a quest, and Sally Benson's New Yorker sketches were built the same way, keyed to a street address rather than a story. Minnelli's addition is that you feel the year go by rather than watch it.
And you feel it inside one house. The Smith place is built as a continuous, multi-level environment, and Minnelli blocks nearly everything on its staircases, landings and thresholds, letting the camera walk through the architecture instead of cutting between setups. He had worked the technique out the year before on Cabin in the Sky, his first feature: crane and dolly through choreographed domestic space. Here it becomes an argument. Deleuze, borrowing from Bergson, calls the shot a mobile section, a piece of movement that registers a change in the whole and not merely a change of position. Every glide through the Smith house says the same thing. This place is one connected body. Which is precisely why the New York announcement lands like an amputation rather than an inconvenience. Bazin argued that chopping a space into shots destroys something true in it. Minnelli, working in the most frankly artificial genre on the lot, keeps the space whole, and the wholeness turns out to be the film's subject.
The songs come out of that same refusal to cut. “The Trolley Song” is staged in and around a moving streetcar with the camera riding along and the editing kept out of the way. Deleuze noticed something about the American musical that few critics had bothered to say: in its best numbers the dancer stops being the source of the movement and is taken up by a movement belonging to the world. He called it the movement of world. Watch Esther on that trolley. She is not propelling anything. The car is going, the crowd is going, the song is going, and she is carried by all of it. Garland had been doing longing-through-song since “Over the Rainbow,” and For Me and My Gal had begun prying her numbers loose from the backstage format. Minnelli finishes the job by abolishing the stage. There is no performance frame left to step into, so she does not step. The world is already singing and she joins it.
Then the film goes out at night. The Halloween sequence is shot in a markedly lower key than anything around it, shadow-heavy, the palette dropped to deep blues and blacks, the track alternating hush with sudden noise. Children in costume, out past the safe houses, honestly terrified. Deleuze separates the recollection-image, a dated flashback where someone is remembering, from the dream-image, where a circuit opens that no memory accounts for. Nobody is remembering Halloween. We have gone into Tootie's version of the world and the film has agreed to stay there. Deleuze thought this was Minnelli's lifelong subject, people who fall into somebody else's dream and have to live in it. The visual grammar comes from German expressionism, where the light-and-shadow gradient gives objects a life of their own that has nothing to do with human purposes. Dropping that into a family musical without cracking the film in half is a real feat of nerve.
Colour carries it too. Three-strip Technicolor had a reputation for garishness; Becky Sharp (1935) had hinted the process could be handled with restraint, and George Folsey keys this whole film to season and mood, muted autumnal browns, warm interiors, that black-blue night. Deleuze's colour-image is a colour that stops describing a scene and absorbs it, so the feeling sits in the hue rather than on anyone's face. The Halloween night is not blue because it is night.
Then winter, and the scene the film is really built toward. Esther sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to her little sister. It is the most beautiful consolation in the American musical, and it fails. Tootie gets up, goes out into the snow in her nightgown, and wrecks the snow family she cannot take to New York. Deleuze's crystal-image is an image in which a thing and its own reflection cannot be told apart. A closed world like this house comes near to being a perfect crystal: it turns through its year, mirrors itself, admits no outside. What he calls the crack is the fissure through which something escapes the totality, and New York is the crack. The child is the only one who acts on it, because she is the only one small enough to see that a world can simply end.
Then the father closes it. They stay, and the Fair, which the whole year has pointed at and which the film has kept out of frame, opens in their own city, so the outside arrives inside and nothing has to be surrendered. The ending only works because a child was allowed to smash snowmen in the dark first. Whether the film believes in 1903 or only in the wanting of 1903 is a question I do not think it settles, and I would not want it to.
What it did to the art: it showed an industry that a picture could be organised by time instead of by plot and still be one of MGM's biggest earners of the decade, which gave the Freed Unit the autonomy to run the American musical for the next fifteen years on the principle proved here, that a song can rise out of a situation and be carried by camera and performance rather than by cutting. It founded the nostalgic Americana strain, turn-of-the-century family life in warm period colour, that kept coming back through the forties and fifties. Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) had used vintage tunes to summon a national past; Roger Edens does that here with “Under the Bamboo Tree” and “Skip to My Lou,” but fastens them to one house with one staircase, which is the whole difference between a jukebox and a memory.
Watch it again for the thresholds. Minnelli shoots doorways and banisters the way other directors shoot faces, and once you see that, the move to New York stops being a plot point and starts being what it is. And when the last card thaws, notice that you are being handed a year the film has already told you is finished.
Concepts in play
- movement of world — “The Trolley Song,” staged in and around a moving streetcar with cutting minimised so camera and performance carry the number: Esther is not the source of the movement, she is carried by it
- onirosign / dream-image — The Halloween expedition — a child's-eye nocturne with genuine menace, not attributable to anyone's memory; the film enters Tootie's version of the world and stays there
- crystal-cracked — The Smith house built as a sealed, self-mirroring annual world; the father's New York plan opens the fissure, and Tootie goes out in her nightgown to destroy the snow family she cannot take with her
- temps mort / dead time — The episodic, calendar-bound structure — dinner and a telephone call, a trolley ride, a Halloween night, a Christmas ball — with the central conflict introduced late; the "plotless" picture Mayer doubted
- the mobile section (plan) — Folsey and Minnelli follow performers through the multi-level architecture of the Smith house rather than cutting between static setups, the crane-and-dolly grammar worked out on Cabin in the Sky
- affective colour — Three-strip Technicolor keyed to season and mood — muted autumnal browns, warm interior palettes, the deep blues and blacks of Halloween night — restraint rather than saturation
- expressionism — The Halloween sequence shot in a lower, shadow-heavy key than the rest of the film, with hush and sudden noise on the track, charging the night street with a life of its own
- the readable image — Each of the four seasonal chapters opens on a still Currier-and-Ives-style greeting-card painting, an image with no action in it, which then dissolves into live action