‘The Bad and the Beautiful’ or — Beyond Good and Evil?

‘The Bad and the Beautiful’ (1952) isn’t a film. It’s a dazzling God appearing before us and removing the scales from our eyes so we fall to our knees proclaiming “I see the Light!” Although the one advantage this movie has over the Almighty Himself is that God didn’t have Cedric Gibbons as His art director because if He had then St. Paul would’ve been even more impressed on his way to Damascus.

It is the answer to Epicurus’ question of evil — if an infinitely benevolent and boundlessly creative deity exists then how can It do such terrible things — the reply being “I just do, okay. Now shut the fuck up and get a load of THIS!”

It is a repeatedly self-manifesting sentient cake capable of continuously possessing AND devouring itself as it euphorically gazes at us with a cannibalistic look of “Hmm. I taste gooooood!”

It is an unforgivable justification for abusive relationships and destructive behaviour, but we’d happily let it shoot the family pet in front of the kids if only it keeps doing that wonderful thing it’s doing.

It has a similar(ish) structure to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ ‘A Letter to Three Wives’ (1949) where three individuals — here it’s a film director, an actress and a writer — each have a flashback about the same person who impacted their lives. This person is Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas), a man who took advantage of, manipulated and used all three of them. That’s not the problem. The problem is he also made them, and they know it.

Shields is a cold genius. This is why the inside of the door to his office looks like an Aztec stone carving of the surface of his brain. He knows how to get a picture made, but doesn’t care about the damaging costs. This creates another troubling problem, because we find that neither do we.

The film’s director, Vincente Minnelli, also knows how to make a picture. This means he also knows how to take one apart for us to examine. This act of disassembly draws our attention to the myriad details that constitute a movie — lighting, gestures, costumes, camera moves, music, unspoken relationship dynamics — and once we’ve been educated in seeing a purring Minnelli whispers in our ear “Now, want to see what happens when we put all that together?” and suddenly — BLAM! — Lana Turner’s freaking out in an out of control car and the effect blows our tiny minds! There’s a name for this, and it’s called ‘virtuosity’.

All this seemingly limitless visual information is always pushed to the extreme for maximum impact. This is why we’re not surprised when Turner’s Champagne bottle is so hilariously enormous. Yet it’s also a film of psychological extremes and opposites, something Minnelli, and writer Charles Schnee, utilise to generate both laughter and tears (it’s the same mechanism driving both). Someone is intensely happy/therefore they must be plunged into the abyss. Someone is at rock bottom/they are suddenly lifted to glory. A sad scene is immediately followed by a hysterically funny one and vice versa. So it is on the happiest night of her life that Turner must be totally destroyed and those previously mentioned contrasts now physically manifest as we notice she is dressed in oversized white while the cause of her emotional annihilation is wearing slinky black (her heart might’ve been broken by betrayal, but don’t discount the cause of the pain being that her rival has the better outfit).

Finally, ‘The Bad and the Beautiful’ is a machine that keeps shattering its own reality and stepping out of itself so we’re never quite sure what realm of existence we’re inhabiting or how many layers there theoretically are. Infinite? So we can’t help but wonder what possible influence Minnelli must’ve had on the French New Wave, particularly Truffaut… but especially Godard.

This is a film of a magnitude that’s on a whole other level. “That’s not a god talking to you!” a character declares at one point, “That’s only a man!” That statement might apply to Shields but I don’t think it does to Minnelli because ‘The Bad and the Beautiful’ isn’t a movie. It’s a bloody miracle.