Bigger Than Life has been recently released on DVD in Australia.
“God said to Abraham ‘Kill me a son’
Abe said, ‘Man you must be puttin’ me on’.”
(Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited”)“Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
(Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor)
A key characteristic of the work of Nicholas Ray is its willingness to deal with contemporary issues and problems. The films produced on either side of Bigger Than Life (1956), Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and The True Story of Jesse James (1957) (originally to star Elvis Presley), are in some ways disparate works that each deal with the problems of juvenile delinquency, home, the generation gap and the psychology of individuals out of step with mainstream society. Ray is often also recognised as a Hollywood progressive and one of the few directors of the period to consistently confront burning social issues. Bigger Than Life is no exception, and is based upon a controversial medical article by Berton Roueché entitled “Ten Feet Tall” published in the New Yorker in late 1955 (the script was worked on by numerous uncredited writers including Clifford Odets and novelist and film critic, Gavin Lambert).
On a surface level, Bigger Than Life might seem a rather conservative film. Its social critique appears to be founded upon the dangers of drug-taking, ideological extremism and diverging from social norms, and its final reinstatement of the family, as the ultimate social unit, might seem to be the icing on its status-quo affirming cake. Even its central concern, the dangerous side-effects of cortisone, might seem a little apolitical and unfocused (I think that this is probably the point). But beneath this, and I think it is more readable and “there” than mere subtext, can be found a rigorous questioning of the familial, religious, political and educational values that structure everyday American life (specifically in the 1950s). The film is very open about this central concern; in an early scene before his drug-induced “rebirth” the protagonist (Ed Avery, a school teacher, played extraordinarily by the often-great James Mason) casually comments upon the boredom and averageness of his suburban life. It is indicative of the balance, understanding and complexity of this film that the spectator never really looks down upon these representations of bourgeois everyday life, but neither do Ed’s inflated critiques of it (relating to its small-mindedness, mediocrity, and repressiveness) pass by without the ring of truth. Also unsettling is this society’s ability to absorb and incorporate Ed’s thinly veiled fascism (best illustrated by the parent-teacher night scene in which some parents, after hearing his tirade about tough-love education, want to make Ed Principal).
Essentially, Bigger Than Life is social critique masquerading as a portrait of psychosis, in which the taking of drugs doesn’t distort perceptions outright but enlarges and clarifies them. Essentially it is a film about seeing too clearly and, thus, recognising the repressive underbelly of a particular American ‘50s mindset and existence. In the process, it becomes a fascinating condensation of life-long delusions of power; a lightning procession through the life defining stages of childhood (Ed, in the grip of his illness and weak as a kitten, being cradled by his wife), work (Ed as over-achieving, “progressive” and demanding teacher), parenting (to live for and through children), and the God-like wisdom of old age (Ed’s murderous but “divine” threats to his own family). Yet, the greatness of Bigger Than Life lies in the gentleness and subtlety of this social critique. Ed’s cortisone enhanced psychosis is the site for excessive and larger than life situations, but these enlarged emotions, situations and actions are always couched within “believable” frameworks. Thus, Ed’s ascent and descent into psychosis is prefigured by events that precede his illness (and subsequently the taking of the drug which seemingly produces these warped perceptions). This illustration of the close proximity of seemingly divergent states is probably the most significant achievement of the film, situating a set of extreme, unblinkered and despotic values just beneath the surface of daily life. And, inevitably, this is what Ray’s film is about. He takes a fashionable and controversial topic, the recently documented side effects of the wonder drug cortisone, and skews this into an examination of dominant values and value systems; education, medicine, religion, marriage and family.
This open critique of social institutions is one of the key reasons that the film is often included within the genre of family melodrama (though the film “frames” its exaggeration and “realistically” documents everyday suburban life in a fashion unlike much of the contemporaneous work of Douglas Sirk). Another reason is the film’s treatment of mise en scène, colour (dynamic colours like green and orange are expressively splashed against a sea of monochrome) and composition – its almost architectural and spatially confining use of the cinemascope frame, and how it circulates, places and over-signifies objects, in particular. Thus, the staircase, often a highly loaded and contested symbolic site in the family melodrama, occupies a central dramatic and ideologically defined place in the final cataclysmic scenes of the film. Also, the football which ironically marks Ed’s brief success as a college footballer, takes on an increasingly complex significance as it becomes the chief means of communication across the film between demanding father and harassed son. At first it is pumped up as a sign of Ed’s reinvigorated and almost careless (witness the indoor football match) attitude to regular existence. Subsequently, it becomes a cipher of the father’s disappointment with and physical superiority to his son, and the central focus of the final “failed” gesture of appeasement between the two.
Another central achievement of the film is its ability to imbue its central characters, in particular the endlessly harangued and compromised wife (Lou), with a sense of grace and worth. Ray’s films are often populated by curiously sympathetic characters who attempt, often hopelessly, to understand the emotionally troubled protagonists who rail against them (for example, the try-hard father in Rebel Without a Cause). Also, as the film progresses religion takes on an increasingly central role, occupying centre stage in the final psychotic showdown between god-like father and sacrifice-like son. This reliance upon religious metaphor and biblical parallel produces what is perhaps the most satisfying and daringly dramatic moment in the film (and in all of ‘50s American cinema). Upon returning home from Sunday service Ed (his black clothing and performance an echo of the demonic Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar [1954]) declares his intention to kill both himself and his son in a re-enactment of God’s missive to Abraham to kill his own son as a sign of his faith. As his wife corrects him, “But God stopped Abraham”, Ed proclaims the ultimate and inevitable critique of the social structures that surround, define and organise him: “God was wrong”.
If Abraham is separated from a common murderer by his faith, then where is its equivalence in Ed’s entropic, confused and despotic world? It is soon after this, as Ed approaches his son for the blood sacrifice, that the football returns in a cruel reinstatement of Ed’s inflated and subsequently deflated ego. As Ed ominously towers over him (bigger than life indeed), his son blindly holds the football aloft, uncertainly illustrating either the acceptance of his fate or an incredible misunderstanding of the very real psychosis his father is suffering. In the face of such a complex, contradictory and over-signified object Ed’s focus and resolve shatters (like the fragmented mirror that Lou smashes earlier in the film, a hoary representational device reinvigorated here to emphasise the close proximity of apparently divergent psychological states). On another level, the staging of the final phase of Ed’s addiction across the Easter holiday (he is resurrected on Easter Monday, of course) provides another pertinent, over-ripe and somewhat contradictory metaphorical layer to the film. This subtler, and more controversial, pairing of Ed with Christ, attempts to cut through and move beyond the petty social structures which surround them. It is also intentionally buried beneath the film’s multi-layered metaphorical structure. This mixture of grand themes and banal consumerist objects, over-riding institutional structures and everyday life, barbed social critique and social understanding, makes Bigger Than Life such a complex and contradictory work. These elements, alongside its technical virtuosity, stylistic brilliance and high level of performance, help qualify it as one the richest and most surprising films made anywhere in the 1950s.
Yet, the film’s movement towards a nihilistic endpoint is inevitable, as the grand ideas of “inflated” Ed are washed against the mediocrity, disappointment and banal rigidity of the world around him. In keeping with this, the world of Bigger Than Life is full of small, ironic pleasures; for, example, the travel posters which dot the walls of the Avery home have a kitsch, cocktail-exotic ‘50s feel about them (in fact the early dinner party in the Avery home seems to noticeably lack such a score – one feels it should be there). Subsequently, the world around and outside the Avery home seems accessible and consumable (a kind of modernist ‘50s internationalist utopia). But this global village is reflected in, trapped and defined by the cheap print and petty materialism of the bourgeois suburban household.
In the final scenes of the film the ultimate reinstatement of the family, typical of the family melodrama, is undermined by the precariousness of Ed’s recovery. Upon waking from the nightmare of his drug-addled state, Ed replaces his paranoid visions of and identification with the “new” Abraham (who would now kill his son) with the emancipative visions of another Abraham; “I walked with Lincoln… Abraham… Abraham”. Thus, Ed tries to contain his psychotic, murderous and egotistical state within the metaphorical frame of the “Father” of the new America. His walk with Abraham is clouded by delusions of grandeur and reunification, and the spectre of emancipation and education. Ed Avery becomes a man for the times, deluded into believing in an illusion of freedom, idealism and emancipation weaved into the fabric of modern America. But he also remembers the very real threat he posed to his family. In the end, as he intones to wife and son “closer, closer”, one must ask just who Ed Avery is; everyman, Christ, Abraham, the great emancipator, a rebel without a cause, society itself, empty vessel, or just a closet despot carried away by his own petty expressions of power?
Adrian Danks
Adrian Danks is Senior Lecturer and Head of Cinema Studies in the School of Applied Communication, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (University). He is co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque (was President between 1988 and 2006), and editor of CTEQ: Annotations on Film, published in Senses of Cinema. He is also a member of AFCA.
This is an extended version of an article that originally appeared in CTEQ: Annotations on Film no. 3, 1996