Elemental melodrama

Abstract

Written on the Wind (1956), Douglas Sirk’s mid-century saga of a Texas oil dynasty, stands as one of the émigré filmmaker’s best-known works from his string of Hollywood melodramas made in the 1950s, and has been written about widely as one of the paradigmatic examples of the mode. A tale of familial disappointment, unrequited love, and the empty allure of unearned wealth, the title of Sirk’s film – itself also the name of the title song – hints at something else that might be unfolding before us: ‘what’s written on the wind, is written in my heart’. Blowing leaves through the open door of the family mansion, and then blowing back the pages of the tabletop calendar to mark the end of the opening flashforward, wind with its ‘fatalistic associations’ functions as an element that reinforces the futile circularity of the plot...