Directed by John M. Stahl, written by Jo Swerling and centred on a spellbinding performance from Gene Tierney, Leave Her to Heaven melds noir, melodrama, the western and the courtroom drama to produce one of the most devastating critiques of the American Dream ever committed to screen. It’s remarkable in many ways, first and foremost for the psychoanalytic austerity of its narrative, which revolves around the doomed romance between Richard Harland, a novelist played by Cornel Wilde, and socialite Ellen Berent, played by Gene Tierney. Richard is from Maine and Ellen is from Boston but they meet on a train to New Mexico, where they turn out to be staying with the same friends, and where Ellen is scattering the ashes of her late father. They are immediately attracted to one another, quickly develop a romantic attachment, and are soon engaged to be married, but Richard hasn’t counted on Ellen’s monomaniacal jealousy, which stems from her inordinate attachment to her father. Indeed, the only reason she agrees to marry Richard is because he looks like her father, unlike her former suitor Russell Quinton, played by Vincent Price. Whereas Ellen continually postponed the question of marriage with Russell, she proposes to Richard within days, and soon enough they are leaving New Mexico for a life of their own.
It doesn’t take long for Ellen’s jealousy to manifest itself – or to escalate. Her first impediment is Danny Harland, played by Darryl Hickman, Richard’s younger brother, a disabled child who she murders shortly after he comes under her care. Not content to remove this child as a competitor, she also kills her own child, throwing herself down a staircase to self-abort so that there will be no future rival to Richard’s affections. If those two acts of infanticide weren’t enough, Ellen quickly grows jealous of Richard’s writing, which means that she grows jealous in turn of her sister Ruth Berent, played by Jeanne Crain, who comes to visit the couple and shows a marked interest in Richard’s craft. Upon being exposed for the murder of the two children, Ellen commits suicide, but frames Ruth for the her death, continuing to manipulate Richard beyond the grave as Russell, a lawyer, prosecutes Ruth for the supposed murder. At every stage, this jealousy overrides maternity, family, love and Ellen’s own life, consuming her and everyone around her in its toxic ambit, with the result that the film’s resolution, and Ruth’s acquittal, feels incidental, beside the point. On her death bed, Ellen, tells Richard: “I’ll never let you go, never, never never.”
Such a lurid plot clearly demands a psychoanalytic reading and it’s not hard to see in Ellen an instance of the Electra complex, or more properly what Freud termed the female Oedipus complex. Positing that a girl’s first object of attachment is her father, Freud suggested that a key part of female psychological development was relinquishing the fantasy of exclusive possession of the father. With Ellen this clearly never happens, producing a character who seeks paternal substitutes while remaining within the logic of exclusive possession. That radicalises jealousy, detaching it from mere sexual competition (Ellen’s rivals include her son-in-law, her unborn baby, and Richard’s writing career) and turning it a drive for total domination that necessitates a wholesale rejection of reality. This totalising jealousy thus becomes an instance of Freud’s death-drive, a tendency that pushes Ellen past regular pleasure-seeking behaviour to repetition, destruction and ultimately a return to an inorganic state, a longing to be at one with her father’s ashes. Paradoxically, the death drive is activated when desire becomes absolute, when the subject cannot tolerate any limit to their desire, leaving self-annihilation as the only viable option.
The sheer extremity of that narrative would be remarkable in itself but Stahl’s film is doubly extraordinary for the way it couches it within what appears on the surface to be a lush romance. For all the unique fusion of genres that constitute the film, Stahl initially disguises it as a romance, only to confront us with a psychic economy of possession and annihilation underpinning American normality. Rather than Ellen’s psychopathy occurring as overt violence, it instead emerges in and through the medium of romance – unfolds, indeed, as a function of love, whose opposite here is not hatred but the inability to conceive of the other as separate or autonomous. Ellen moves beyond loving excessively to an inability to tolerate love as division between two people, and so the film presents an initially normative vision of heterosexual monogamy only to strip it away and reveal an infantile demand for exclusivity, like a child who cannot bear to share a parent. By the closing scenes, Ellen has attempted to abolish everything that reminds her that Richard is, or could ever be, a separate person.
That intensity often tips Leave Her to Heaven into the region of noir and there is no doubt that Ellen is every bit as terrifying as the most flamboyant of femme fatales. But there is ultimately a different psychic geometry operating here, almost an obverse of noir, which tends as a rule to revolve around the return of the repressed – protagonists who are driven by desires that they have tried to conceal from themselves, longings that they (and we) know go against their better nature. Whereas noir protagonists are internally divided, drawn in two incompatible directions at once, Ellen is radically coherent in her desire – it’s just that what she wants, the total domination of another person, remains untenable. Rather than repressed wishes erupting into consciousness, she remains stuck in an early developmental configuration, with the result that her character never evolves – we just see more of it. This creates both a different kind of jealousy and a different iteration of the death-drive from what we see in noir, which usually revolves around a protagonist who is an obsessive reader of signs, continually attempting to decode an opaque world that threatens to disclose his desire back to him. By contrast to this paranoid jealousy, in the Freudian schema, Leave Her to Heaven is more interested in pathological jealousy, since Ellen never struggles to interpret her desires, but simply sets about acting upon them as efficiently as possible. Unlike the noir death-drive, which revolves around repetition-compulsion, in which the protagonist is stuck in an endless psychic loop of revelation and repression, Ellen’s death-drive is closer to Lacan’s “impossible enjoyment” which demands that every obstacle to desire must be systematically destroyed, concluding with the subject doing the desiring.
In other words, Stahl’s film is ultimately preoccupied with desires too enormous to be satisfied – and this is what shifts it into a precursor to the great melodramas of the 50s (and Douglas Sirk in particular). Whereas noir characters are trapped by repressed desire, melodramatic characters tend to be trapped because they desire too intensely. Like Sirk’s characters, Ellen seeks absolutes – perfect love, perfect recognition, perfect belonging, perfect selfhood – in a world built on compromise and yet Stahl’s vision is considerably bleaker than Sirk’s. For while Sirk tends to be sympathetic towards his protagonists’ desires, and frames their frustration as products of a flawed social system, Stahl suggests that Ellen’s desire is inherently frustrated, since it cannot admit the most basic truths about how people are divided between different relationships in their lives. Nevertheless, Stahl also anticipates the way in which this impossible desire corresponds to the American Dream of middle-class security and prosperity, setting his narrative amidst what initially seems to be a perfect mélange of décor, family, love and career that quickly turns dissonant and violent.
It is here that we see the third and perhaps most remarkable element of the film after the psychoanalytic austerity of its narrative and lushness of its romantic framing device – the fact that it plays out against some of the most sumptuous Technicolor ever committed to the big screen and some of the most beautifully ornate production design of the classical era. In fact, Leave Her to Heaven is arguably the foundational film in imagining Technicolor as a vehicle for melodrama, part of the reason it won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 1945. In stark contrast to the black and white of noir, which works to evoke repressed and obscured desire, here cinematographer Leon Shamroy uses Technicolor to project desire onto the world, to conflate emotion and environment – and above all, to insist that colour itself can be ideological, a palette for the fantasies and contradictions of the American Dream’s intertwining of beauty and pathology, desire and death drive. Shamroy and Stahl emphasise this through a unique form of dramatic irony whereby Richard is unable to fully experience this richly saturated visual field due to his congenital colour blindness, which leaves him without the perceptual lens needed to understand Ellen’s impossible desire. Like America, the film suggests, Richard has not fully come to terms with the consequences of the American Dream as personified by Ellen.
Of course, vivid colours alone aren’t enough to evoke that Dream – and so they are paired here with an extraordinary advertisement for middle class life that unfolds across a series of settings so gorgeous that they occasionally verge on science fiction. From the New Mexico ranch of the opening act we move to a lavish sanatorium in Warm Springs, George, and from there to Richard’s lake house at “Back of the Moon” in rural Maine, before the action shifts once again to an imposing and palatial cliff top house in Bar Habour. These incredible locales seem to birth Technicolor in real time – even the waiting room in a hospital is exquisite – and become the canvas for Ellen’s desire, which dictates that they must all be vacant except for her and Richard, backdrops and contours to their exclusive regard for one another. When they finally move into their own home at “Back of the Moon,” she announces as much to his considerable surprise – “I don’t want anyone in this house but us!” “Ever?” “Ever!” – and even the enormous sightlines of this “most remote, uninhabited place east of the Mojave” becomes crowded by the prospect of her son-in-law, sister and unborn child. For all their beauty then, these elaborate mise-en-scenes are strangely airless, stillborn in the intensity of Ellen’s desire, most vividly in a scene in Bar Habor when her pregnancy confines her to the house while Richard, Ruth, and Ruth and Ellen’s mother, played by Mary Phipps, walk into town to do some baby shopping. Upon returning, this trio of characters is brought together by a crisp sea wind that sees them laughingly collapse into each other while Ellen remains trapped within the morbid stillness of the world she has curated for Richard, staring at them out the window. The very strategy she thought would entrap Richard further – getting pregnant – has only accentuated their division, and so it is only after she self-aborts that she can also lay claim to this dynamic exteriority, with a brisk swim in the surf that feels as if she is trying to enclose nature itself as a rival to her love.
That element of domestic fantasy is only enhanced by the fact that all of these gorgeous settings gesture towards a sublime prospect that doesn’t quite exist yet: suburbia, the space that more than any other claims to offer total fulfilment within the American imaginary. Upon the film’s release in 1945, America was still two years away from Leavittown, the prototypical suburb constructed on Long Island, let alone the classic ingredients of suburbia as it flourished in the 1950s: enormous tract developments, the commuter husband, the ranch house, the television-centred family room and, of course, the highly codified gender roles that would be explored in such iconic texts as Revolutionary Road and Mad Men. By contrast, Leave Her to Heaven evinces more of a mobile and aristocratic sensibility, founded on trains, boats, an actual ranch (as opposed to a ranch house) and a mountain lodge – and yet the foundations of suburbia are also in place in Ellen’s desperate efforts to congeal property, prosperity, consumption and gendered life to ensure Richard’s total devotion. The result is a transitional text that remains in the realm of nuclear family drama but reaches for the socialised psychoanalysis, the spatial pathologies, that will typify Sirkian suburbia.
If Leave Her to Heaven gestures forwards towards suburbia as a certain apotheosis of the American Dream – upward mobility and bourgeois luxury for all – then it equally looks back to the western genre as a deeper fundament of the American Dream, while anticipating the return of this genre in the 1950s as a lavish Technicolor and widescreen vehicle. The narrative is bookended by the image of Richard paddling across the Lake of the Moon, like a prospector setting himself against the wilderness, while Ellen’s favourite place in the world is the ridge line beyond her family’s New Mexico property – she scatters her father’s ashes there, will spend twelve hours at a time immersing herself in its vistas, and describes it to Richard as “like riding across the front lawn of heaven,” giving the film its title. Stahl and Swerling thereby situate the narrative’s psychic structure within a broader western spaial system, creating an unusual and initially dissonant dynamic. For where the melodrama emphasises interiority and constriction, the western is founded upon expansion and autonomy, a contrast encapsulated in the role that Ellen’s father plays in the script. The scattering of the ashes is in some sense the central spectacle of the film – set against the sublime ridgeline, beneath an enormous sky, and suffused with the gravitas of ancestral territory, it dramatises the absence of paternal authority that often sets the western in motion. Yet whereas the dead or missing father tends to represent a symbolic authority that the western hero must surpass to reckon with the frontier, the logic of Leave Her to Heaven tends towards enclosure rather than expansion, fixation rather than freedom – rather than enabling the future, the death of Ellen’s father produces a wound that cannot be healed, since her father remains psychically alive. The ritual of scattering the ashes mediates the New Mexico landscape in an uncanny way – according to western convention these vistas should contain the future, but they are really where the foreclosure of the future occurs.
Likewise, on the face of it Ellen’s psychology is defiantly anti-western, since the western hero generally accepts separation as part of the structure of life, and is committed to leaving people, towns and whole civilisations behind, or else remaining scrupulously unattached; even the most sensitive of western heroes usually register domestic life as a compromise or veiled form of servitude. This couldn’t be more different from Ellen, who does everything in her power to ensure that separation cannot occur and to destroy the openness of space that characterises the western by corralling it into her suffocatingly beautiful mise-en-scenes, which quickly come to make even the most expansive of exterior establishing shots feel as if they have been assembled from a homeowner’s catalogue. Much of the film’s aesthetic plays as a prototype for one of the most distinctive of classical suburban tropes, and a recurring image in Revolutionary Road in particular – the picture window, the enormous pane of glass that effectively turns the natural world into an extension of interior design by bringing it into the living room (and so removing the need to actually go outside). Poised between a counterpart and counterpoint to television, the other competitor for eyes in the suburban living room, the picture window is the driving aesthetic principle of Leave Her to Heaven, whose incredible natural landscapes seem to arrive pre-framed, mounted behind glass, illustrations in the book that forms the opening credits.
No doubt, then, Stahl creates an interesting dissonance between melodrama and the western – and yet the power of the film stems from the way it ultimately traces a lineage between these forms as different iterations of the American Dream, which at heart is the fantasy of unmitigated selfhood, individualism with no impediment, whether expressed through outward expansion (the western) or impossible desire (the melodrama). Seen from this perspective Ellen becomes the uncanny domestic double of the western hero, clearing space for suburban containment in the same way that her cowboy forebears cleared space for urban expansion; in both cases the key point is that all obstacles must be removed so that the self can inhabit its chosen world in the most comprehensive way possible. Inhabiting the logic of Eisenhower-era suburbia before it has eventuated, Ellen is in her own way a pioneer of a spatial system that doesn’t yet exist, laying the foundations for an endless sweep of tract homes and front lawns in the same ways that the cowboys laid the foundations for the agricultural and urban systems that now cover the American continent. With the western frontier exhausted, and only present as an image, the fantasy of absolute selfhood moves into the domestic realm and promises freedom through marital possession.
Pivoted precariously between the dual fantasies of western and melodrama, the landscapes of the film take on a remarkable uncanny quality, expansive and suffocating at the same time. Two examples stand out to me in particular, the first of which is the scattering of the ashes on the ridge life, where Ellen’s drive to totally possess her father, and future surrogates for her father, emerges out of the older western imagery of mythic inheritance, maintaining the continuity of the land. As a result, this is no ordinary ash scattering but closer to an arcane magical ritual that conjures a new world out of the old, much as the sheer force of Ellen’s desire conjures up a suburban imaginary that doesn’t yet exist. The second scene is Ellen’s murder of Danny, Richard’s brother, which she engineers by encouraging Danny to overcome his disability and swim to the centre of the Lake of the Moon, drawing him out further and further and then leaving him to founder when he suddenly loses energy and traction. Stahl treats this sequence as an exercise in deep focus, pulling us further and further into the depth of field of the lake, immersing us in its supreme placidity even as it becomes a vehicle for Danny’s suffocation and an image of Ellen’s submerged violence. While Richard’s paddle across the lake at the start and end of the film may seem almost Thoreauvian in its communion between the individual and wilderness, it takes on an elegiac tone in the wake of Danny’s death, and marks the transformation of the lake into a curated domestic space, epitomised by his writing studio, which is positioned cosily at the end of the dock, an entire structure that obeys the logic of a picture window.
In its shift from frontier mythology to domestic modernity, by way of noir’s openness to psychopathology, Leave Her to Heaven thus maps genre onto the evolution of the American Dream – and the final stage in this process is the Dream’s assurances of rational and impartial justice, which detours the closing act into the realm of courtroom drama when Ruth is prosecuted by Russell for the supposed murder of Ellen. We see here a final showdown between the legal system as mechanism for providing conscious explanations and psychoanalysis as a method for appealing to unconscious explanations – and the legal system falls short, for while the film may arrive at juridical closure in the exoneration of Ruth, Ellen remains the most active figure driving the narrative. Even as the trial convicts Ellen it also functions as her propsopoeic mouthpiece, as does Russell, whose own jealousy of Richard she relies upon to ensure that Ruth receives the most aggressive treatment. Confident that Russell will be happy to play the role of surrogate protagonist and expand creatively on her version of things, she transforms him into a fresh embodiment of her impossible desire, as his hectoring, haranguing and apparently insatiable cross-examination of Richard culminates with him repeating, over and over again, “Are you in love with Ruth?”
Yet these final moments also speak to a more fundamental dialogue, across the film, between narratives and images as repositories of what Lacan described as the imaginary and symbolic order. Unburdened by any reality referent apart from her own desire, Ellen lives in the imaginary, in a world of images, and often seems to be generating the extraordinary Technicolor vistas that surround her and Richard, much as she takes on the role of director of the mise-en-scenes that unfolds across the film. She enters the action like a visual apparation, or a perfectly configured palette of colours, and has an immediate visual impact on people before they understand anything about her (or so that they cannot understand anything about her); indeed, by the courtroom trial, she exists more as a collection of indelible images than as a character in the conventional sense. It’s no coincidence that she retreats to the remoteness of pure image immediately after admitting to the murder of Richard’s brother – perfectly framed on the couch in the Bar Harbor living room, wearing a lurid blue and red dress, death-driving herself to become one with the inorganic realm of décor and furniture. Nor is it a coincidence that Richard becomes “imagised” by her gaze and by the Technicolor that supplements it; the film’s lurid palette gives his face a weird unblinking patina, draws out his inherent mannequin-like qualities.
Nevertheless, Richard’s profession as writer means that he also represents the symbolic realm – all the rules, restrictions and conventions that go into the everyday reality that cannot accommodate Ellen’s impossible desire. As extreme as her infanticide and suicide may be, they merely approximate the rage with which she regards Richard’s writing, the ultimate object of her jealousy, because it represents the reality she is committed to rejecting. Since Ruth actively encourages Richard’s writing (and Richard dedicates his book to her), she becomes drawn into this matrix of jealousy as well, and so the courtroom becomes a showdown between Richard’s skill as a novelist and the power of Ellen’s final letter, which implicates Ruth – and as Ellen predicts, Russell seizes on Richard’s dedication to Ellen as the critical forensic clue in the case. It is as if Ellen’s most primal fear is that Richard will write a book about her, or find a way to represent her pathology through literature, pinning her forever in the stickiness of the symbolic. So she writes a narrative of her own, an erotic thriller delivered from beyond the grave that centres on a lurid conspiracy between her husband and sister, that Russell, for one, accepts at face value.
By the end of the film we therefore see Ellen operating on two planes. Within the imaginary, the field of images, she has adopted elimination as her core strategy, scrupulously removing anything and everything that doesn’t conform to her monomaniacal mise-en-scenes. Yet when this comes up against the symbolic order, she realises that narrative is an equally potent weapon to elimination, and so sets about to rewrite the conditions of reality from beyond the grave. And in doing so, she personifies the film’s final conflict, between the imaginary components of the American Dream, the impossible individual and total selfhood that it promises, and its codification in a symbolic world that renders it untenable except through daring and fleeting acts of narratives, stories compelling enough to convince you they’re true. Hence the film’s own truncated and perfunctory ending, which fulfils the most basic of narrative obligations by restoring Richard and Ruth’s romance and only pays lip service to Richard’s narrative of the relationship with Ellen, who is still the primary author of his life. Like her father, she continues to exert her influence from beyond the grave, and so the film ends up simply replicating rather than restoring her father’s influence, much as her symptoms are progressively revealed than her character “developed” in a naturalistic sense. Unlike in noir, the death of the femme fatale doesn’t restore masculine order; Ellen’s death only perfects her influence, turns her into an inextricable part of the emotional matrix, the affective mise-en-scene, under whose conditions Richard accepts Ruth as his new wife.
What we’re left with then is the irreducible facticity and affectivity of Ellen – or perhaps most accurately Ellen’s desire, which survives her and seems to generate the film’s own lavish imaginary sphere, its tendency to dissociate from narrative into a sequence of sumptuous tableaux, with each fresh viewing. Beneath the radiant Technicolor surfaces of the American Dream lies an impossible desire that the frontier can’t contain, the family can’t satiate and the law can’t regulate – that can only be expressed adequately through the death drive. In the end Leave Her to Heaven dialectically anticipates Sirk by asking what it would take to satisfy the totalising desire of the American Dream; a decade later, in the midst of the 50s, Sirk will ask what happens when that satisfaction seems to have occurred.