A Couple of Old Movies

Now and then old Hollywood hits a note
that makes one feel a fool, disarming judgment,
opening the heart to streams of sentiment
resisted and resented first as mere
capitulation to manipulation,
but welcomed in the end on one condition:
that what has moved us be in essence worthy.

Why should one love, for instance, Casablanca?
Why collaborate in such a softened,
scrubbed, presentable account of what
must certainly have been a far more squalid,
far more base and treacherous and brutal,
backwash of the running sea of war?
Critical judgment argues and complains:
in real life, this—would never happen,
not be pretty, come to an undramatic end,
the tawdry adulterous couple drifting off
to destiny equally shapeless whether
humdrum or violent, in or out of the war,
together or alone—no matter how
it all came out, having neither made nor dreamed
that gesture of magnificent sacrifice
which brings the exalted tear to the viewer’s eye.
But life is the war of good and evil, hidden
though the struggle must be as a rule
and fought, for the most part, in half-light or less.
And so we love to see these things made clear,
and hold far more important and more true
than any fact of wartime Casablanca
that these two did the right thing in the end.

Or take the slight and giddy Funny Face:
a Hollywood divertimento spun
of Gershwin songs and glowing Technicolor.
Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, lights
of grace in a dim and stumbling world,
have but to dance and sing, to show us
what our hearts must look like when we love.
The silly plot, as formal as a sonnet,
bubbles into and lifts the heavy heart.
Not God, not death, not faith is present here
(though all seem waiting just offstage):
a clownish puppet called philosophy
is made Malvolio, both hypocrite
and fool, mechanic of a system mad
and secretly lecherous, useful to disarm
the naive dark-eyed girl, and to dismiss
the decent honest man, whose love, we know,
will win her love, confound the bearded fraud,
disperse the philosophical fog, and send
the lovers drifting down a twilit stream
beside green lawns and white cathedral wall
where they had sung, and left us singing, too,
how wonderful love is indeed, and marvelous.

In youth I would have scorned all this, and held
myself apart from any such contrivance
plainly meant to pull the easy strings
and part the money from the multitude.
I thought there were such things as saints of art
and wanted only what came pure from them
and only (as I thought) to those as pure.
But, nearer dirt than I was then, I know
their secret: they’re no more than ordinary
men and women with a certain knack.
The muses are a feckless crowd, and visit
whom they will. What matter if the artist
pays with his life, or gets paid by the hour?
Fred Astaire was paid to dance, and Audrey
Hepburn to be what she was, or could be
made to seem: a source of light, a star.

But let the artist get the message straight.
The muses visit whom they will, and leave
not only tune and story, color and line,
but also something of the truth, to which
the artist binds himself, or breaks his faith.
To show us what we are is well and good;
to show us what we might be, better still,
but only if we can be what we might.
There’s the question which to answer “yes”
swings wide the door that opens to the stars
and all that we had thought was wishful dream.
Astaire and Hepburn dance and sing, and I,
recumbent in a darkened room, suspect
that even I, as heavy as I am,
might move as lightly, and never lose my love.
For how can we dream more than is our world
unless the world is more than we have dreamed?