A Film Canon

 

 

To a greater extent than any previous film, Meet Me In St. Louis transforms the entire world into a mere function of colour, and, more generally, of beauty, such that every surface shines with the lurid perfection of frosted icing, and the most touching gesture of familial loyalty comes with a mutual resolution to eat cake. More specifically, Minnelli suffuses the saga with the breathless expectation of the 1900 World's Fair, the majority of which is pointedly elided - or at least reduced to a single, distant neon display - as if to encourage melancholy contemplation of how the twentieth century might have been, from the implicit vantage point of WWII. This produces a strange conflation of retrospection and projection, nostalgia and optimism, neither of which cancel out the other, but rather provide a circuit encapsulated in the cyclical quality of the narrative, structured around the four seasons, as well as Esther Smith's (Judy Garland) final condensation of them into an awed, hyperbolic invocation of the present, in all its irreducible, ambiguous immediacy. It's this identification of Garland with a free-floating 'now' that redeems her fairly one- dimensional acting, transforming her into a synecdoche for a wide-eyed world on the cusp of adulthood. That said, it's Esther's younger sister, Tootie (Margaret O'Brien) who takes this paradox to its poetic conclusion, incorporating gloom, violence and horror - that is, the Gothic - into the Technicolour spectacular in such a way as to make the very presence of death its motivating factor. The result is a poignant vision of adolescence as the first intimation of mortality - or, rather, of colour as the mere flipside of an ominous black-and- white world; snow set against a darkening sky, just beyond the reaches of the family fires.