“There are some side-effects associated with cortisone use. Depression and peptic ulcers occasionally occur. Psychic derangements may appear when cortisone is used, ranging from euphoria, insomnia, mood swings and personality changes, to frank psychotic manifestations. At high dosage, moon face and buffalo hump can also occur.”
— A Winning Essay: Cortisone: The Wonder Drug
“Childhood is a congenital disease, and the purpose of education is to cure it.”
— Bigger than Life
Nicholas Ray explodes the 1950s American ideal nuclear family. From the beginning, he hints at its instability: the father works a second job at a cab company in order to maintain a façade of success; he lies to his wife and son, who are models of docility; and he notes to his wife that their friends, as well as they themselves, are bores. The landscape of fifties suburbia is shown dense with exaggerated shadows, as if the darkness of film Noir’s expressionistic lighting lies, malignant, within the American ideal.
When the father starts taking cortisone pills to treat a rare blood condition, he develops a megalomania that ruptures the ideal, allowing all the unspoken resentment, quelled ambition, and bitter disdain born of this ideal to spill forth. Believing himself to be “bigger than life”—free from social bonds and filled with a violent energy hovering on despair—he casts aside American institutions, criticising the modern education system in a bitterly hilarious speech, scorning his marriage to a wife who he chastises as intellectually inferior, and finally condemning Christianity and its soft-hearted God. Played with both restrained pathos and sprawling mania by James Mason, the father exemplifies the malignancy lingering in those Noir shadows: a frustration with oppressive social norms and a despondent denial of one’s own failings.
To reaffirm Mason’s disunion from his former self and society, the camera separates him from the rest of the cast, emphasizing the space between him and them, shooting him from below as if to glorify the absurd freedom and the terror of his mania. But this separation is laced with a frequently humorous tone, maintaining an ironic distance that allows us to remember the placid past underlying Mason’s grandiosity, never allowing that grandiosity to become seductive in its self-destructiveness. The melodrama of the father’s breakdown is embedded in the world of Father Knows Best, and this dichotomy is utilized to comment on both the breakdown and the televised idealization. With both extremes thus destabilized, the film then leaves only the reality: a sad picture of a man broken by the weight of his expectations.
Tags: favorites, movies, Nicholas Ray, society
