It's 1950 in middle-class America. Ann Blythe is the 18-year-old daughter of a loving family. She pretty, smart, and is going to deliver the valedictorian address at her high school graduation. She has a handsome young boyfriend in the person of Farley Granger and, with him, sits on the porch swing and once in a while they get to sparkin' and a-neckin' in the most chaste way.
Then tragedy strikes. She discovers by accident that, unlike her two sisters, Joan Evans and Natalie Wood, Ann was adopted as an infant. Her life, which once seemed so sure, is now a bindle full of uncertainties. She becomes sullen, aloof, resentful, angry. She visits her "real" mother, Ann Dvorak, and finds that she was an illegitimate child. The good-natured Dvorak lives with her good-natured husband in a relatively shabby working-class neighborhood, where the men sit around playing cards and smoking cigars and the wives gossip on the couch. A train chugs along in the background. They don't even have a maid. That's how bad things are. Dvorak is a nervous wreck and, though delighted to see her daughter for the first time in eighteen years, she's kept her sin from her husband and friends and there is no room for Blythe in her life.
Is Ann Blythe justified in feeling torn apart by the realization that she is not the natural daughter of her parents? Yes. Why? For the same reason that Hallie Berry and Barack Obama are "black", even though one of their parents was white. And for the same reason that marijuana should be illegal and fine single-malt scotch should be legal, and the same reason that being gay is unnatural and being straight is normal. It's why we measure our speed in miles per hour. It's why we have separate words for "blue" and "green", which isn't the case in many other languages.
It's right because everybody says so.
In my opinion, the movie is a trumped-up tear jerker with a couple of good performances but it's an excellent demonstration of the operation of a force called "the social construction of reality". (You can probably Google it.) I speak to you as your sociologist now. The fee is ten cents.
What the loving family should have done is off-handedly let Ann Blythe know she was adopted from the moment she could understand English. It was a big deal in 1950 because we made it into a social problem. In the small Polynesian village in which I did field work, children were born, played with for a while by their natural parents, and then turned over to their older siblings or their grandparents to be raised. Everybody agreed that it was natural. There was no such thing as "adoption." A person's biological parents were known to everyone, but it wasn't important. Everyone knew who the homosexuals were too, but that wasn't important either. Two of the village's dancers, boys of no more than five or six, were casually referred to as "female males." The movie was dragged out, I thought, especially the beginning. There seemed to be an enormous amount of repetitious exposition. Points were made, remade, and then made again. It was almost an hour before the Big Reveal. However, if you want to see a comic book happiness turned into dysphoria in one big jiffy, this is the movie for it.
Then tragedy strikes. She discovers by accident that, unlike her two sisters, Joan Evans and Natalie Wood, Ann was adopted as an infant. Her life, which once seemed so sure, is now a bindle full of uncertainties. She becomes sullen, aloof, resentful, angry. She visits her "real" mother, Ann Dvorak, and finds that she was an illegitimate child. The good-natured Dvorak lives with her good-natured husband in a relatively shabby working-class neighborhood, where the men sit around playing cards and smoking cigars and the wives gossip on the couch. A train chugs along in the background. They don't even have a maid. That's how bad things are. Dvorak is a nervous wreck and, though delighted to see her daughter for the first time in eighteen years, she's kept her sin from her husband and friends and there is no room for Blythe in her life.
Is Ann Blythe justified in feeling torn apart by the realization that she is not the natural daughter of her parents? Yes. Why? For the same reason that Hallie Berry and Barack Obama are "black", even though one of their parents was white. And for the same reason that marijuana should be illegal and fine single-malt scotch should be legal, and the same reason that being gay is unnatural and being straight is normal. It's why we measure our speed in miles per hour. It's why we have separate words for "blue" and "green", which isn't the case in many other languages.
It's right because everybody says so.
In my opinion, the movie is a trumped-up tear jerker with a couple of good performances but it's an excellent demonstration of the operation of a force called "the social construction of reality". (You can probably Google it.) I speak to you as your sociologist now. The fee is ten cents.
What the loving family should have done is off-handedly let Ann Blythe know she was adopted from the moment she could understand English. It was a big deal in 1950 because we made it into a social problem. In the small Polynesian village in which I did field work, children were born, played with for a while by their natural parents, and then turned over to their older siblings or their grandparents to be raised. Everybody agreed that it was natural. There was no such thing as "adoption." A person's biological parents were known to everyone, but it wasn't important. Everyone knew who the homosexuals were too, but that wasn't important either. Two of the village's dancers, boys of no more than five or six, were casually referred to as "female males." The movie was dragged out, I thought, especially the beginning. There seemed to be an enormous amount of repetitious exposition. Points were made, remade, and then made again. It was almost an hour before the Big Reveal. However, if you want to see a comic book happiness turned into dysphoria in one big jiffy, this is the movie for it.