Dark Victory

Dark Victory

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Movie Reviews of Dark Victory

Movie Review: Lesbian humanism
Summary: 5 Stars

However, it is structured in such a way as to show that Bette's Judith Traherne's moral growth is one that starts as a negotiable, but real, demand to be treated as an adult by her horrible mother, and to be allowed to get personal gratification.

Of course, at the time it was made (a time to which US culture seems to be regressing) many families forced women, and some men, to forget about their own satisfaction using a moral code in which to do so was to be "selfish."

But the movie goes on to show that Judith Traherne is unavoidably compassionate towards others and makes her later altruism flow out of her struggle for personal satisfaction.

This is astonishingly intelligent for it is a dialectic. The "thesis" is the demand by Judith's mother that Bette sacrifice herself. The antithesis is the way that Bette says, up yours, Mom. The synthesis is that Bette is able to return to a new, and higher form of caring for others in the way she "adopts" a repressed and frightened girl.

Of course, crude interpretations of identity politics aren't dialectical. They consist of non-negotiable, zero-sum and winner-take-all demands for "rights" in which the losers are expected to act like losers, and not fight back...as in the case of the Born to Lose "angry white male." In particular, lesbianism becomes in the social sense a kind of Bantustan, in which the privilege to walk down the street hand-in-hand is continually under threat, because it is assumed to deny heterosexuals a right not to be offended.

The lesbianism in the film is of course quiet in its time and consists in Judith's denial that she "needs" a man (which was quite daring in its time.) Lesbian humanism is the denial that a person, usually a woman, should not have to implement power in the small and it points to the destruction it results.

The film is almost enough to make me a lesbian. Unfortunately, and as Garrison Keillor has pointed out, to be a male lesbian is nearly an oxymoron. But, in view of the hatred for women that is on-tap in our society, perhaps Keillor is wrong, and their are very few male lesbians.

"Humanism" is no longer a singular term because, of course, the immediately preceding generation confused sets of actual humans with all of humanity. Nonetheless it exists as an abstraction which is, I think, instantiated in any narrative of a struggle that is genuinely human, and made so by a dialectical refusal to stay only in personal gratification or self-sacrifice.