Staircases (and analogous things [are] unquestionably symbols of copulation. It is not hard to discover the basis of the comparison: we come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the bottom again. The Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. 5:355
Quite apart from the individual symbols and oscillations in the sue of universal ones, one can never tell whether any particular element in the content of a dream is to be interpreted symbolically or in its proper sense. … A knowledge of dream-symbolism will never do more then enable us to translate certain constituents of the dream-content … It will, however, afford the most valuable assistance to interpretation precisely at points at which the dreamer's associations are insufficient or fail altogether. On Dreams S.E. 5:684, 685
Gone with the Wind (1939). Scene: Clark Gable, who has been denied the bed of his vain wife, forcefully scoops up the struggling Vivien Leigh in his arms and bounds up a wide, straight-up staircase to the dark at the top of the stairs. Vivien Leigh, in bed the next morning, stretches sensuously, a small catlike smile crossing her face as she remembers last night's passion.
Scene: Vivien Leigh turns to strike Clark Gable as they tear verbally at each other; she falls a long way down the same flight of stairs, losing the child conceived in this night of passion.
Scene: Hattie McDaniel tells the pregnant Olivia de Haviland, as they slowly and laboriously climb the same flight of stairs, that Clark Gable, mad with grief, has locked herself in a room with his dead child Bonnie. He refuses to allow anyone into the room, determined that Bonnie, who had been terrified of the dark, to be buried in the dark ground.
Even before (or without) interpreting what it is about staircases that confers upon them the power to move me, I enjoy simply noticing that many movies make use of staircases, thereby endowing scenes—which might just as well, from the point of view of the narrative have occurred on a flat surface—with a special intensity.
The Dance of Desire Swing Time (1936). Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance an extraordinarily nuanced dance of desire and separation—delicate hesitations, slow graceful movements of longing, a coming together, a drawing apart—at the foot of, an finally up, an art deco staircase. (Stairways on extravagant sets of thirties musicals requrie an essay by themselves.)
Rebecca (1940). Joan Fontaine is tricked by Judith Anderson into secretly dressing herself for a costume ball in what turns out to be a dress once worn by her husband's dead wife. She comes down the huge staircase at Manderley, hoping to surprise and delight Lawrence Olivier. However, when he catches sight of her, he turned on her in a rage, sending her upstairs in a state of shame and confusion.
Now Voyager (1942) Scene: Bette Davis, spinster daughter of her tyrannical mother's old age, dumpy, bespectacled, with thick eyebrows, comes down the staircase of a Boston mansion, camera focused on her thick ankles and sensible oxfords, to be confronted by a kindly psychiatrist, Claude Rains. When she flees, he follows her up the stairs to see her room, discovers some of her secrets, and diagnoses a “nervous breakdown.”
Scene: After a stay in Rain's sanatorium, recovered from her illness, she stands up to her mother, Gladys Cooper. After this encounter, the mother throws herself down the stairs, twisting her ankle and retiring to her room, to which the assembled family came up one by one to do obeisance. Bette Davis, transformed and triumphant, goes down the stairs in a dramatic black evening gown, now svelte and beautifully coiffed, to greet her astounded family.
Mr. Skeffington (1944). In scene after scene, the lovely and vain Bette Davis descends the staircase of her home, beautifully dressed, eternally young, to greet and dazzle the
suitors waiting below, looking up at her. Claude Rains, her husband, leaves her. In the end, old, ugly and alone, she ascends the staircase supporting the broken Claude Rains, who has returned to her from Europe where he has been tortured by the Nazis. Now blind, he will always “see” her as young and beautiful.
Sunset Boulevard (1950). Gloria Swanson, an aging former movie queen, having killed her young lover, descends as if in a trance, the staircase of her Holywood mansion, reaching out with undulating arms to the crowd of newsmen in the mad belief that she is on a set before the movie cameras again.
The Scarlet Empress (1934). Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great in a white military uniform, waving a sword, rides a huge white horse up a bizarrely ornate staircase in the palace, leading her loyal soldiers (many of whom she has slept with) to victory.
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, in one of the best fencing duels in the movies, dart back and forth and jump on and off the curving stone stairway of an old castle.
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The young Tim Holt and his overindulgent aunt, Agnes Moorehead, scold, nag and reproach one another, in a vivid depiction of the strains of love an hate intertwined in a family relationship, he is on one landing and she on another of a many-storied staircase in a Victorian mansion, the entire staircase astonishingly within one frame.
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). Judith Anderson is killed on a staircase with her own cane by the young niece she has bullied and tormented.
Spellbound (1945). Scene near the beginning of the movie: Ingred Bergman, a psychoanalyst, climbs the stairs leading to Gregory Peck's room, driven by sexual desire but deceiving herself that she is going to the sanatorium library next to his room to get a book he has written in order to ask him about it. Scene near the end of the movie: Ingred Bergman climbs the same stairs to confront a killer whose identity she has discovered by interpreting a dream. During their encounter, the killer threatens to shoot her, but instead turns his gun on himself.
Notorious (1946). Cary Grant stealthily climbs a staircase in a Nazi stronghold looking for Ingrid Bergman, who lies captive and poisoned in her room. Then, supporting her, he slowly descends the stairs, accompanied by Claude Rains and his mother, who have rushed out to stop their escape, but who dare not betray them to their Nazi colleagues below lest they discover that Rains has foolishly and unwittingly married an American spy and thus murder them.
The Little Foxes (1941). Bette Davis coldly sits by as her husband, Hebert Marshall, crawls up the stairs for his heart medicine, he collapses and dies.. At the end of the movie, Bette Davis goes up the same stairs, pauses as she nears the dark at the top and turns to ask her daughter. Teresa Wright who now suspects what has happened to her father and is leaving home, to come with her to her room. “Are you afraid, Mama?” the daughter asks.
King's Row (1942). Scene: Maria Ouspenskaya, having been told she is soon to die of cancer, goes slowly upstairs, as her friend and lawyer comments to her doctor that her death represents the passing of a world, a whole way of life.
Scene: Robert Cummings, who at the turn of the century has studied psychiatry in Vienna, where exciting new developments are occuring, and who has returned to a small town in America of practice, rushes up a tiny staircase and into the room at the top to embrace the bed-ridden Ronald Reagan, and old friend whose legs have been amputated. Reagan looks down at himself and turns his face to the wall.
Scene: Cummings comes up the staircase to confront Reagan with the knowledge that may “make or break you.” After his accident in a railroad yard, Reagan's legs were amputated unnecessarily by a sadistic surgeon, Charles Coburn, who objected to Reagan's interest in his daughter.
The Spiral Staircase (1945). A mute girl, Dorothy McGuire, is stalked on the spiral staircase of a gloomy old house by a crazed murdered of deformed girls.
Kiss of Death (1947). Richard Widmark, giggling maniacally at the top, pushes an elderly women he has tied in her wheelchair to her death down a flight of stairs.
I write here about movies, not about cinema or films as art, even when a movie is not “good” there always seems to be something in it, some scene, some performance, some object, that enthralls and gives pleasure. The recurrence of themes, stars, and things—the reappearance of a kind of scene, a star or an object such as a staircase through a series of films (just apprehended sensually, quite apart from interpretation) - has the same emotional resonance as a network of affectladen memories.
Movies evoke unconscious fantasies, especially ones of a sexual nature (in the broadly psychoanalytic sense). This is one way to understand why genre movies (westerns, gangster movies, musicals, melodramas, suspense thrillers, horror movies, sci-fi movies) give pleasure. Genre movies are variations on familiar themes - themes that remain constant and recognizable, however embellished, transformed or disguised.
Movies are an expression of sexuality, and perhaps especially so of deviant forbidden or frightening sexuality. Movies are the paradise of the voyeur, the refuge of the fetishist, the playground of the bisexual, who exist in all of us. Perfect voyeurs, we watch performances by magnified mythic humans who become identified with the actors in the secret scenarios of our minds. The familiar face envelops us in close-up. Can anything arouse such deep, such reverberating emotions, as a human face! As fetishists are, we are stirred by a familiar gesture, the timbre of a familiar voice, a distinctive walk, hair, lips, mouth, eyes, breasts, wrists, ankles. We stare at movie stars, compelled; it is enough for them to be on the screen; the rest of the movie does not matter; if they disappear, we wait impatiently for them to reappear.
In the same way we a fascinated by emotionally charged parts (animate and inanimate), artifacts and natural objects which are fascinating just because of the role they play in those secret scenarios. Movies make us aware of objects, the furniture of the world, and of their significance: staircases; doors and windows (Stella Dallas [1937], Wuthering Heights [1939], The Searchers [1956]); portraits (The Light that Failed [1939], The Picture of Dorian Gray [1945], Vertigo [1958]), dresses (Jezebel [1938]); hats (Ninotchka [1939], A Woman's Face [1941]; gloves (Little Women [1933], Gilda [1946]); trains (The Lady Vanishes [1938], Night Train to Munich [1940], Murder on the Orient Express [1974]); automobiles (Two for the Road [1966], American Graffiti [1973], The Betsy [1978]); ships Dodsworth [1936], Ships of Fools [1965]); mirrors (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [1937], Citizen Kane [1941], The Lady from Shanghai [1948]).
Fade to your nearest video store.