37. Clash by Night (1952)

Directed by Fritz Lang
Written by Alfred Hayes
Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, and Robert Ryan
CW: intimate partner abuse; violence against women

This movie is a white knight, bitter the assholes get the girls. Spurned men conflate assault with seduction. In the projection booth, Earl tells Mae he wants to mutilate the faces of beautiful women. His tone suggests he’s only half-joking. When I worked at a movie theater, I never once felt compelled to threaten or cast aspersions on whole groups of people. Anyway, my boss was queer and awesome and didn’t put up with anyone’s hateful shit, which mostly came from M, the son of one of the owners. He was sixteen when I was twenty. On the night The Two Towers opened, we played Neckbone behind the concession stand, trying to trick each other with impossible lies. I told him he dropped his hubris, which a customer in line thought was a hoot. But M didn’t know what hubris meant. So much for cleverness. Sometimes I showed up early for my four o’clock shifts to sleep off a hangover on the break room couch. I wasn’t the only one. My boss didn’t care, as long as we didn’t leave cigarettes burning in the ashtray while we napped. God knows how we survived our headaches and sour stomachs without №1 Chinese across the parking lot. One can only eat so much free popcorn. Let’s not talk about Earl’s impression of an East Asian person. Aren’t there signifiers of female domesticity other than laundry and motherhood? That politician must have done a number on Mae. At least Jerry never raises a hand against her. Masculinity sets a low bar for itself. Uncle Vince refuses to take down his wall of dirty pictures, despite Mae’s discomfort. That’s cause enough for Jerry to kick him out. Better Vince be a bum than have a woman tell him what to do. What a hill to die on. But what do I know. Maybe that era’s pornography had some groundbreaking aesthetic innovations, or maybe Vince thought his collection would appreciate in value like baseball cards or Superman comics. If I had a nickel for every cigarette Barbara Stanwyck lit and tossed after one puff, I’d be dead.