Theyre Alive Again and the Hills Are Singing

Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music (20th Century Fox, 1965).

My grandmother's highest compliment for a natural landscape was to say that it was "pretty as a picture." Even as a child I call up thinking that this aesthetic was somehow upside-downwards, that the beauty of fine art should exist judged according to the inimitable standard of natural beauty rather than the other way effectually. During the tardily 18th and early 19th centuries, well-heeled European travelers toured the countryside looking for views that would be as pretty as a picture — or, to be more than precise, as pretty as a painting. And because they had a certain kind of painting in heed as embodying their standard of natural dazzler, these early on ecotourists oftentimes carried with them a small, convex, tinted mirror known as a "Claude glass," afterward the 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain. When a picturesque landscape was encountered — say, the snow-capped Alps — the tourists would plow their backs to the mountains and whip out their Claude glass, holding information technology upwardly to frame the mountains, which were non only reflected only also colour-shifted to a tonal range that made them appear more painterly. And voila! The rugged Alps go not merely pretty as a motion picture, but become a picture, every bit the pleased ecotourists admired non the mountains but rather the image they had created. Merely must we turn our backs on the country to run into it as aesthetically pleasing? Why practise we so often dear our representations of the globe more dearly than nosotros love the world itself?

Yous might say that the Claude glass of the 19th century was photography, and that the 20th-century Claude glass was picture show. These technologies have profoundly conditioned our landscape aesthetics; they take, in issue, allowed us to frame the earth. Certainly cinema's stylized, controlled and color-corrected representations of nature have thoroughly mediated our relationship to the physical globe, non only shaping our environmental aesthetics but also implying that a representation of nature may be an improvement upon nature itself. Film has the power to testify united states landscape in remarkably dramatic fashion; simply to see the country in film we must showtime turn our back on the country itself. To climb upward into the bright mountains of the screen, we must kickoff descend into the night cave of the theater.

From an early age I've held the unwavering confidence that musicals — especially movie musicals — constitute the nearly intolerable and misguided aesthetic form in the checkered history of homo civilisation. Also being uniformly hokey and boring, musicals are also cloying and saccharine. I brand it a policy never to trust a person who would spontaneously pause into vocal, especially when they're about to begin a knife fight (West Side Story), adopt an orphan equally a publicity stunt (Annie), or confess their unwanted pregnancy (Grease). Clearly the world would be a improve place if this upswelling, confessional, tuneful emoting could be soundly squelched.

Singing sheep in the Stubai Alps, Austria. [Photo past Fozzman]

If I sound testy, I have good reason. As the father of ii young daughters, I take in the past several years been subjected to musicals too numerous and nauseating to be enumerated. The nearly oftentimes repeated of these abominations is the much-dearest The Sound of Music, whose perennial popularity confirms every curmudgeonly thing I've ever said or written about my fellow human beings. Indeed, the National Clan of Misanthropes might consider screening this "timeless classic" at its annual convention, if only to reassure members that they really are on the right track. Just despite my personal aversion, The Sound of Music, released in 1965, not only bailed out a sinking 20th Century Fox just, adjusted for aggrandizement, has gone on to make over a billion dollars. That'south "billion" with a "B," every bit in "Blockbuster," or "Banal" or "Bullshit."

And so beloved is this appalling movie — which, by the way, won 5 academy awards and was nominated for five more — that the first-ever reunion of its nine principal actors was staged as part of the final season of Oprah. The film was actually ranked #55 on the American Film Institute'due south centennial list of "100 Years … 100 Movies," where it was judged superior to 18-carat timeless classics including The Third Man and Vertigo, Stagecoach and The Searchers, The Gilt Rush, City Lights and Mod Times. Among the few to tell the truth virtually The Audio of Music was the moving-picture show critic Pauline Kael, who called it "the carbohydrate-coated prevarication that people seem to desire to consume." "We have been turned into emotional and artful imbeciles," wrote Kael, "when we hear ourselves humming [this pic's] sickly, goody-goody songs." In a simultaneous blow to gratis speech and good gustation, Kael was fired from McCall's Magazine for the heresy of this acute opinion.

I've meditated at length about this awful picture for a reason. It isn't simply the uncalled-for singing, which is owned to the form, or the appalling sentimentality of the characters, which is predictable, or even that we're asked to believe that a guy with seven children could be happy instead of insane, even were he not on the run from the Nazis — which, as you'll recall, he is. No, the problem runs deeper, and information technology is this: The Sound of Music is an expression of my own values. How and so? First, at that place is an accent upon the axis, resilience and importance of family, a principle I hold dearest. Then there is, in the romance plot, an exclamation of the ability of love to intermission downwards interpersonal barriers, including those related to course. This too I believe. And the skillful guys in this movie regard the Nazis as bad guys, which I take no difficulty going forth with.

But what is the cadre value at the centre of the film? Information technology is the protagonist's deep love of nature. You'll perhaps remember that at the beginning the Julie Andrews grapheme, Maria, is an irresponsible and negligent nun in training who fails miserably at her religious duties. And why? Because she is so decorated spinning around flowery mountaintops in implausibly orgasmic nature reveries. Here we recognize the oldest of the tricks in the book written by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Beethoven and Schubert, Bierstadt and Cole, Emerson and Thoreau: indulge orthodox rejoicing and piety, but while your parents aren't looking swap out the divinity of God for the divinity of nature. Maria isn't a bad nun so much as she is a good Transcendentalist. She believes in grace, and in the divine, but for her the locus of divinity is the Alps rather than the abbey. And so moved is she by nature that, well, damn it, she only has to "climb every mountain." And she'southward none as well tranquillity nearly it.

Why, then, if this motion picture reflects then many of my own values, do I find it intolerable? You know that feeling you lot get when you discover that the biggest idiot at the party is a huge fan of your favorite baseball team, or an ardent admirer of your favorite band or movie — when the purity of your ineffable love for something is sullied because it must be shared with an obnoxious knothead? The Sound of Music is so incredibly trite that I tin't assist but resent its superficial dramatization of my ain behavior — especially my core religion in the spiritual value of nature. Is this how I appear to others, like a gushy, self-indulgent, dirt-worshipping tree-hugger who twirls effectually in fields bursting into earth-loving song?

Recently, inspired by their immoderate amore for Maria, my daughters Hannah Virginia, historic period 8, and Caroline Emerson, age four, suggest that we should climb our local hill and reenact the opening scene of The Sound of Music. Every bit a homo who despises musicals and is deeply suspicious of Chautauquans, Ceremonious War reenactors, and department store Santas, all of whom I consider not simply fakes merely also drunkards, I am a poor option for this mission. Just here's the affair: I'm their Dad. And among the many blessings of existence the father of daughters is the constant opportunity to operate outside my comfort zone. What selection practise I have, especially later on my married woman, Eryn, with a wry smiling, tells the girls how certain she is that Dad would love to exist a office of this project? "Daddy fifty-fifty teaches film at the academy," she says enthusiastically. "I'm certain he can help y'all understand why this movie is then bully!" This is my penalisation for having married someone with a sense of sense of humor, which now seems less charming than it did during our courtship. "OK," I finally assent, "but if I help you reenact the 'Hills are Alive' scene, then I get to choose another scene from the movie that someday y'all will assistance me reenact." When the girls promptly agree, I reveal my choice: the scene in which Dad, the grumpy Captain Von Trapp, imposes martial bailiwick upon his children, controlling their every behavior through a series of coded orders tooted out shrilly on a canis familiaris whistle. This promises to be a refreshing alter from my usual domestic life, in which my agency has been reduced to running the chainsaw and drinking beer.

Every bit we screen the opening sequence in order to observe every excruciating nuance of the "Hills are Live" scene, I'g reminded that the moving picture begins with a montage of lovely establishing shots of the snowy Alps and verdant Salzkammergut foothills — helicopter shots that are plenty respectable for Sixties cinema. But as one begins to savour these rich images, however, the aerial camera makes the unhappy discovery of Julie Andrews doing those orgasmic hilltop pirouettes, after which she promptly destroys the moment past bursting into vocal. This is the kind of cinematic scene that, rescreened a few times, could make spies talk. In fact I find it difficult not to daydream about some way — any style — to brand Julie stop. I imagine that the studio helicopter is really a helicopter gunship, its sweeping descent toward warbling Maria accompanied by the satisfying rat-a-tat-tat of car-gun strafing — or perhaps that she might be skewered past the chopper skid, a chirruping Maria-kabob rising joyfully into the clouds. Maria'south vocal, "The Hills are Live," turns out to be a kind of environmentalist canticle, replete with images of hills, birds, lakes, trees, breezes, brooks and stones. The degree to which Oscar Hammerstein'due south souvenir as a lyricist has been exaggerated is made especially articulate past the line in which Maria's middle wants to sing "Like a distraction / Who is learning to pray." This is a moment so detestable that nosotros ourselves might pray, along with the hapless distraction, that Maria would merely shut her Von Trapp. But in that location it is again: my personal conventionalities in the divinity of nature, existence expressed in the most syrupy and clichéd manner possible. And, of course, my daughters admittedly love it.

Great Basin foothills, Nevada. [Photograph by the writer]

The girls and I make our plans for the reenactment, and Eryn costumes them to look suitably Maria-ish. I make full a daypack with snacks, water and sunscreen, and nosotros brainstorm our afternoon ascent of "Moonrise," a nearby hill that we've so named because information technology'southward an especially fine spot from which to picket the ascent moon on summer nights. These Great Basin foothills in northern Nevada could not be more different from the lush hills of the film's Austrian Alps. Here we button through high desert scrub including thorny desert peach and scratchy bitterbrush, an unbroken carpet of large sage and rabbit castor rolling out before us to the distant horizon. It is a dark-brown and desiccated landscape in which we must guard against sunstroke, dehydration and Great Bowl rattlesnakes, which are common on the rocky slopes of Moonrise. Here are no blathering brooks to meditate beside, no azure lakes into which to dip our oars, no trees to stroll romantically beneath, no emerald grass to loll upon. Nothing here is green, save for the yellow greenish of an Ephedra bush-league hither and there. The glare of the high-elevation lord's day is intense as we push up the dusty slope into the hot blast of the Washoe zephyr. This is not the land of the Claude glass but rather the land of the emergency point mirror — not a place for twirling, but rather for hunkering down to survive.

The western American writer Wallace Stegner once wisely observed that nosotros need to "get over the color green." "You accept to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns," he admonished. Stegner realized that our fantasy landscape remains closer to that of The Sound of Music than to the geophysical realities of the barren Westward, and that this aesthetic preference has environmental consequences that are all also real. Until nosotros get over the colour green, we'll remain doomed to view the W through a Claude drinking glass of our own imaginative construction. Nosotros'll continue to run across the globe indirectly, artificially framed, color-shifted to conform to an environmental aesthetic that is asunder from the visceral reality of this amazing place. Here in the western Great Basin, greenish is the colour of the lawns that don't vest and the coin that buys the vanishing water that keeps them that way. The high desert is not the dark-green world of the Austrian Alps, but neither was it meant to exist. This is our abode landscape, and to the states it is far more beautiful than the Alps could ever be.

Moonrise, Great Basin foothills, Nevada. [Photo by the writer]

On the mode upwards Moonrise, I ask little Caroline what her favorite role of The Sound of Music is. Without hesitating she replies, "I like the office with those bad guys, Daddy. What are they chosen again?" "Nazis," Hannah replies. I blench. This is the same kid who, during our earlier reenactment of scenes from The Wizard of Oz, insisted upon playing the role of the malevolent flying monkeys, even in scenes where they had no credible reason for appearing. Hoping to shift the conversation, I ask Hannah what her favorite office is. "I like Liesl the all-time, especially the part where she'south singing in the rain." I wince again. The scene Hannah has in mind depicts the courting of Liesl, the eldest Von Trapp girl, by a messenger named Rolfe — a scene in which Liesl croons the insipid teen anthem "16 Going on Seventeen." This awful ditty includes the lines: I need someone older and wiser / Telling me what to do / You are seventeen going on eighteen / I'll depend on you. As the male parent of daughters, this is not the sort of affair I want to hear. I annotation that this anti-feminist narrative isn't much of an improvement over Hannah's favorite child motion-picture show, The Little Mermaid, in which a mermaid girl — basically an aquatic Liesl — disobeys her male parent, leaves home, and relinquishes her own voice to be with a guy merely considering he's man. At this rate, I worry to myself, my kid is headed for an advent on Oprah. "Hannah, do me a favor," I implore. "When y'all're sixteen going on seventeen, recollect that I am the one who is older and wiser. Not some boy, me! And call back that mannerly Rolfe ends up joining the Nazis." "Right," interjects piffling Caroline, "I like those guys!"

At last we reach the meridian of Moonrise, where we pause in the shade of a granite outcropping to hydrate and snack. We are above 6,000 feet now, and the clement cobalt heaven shimmers as it tin can only here in the loftier desert. The scat of pronghorn and coyote are nearby, and the faint tracks of black-tailed jackrabbits, and some orange lichen that has eked out a living in a fissure in the stone. One time rested, we choose the site for our reenactment, and I clamber up into the rocks to approximate the pic'south memorable, loftier-angle opening shot. The girls are downwardly below, practicing their lyrics and poised to pirouette. They look ambrosial in their corny dresses and makeshift aprons. At terminal I yell "Action," and they begin to twirl like crazy, stumbling a little over the rocks, bumping into each other and besides into the sage and rabbitbrush. I catch a word here and at that place as the hot wind sweeps their song abroad toward Utah. The sere, brown country is treeless and flowerless. In the viewfinder of my camera I frame the picayune stars of my own life story, spinning in their mountaintop reverie. They are laughing, and dancing, and singing, right here, in this identify, among the rattlers and scorpions. It is, I admit to myself, a foreign and wonderful kind of musical. In the glare of the loftier desert sun and the sweep of the scorching wind, the irony of the reenactment dissipates, and I feel a sudden rush of genuine sentiment. My little girls are dancing in their home hills, and the hills are alive.

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Source: https://placesjournal.org/article/the-hills-are-alive/