Splendor in the Grass > IDEAS & IDEALS

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 Late at night the other day I turned on TV and tuned the dial to one of the satellite channels to find quite unexpectedly that an old Hollywood movie, Splendor in the Grass, was being run. I got wistfully interested and watched it to the end with nostalgic reminiscence of my youth. I had a moment of time to calculate and recollect. I had seen it first in 1962. I was a twenty-one year old sophomore college student then majoring in English. I was accompanied by my first love. Momentarily I went back to the time when I was young and full of hopes and fears for the future lying ahead of me.

     Watching the old movies, like listening old songs, brings peculiar pleasure to us. They take us back to the days gone by and revive the forgotten memories associated with them. I was glad to see the young and fresh faces of the once so famous and popular movie stars, Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty, and became sad and philosophic at the same time to realize that the latter had already died and the former must inevitably be, like me, quite old, wrinkled and subdued by now.

     Once there was a time when going to the movies was the only and best pastime for me. Hollywood movies including the Westerns dominated and captivated my world of imagination. Without being told to do so I learned the long and strange names of the foreign actors and actresses by heart and mimicked and imitated their actions and fashions. Most of the pictures are forgotten by now, but some linger on in my memory and heart for some reasons. Splendor in the grass is the one.

     Since I had already seen it once before, I thought I could remember the movie quite well in detail and would not be deeply touched this time as much as I had been. But I was quite wrong in the presumption. I forgot almost all plot, the individual scenes, the dialogues and the dramatic turn of the events. In short, it was simply a new movie to me. I can assure you that memory is not so much dependable as you might think, especially that of the old man's. I feel, therefore, the urgent need to oblige my readers by summing up the outline of the movie for those both who have and have not seen it before.

     Splendor in the Grass is about the two adolescent students growing up in a small town in Kansas in the late 1920s. Bud Stamper(Warren Beatty) and Wilma Deanie (Natalie Wood) meet and obsessively fall in love with each other. They become sexually awakened and experience emotional turmoil, and confront parental pressures and prejudices, social constraints and class difference. Bud's father encourages his son Bud to leave Wilma to find "another kind of girl," while Wilma's mother tells her daughter obstinately that sex is just for making babies, which drives Wilma into a mental institution. Bud reluctantly obeys his father, leaves home and enrolls at Yale University, breaking up his love with her. The stock market crash of 1929 changes the lives of both families altogether. When they meet again for the last time years later, they accept the realities of love and life and sadly but wisely go their separate ways. One of the universal themes in literature, achieving maturity or wisdom in life through suffering, is well and clearly presented in the movie.  

     For me especially this picture has an unforgettable element that makes it so moving and memorable. A poem is being read aloud first by Wilma in the classroom and narrated later by someone at the last scene of the movie. The poem, from which the title of the movie has come, is the penultimate stanza of William Wordsworth's so-called "Immortality Ode," a long poem of eleven stanzas. Meeting with it once more in the movie forty-six years later was an another experience, thrill, even a catharsis for me, who has become a professor of English and has read and taught the very poem to the students so many times in the classroom.

     Forgive me, readers. I cannot restrain myself from repeating it here because I know it is good, true and beautiful. I am convinced that it should be shared by us all, not monopolized by a few of the privileged persons, like me, especially when stock market plunges so many into despair every day and people are committing suicide for no visible or probable reasons. I feel I must comfort them. Here you are:

               "What though the radiance which was once so bright
               Be now forever taken from my sight,
               Though nothing can bring back the hour  
               Of splendor in the grass, or glory in the flower;
               We will grieve not, rather find
               Strength in what remains behind;
               In the primal sympathy
               Which having been must ever be;
               In the soothing thoughts that spring
               Out of human suffering;
               In the faith that looks through death,
               In years that bring the philosophic mind."

     When the movie ended I found I was all by myself in front of TV. It was past midnight already and my wife had gone to bed long before. I fell into a silly reverie. Had I married my first love, would she have gone to bed leaving me alone to watch the very movie we had seen together? I thought of her, my Wilma, and of the time my heart leapt when I beheld her. I was so happy and proud of being with her. She was everything to me. It was impossible to marry other woman. But I have married other woman and she is sleeping peacefully, leaving me wide awake in a silent and empty room. Momentarily I got angry with my wife and with myself for no reasons. Very fortunately was an old man now with no particular hopes and fears. Being old is a cold blessing.  
     (October 28, 2008)