Dark Nostalgia: The Beauty of Meet Me in St. Louis

I have seen Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) many times but a recent viewing was the first time I cried while watching it. I wonder why it has taken so long. I have always enjoyed it visually, nostalgically, and as a transcendent vehicle for film history's greatest musical performer, Judy Garland. When dateless Esther Smith (Judy Garland) is so low and depressed at the Christmas party, ballroom dancing with her grandfather (Harry Davenport), then disappears behind the Christmas tree, I got weepy in anticipation for the moment at which a beaming Garland would reappear and continue dancing in the unexpected arms of her beloved "boy next door" John Truitt (Tom Drake).

Using an episodic, seasonal framework that starts in summer, carries through Halloween, Christmas and Easter, Meet Me in St. Louis is a musical that tells the story of the upper middle-class Smith family who live in early twentieth century St. Louis. It is about small, old-fashioned things--making ketchup, corn beef portions, fitting into corsets, waiting for long-distance calls and turning down the gas lamps. These things are so slight that, according to director Vincente Minnelli's memoir, twenty-one-year-old Garland balked at appearing as teenager Esther in the film, having just played post-adolescent adult roles in For Me and My Gal (Busby Berkeley, 1942) and Presenting Lily Mars (Norman Taurog, 1943). Of the script, she said, "It's not very good, is it?" Minnelli responded, "It's magical," and talked Garland into doing the picture. (Minnelli and Garland eventually married and had a daughter, Liza Minnelli.)

In all the sentimental goodies, it is easy to overlook that Meet Me in St. Louis is about something bigger: family, ritual and hope. There are many wishes in Meet Me in St. Louis and they are all pretty well granted. There is something so welcoming about that. It deals with the promise of young love (all the adult Smith children reunite with their appropriate paramours), but it also deals with the disappointment of romance, not only when John Truitt breaks a dance date with Esther, but again when he proposes to her and she is forced to make a choice between leaving with her beloved family who are packing for New York or staying with the man she loves.

That darkness creeps into the "Halloween" episode of Meet Me In St. Louis in which the neighborhood children burn piles of furniture, play pranks on the neighbors and cross-dress in their parents' old clothes. The macabre is also ever-present through the youngest child Tootie's obsession with killing off her dolls and burying them. It is this growing tension between the lightness of the early part of the film and the creeping darkness that makes the "Christmas" episode so satisfying. Believing that the family has to move away, Esther sings "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" and tells Tootie that they'll have to "muddle" through the next year "somehow." On this Christmas Eve, a night traditionally filled with gifts and familial laughter, there is only heartbreak and regret. And so it only makes sense that the feral Tootie goes out to the snow family she has created and destroys them; she would rather not have them at all than wait through the pain of losing them.

Until recently, I had only ever seen Meet Me in St. Louis in Los Angeles, first on PBS, on home video and then at revival screenings. Viewing it after living in Chicago for several years and having grown originally up in Milwaukee, I brought my own subtext to the party and really identified with how the seasonal framework and nostalgic mise-en-scene prompted my own memories. I felt the romance of my childhood wishes (days in the snow, dressing up for Halloween, playing with dolls) and adolescent dreams (longing for the boy across the way) awoken in the characters of Tootie and Esther. But being both a gay man and my dreaming of being a filmmaker could never be satisfied in my small midwestern town so I had to leave that seemingly "magical" world behind. That world has faded away and this bittersweet ache haunts every frame of Meet Me in St. Louis.

In Stephen Harvey's book, Directed by Vincente Minnelli, he says the rationale for the abrupt and anti-climactic ending - Easter day celebration with fireworks, music, Esther, her fiance and her family at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair-- was that Minnelli had already spent most of his lean, wartime budget creating the Smith family home sets and shooting the previous scenes. Harvey also says that Meet Me in St. Louis affirms the MGM ethos that "there is no place like home" and Minnelli's embracing of this theme is "odd" because Minnelli himself fled his small town when he was in his teens. I grew up in a small-town and fled it in my young adulthood. I understand the charms and pitfalls of the life of a heterosexist, homogenous community. In Meet Me in St. Louis, Minnelli did not recreate the early 1900s; he created a fantasy version of small-town life in the 1900s. The tension between the sincerity of the heartbreak in the "Christmas" episode and the rushed wrap-up and faux celebration of the World's Fair climax seems to force a recognition of the greater theme of Meet Me in St. Louis: there is a gulf between the home in our childhood heart and the world of our adult desires. Maybe Minnelli spent so little on the finale set on purpose, because he wanted its cheery simplicity to ring false or, at the very least, seem so bright that it would leave the viewer wanting more shadows. Those shadows loom gloriously large in Meet Me in St. Louis which is, alongside It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1947), one of the greatest holidays films ever made.

- Randy Caspersen