I don’t often like what’s on TV, unless (intellectual snob that I am) I find a good concert or documentary on PBS or a good movie on Turner Classic Movies. The other night I watched The Red Shoes on TCM. This is the famous 1948 J. Arthur Rank (does anyone else remember J. Arthur Crank from Electric Company? But I digress) film starring Moira Shearer as Victoria Page, the ballerina; Anton Walbrook as the ballet impresario, Lermontov, aka, the devil; and Marius Goring as the composer, Julian Craster. The film, which was beautifully restored in 2008 by UCLA, is based on the 1845 “fairy tale for adults” by Hans Christian Andersen. This is a scary story about a poor girl named Karen. As Maria Tatar writes in The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (Norton, 2008), Karen receives two pairs of red shoes, “the first leading to her social elevation … and the second to her social degradation” (p. 252). At first, Karen is admired even by the queen. “There’s nothing in the world like a pair of red shoes” (p. 254)! There’s no ballet in Andersen; Karen goes to a ball, and the shoes dance away with her still in them. She dances into church (which shows the sin of pride), and she gets neither rest nor peace until the executioner chops her feet off. It’s pretty grim (pun intended). In the Red Shoes ballet in The Red Shoes, the ballerina receives red toe shoes from a Luciferian shoemaker and dances across the world (wonderful film work) and ends by saying, “Take the shoes off.”
Introducing The Red Shoes, Robert Osborne said that it inspired little girls all over the world to want to be come ballerinas. It’s even mentioned in the song “At the Ballet” in A Chorus Line. Well, I don’t get it. Why would a movie based on a story about a girl whose feet get chopped off, a movie in which the ballerina comes under the influence of the devil (Walbrook gives a splendid performance) to become an obsessive dancer until she falls in love with an obsessive composer, runs away with him, quits dancing for him, and then is tempted (by the devil) to return to the stage to dance the composer’s Red Shoes ballet, only to have the shoes dance her out the window and make her leap down on the train tracks with the train on the way? What’s inspiring about that? It’s a story of obsession: Vickie the prima ballerina, Lermontov the impresario, and Julian Craster the composer are all obsessives. It ends badly for all three of them. What’s inspiring about that?
I’ve been to the ballet. When I was a teenager, I played the piano for a local ballet teacher. That’s how I read Quo Vadis. I memorized all the waltzes to which the little girls did their barre exercises in about two weeks, so I propped the novel up on the piano and read and played at the same time. I took my son to his first ballet when he was about six years old; twenty years later, I took a friend to her first ballet, too. I know enough to sit in the mezzanine. If you sit too close to the stage, you hear the toe shoes going thump-thump-thump-thump-THUMP, which kinda knocks the romance out of the event. You also see how ratty the costumes are. I know that dancers take lessons and practice obsessively every single day, even when their feet are bleeding and their muscles are worn out. My favorite ballet company is Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. Those guys are wonderful. Six-foot men dancing on pointe. Their shows are satiric—especially the dying swan who molts all over the stage—but they also do one act of a serious ballet. And the program notes are priceless. If you haven’t seen the Trocks yet, make every effort to do so.
I guess I need to talk to a few real ballerinas to find out what it is about The Red Shoes that inspires little girls. If I were little and someone took me to see the Trocks, maybe I’d be inspired, but would the obsessive dancer in the movie inspire me to put on toe shoes? I don’t think so.
Which brings me to the idea of balance. We’re moving into the sign of Libra, the scales. Libra arrives on the fall equinox, when day and night are of equal length. The pans of Libra’s scales suggest balance. And (duh) dancers are very good at least at physical balance—dancing on your toes and not falling down is hard. Indulge me as I write the obvious cliché: Balance Is A Good Thing.
I get obsessive myself. Ask any of my authors. I obsess over subject-verb relationships and unnecessary modifiers. I’ve issued my own obsessive fatwahs to some of my authors. One has already used up his lifetime supply of semicolons. Another may not use another adverb ending in -ly unless he can justify it. Another may never use any variation of the word “grab,” not ever again in her life. Another has used up her lifetime supply of participles. None of my authors has my permission to write the word “utilize,” and I am forever telling them to be wary of homophones (words that sound alike; one of my authors described a man with a reseeded hairline) and not to verbize nouns (another author wrote that the flowers “fragranced the house”). That’s how I help my authors not embarrass themselves in print. They appreciate the help.
Yes, I, too, am obsessive. In my way, I’m probably as bad as the prima ballerina. (Moi? An impresario of editing?) So I’m glad we’re moving into Libra. I’ll think of those balance pans in the sky and work at getting my life more balanced. I’ll continue to edit by day, read well-crafted novels (see a new review posted on Feathered Quill), and watch movies after supper. Even movies I don’t understand. (If you’re a ballerina, can you please write to me and explain the appeal of The Red Shoes?) Tonight I’ll be watching disc five or six of the seven-DVD Noël Coward Collection. A temporary obsession. Yummy!