Miller’s Eastern plays have a similar interest in
the dramatic discovery of buried family traumas,
but in The Misfits another kind of tragedy seeps
in, the peculiarly Western American tragedy
of having no place to go, no home at all, no father to avenge and no mother to recognize you.
This is why the movie must be set in reno, the
metaphorical capital of divorce, and why Miller’s
misfit characters gather for whiskey and dancing in the house guido intended to build out in
the desert but could not bear to finish after the
death of his wife.
“Don’t you have a home?” roslyn asks
gay when they’re driving around. “Sure,” he
says, “never was a better one, either.” “Where
is it?” “right here,” gay says, and nods at the
road and out at the desert. The camera shows
us a stretch of land blurred by the speed of the
drive: scrub brush, sand, and mountains. Sometimes the land looks grand, sublime, and inviting; on other viewings, it seems sadly desolate
and empty, a kind of lie. Anyone who has ever
been to nevada knows the feeling of being divorced from everything, stuck between two sets
of mountains, the time zones piling up between
you and your family, everyone you once loved,
and everything that once loved you. roslyn’s
response to gay’s childlike faith in the open
country—a place where you can “just live,” as
he puts it in an earlier scene—seems to open
into a void. Monroe’s face conjures a movie
star’s well of loneliness, a wounded look that
seems to stare out from the foster homes of
norma Jean’s own childhood.
“I don’t feel that way about you, gay,”
roslyn says, and the next thing you know he
is kissing her awake for breakfast. Eroticism
becomes the great American balm for lonely
hearts, the fake cure-all from the movies, from
Marilyn. The characters in The Misfits try to
fabricate an artificial tribe out of the magic
dust of sexual alchemy and instant friendship
in a broken-down void that isn’t even a frontier
anymore. In the East, Miller’s characters cannot
escape their fates because of their closely knit
families, or because of events that loom out of
the past to entrap parents and children. In the
West, Miller’s characters are completely free
but also completely unstuck, there’s too much
room and nobody knows what to do. Maybe
the East contains too much love and the West
not enough—absolute freedom can be as ter-
rifyingly lonely as family life can be cloying. At
any rate, there’s no solution anywhere; the signs
leading to the freeway or back home are point-
ing in different directions. “Well, you’re free,”
Isabelle toasts roslyn near the beginning of the
film. “Maybe the trouble is you’re not used to it
yet.” or maybe the real trouble is that the heart
cannot stand this kind of freedom.
Roslyn: how do you find your way back in
the dark?
Gay: Just head for that big star straight
on. The highway’s under it. It will take us
right home.
We want to believe it can all work out, and so
does Miller, at least he does here. This is sorrow-tinged, impossible wish-fulfillment, not just another manipulation cooked up by the studios. The
