The infinity tale
#27 - ‘Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans’
Because Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is the story of a love triangle, I spent part of my first viewing wondering just who the titular two humans were. There are, after all, three in contention - The Man, The Wife, and The Woman from the City agitating for The Man to do the unimaginable to The Wife so the other two can be together.
A little more time has passed, and I’ve decided I was focused on the wrong words entirely. It’s the more infinite words - Sunrise and Song - that summarize both the purpose and the mood of this brilliant film.
As told by director F.W. Murnau and screenwriter Carl Mayer, this story could play on loop. It has a song-like structure - verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus - that doubles back on itself and, in so doing, expresses something true and beautiful and bleak about human nature.
Humans. We’re never really satisfied, are we? The Man, The Wife, and The Woman from the City all want something else out of their lives and endlessly gaze across a lake in search of it.
The Woman from the City treks across one way, falls in love with The Man, then tries to pry him from his life and back across. But first she convinces him that he must cross the lake the other way with The Wife and kill her during the crossing. It isn’t enough to steal The Man from his family. Their arrangement has to appear clean. Even if successful, how long before she’s on to the next Man or he’s on to the next Woman.
The Man goes along with her plan, only pulling back in the middle of the lake just before he does something truly monstrous. It’s a terrifying moment - The Man with bugged-out, demonic eyes, towering over The Wife ready to set her adrift forever. It reminds us of another fact about the human condition - one we’ve had in our stories since the dawn of Western Civilization. We all have dark thoughts, but when we begin to manifest them, forces are let loose that we can not entirely control.
Of course, this is just what happens to The Man. He safely completes the crossing with The Wife, rediscovers what he seems to have been searching for with The Woman From the City (ironically in the City with The Wife). On their return, those uncontrollable forces crash down on him anyway. Like some sort of Greek tragedy, The Man seems unable to outrun his fate once he sets certain things in motion. He never would have been on the lake to begin with had he not meant to turn his thoughts in to action.
So much of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans doesn’t even feel exactly like a film, or at least one that is set in reality. George O’Brien contorts his face impossibly to convey the waves of anguish and contentedness and anguish again felt by The Man. Janet Gaynor is a mirror image of his emotion, telegraphing helplessness and melancholy and terror and then hope.
They do this all against the fugue state of the lake and the city. The town The Man and The Wife lives in feels real, but everywhere is like a dream or a nightmare, a prison of thought, perilous and divine. Perhaps this explains why the sets all seem designed to be pitched on a downward slope. We are perpetually tumbled back toward our own thoughts, navigating them cyclically until the day we die.
The Man and The Wife are crossing the lake back and forth for all time, as are we all. During the next crossing, it could be The Wife towering over The Man like the huntsman in Snow White. Or, if they’re lucky - if we are - maybe they will simply enjoy the ride and the fact that they each have someone with which to share it.