The Artist as Failed Transcendent and Successful Collaborator: “Young Man With a Horn” [Michael Curtiz, 1950, USA]

Throughout their careers certain actors become drawn toward playing the same specific character types and roles, with varying motivations for doing so. For example, an actor may see in the same specific character type something of him/herself and thus use that type to explore his/her own psychological depths, but on the other hand an actor may simply recognize his/her proficiency at playing a specific character type, and thus he/she will repeatedly return to it to re-experience creative success.

I don't know enough about the life of Kirk Douglas to confidently say or even guess as to why he did so, but for some reason this iconic actor was constantly drawn toward playing tortured artists. This tendency is apparent in a "veiled" artistic portrait like Champion (1949), and in an explicit one like Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), but it is exceedingly evident in Young Man with a Horn, which takes as its central theme the artist's failure to transcend the unsatisfying limits of creative representation in order to discover and work within the Real. As a Hollywood product intended for mass viewership, Young Man expresses its theme through a classical structure and style that perfectly reflects mainstream culture's understanding of the tortured artist archetype while also offering an optimistic moral for the reconciliation of that archetype with the body politic. (Douglas also starred as Vincent van Gogh in the Vincente Minnelli-directed Lust for Life [1956], but van Gogh has become so over-determined in Western society as the quintessential Tortured Artist that an analysis of the film would almost be too obvious for the purpose of this study.)

In Young Man Douglas plays Rick Martin, a fictional jazz trumpeter based on Bix Beiderbecke. Orphaned at an early age, Martin is raised by a promiscuous older sister who leaves him to his own devices. Without parental or any other kind of supervision, Martin searches for purpose until he finds it in music, initially in the piano and then permanently in the trumpet. (Harry James dubbed the sounds for Martin's trumpet licks.) His mentor is Art Hazzard (Juano Hernández), a jazz virtuoso with an appropriate name -- even as he teaches Martin everything he knows about the trumpet, Hazzard warns his protégé away from the creative life and the culture industry. Hazzard explains that Martin's artistic idealism cannot fit into a capitalist entertainment model that forces artists to comply with the tastes of philistine consumers, but Martin still imagines that he can make a living by producing art solely on his own terms. "I don't play for people!" Martin tells Hazzard. "I play for myself!" Hazzard retorts: "Look, boy, a man's got a lot of living to do in this world. But, you, you're kind of locked up inside yourself. You're like a -- like a bird trying to fly on one wing. You'll stay up for a while. Then you're going to fall."

The dichotomy between the artist's idealism and the entertainment business's pragmatism is further developed when Martin joins Jack Chandler and the Collegians, a dance orchestra that mostly serves as a back-up band for the smooth vocal stylings of Jo Jordan (Doris Day). During his first rehearsal with the band Martin attempts to improvise over a written score but is quickly admonished against doing so by Chandler (Walter Reed). "Well, I mean, do we have to play every number the same way every time?" Martin asks. "That's right," Chandler responds. "This is no jam session. It's a dance orchestra." Here Martin learns that art has little place in an industry that requires its workers to execute uniformity and repetition rather than individuality and spontaneity. Later that evening Martin talks with Jo, with whom he shares his artistic vision:

Martin: Someday when I'm really good, I'm gonna do things with this trumpet nobody's ever thought of doing. I want to hit a note that nobody ever heard before.

Jo: You've got to have some other interests or you'll go off your rocker. I know. You need a hobby like collecting stamps or -- or a dog or . . .

Martin: How 'bout a girl?

Jo: Don't pick on me Rick. You're a married man.

Martin: Married?

Jo: You're married to that trumpet. I certainly wouldn't want to come between you.

This is one of the film's most significant sections of dialogue because it not only encapsulates Martin's raison d'être as an artist but also establishes a thematic parallel between creative expression and romantic coupling. This parallel becomes the film's core concern as Martin's failure to tow the line in Chandler's orchestra -- and as his continuing struggles to find artistic satisfaction in the culture industry as a whole -- run in tandem with a rocky marriage to Amy (Lauren Bacall), a wealthy woman who wishes to start a career in psychiatry. Unlike Martin, whose devotion to jazz borders on the monomaniacal, Amy is a dilettante who never focuses for too long on or explores in too much depth any one field of endeavor. Her diffusiveness also extends to her erotic life, for Amy is "coded" (as per the self-censoring representations of Hollywood circa 1950) as bisexual, and just as she marries Martin in a desperate bid to "stabilize" her sexual desires, so does she show off Martin to her socialite friends as false proof of her cultural rootedness despite her actual lack of appreciation of jazz or anything else. (Martin is characterized as purely emotional and intuitive; Amy is characterized as purely intellectual and calculating. Their marriage should work as an attraction and combination of contrasting values and viewpoints, but it instead ends up as a clash. Their dynamic is remarkably similar to the dynamic between Douglas's van Gogh and Anthony Quinn's Paul Gaugin in Lust for Life.)

Martin sees through Amy's pretensions and insecurities, but once he separates from her he is bereft of his own "stabilizing" illusion of a balanced personal life and becomes completely untethered in pursuit of the artistic ideal. Whereas his jam session buddies can quit after playing all through the night, Martin pushes the limits of physical and mental endurance in the attempt to "hit a note that nobody ever heard before," and he reveals himself as wholly unsuited for work as a studio musician when he makes a hash of Jo's recordings by chaotically improvising over her instrumental arrangements. Even Martin's dream to cut his own records fail in the face of the realities of the culture industry, as is revealed in his conversation with pianist "Smoke" Willoughby (Hoagy Carmichael):

Martin: Hey, Smoke. Hey, you know what we ought to do? We ought to make our own records. Make 'em the way we want. Boy, we could make records that'd really split 'em wide open. Make them sit up. Do some of the old ones Art used to do, like "Dinah" and "Twelfth Street Rag" and "Louisiana Blues."

"Smoke": They won't buy 'em.

Martin: Who won't?

"Smoke": People. You know who buys records? High school girls. You know why? To learn the words. They only buy the new songs to learn the words.

Unable to transcend the limits of artistic representation while in search of the Real, Martin lapses into alcoholism (drug use often offers illusory promises of the Real) and suffers an emotional breakdown. When "Smoke" and Jo visit him in a sanitarium, Martin asks his friends to collaborate with him upon his release, and in doing so he once more expresses his desire for creative transcendance: "They don't have to listen to us. We can play for ourselves. We got no words. We -- we can't -- say what we mean. We just gotta feel it." Young Man repeatedly contrasts verbal language's ability to convey rationality and logic with music's ability to convey the passionate and ineffable, and this contrast is expressed in the film's visual style, which tends toward noir's emphasis on dramatic contrasts of illumination and shadow. Ever since its emergence in the 1940s, noir has been the style favored by Hollywood to express subjective duality without sliding into out-and-out hallucination or fantasy. (Not coincidentally, many "tortured artist" films -- e.g., Images (1972), The Shining (1980), and Black Swan (2010) -- take the form of nightmarish and surreal psychodramas that represent the dualism of the creative temperament through a protagonist's confrontation with a "doubled" self.) Whereas genres like the musical or the horror movie often represent dual natures through fantastical, supernatural, or otherwise "impossible" scenarios and environments, noir typically remains rooted in the "real world" even as it visually suffuses that world with a moody, dreamy despair borne of the irreconcilable conflicts that rage within society and the psyche. Most famous as the director of Casablanca (1942) and yet an unsung master in the implementation of noir throughout various genres (melodrama in Mildred Pierce [1945], the musical in King Creole [1958]), Michael Curtiz depicts Martin's surroundings as a projection of his inner "split" between the necessity of existing within a mainstream culture that demands relationship through the use of rational, verbal communication on one hand and the spiritual and existential longing for self-expression in the "pure" language of emotional, non-verbal music on the other hand.

It is sound, however, that ultimately reconciles Martin's inner "split" by forcing him to recognize the underlying self-destructive impulse in his search for transcendence. From his room in the sanitarium Martin hears the blaring of an ambulance siren and calls it to the attention of "Smoke" and Jo: "Hear it? Jo, hear it? You said I tried for something that didn't exist. There's no such note. Hear that note, Jo? It's clean and sweet. Gee, that's a good note." The unheard note that Martin longs to play and that symbolizes the Real he desires to obtain by transcending the limits of art is nothing but a death knell. It may be "clean and sweet," but it's also an alarm that signifies the end of existence, the end of the search for any meaning, transcendent or otherwise. "Smoke" drives the point home in a direct-address to the camera (and thus the viewer) at Young Man's conclusion: "You see, Rick was a pretty hard guy to understand. And for a long time he didn't understand himself. But the desire to live is a great teacher, and I think it taught Rick a lot of things. He learned that you can't say everything through the end of a trumpet. And a man doesn't destroy himself just because he can't hit some high note that he dreamed up. Maybe that's why Rick went on to be a success as a human being first and an artist second." The last scene shows Martin successfully employing his improvisational talents while accompanying Jo in one of her studio sessions: he has learned to collaborate in harmony with, rather than seeking transcendence apart from, others, and -- to use Friedrich Nietzsche's terms -- he has achieved an adept command of expressing himself through a tempered, communal "Apollonian" art as opposed to annihilating himself through an intoxicated, dissolating "Dionysian" one.