Corrosion of Conformity
Consider All that Heaven Allows to be the 1950’s chick flick version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Cary spends most of the movie in rebellion against the concept of what it means to be a middle-aged widow in the decade of Eisenhower and McCarthy. She is rebelling against the restrictions place upon her by society in a way that isn’t enforce, but coerced. Give up the younger man, sit back and watch TV and wait to die is the message that society is giving Cary. Like Dr. Miles Bennell in regard to the pod people, she respectfully declines the invitation to become a dead-eyed future suburbanite of the 1960's watching as the revolution is televised.
The Artifice of American Perfection
Almost certainly less so at the time than looking back now in nostalgic retrospect, many pinpoint the 1950’s as the closest America ever got to being perfect. Of course, what they mean by that is the closest it ever got to being perfect for white, heterosexual, married couples. As for the rest of, well, the less said the better. But even for those white, heterosexual married couples the alleged near-perfection of 1950’s America constructed on lies as artificial as a Hollywood set. Douglas Sirk staked out his reputation and legacy by taking a chance on making a series of glossy melodramatic women’s pictures in the 1950’s on constructed sets and using anti-realistic color cinematography that not only failed to be convincing as reality but purposely avoided even trying. The artificiality of the very look of the film is inseparable from its content and work together to present the theme that the happy pretense of American getting everything right at last was a big fat lie that everybody knew, but pretended otherwise.
Women’s Liberation is Not Yet From Men
Cary in definitely in rebellion against societal expectations on how she should live the rest of her life following the death of her husband. She is a rebel breaking bad and away from conformity in all respects but one very important way. Ultimately, Cary turns her back on being a happy TV-consuming pod widow. And ultimately, she rejects the upper-middle-class home that has become a prison in favor of rebellious geometry of Ron’s architecturally divergent home. But in the end, it must be admitted that the journey she makes on road to revolution is really just moving from one man to another with little differentiation in the way of gender expectations and domestic roles. Cary has begun the process of liberation, but she is nowhere near to liberating herself from the patriarchy.
