Meet Me in St. Louis: The Melancholy Window of Nostalgia

I don’t usually post reviews for television shows, but it feels appropriate to start today’s discussion with my reaction to Apple TV+’s series, Schmigadoon!

If you’re not familiar with the series, it follows a couple who are looking to reclaim the spark of their fading romance. While hiking in the mountains, they get lost and stumble upon a cozy village, Schmigadoon, where everyone lives like they’re in the middle of an old school musical film. She’s kinda into it, he hates it, but neither of them can leave until they find true love like that in the classic movie musicals.

I appreciated the series’ many homages to classical musical films. And I really loved the show rounding up musical celebrities like Aaron Tveit and Ariana Debose. Just so, I had an overall muddled response to the show.

Schmigadoon! takes it as a given that this town inherits the social mores of the era in which the musicals that inspired this series were made, and that becomes the basis of not only the show's humor (there's a recurring joke about the mayor being a closeted homosexual, and like half of the characters don’t know where babies come from), but also much of its plot progression. The eventual reconciliation of these lovers occurs in tandem with them curing these simple townsfolk of their antiquated worldviews. This stance is somewhat dissonant given that the show opts for a multi-ethnic cast, which Cecily Strong remarks upon in the first episode. It's a totally valid choice, but one that further undercuts the show’s claim about the town being bigoted or out of touch.

    With some exceptions like West Side Story, classical movie musicals weren’t super focused on changing social values or tensions, nor were they especially vulnerable to the limiting viewpoints of their time. You could argue they had special interest in the heterosexual union, but only marginally more than other genres. Either way, that's not the system that the series ends up examining. So I found it interesting that this series, a “love letter” to musicals, anchored so much of itself to this idea that the musical world was by design antiquated or otherwise stuck in the past.

That said, the series wasn’t entirely wrong to link the mythology of the musical with a bygone era. From this end of the millennium, the musical is often viewed nostalgically, a token of a paradise lost to time. That musicals themselves haven't really been a staple of film in sixty years only amplifies this cloud of sentimentality. We could have all sorts of conversations about rose-colored glasses and "were the 'good old days' really that good?" But let's agree for a moment that as a genre, musicals in their unabashed romanticness connote a certain kind of innocence, and with it a suggestion that once upon a time, the world was unspotted. Sinless.

But I want to talk about a very specific musical, one that was nostalgic from the day it premiered. I am talking, of course, about Meet Me in St. Louis.

The musical centers on a year in the life of the Smith family growing up in St. Louis, Missouri at the turn of the 20th century. The film was a big hit for MGM, and not without good reason. The movie’s euphoria is just so enveloping from its easter color palette to the sheer charm of the performers. It wouldn’t take much prodding for me to admit that (sorry Dorothy) this is my favorite of Judy Garland’s musicals. Tina Hassannia of Spectrum Culture writes,

"The film feels more like a walk down memory lane than a classical Hollywood story, and Minnelli’s director’s touch gives the impression that the viewer is genuinely looking back on individual childhood reminiscences … It’s a testament to Minnelli’s talents, then, that a studio assignment based on a series of cherished memoirs could avoid being redundantly sentimental or perfunctory, and could instead exist in a purely experiential realm that allowed the indelible sensations of memory to seep through the screen."

Musicals were a huge presence during the age of Classic Hollywood, and modern audiences tend to prescribe a certain mindset and worldview onto both of these things. They assume that the reverie of musical storytelling only emerges from a specific, sheltered upbringing. They forget that classical musicals were at their most popular during and immediately following World War II. The world that made Meet Me in St. Louis absolutely knew what it was like to dread what the future would be like--if it came at all. This music does not come from a place of ignorance.

The film musicalizes memory in a way that is much more profound than something like Schmigadoon given the genre credit for. If Meet Me in St. Louis crafts sweet musical bliss so authentically, it’s only because it knows despair so intimately.

         Meet Me at the Faire

         Meet Me in St. Louis follows the Smith family living in Missouri in the year leading up to the St. Louis World Faire of 1903. The story centers on the second oldest girl, Esther Smith, brought to life by Judy Garland. This musical film came during the peak of Judy Garland’s stardom and was one of the most financially successful films of her career.

The film is mostly episodic and the plot is thinly developed. We’re more than halfway through the film before the possibility of the Smiths moving is introduced. Up until then, the tension is mostly confined to whether or not Esther will have the nerve to tell the boy next door that she likes him. The film spends more time recreating an environment than telling a story, per se.

         Most of the film follows the girls learning life lessons across the span of a year. As one example, there’s an episode where Esther and her older sister, Rose, set themselves against “Eastern snob,” Lucille Ballard, after she asks out the boy Rose was pursuing for the Christmas Ball. Esther and Rose plan to Regina George her night by arranging for her to dance with every undesirable guy at the dance. But Lucille clues in on her mistake at the ball and happily switches dates with Rose. Esther feels ashamed of her attempt to sabotage this nice girl’s evening, so she takes on all of the awful dances she’d allotted for Lucille. This becomes a learning experience for Esther and Rose about not assuming the worst in people, as well as taking responsibility for her own actions.

 When I talk about this movie's sentimental reverie, I also don't mean the movie is saccharine or treacly. While this film's embrace is sincere, there is a small wrinkle in the fabric, a quiet bit of modern sass, in the way the lines are delivered (by this film's exceptional cast, of which the Miss Garland is only the centerpiece in an ornate arrangement) that keeps this film grounded. There's more than just escapism in this reflection. There's also the giddy thrill of discovering that sisters tossing pillows at one another and clueless fathers are at least as old as the gas-powered automobile, and that's the key to the audience buying into this painting.

This movie also served as the end of an era for Miss Garland. She was twenty-two at the time of the film’s release, and up until then, she had found her niche as the small-town sweetheart. (This, of course, dismisses how stardom disinfected her childhood of anything resembling normalcy, as I noted in my essay on Judy Garland. By the time Judy starred in this film, she had already been divorced from her first husband.) While her abounding sweetness and approachability would continue to be a part of her star persona, Meet Me in St. Louis is generally acknowledged as the last film to cast her as “the girl next door.” Starting with films like The Harvey Girls, she’d start to inhabit roles of working, marrying women. In a way, this film marks the end of Judy Garland’s “childhood.”

You’ll notice that the gap between the time in which the movie is set (1900s) and when it is made (1940s) isn’t so far off from the range between our time and the 1980s, with which much of 2010s and 2020s pop culture is obsessed. There’s something to be said for a generational echo that seems to guide a lot of popular media, but the turn of the century setting has special significance for a world living through World War II. More on that in the next section.

    This spotlight of the domestic utopia was a change of pace for Hollywood in the 1940s. Films of this time were hyper-fixated on the war being fought overseas. Casablanca, The Great Dictator, even Walt Disney was enlisted in creating short propaganda films to promote the war efforts, including one in which Donald Duck has a nightmare about living in Hitler’s Germany.

    The tone of American film at the time following the start of the War was generally optimistic about America's involvement in the war. It's not necessarily that the U.S. wanted war or devastation, but it was easy for them to craft fantasies about America, or else the American spirit, playing some essential role in solving the world's problems. This gave us movies like Hangmen Also Die! which sees Nazis trying to coerce the entire city of Prague into divulging the location of an assassin, but of course the resistance withstands. This kind of thing really fed an American appetite.

    This approach can also, of course, be exhausting. Meet Me in St. Louis was some much-needed counter-programming for an audience that didn’t want to think about the war nonstop. Here Hollywood turned its eye from what was going on overseas to what was waiting for them when they got back home.

         A Time Gone By

         One of the earliest romantic scenes between Esther and John has them walking through her house and turning off the lights manually by dimming the candles. The film is set twenty years before electricity became common in American households and released twenty years after the practice faded into irrelevance. Though this ritual was long forgotten, the act is filmed with a certain reverence. The blossoming romance between Esther and John is likened to the romance of this forgotten custom of putting the house to bed.

     Meet Me in St. Louis reaches for a period of innocence across all dimensions: childhood, young love, smalltown America, the security of a nuclear family, an economy that hadn’t been crippled by economic devastation, and so on. The movie puts a magnifying glass on a world that is small and intimate, but what this movie yearns for is actually much larger. Meet Me in St. Louis is reaching for a time where you felt excited for the future rather than frightened of it.

    The faire at the center of the film is the 1904 St. Louis World Faire, a centennial commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase, which gathered the leaders in the fields of science and the arts for an exhibition of everything cutting edge and exciting. For much of the public, this was their first exposure to commodities like the automobile. The World Faire felt like a time of promise, a time when you could gaze in awe at the gas-powered car without having to worry about climate change.

         It’s always reductive to say “it was a simpler time,” but planted in the 1940s, turn of the century America sure felt like a simpler time. It was a world that hadn’t been stained by a Great Depression or two World Wars. When Esther and Rose bid their brother farewell, they’re sending him off to Princeton, not to the gunfire of some far-off country.

    Jason Sperb, professor at Oklahoma State University, has noted, “Nostalgia is always most intense during periods of dramatic cultural and technological upheaval, whereby the perceived reassurances of a simpler past anchor our perception of an uncertain present (and future) ... Nostalgia, then, is less about reclaiming a vanishing past than about paradoxically resisting a potentially threatening future: how to pull back against the endless rush to change or against the inevitable end of mortality itself? In this sense, nostalgia is often really about the lingering specter of death; the awareness that everything must one day end nurtures the idea that moments and memories lost will never come again. Paradoxically, personal and collective (cinematic) fantasies of a past that often never existed in the first place become the only way to relive it.”

         In a time like this, it’s easy to look back on an era gone by and wonder where the world went wrong. Maybe if we could just turn back the clock, we could heal the world of its impurities. At the very least, maybe we could just escape into this world for an hour or so, and this is where nostalgia threatens to become something dangerous.

         With the passive gazing that is so integral to film as a pastime, there’s always a danger of falling for the trap of escapism, of wanting to live in a world that only exists inside a screen. This trap exists whether your favorite mode of media is classical musicals, modern superhero flicks, workplace sitcoms, video games, or anything in between. It’s easy to prefer the world onscreen so much that we neglect our offscreen existence.

Belfast (2021)

    Film scholars have made similar observations about the way nostalgia operates today. A time of political and international turmoil brings out the child in all of us. The child who just wants to go back to a time when things were simpler and will eagerly watch the new live-action remake of their favorite Disney cartoon.

         The lens of nostalgia naturally distorts the picture just a little. We’re looking back on then through the eyes of now. Part of that is a sort of romantic revisionism. Part of that is drawing a connection to the present. In Meet Me in St. Louis, this is reflected in the music style. The soundtrack itself would have sounded “modern” to the 1944 audience, even as the story itself was set forty years prior. (To that guy who keeps complaining about The Greatest Showman having a modern soundtrack in a period setting, don’t hate. Musicals have been doing that for a while.) This is the 1900s as seen through the eyes (and ears) of 1944. I don't see this essay as a historical fact-check machine, but I suppose this all does tease the question of how much of what we see is drawing a parallel, and how much of this is wishful imagining.

         But before we get into all that, let’s talk about the music of this film.

 

“Ding-Ding-Ding! Went the Trolley”

         Two main observations drew me to write about this film. The first was the observation that Meet Me in St. Louis was the rare musical to actually abide by a certain musical creation ex nihilo.

Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)

         As we discussed in other musical-themed essays, the healthy majority of musical films were set about two streets down from Broadway or Hollywood and generally centered around an in-universe musical performance. Musicals were generally about musicals. What’s interesting about the earliest musicals is that very few, if any, of the songs appeared in a context that was not-strictly performative.

    Pre-1945ish, you didn’t see a lot of songs where the leading lady sits down by the city fountain and starts singing a song that popped into her head fully-formed in the moment and then all the townsfolk pick up the rhythm in the second verse and start dancing along with her. You can find exceptions if you dig, but for the most part, songs were performed on stage or some other venue where we might find music in real life. This reflected the plots of said musicals, which were themselves overtly concerned with performance as a concept.

       Our first musicals

42nd Street (1933)

were about the backstage drama and hassle it took to put on a Broadway musical revue. The narrative proper would usually center on, say, a chorus girl at a crossroads with either her love life or onstage career. As she navigates the roadblocks of her own life, she and her castmates perform various musical numbers for their show. The main storyline would be peppered with these on-stage musical numbers performed in-universe. This performative backdrop offers a natural opportunity for the film to present spectacular song and dance sequences. It is, after all, a film about putting on a musical show.

         Musicals did eventually start to feel comfortable having more spontaneous musical numbers that weren’t rehearsed in-universe. Tethering just a few of your numbers to some in-universe performance, maybe a stage musical that the main character is writing, opens the door to the film including musical numbers that aren’t “staged.” A film like The Greatest Showman has numbers that are performed for an in-universe audience (e.g. "Never Enough"), some that are spontaneous (e.g. "Rewrite the Stars"), and even a few that bridge the divide (e.g. "This is Me"). Even today most movie musicals center their plots somehow on putting on a show. Exceptions, like Les Miserables or In the Heights, are usually based on a pre-existing stage musical.

         Many of my favorite musicals take this approach, and they find ways to sincerely represent hopes and dreams in a way that surpasses the mundane confines of reality. Just so, I really admire a musical that’s confident enough to invoke musical storytelling without using training wheels. I appreciate it when the genre acknowledges that just being alive is reason enough to sing, that rising starlets and starving songwriters aren’t the only people with complex feelings that deserve to be displayed through illustrious musical sequences. Hence, I really like Meet Me in St. Louis.

    St. Louis, Missouri is about as far away from either New York City or Hollywood as you can get. There isn’t even like a community talent show that has the Smith girls performing. The songs arise naturally inside the Smith’s own living room or the town trolley. Meet Me in St. Louis doesn’t use real-life performance as a launching pad for its in-universe singing. 

Music is enabled in this universe not by the power of the stage curtain, but by the curtain of memory. Anything can look better through hindsight. Maybe there could have been music in the streets of 1900s Missouri. Through the lens of nostalgia, you can imagine a period of time to be anything you want, even musical if you so desire.

         Nostalgia also allows you to look back on a time and ignore some of its less romantic facets—no one really talks about how the Smith girls can't vote, as one example—and this is another place where nostalgia starts to become dangerous. You can start to feel cheated for having lost something that was never there, which further stirs the question of what use the level-headed thinker has for nostalgia in the first place--especially! when it comes so laden with singing and other such cloyingness.

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”

People know this song primarily through its radio play every Christmas season, and they probably know the Frank Sinatra version best of all. But “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” actually originated from this movie specifically, and from a specific context. And that context isn’t the family sipping hot chocolate by the fire while the kids open presents. It’s more like holding old photographs of the family sipping hot chocolate by the fire while the kids open presents.

       If this film’s episodic flow can be said to have a climax, it’s probably with this song. On the last Christmas Eve before the move, Esther and her youngest sister, Tootie, look outside at the family of snowmen they built that morning. Realizing they can’t take the snowmen with them to New York, Esther reflects on how their time in St. Louis is coming to an end, inspiring the musical number.

On the surface, Christmas is just another pitstop on this movie’s childhood world tour. But it doesn’t feel that way watching it in the context of the film. This isn’t a moment of celebration for Esther and Tootie. It’s them acknowledging a loss. Esther and Tootie are reckoning with the fact that they are about to say goodbye to the world that they understand, a world that shelters them. Blissfully unaware, yet somehow anticipating, how social and economic turmoil are just around the bend.

    When Sinatra commandeered the song, he revised many of the lyrics to better suit a more straightforward cheerful mood, more on par with what one might expect from a Christmas song. “Someday soon we all will be together” became “Through the years we all will be together.” As such, the modern listener usually misses the mournful undertones of the song. (The original lyrics were even more somber. Judy reportedly objected to singing the lines “Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,” to a five-year-old.)

         Audiences of the 1940s have spent the runtime of the film gazing through the window of the film and into a world that no longer exists, a world they might never find again. Here, that world stares back.

    The year of this film's release, 1944, was an especially dire one for the war efforts. That summer had seen D-Day, for example, the largest invasion force in human history, and also a significant turning point in liberating Europe from the Nazis. For a moment, it looked like maybe the war was finally at a close and we'd have the family back together by the holidays. The Nazi forces would surrender the following year, but failed Ally efforts like Operation Market Garden made it clear that the war would not, in fact, be over by Christmas. There's something especially poignant, then, about the film musing that “Next year all our troubles will be out of sight." Until then? “We’ll have to muddle through somehow.”

To recap, 1940s audiences needed nostalgia for the same reason they needed musicals.

What About The Ending?

I mentioned that there were two observations that made me want to write about this film. The first was the music, the second is the film’s ending.  

       In stories about nostalgia or childhood, the natural impulse is to end the film with your characters graduating from their playground into adulthood. This jives with what we know to be true about childhood innocence, it is a temporary state that all of us eventually have to move past. Maybe we want Wendy to stay in Neverland because it sounds like fun, but denying her the chance to grow up wouldn’t feel honest.

For most of the runtime, the film seems to be on a trajectory to end with the Smiths “growing up.” The song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is so affecting because the film plays the song like the Smiths are getting ready to move to New York and leave behind the safety of childhood. But that’s not what happens.

    After that song concludes, Tootie is overcome with emotion, and she runs outside. Tootie is so distraught that she can’t take the snowmen with them to New York that she starts breaking them down with a shovel. Esther tries to console her, but the imminence of their departure is affecting them both. The father witnesses his daughter’s emotional outburst, and he wakes the family to announce that they aren’t going through with the move. They will be staying in St. Louis after all.

We’ve seen films take this stance before: Dad wants a big house and fancy cars for his kids, but he needs to learn that there are more important things than money. And the film ends with Dad turning down the prestigious job so that the family can have what really counts. This kind of ending features a lot in domestic family dramas, and Meet Me in St. Louis is certainly that, but it’s also a statement on nostalgia, and this is where the film starts walking a fine line thematically.

By not having the Smiths say goodbye to the home of their childhood, the film seems to be telling us that the turning of the wheel can be stayed, that maybe the Smiths don’t have to grow up, which is a very unusual thing for a film to do. Musicals especially were almost gluttons for this kind of transparency. But here was Meet Me in St. Louis saying that if you just want something earnestly enough, your heart’s desire will be granted.

Pennies from Heaven (1981)

    Musicals have always had to fight this reputation of fundamentally denying reality, of using pleasant fantasies to distract the audience from the harsh but unavoidable truths of reality. Life doesn’t always work out as neatly as it does in the world of musicals. Most romances that make us feel like we could dance on the ceiling actually end by crashing on the ground. Most dreamers who reach for the stars on Hollywood only catch smoke.

So is Meet Me in St. Louis just cinematic cotton candy? Tasty, but non-nutritious and quick to dissolve? That’s not how I choose to view it. Film has the capacity to not only show the world for how it is, but also to reveal the way it could be, even how it ought to be. Is Meet Me in St. Louis so wrong to imagine a world where fathers valued the emotional needs of their children more than their own financial pursuits? Or where everyone could make it home for the Faire this spring?

    See, nostalgia only becomes a parasite when it becomes an end unto itself, but a yearning for the past can also remind you what kind of future you're fighting for, or even that the future itself is worth fighting for. I don't blame a world drowning in war, a war that would fundamentally change the vocabulary of modern history, for telling itself that there was music and family waiting for them back at home.

    One thing about this film that doesn’t get discussed very often is that, perhaps owing to the younger cast, this is the rare musical film not to end with the main pair marching off to the chapel. We see John with Esther at the faire and understand that they are “together” now, but we don’t necessarily know what their future is. Following Hollywood trajectory, I guess we can imagine that they’ll get married eventually, but that’s incidental. In this film, it’s not the guarantee that matters, but the possibility. And possibility is really what a world torn by World War II was praying for.

In a weird way, the film “ends” with Esther singing to Tootie, and everything that comes after is a prayer for what life might look like when the war ended. And the war did end. America came out of the wreckage changed, absolutely, in ways I would need millions of essays to fairly document, but the clouds did part. Emerging from a world of death, they returned at last to a world of possibility.

 

We’ll Be Together, You and I

        So I started drafting this piece before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the most violence Europe has seen since World War II, the same time in which Meet Me in St. Louis was made. When I started writing this, the world was merely unraveling instead full-on hemorrhaging. I was not prepared for this to be such a timely piece.

         In a way lot of us have been singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” the somber Judy Garland version, for the last few years, and there’s no telling how large the cloud will grow before the skies clear.

         Lest we start wishing that we could go back to the way things were when Judy Garland reigned supreme, it must be acknowledged that the world has been broken for a while. Yet people pulled through, and they still found reasons to sing.  

         I make this connection not to suggest that we should expect entertainment itself to heal the wounds of the world, nor to downplay the necessity for direct action, but to hopefully inspire peace. Meet Me in St. Louis reminds us that while childhood is temporary, so is social turmoil. And when the wars and recessions have faded away, some things remain.

            --The Professor