Bigger Than Life (1956)

B. Kite via Criterion Collection:

The film has often been read as a critique of nuclear family values, and the case is powerful and persuasive. Jonathan Rosenbaum puts it concisely: “Bigger Than Life is a profoundly upsetting exposure of middle-class aspirations because it virtually defines madness—Avery’s drug-induced psychosis—as taking those values seriously. Each emblem of the American dream implicitly honored by Avery in the opening scenes (his ideas about education, his respect for class and social status, his desire for his son ‘to improve himself’) is systematically turned on its head, converted from dream to nightmare, by becoming only more explicit in his behavior.”

Bigger Than Life, then, might be said to pose the question, What would happen if the patriarch returned as an archetype, in all his inexplicable strength? Ed tries on a number of patriarch roles in the film, but they all prove too small. He’s the cheery father of the Oldsmobile ads when he takes his family on their shopping expedition, but somehow his forced smile and slightly sweaty face push past the smug comfort that’s a prerequisite for the part. Ed the athlete fares no better, defeated by the degeneracy of his offspring. Ed the instructor puts in long hours but winds up thwarted by the meddling of his inadequate wife. The church service offers yet another possibility—the forgiving father who welcomes the return of his prodigal son—but Ed rejects such “fuzzy-minded” permissiveness almost instantly, flipping to the Old Testament to find a father with a stiffer spine.


He lands, of course, on Abraham, Kierkegaard’s “father of faith.” In fact, Kierkegaard anticipates Bigger Than Life, and specifically the disjunctive tones of its climax, in Fear and Trembling. Pondering the challenge to ethics offered by the story of Abraham and Isaac, he wonders what would happen if the story of God’s demand was overheard by the wrong party, say “a man suffering from sleeplessness”: “then the most terrifying, the most profound, tragic, and comic misunderstanding is close at hand . . . The tragic and comic make contact here in absolute infinitude.” This contact occurs in the film, too, in the uneasy admixture of horror-movie lighting, loud carnival music, and an awkward, almost slapstick tussle that tips over the couch in its course through the living room, only to right it again on the return journey.

It may be, though, that the cosmic scope of the film’s blasphemy has yet to be fully appreciated. What Ed is finally proposing, in all the rigor of his madness, is a rewriting of the New Testament—a sort of inverse Crucifixion. He realizes that killing his son is a morally abhorrent act, but he sees also that his son seems destined to bring every sort of chaos into the world. Such circumstances demand the greatest sacrifice of all, the sacrifice of himself. Or Himself, since Ed has finally grown to such a stature that the only role scaled to his contours is that of God the Father. Somewhere in suburbia, the order of creation is turning over.