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Over the Rainbow - Page 2

© Robert Davis

You see, there is a joy underlying Ed Wood's work--simply the joy to be making a movie, to be placing before the world the whole creation of his mind. That same joy pervades Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I do not think it is too strong even to invoke Joy in its deeper, almost theological sense, either--the sense that C.S. Lewis ascribes to it when he professes autobiographically to have been "Surprised by Joy," by the twinge of inconsolable longing and the unbearable love and the irrepressible happiness that can all be bound up in the desire for a single object that is touched with numinous awe. This Joy can only come from something that is Good.

I am deeply touched by Sky Captain. It is delightful entertainment, and the part of myself that is so invested with expired longings for the future we envisioned in pulp magazines and comic books so many decades ago simply thrills to the sight and sound of that world so perfectly given life. But more than that, far more, I see in its purity and excitement and honest, whole cloth that it is truly the movie Ed Wood always wished he could make--the movie he had inside him, dying to get out and see the light of day. And at last, here it is.

And how marvelously, how wonderfully does Jane Monheit's heartbreaking rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" during the film's closing credits capture that longing, that Joy?

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high,
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.
Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.

Someday I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far
Behind me.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow.
Why then, oh why can't I?

If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow
Why, oh why can't I?

I just know that some folks are reading this and thinking, "Egad, he's flipped his lid." Well, maybe. But if you can't feel your own lid flipping just a bit, if you aren't the least bit touched, if you've truly no sense of this Joy in you, then my heart breaks for you. And I beg you, see Sky Captain. Perhaps you'll find a bit of the old spark in you, after all. And if you do sympathize in the least with what I'm saying, then by all means go and see Sky Captain. I say to you with utter conviction, with all the honesty and simplicity I can, that it is a thing of beauty. Nothing else but a thing of beauty.

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