February 5, 2014
I think this is the eighth snowstorm to hit New York City, and we are only halfway through winter. As I wrestle with the boots I wear over two pairs of socks, I think about "trench foot", the mysterious condition that has cost so many soldiers parts of their feet in innumerable wars through history. Including World War I, the beginning of which, one hundred years ago, we mark this year. In cases of trench foot, dampness and unsanitary conditions are the main culprits, although not necessarily cold: trench foot can be found in temperatures as high as sixty degrees Farenheit (about sixteen degrees Celsius). Untreated, the skin and flesh start to decompose, leading to eventual loss of the toes and other parts of the feet. Not a pretty sight.
The sort of winter we're having harks back to the winters of my youth, when the New York tabloids would use their front pages for photos of pedestrians struggling with snow on their way to and from work, scaling curbs piled with several feet of it, wading through gutters groaning with water. Today there was a power outage at Columbus Circle that threw thousands off schedule: temperatures are expected to drop a bit over the next few days, making for lots of "black ice" and risky walking or driving; and there is a sixty percent chance of snow on Sunday. All across the Northeast, states and municipalities are running out of salt, an unheard of event.
New Yorkers are complaining a lot these days; everyone is exhausted from fighting the weather gods, although most of us have it pretty easy. In fact, I think we ought to take this long winter as an opportunity to ruminate on what life is like in the really cold parts of the state, like Buffalo, Rochester and Utica. Life is very different in these places: L.L. Bean, the outfitter from Maine, surely does a good business among the citizens of these cities. Practical considerations take first place, fashion second, when staying warm and dry are imperative. New York, with it's latitude near the same as Madrid's, can usually afford to elevate style over substance, thanks to its generally milder winters. That's a fact I appreciate more this winter.
What are the most famous movies to romanticize winter? To me they are Doctor Zhivago and Fanny and Alexander. When David Lean's Doctor Zhivago premiered in 1965, it inspired women's fashion designers to embrace the styles of the Russias: Cossack-type fur hats in fox, solid color blouses with balloon sleeves in heavy silks, Eurasian vests heavily embroidered and trimmed in braiding of gold; "maxi" skirts sweeping past the knees, worn with boots that climbed above the calves. Every young woman wanted to look like either Geraldine Chaplin --who played Zhivago's wife, Tanya-- or Julie Christie, who played his muse, Lara. The trend endured: Yves Saint Laurent did a particularly beautiful collection inspired by Russian themes in 1976, eleven years later; and in the same year, Jacqueline Onassis' first book as an editor at Random House, "In The Russian Style" also appeared.
What I think of first, though, when I think of Doctor Zhivago, is not the early scenes, in which these opulent styles figure, but the winter scenes in Varykino in the Ural Mountains, where Zhivago and Lara, hiding from the war raging around them, take refuge. Their lives are ones of meager subsistence in an ice-bound summer house. (Although it is at Varykino that Tonya, their soon-to-be orphaned love child, is conceived). Doctor Zhivago is a picture of profound love against the odds, based on Boris Pasternak's autobiographical novel of the same title. Half the beauty of Doctor Zhivago, the film, is its scenes of the Russian winter: snow crystals on the windows at Varykino magnified by Lean's lens, horse-drawn sleigh rides through fields of immaculate snow, everyone in bourgeois Moscow dressed in luxurious furs.
Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, originally a television series in Sweden cut down to the size of a feature-length movie, is another film about winter's joys. Much of the film takes place in the home of the Ekdahl family in Uppsala, modeled on Bergman's own. The scenes at the studio of the toy-maker who is a family friend, Isak Jacobi (played by Erland Josephson) are fantastic and wonderful, but it is the light-filled interior scenes at the Ekdahl's --amid the fine furniture, the crystal and the silver- that celebrate the sensual properties of everyday objects, the winter light glinting off them and making them resplendent.
Except that during winter in Uppsala (as in Sweden in general), there are only a few hours of sun every day during winter, when Apollo is at his weakest. Fanny and Alexander is really a film about how we romanticize our childhoods, even the bad parts. It is a beautiful film, but you can't take it as a travelogue of Uppsala in winter.
No, "trench foot", not Zhivago or Fanny, is a better reminder of winter's realities in the city.
--But what movie-loving New Yorker could live daily with the realization that, in the cold cities of the world, a good part of winter consists of inconveniences, alternating with fleeting glimpses of natural beauty immediately after a snowfall? In New York, we have to dream a better winter than that we know, as we trudge over the dirty snow and the slush, as we feel our feet dampen and our fingers go numb.
--After all, it's winter in New York City, not Stalingrad.
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