Meet me in Saint Loo-ey, Loo-ey; meet me if you dare.

I watched Meet Me in Saint Louis with my children last night. [Their faces lit up especially when they watched the Under the Bamboo Tree number. Sniff.] I have seen the movie many times, yet each time I see it I'm surprised by how entrancing it is. I say "surprised" because I can't, for the life of me, quite put my finger on the source of its greatness -- and maybe it's that very elusiveness that is part of its appeal. I recognize the individual parts of a great movie -- gorgeous technicolor cinematography, Judy Garland at the peak of her career, Margaret O'Brien at the height of her adorable moppet stage, lovely tunes (including Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas), beloved character actors, show-stopping numbers like The Trolley Song -- and I still can't explain to my satisfaction how it all coheres. Or maybe what I'm trying to say is that it coheres quite nicely in the ordinary way, and that what really baffles me is my sense that, for all its quaintness and even its kitsch, it transcends its particular genre in an almost melancholy way. My sense of the movie's transcendence may be partly an effect of extra-cinematic elements -- the accretion of emotions and experiences that I associate with the movie based on repeated viewings, my knowledge of Judy Garland's sad life, the notion that "they-don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to" which becomes more pronounced with every viewing -- but I am convinced that the movie's effect is not wholly due to such elements, that something in the movie itself contributes to this transcendence. I always come away from the movie feeling like some Platonic form of Meet Me in Saint Loius manages to hover above the movie that we mortals see with our cave-dimmed eyes, and that the movie's sweetness and nostalgia become transformed in a way that somehow points to an ineffable falling off, a falling short of all human desires and aspirations, a sense that, even when you stay home to begin with, you can't go home again. That feeling, come to think of it, was probably a very familiar one to the moviegoers of 1944, and it may have clutched at them quite poignantly when they viewed the cinematic depiction of an era so blissfully unaware, at the dawn of the twentieth century, of the precipice it hovered over. And it's a feeling that post-September 11 Americans are tragically well acquainted with, as well.

So I've managed, quite unintentionally, to cut a rough path from the nostalgia of Meet Me in Saint Loius to the sense of loss associated with September 11, which means I've reached a point in my rambling that I'm quite certain how to interpret. It's time to go to sleep.