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This
Isn't Some Movie
by
Eric Barker
10.01.01
I’ve
heard it all before, in the Army, in New York, in the theatre.
People say “Hollywood” when they want to insult you. Really,
Hollywood is just a place where they make a product. It’s
a factory town, like Detroit or Birmingham or Schaffhausen.
But because the cheap element of the town has been overly
advertised, it becomes an insult to remind a man he’s from
there.
--
Clint Eastwood, as a thinly disguised John Huston, in White
Hunter, Black Heart (1990)
All
of us must have thought about it on our own, at some level,
before the pundits started reminding us in various ways. Part
of the shock of it was the horrific, cinematic nature of the
event, so orchestrated it would not be believable on the “big”
screen. This was not some movie idea of terrorism, this was
the real thing; these were not movie terrorists, these were
real people murdering real people. One NPR personality repeated
it so often while she was interviewing survivors, trying to
get them to open up and describe their experience, I changed
the station to a conservative rant fest just to get away from
her.
This
wasn’t some movie idea of a terrorist attack, of a
towering icon of progress collapsing, of thousands dying,
of a country in shock, of an incomprehensible human tragedy,
etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, it went on and
on.
As
a lifelong wordsmith, I’m very sensitive to language and its
rhythms and meanings. Often, I’m probably too sensitive. People
who devote a large portion of their lives to words tend to
think they are more attuned to the power and nuance of language
than others, when they’re actually just linguistic navel gazers,
lint pickers most of the time. It becomes a conversational
weapon; in case we don’t like someone, we can correct their
grammar and usage to deflect their argument, as if speaking
had anything to do with the dogma of grammar.
But
I am a lifelong movie lover as well, and I frequently find
myself caught on the fence between words and the moving image.
It’s a constant variable, especially in talks with liberal-intellectuals
and/or artists (two philosophical groupings in which I count
myself a member, most days), people who are usually out to
teach me something, to teach us all something, mostly about
how screwed up everything is from a Marxist perspective. With
any luck, they actually know it’s a Marxist perspective. It
can make a movie-lover-with-a-brain feel very lonely, because
it is usually the art form itself that is attacked.
“Movies
are bullshit,” one intellectually militant friend says to
me, with finality, and I feel lost for an argument because
it seems to come from nowhere, there’s no reference point
in our dialogue up to now that warrants the dismissal, but
I’m also exasperated because, really, the statement itself
is bullshit. The movies are only a century and a few days
old, yet they already have an extraordinarily vast history
of artistic rigor and contention. “It’s a diluted art form,”
says another friend, whom I also respect for his sharp analytical
mind, when he becomes frustrated with me for defending a movie
he’s attempting to pick apart. He says it because he hopes
it will insult me, shut me down, and cease the threat I pose
to his deeply held prejudice against imagery and emotion,
a prejudice he doesn‘t realize he owns. It does shut me down,
too, but not because I have no argument. It shuts me down
because I’m tired of having to make the argument.
Oh,
they’re not talking about the people who work there and that
try to do something worthwhile. They’re talking about the
whores when they mention Hollywood. Whores have to sell the
one thing that shouldn’t be for sale in the world, and that’s
love.
--
Eastwood, ibid
This
isn’t some movie, the commentators kept saying, like a lament
for all the wrong-headedness of our past nightmares.
Not,
“This isn’t some book,” or “This isn’t some dance,” or “This
isn’t some painting,” or even “This isn’t some TV show,” although
it was a TV show for a while, in the very limited sense of
the terrorists attempting to use the image hungry media to
their advantage, as terrorists always do. No, movies became
the rhetorical target, perhaps because they generally have
a bigger budget to work with, and so, sometimes, in some movies,
explosions seem to be the art form’s métier. What was really
meant, though, was “This isn’t a mindless entertainment, this
is the real thing,” as if viewers didn’t know that after the
first glance, as if viewers older than nine don‘t realize
a movie is just a movie, and worst of all, as if all movies
were mindless entertainment.
And
it was also tremendous guilt: guilt for having enjoyed trashy
movies all our lives, as if we still had to sneak away to
see a nickelodeon or a silent flicker show, knowing our pastors
and our mothers would smugly disapprove, and now here were
some very nasty, hateful people turning it all against us,
even our entertainment tropes, which, by the way, we export
to any corner of the globe that‘ll have us, and that turns
out to be nearly everywhere but the Taliban’s Afghanistan.
The
great science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, speaking about
the disparity between the best stories in his field and the
enormous wasteland of the rest, once said that ninety-percent
of Everything is crap. Amen, brother. The movies are a human
construct, with all the flaws and wonders that imagination
and love and ignorance can contain. They have perpetrated
some diluted ideas in their time, and plenty of utter bullshit,
and they assuredly will again. All art forms do: bookstore
shelves are sagging with crap in every section, local art
galleries hang dumb paintings next to the good, a lot of poetry
and music everywhere really sucks, composed by people blissfully
unaware of theory or discipline or the work of their betters.
Actors, it is true, can be boorish weirdoes with big mouths
who say the wrong thing when they don’t have a script; studio
heads can be cowardly as a stockholder when it comes to censorship,
their eyes forever, nervously scanning the bottom line, all
other considerations nonsense; directors can be insane petty
tyrants driving stunt people to ever greater dangers, inevitably
confusing bigger with better in spite of all evidence.
Yet,
movie history -- not our current, irony- and marketing-choked
cultural moment, but real history -- tells a lot of different
stories. Anyone who has watched a movie from the forties knows
that a patriotic consciousness suffused anything made after
December 7, 1941, whether it was a war movie or not. Movie
stars joined up by the truckload and flew dangerous missions
over Europe, or piloted PT boats in the Pacific -- Clark Gable,
James Stewart, Robert Montgomery, to name three. The entire
Hollywood community collaborated to entertain troops both
at home and in the field, some of them, like Leslie Howard
(Ashley in Gone with the Wind, 1939) and Carole Lombard (Mrs.
Clark Gable) getting killed in the process. The great director
John Ford stood in the line of fire at Midway to get a decent
shot of strafing Zeroes, so caught up in the moment he yelled
direction at the attacking Japanese pilots, and two years
later he landed a platoon of cameramen at Omaha Beach alongside
the troops (the same beachhead that opens Saving Private Ryan,
1998), supervising some of the most dangerous documentary
footage of the war. John Huston enlisted, and wound up making
documentaries that stayed classified for decades, largely
because they told uncomfortable truths about the price of
war on European civilians. Alfred Hitchcock’s documentaries
on the liberated concentration camps still can’t be seen because
they’re too disturbing.
Throughout
their century of existence, the movies have done their part,
consistently telling a truth about war that either no one
wanted to hear, or that made a brief impact before they were
forgotten by a moviegoing culture that has a very short memory.
Potemkin (1925), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Grand
Illusion (1937), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Twelve
O’Clock High (1949), Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games, 1951),
The Red Badge of Courage (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953),
The Bridge on the River Kwai and Paths of Glory (both 1957),
Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love
the Bomb (1964), The Battle of Algiers (1965), M*A*S*H (1970),
The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), The Big Red
One (1980), Das Boot (The Boat, 1981), Platoon (1986), Glory
(1989), Henry V (1989), Schindler’s List (1993); every decade
produced movies of depth and courage and humanity worthy of
any other art form.
And
not just movies about war, either, but profoundly good, amazing
movies of all stripes: about marriage and family (The Crowd,
1928; How Green Was My Valley, 1941; Pather Panchali, 1955),
social injustice (The Grapes of Wrath, 1940; To Kill a Mockingbird,
1962), love (Bringing Up Baby, 1938; Romeo and Juliet, 1968),
crime (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967; The Godfather, 1972) , politics
(Weekend, 1967), death (Wild Strawberries, 1959; A Taste of
Cherry, 1997), and redemption (Raging Bull, 1980). Tip of
the iceberg. I haven’t even mentioned Citizen Kane (1941)
yet, or Network (1976), two pretty good movies about, among
other things, the abuse of media power. There are thousands
more that achieve the criteria of both art and entertainment,
thousands. A person could never see them all in one lifetime.
‘Course,
there are other kinds of whores than the floozies you frequent,
Ralph. There are whores who sell words and ideas and melodies.
Now, I know what I’m talking about, because I’ve done a little
whoring in my time. And what I sold when I was whoring, I’ll
never get back. What I’m trying to say, Ralph, is -- it’s
the whores who put Hollywood up as a big target.
--
Eastwood, ibid
What’s
most maddening about this unearned snobbery toward motion
pictures, though, is not the vacuous dismissals of people
who don’t know all that much about the art form, or of those
to whom an old movie is The Waterboy (1998), but the fellow
artists who should know better, who cringe and rail if you
listen to anything vaguely melodic or that, God forbid, has
a structure, or if you express an appreciation for representational
painting after 1850, and then, cringing and railing finished,
have the not-so-innocent effrontery to say, “I like bad movies,
you know? The kind that are so bad they’re good?”
Speaking
of bullshit. Yeah, and I like books you don’t have to think
about.
If
the movies have given us a head full of crappy imagery in
the last twenty years, and they have, it was because we wanted
it that way. We can say what we want to about Oscar stupidity,
which has indeed been on the rise since the mid-nineties,
but we, the people, vote as a collective. We make our tastes
known at the box-office. The movies are a capital-intensive
art form and their creators must pay attention to what the
audience wants if they mean to stay in business.
According
to managers at Blockbuster Video stores across America, what
the audience asked for last week was movies in which terrorists
got their asses kicked, and kicked again, by God, into the
stratosphere. Since there’s only a limited number of such
movies, the biggest home video rentals of the week were the
so-bad-it’s-almost-good Hannibal, Blow, which one critic described
as Traffic Lite, and Memento, the only truly original movie
in the top ten. It may be that a protracted conflict with
world-wide terrorism will change the audience mood, but right
now they clearly want that thing which commentators insistently
reminded us the World Trade Center attack was not. At theatres
they flocked to Keanu Reeves’ latest, Hardball, which set
box-office records for this time of year, and the anachronistic
The Musketeer, in which eighteenth century Europeans fight
like mystical kung fu masters and circus acrobats. Not exactly
a rush for the poetic enlightenments of Grand Illusion, but
then nothing on the top rental chart was made before the year
2000, either.
Why
be gloomy?
Cut thy nose off to spite thy face?
Listen to me A nose is hard to replace
-- Danny Kaye, singing the opening tune of The Court Jester
(1956)
We
still don’t know what this conflict will become in the great
scheme of things, but it will determine the course of the
movies, along with every other aspect of our lives. Among
those movies yet to be made, ninety-percent will be crap,
because that’s the way art works. You win some, but mostly
you lose; you go to the circus, you pays yer money and you
takes yer chances. But that doesn’t mean the movies will make
up our minds for us, or that they ever have, and in any event,
a terrorist attack is in no way a valid statement about modern
culture, either in the U.S. or around the globe. It’s a terrorist
attack, a particularly gruesome and horrifying reminder that
some people want everyone else to die for what they believe
in. And it didn’t happen because the movies have lied to us
about everything turning out all right, though they often
have, or because our movies have too many exploding buildings,
since most of them don’t have any, or because we’re a soft
people who sit in front of the TV too much, though we often
do.
It
happened for a complex of reasons that are primarily religious
and political. It happened because of fundamental differences
in the perception of reality, differences we have not yet
begun to address in any aspect of our lives. For much of the
Islamic world, mystical and spiritual awareness remains a
vital force in day-to-day life, and the mythos of their religion
is the foundation of their law and politics. In the Western
world, logic has trampled myth and religion, built monumental,
hard-edged skyscrapers celebrating commerce, and divided art
and spirituality into opposing realms, both disciplines kept
scrupulously away from the efficient operation of government.
For us, myth is just another movie and vice-versa, a sordid
collection of transparent ideologies and stereotypes that
can be shrugged away like a bad dream. But Islam has a living,
breathing mythos tied to verifiable historical events, and
many Muslims take an especially dim view of its trivialization,
however imaginative (ask Salman Rushdie).
Most
Americans distrust the worship of anything, while we gleefully
embrace the trivialization of everything. Baseborn or filthy
rich, we most love to see the pompous and pretentious, as
we define them, taken down a peg or two. We work hard for
the money, now we want a couple of laughs at the end of the
day. Fiercely independent in our hearts, no matter what drudgery
we perform day-to-day, most of us claim belief in a supreme
being, but in our stringently secular society it’s bad form
to claim which supreme being for more than a sentence or two.
Like everything else around here, God has been compartmentalized,
just another duty that has been fit into an increasingly hectic
schedule.
We
have no collective mythos that we all share, unless you count
the values and ideals and conflicting ideologies that are
espoused nightly on TV, and in countless movies we’ve been
embracing for the last century. Everyone, no matter how much
they claim to despise movies, has a favorite they’ve tucked
away, some little gem that speaks to their private myth of
how things work. Sometimes, personal taste can be not only
surprising, but baffling.
My
favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock, a great visual poet of
20th century anxiety and fear, most liked to watch Smokey
and the Bandit (1977) in his last years, when his wife was
ailing and his own health had nearly gone. It made him laugh.
My friend who says movies are bullshit watches Bob Clark’s
A Christmas Story (1983) every year. He says it’s a “great
movie,” words he does not juxtapose without some forethought.
When
the New York Times asked Woody Allen to participate in their
series on filmmakers and the movies they admire, he picked
George Stevens’ Shane (1953), a Western, one of the most un-Woody-like
movies imaginable. Shane is a masterpiece of Hollywood mythmaking
that speaks to the deepest American beliefs in hard work,
fair play, law and order, and the morality of protecting your
own against evil forces. Woody chose the movie (several months
ago, I must add) because he appreciates its skillful storytelling,
its fine acting, and so on, but it is also apparent as he
discusses Shane with the Times interviewer that he feels a
strong emotional resonance with the tale, and who wouldn’t?
Shane works by an accumulation of details about human behavior
that won’t be found in any other movie, in the service of
a story about simple people being terrorized by evil men who
won’t leave them alone. One of its hallmarks as a great movie,
for me, is that it provokes very different reactions when
I share it with friends -- some like it just fine, while others
have been outraged by a movie in which a small boy would be
taught that violence, any violence, could ever be an answer
to anything.
It’s
debatable whether that is truly the lesson the boy learns
at the end of Shane, but there is little doubt the movie itself
(that is, George Stevens himself) believes there are just
some people who will not leave you in peace, people who will
keep hurting you and your family until you either pack up
and move on, or you try to do something about them, whatever
the cost. It’s a primeval conflict, the sort of thing that
movies, as an audio-visual art form, do extremely well on
a gut level, because so much of primeval conflicts are about
body language, landscape, gesture, and tone of voice. Shane
raises the ante on the presentation of these common subtleties.
It’s a movie that can make us see differently, the way a good
painting can jar our perspective for a few hours and make
us perceive the world anew.
Personally,
I would choose a very different movie, in light of our troubled
moment, though it can have a similar effect of giving a one-eighty
spin on the viewer’s perspective. It, too, is about fighting
evil forces, and it also raises body language, gesture and
tone of voice to a dizzying level of mastery. If inspired
silliness was ever officially declared an art, then Danny
Kaye’s The Court Jester would be hailed as a seminal masterpiece
of comedy, made twenty years before Monty Python started making
us go “Wha‘?” A relentless spoof of the Robin Hood legend,
it’s nothing more or less than a showcase for Kaye’s unique
verbal and physical genius, filled with knee-slapping songs,
brilliant narrative twists, choreography to make curmudgeons
giggle, ingenious tongue-twisters, balletic slapstick, and
an indomitable free spirit that could only be classified as
American, in spite of its Anglo-Saxon source. It’s irreverent,
manic, tender, gloriously wacky, intensely human and wildly
creative, a movie that’s so good it’s great.
That’s
the kind of movie I like to watch.
Which
brings us to the plot
Plot we’ve got, quite a lot
As it unfolds you’ll see
What starts like a scary tale, ends like a fairy tale
And life couldn’t possibly better be
--
Kaye, ibid
(Quick
note -- two excellent studies on the conflict between
the West and Islam, and what it might mean, are: The Battle
for God by Karen Armstrong and Jihad Vs. McWorld: How
Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World by Benjamin
R. Barber, both published by Ballantine Books).
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