A Prefatory Note: High Noon and Rio Bravo

A prefatory note: to say that pleasures can’t be ranked hierarchically is not to say that there are no standards. There are bad movies and good movies, and really good movies and really bad movies, and movies that would bore anyone in their right minds, and movies that have been botched in the making, and movies that get everything just right, and movies that appeal very deeply to our senses and movies that hardly try. All that is obvious and I’m not going to bother with it: it’s just that knowing there are standards often doesn’t get you anywhere. Applying them is the problem. The task of convincing you that the movie I like is “better” than the movie you like is an impossible waste of time. We can convey what might be useful information and observations to each other that might have been missed, since only the most intense professionals see everything that’s in a movie, but that’s about all.

E.g., High Noon and Rio Bravo, two classic Westerns, are both “about” the same theme, but with profound differences: not for nothing did John Wayne, the star of the latter, call High Noon the “most un-American” movie he’d ever seen. What they have in common is that through the telling of a story, rather than by giving propagandistic lectures, each has something significant to say about the relationship between individuals and the American version of community; about the Cold War, McCarthyism, liberal individualism. Each also has a style appropriate to its narrative, and that is a point worth making to a lover of one who denigrates the other (though again, that’s an aesthetic standard not everyone will agree to or even understand). That is, the real-time editing of High Noon painfully tightens the screws on the lonely hero deserted by the conformist herd; the much more leisurely pace of Rio Bravo tracks the difficulty of welding an heroic community together out of a collection of misfits and loners. I never get tired of seeing High Noon, but as for Rio Bravo I found the fake-folksy acting (except for Dean Martin and Angie Dickinson) and John Wayne’s know-it-all air of superiority redolent of a stupid populism, and the movie generally tedious and boring. This possibly tells you more about me than about the films (the Martin/Wayne contrast seems pure Blue State/Red State on further reflection). As Andrew Sarris said, retracting his earlier dismissal of High Noon, it is a superior movie from the standpoint of a Marxist seeker after social justice; Rio Bravo is a superior movie, he added, from the standpoint of a Christian believer in individual redemption. (Any such who are reading this please weigh in.) I still don’t like the movie, but I can now appreciate what Sarris sees in it.

Or, to take a more recent, and more frustrating, comparison: Dorothy and I recently went to see a revival of the original 3:10 to Yuma, a few weeks after seeing the remake. Here, we thought at the end, is a clear instance where standards are applicable and comparisons possible. The original is a lovely movie and a joy to watch–even for the fourth time, as in my case. The rhythm and pacing of it, from quietude or even silence to outbursts of violent action and then back again, the alternation between romantic nostalgia and cynical realism, produce pleasure in one of the best possible ways: by creating expectations, thwarting them, and then realizing them, and thwarting them again, and finally realizing them. The remake, contrastingly, has no rhythm and no pacing, but is merely an extended visual presentation of often incomprehensible violence and action. It is 35 minutes longer than the original and every one of those minutes is wasted in what appear to be pointless attempts to explain “motivation.” The original did all that’s necessary in two sentences: Dan Evans to his wife: “The town drunk gave his life so people could live in peace and decency; how can I do less?” Ben Wade to Dan Evans: “You saved my life back there; I don’t like to be under an obligation.” Not exactly Hemingway, but getting the job done with perfect economy. The difference between low-key accomplishment and expensive junk could not be clearer.

And yet as we were about to leave the theater, the man sitting in front of us said to his companion, “Yeah, I liked the remake more.”

So, to return, what’s the best Western of all time, then? High Noon, Rio Bravo, My Darling Clementine, Red River, The Naked Spur, The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Magnificent Seven? Who can possibly say; the question is pointless. All that can be said is, see them all (as well as 3:10 to Yuma); they’re all magnificent (except Rio Bravo!). Leave such questions to the star-givers and list-makers. I’ve been the latter myself, with a list of “10 Best Movies of All Time” published once upon a time in American Book Review. Silly, really. “100 Best” would barely encompass the possibilities, and as for ranking them we might as well throw numbers in the air and see which come down first.

I will add one more word on standards, though. It’s obviously quite possible to take pleasure in the obscene or the pornographic; as versions of visceral pleasure (see the postings below) are they therefore on the same plane as any other form of pleasure? My first temptation is to say, Yes, you pays your money and you takes your chances. Feminist film theorist Carol Clover, for example, is able to appreciate The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre as an accomplishment in the realm of the horror movie, despite the ease with which it wallows in the aesthetics of pain and torture. But there’s something more to be said. ...Massacre wallows in misogyny, but does not validate it. The man who enjoys torturing women is presented as the lowest of the low.

Suppose, though, we were to see a German movie, made say in 1939 (don’t worry, I’m making this up), in which a bunch of good Nazis torture and murder a Jewish woman who’s been accused of engaging in ritual child abuse; and afterwards give each other high fives amid cries of “that shows the bitch who’s boss,” and “we’re gonna take care of all those bitches,” and then trot off happily to begin a reign of terror over the Jews who deserve it. Is that an appeal to pleasure like any other?

What I have just described, as it happens, is a rewritten but faithful version of the climax of that “great American film,” Birth of a Nation. Birth of a Nation, that is, is an obscene movie, and should be judged as such (along with many others, of course, but the others don’t raise the question of cinematic values so dramatically). Taking pleasure in lynching is obscene; lying about history and using the most loathsome of stereotypes in order to degrade an entire race of people and justify violence against them is obscene. Not “wrong,” or “immoral,” but obscene. So what, then, if Griffith invented a new form of editing, a new version of montage? Would Lynddie England’s photographs from Abu Ghraib be any the less obscene if she’d posed her victims with the attention to composition of Robert Capa? I don’t think so. There’s a limit to the possibility of detaching aesthetic contemplation from the human beings who engage in it, and Birth of a Nation surpasses that limit. In my opinion, it’s a version of false consciousness for humane persons not to see that. This is a standard that can be applied to films, without transgression on some realm of “formal accomplishment” that’s meaningless unless attached to a core of human-ness. It’s a very stringent standard, not to be invoked lightly just to show that you’re a good liberal or anti-Fascist–but it can be invoked. Something to think about when seeing, e.g., American Gangster–which I refuse to see.

Next up: on to the types of pleasure