Movies and Pleasure: I

Now to the types of pleasure, with examples, in alphabetical order. To repeat my earlier caveat, the examples are not meant to suggest that a particular movie gives only one type of pleasure; rather, these are movies that are especially powerful at calling up the kind of pleasure I associate them with here, and that I recommend as such to illustrate the concept.

1) Aesthetic pleasure is alphabetically the first. The dictionary defines it alternately as “concerned with the appreciation of beauty” or “artistic.” I begin with “artistic” and will not attempt to refine it any further, since that would just result in confusion or contradiction. Aesthetic: The pleasure to be found in experiencing a work of art.

Many dedicated movie-goers–and readers, and museum-goers, and music-lovers--will insist that the aesthetic is normatively first as well. I will resist that temptation, though only with great difficulty: the ideology of the aesthetic is one of the dominant cultural ideologies of the modern era, and it affects all of us. In any event, think of Red Desert, Russian Ark, Orphee, The Seventh Seal, L’Avventura, Persona. The first four are obvious examples if you’ve seen them, and if you haven’t you should; a skeptic (I am not one) might even claim that they suffer somewhat from aestheticism. But about the last two many movie-goers might well ask: how can a visual experience every moment of which is icy cold, or fraught with pain and despair, or not even especially beautiful by conventional standards, be said to give pleasure of any kind, let alone aesthetic pleasure?

The answer (I have Laura Green to thank for this formulation, as well as several others scattered throughout this commentary) is that there can indeed be pleasure–an aesthetic pleasure--to be experienced in witnessing the rigorous and uncompromising pursuit of an artistic vision, however dark that vision might be. We are aware of this possibility in a museum, say the Met in New York: a little while ago we were looking at a painful Rembrandt self-portrait and were deeply engaged...and now we’re looking at an exuberant Pollock and being equally deeply engaged, though they couldn’t be less like each other both formally and expressively. When this happens we perceive that we are in the presence of “Art”–and it is for this reason that European films, which often provide this kind of experience in a way that Hollywood almost never does, are rightfully called “art films.” As many of them are. So against philistines–of course I don’t know any personally–I will insist that the pleasures of real Art are incomparable; but to my sophisticated intellectual friends I will rather say, when they start the pleasure-ranking game, “Oh, come off it.” But at the same time I have to acknowledge, since this is a very personal essay, that three of the above are on any “10 Best” list I’ve ever made, on paper or in my head.

Now, a note about the “beauty” part. I would argue that the aesthetic needs to be very broadly defined if it’s to have any genuine purchase on our feelings and experiences. I once had a discussion with a friend whose definition of “the aesthetic” revolved wholly around the perception of “beauty.” After a bit of back and forth I said to her, “Fine, I’ll give you Red Desert if you give me Rita Hayworth.” She acceded to my demand (too bad it was all in the head), and so we were finally in cheerful agreement about aesthetic experience. But the larger point is that if we extend “the aesthetic,” as we should, to encompass both versions of the dictionary definition, then “beauty” actually has a much larger scope than “art,” and gives us so much more in movies to appreciate beyond the “art film”: not just Hayworth’s flaming red hair in Gilda, or Liz Taylor’s devastating eyes, but say the chiaroscuro renditions of urban landscapes in such noir films as Where the Sidewalk Ends, While the City Sleeps, Phantom Lady; or the emotionally entangling color-coded symbolism of Fatal Attraction. As may be obvious, I’m still having trouble resisting the temptation to put the aesthetic first.

2) Aesthetically perverse pleasure. This, contrarily, is pleasure found in the spirit that Poe called “The Imp of the Perverse:” the spirit that moves us to do something “merely because we feel we should not.” Or in the case of Art, to do something that we know the audience, or the respectable classes, or the bourgeoisie, will “feel that we should not;” and in that spirit create movies that seem designed to affront those sensibilities. (“Seem,” because we usually have no way of knowing that what was received by the audience is exactly what the artist intended it to receive.) This is the cinema of stylistic excess, of the baroque and the perverse, of camp and deliberate (or uncaring) bad taste, of over the top narrative elements and performances that go beyond the realm of mere badness and so (for some viewers) enter the realm of eccentric or idiosyncratic entertainment and pleasure. This cinema can’t really be defined except through the experience of it. Its avatar is Klaus Kinski as a mad Teutonic conquistador (!) in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: the Wrath of God (not to mention as Dracula in Nosferatu), closely followed by those insouciant serial killers, Charlie Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux and Jean-Louis Barrault in Bizarre Bizarre!. In one way or another it’s found in movies as various as Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Cries and Whispers, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasss Song, the films of John Waters (Pink Flamingos), Andy Warhol (Flesh, Trash, Heat), Alexander Jodorowsky (El Topo), Catherine Breillat (36 Fillette), and Pasolini (Salo–The 120 Days of Sodom: ugh); not to mention Todd Haynes’s Poison, or Isabel Huppert in Michael Haneke’s sado-masochistic The Piano Lesson, or that imp of the perverse incarnate Mary Woronov in anything (but try Rock and Roll High School).

Is there in fact such a thing as “bad taste?” Perhaps: but your “bad taste” may be my delight in perversity. –De gustibus non disputandum est, as my father liked to quote. It used to be, when I was a young man, that you could take your cue from the Times movie critic Bosley Crowther. If he sniffed at a movie for being not out of the top drawer, there was a pretty good chance we’d want to go see it with an open mind. But now that the cultural bourgeoisie has taken its lumps, apparently for good, and just about anything goes, so that it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish liberated crap from liberated art, we’re all on our own.

3) Emotional pleasure. Contrastingly to both the aesthetic and the aesthetically perverse, the primary feelings that Hollywood films or non-art films generally call up are those of sympathetic identification, either with an active protagonist (High Noon, The Gauntlet, 16 Blocks, Aliens, The Wizard of Oz), or with victims or would-be victims (To Kill a Mockingbird, Dark Victory, Random Harvest, Boys Don’t Cry, Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy–Robert O. Green Executive Producer)–what we usually call sentimental attachment (or sentimentality when we disapprove of it). Of course non-Americans can do this perfectly well or even better: think of Au Hasard Balthasar, or Pather Panchali, or Ikiru (To Live). Hollywood, however, is more likely to give us what we receive as “happy endings;” the three films I’ve just mentioned are rigorous and uncompromising in the same way that say L’Avventura is aesthetically rigorous and uncompromising.

Of course, sympathy can take many forms. One of them deserves special mention as the perhaps the most immediately compelling variety of pleasurable identification. This is the the deferred gratification that we anxiously await when viewing any movie (or reading any book) that can be categorized under the general heading of “suspense.” The headlong rush into fear of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, The Wrong Man, Strangers on a Train, North by Northwest, The Birds; or the doom-laden machinery that plunges Edward G. Robinson into nightmare in Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Window or Scarlet Street: it might seem strange to speak of these experiences as pleasurable. But like any adrenaline high, pleasure is exactly what they give. Whatever else they may do, virtually all American movies (except porn, to be sure) highlight sympathetic identification as the heart of the movie-going experience.

One need only compare Persona or Day of Wrath or L’Avventura to see that this is not the only possible approach to our pleasure centers. Again, however, I think it does an
injustice to Hollywood to leave it at that: more sentiment, less rigor. For what American cinema is not just good at but great at is not so much movies, with their cumbersome baggage of having to tell a complete story, as scenes, that make us cry or cheer or salivate, or fill us with utopian longings. Hayworth and Taylor, of course (the slow 360 pan around Taylor’s face as she and Montgomery Clift perform their doomed embrace in A Place in the Sun remains in my psyche as the most memorable moment in movie history); sexual longing is one of the things Hollywood does very well.

For me, though, the birth of the outlaw hero is more prototypically American, and my favorite cinematic invention overall. As in Viva Zapata!, Zapata/Brando dragged down the road by a troop of Federalistas, while the village women sound an alarm of clicking stones, and the peasants armed only with machetes scramble down the hillside in groups of three or four (in tableaus from the great murals of Orozco) to form a protective screen around their not-yet leader, engulfing the patrol without violence: and Zapata says “Cut the wire!”, and the Revolution begins, to the swelling of Alex North’s great score (out of Aaron Copland).

Or Bogart/Rick Blaine in Casablanca, giving the nod to the band to strike up the Marseillaise, and so taking us all into the good fight against Naziism. Or the birth of the heroine in Aliens, as Sigourney Weaver/Ripley seizes control of the troop carrier from the ineffectual, paralyzed, commanding officer, and tells the marines, “We’re going in!” to rescue the trapped survivors.

Or all those standing ovation movies that seem to exist only in Hollywood’s wonderland: Gregory Peck/Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird walking slowly up the courtroom aisle, having lost the case as we all knew he must, and the Negroes in the balcony rise one by one, and their minister says to Finch’s daughter, “Stand up child! Your father’s passing!” (Nicole Kidman’s favorite scene.) Or Henry Fonda as Clarence Gideon in Gideon’s Trumpet, just a down-and-out perpetual loser who sent a scribbled hand–written note to the Supreme Court saying he’d been denied a lawyer, and so became one of the great heroes of American constitutional law (god, remember those days?), walking tall and free through the gates to the accompaniment of the assembled inmates cheering and banging their mess kits and utensils on the prison’s fence. Or stewardess Karen Black in Airport 75, stepping out of the cockpit of the doomed airplane that with sheer determination she kept aloft until a real pilot (Charlton Heston) could be dropped aboard (I’m not kidding), to rising applause from the grateful passengers...

It would be nice to think that this romantic sentimentality is as American as our madness and rage; it is certainly a lot less destructive, and endlessly pleasure-giving. Everyone will have his or her own favorite version of it, a litany of scenes that are endlessly replayed in the psyche; I can’t believe that anyone will be entirely bereft of that pleasure.

4) Iconographic pleasure--Casablanca, Gilda, Erin Brockovich. The pleasures of iconography can perhaps best be defined by negation, as in: “I would have enjoyed the story of Erin Brockovich just as much if she’d been played by Tori Spelling.” Right. And Jean Arthur and Joel McCrae would have been perfect in Casablanca. More cinematic pleasure than sophisticated people like to admit stems not from “acting” but from that undefinable source of excitement we call charisma. Yes, Meryl Streep is a “great” actress: that is, she has an amazing range, from slapstick comedy to intense tragedy. She can be anyone, and she almost always gives pleasure (except perhaps when she lets you know too obviously how she’s internalized being “a great actress,” as in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, or Sophie’s Choice). Catherine Deneuve, contrarily, can only be Catherine Deneuve: detached, unapproachable, dispassionate in her own embrace of pleasure or pain–oh, did I forget to say, “the most impossibly beautiful actress ever to come out of Western Europe?” That “only” will take you through Repulsion, Belle de Jour, Tristana, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, Mississippi Mermaid, The Last Metro, Scene of the Crime, Indochine, Place Vendome, Le Temps Retrouve, A Talking Picture...and on and on. Do we think Bunuel and Demy and Truffaut and Polanski and Ruiz knew something about her acting ability that we don’t know? No, they knew exactly the same thing that we know–fortunately. A great or even mediocre director knows a great icon when he or she sees one: that’s what it means to be a great icon.

5) Ideological pleasure (Viva Zapata!, The Battle of Algiers, Dead Man Walking, The Question of Silence, Z, Norma Rae, Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses). This category is different from all the others, in that while all values are subjective to some extent in their application, there will generally be widespread agreement on obvious instances. Many viewers may not enjoy Red Desert, but I doubt any would deny that the film is saturated with an intensity of color such as hadn’t been experienced before on the screen. Contrastingly, as my discussion of High Noon and Rio Bravo demonstrates, not just enjoyment but even basic appreciation of an ideologically/politically oriented film often depends on the politics of the viewer.

Men stormed out of the first showing of The Question of Silence in New York, unable to derive any pleasure (to put it mildly) from a movie that justified the slaughter of an “innocent” salesman by four female shoppers, as a reasonable response to the oppression of their lives. A conservative French nationalist will despise The Battle of Algiers (though in contains inter alia a defense of torture far more coherent and compelling than that offered by the Bush Administration and its intellectual fellow-travelers); just as a right-wing Greek will despise Z. Viva Zapata! is a great film for Left romantics; it has always been my favorite film and I’ve seen it about a dozen times, but many of other political persuasions would dissent; just as proponents of capital punishment will think Dead Man Walking is not a powerful critique but liberal sentimental pap.

Conversely, my distaste for the overt misogyny of Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors and Mike Leigh’s Naked will undoubtedly seem to many of their fans like a personal prejudice that should have nothing to do with movie-going. (Actually, the conflation is unfair to Leigh, in that Allen’s film has nothing to say and thus no redeeming social value once stripped of its misogynistic core, whereas Naked highlights the brilliantly excoriating turn of star David Thewlis, which at least defines him as “an unreasonable man.”) On the other hand, how could movie-going, that is the immersion in pleasure, ever be anything but “personal?”

To be continued.