So in the end, how does all this exposition relate to my original excuse for writing this essay? It seems to suggest that the task of making a mutual enjoyment out of communal movie-going is hopeless. Maybe so, but to conclude I will suggest that essentially there are three ways to go. You’ve just come out of let’s say The Interpreter; what do you do?
1) You may take a leaf from the professionals and when your friend says, “So, what did you think?,” you reply without any intimation of irony (best to have rehearsed this beforehand), “Well, it wasn’t the best Sydney Pollack, Three Days of the Condor and The Firm were better thrillers, but if you like suspense he really knows how to do it. Doesn’t he?” (That last is the sting in the scorpion’s tail.) Or, 2) you seize pleasure by the...whatever, and say: “The truth? I could cheerfully pay good money to watch Nicole Kidman shredding a phone book for two hours.” Or 3), let’s face it, there’s only one way to go, really. You set just one foot out that theater’s door
and you turn to your friends and you say, “So, what did you think?”
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Movies and Pleasure II
Continuing right along, then, with:
6) Intellectual pleasure–and I don’t mean a filmed interview with Noam Chomsky. There are at least three quite distinct types of movies that can be described here. First, there are those movies that provide the pleasures of mimesis–that imitate what we think we know about “the real world” so vividly, so grittily, that after seeing them we feel “reality” has been exposed to us in a way it never had been before. Post-World War II neo-Realism is considered the great exemplar of this kind of film-making: not just the Italian version, as de Sica’s Shoeshine and Umberto D., but also Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, or Clouzot’s Wages of Fear; or in a somewhat different vein, Bresson’s Un Condamne a Mort est Echappe (A Condemned Man Escaped).
There’s also a special kind of pleasure we can get from movies that astonish us and expand our consciousness with their presentation of a world previously unknown to us. Of course documentaries sometimes tell us what we didn’t quite know before (e.g., Frederick Wiseman’s Welfare or High School), but there’s also a kind of fiction film that unfolds primarily like a sociological or anthropological treatise, to greater or lesser effect, as Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Nicholas Ray’s exploration of Eskimo life in Savage Innocents, or Herzog’s Stroszek or Truffaut’s The Wild Child.
At this time in cinema history, there is for me a third, more exciting form of cinematic pleasure. This is cinema that focuses so intensely on a person, a community, a slice of life, a moment of time, that at some point in watching the film we realize that we don’t know what kind of film we’re watching or if we’re even watching what we usually think of as a film. In some of the films I’m thinking of it’s unclear whether what is unfolding before us is fiction or a sociological or anthropological documentary or some hard-to-grasp combination of both. In the magnificent Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (it earned all of $60,000 in the U.S.), a bored ambulance driver whose shift should be over tries with stubborn and finally desperate commitment to get her failing charge into a hospital emergency room in Bucharest, all of them being filled with victims of a terrible mass highway accident, and none of their personnel having any interest in what they assume to be just another self-destructive alcoholic. Halfway through the movie my companion (as Ed Koch would say) turned to me and said, “I don’t remember–is this a documentary?” We know the driver is an actress, and the victim is probably an actor, but who are all these doctors and nurses and patients, and are all these hospitals just parading their impenetrability before us or are they participating in a fiction that looks as “real” as St. Vincent’s on a bad Saturday night?
In the same way, though to quite different emotional effect, Ulrike Ottinger’s Joan of Arc of Mongolia, takes us aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, on which a film crew headed by star Delphine Seyrig–who seems to function as an intellectual and producer as much as an actress on the trip–heads to Mongolia to make a film; and after encountering various angry, threatening, or merely interested groups of Siberian peoples along the way, winds up in the midst of a tribe of hard-riding Mongolians led by a scimitar-waving Princess who, it turns out, wants to be an actress herself–or maybe she already is one, or had become on by the time the shooting finished? We can’t say, but the fascination of the trip, and its strange climactic confrontation, is endless.
I speak also of Charles Burnett’s two mesmerizing films of black life in South Central L.A., Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding. It took 30 years for him to get a commercial distributor for them, and yet, amateurish as the acting sometimes is, they take us more intensely into the lives of the people we see–actors? neighborhood hangers-on?–than almost any other American movies of this period. We can accept that they are after all fictions, and yet it’s impossible not to believe in their absolute truth.
Above all, it’s some of the products of recent Iranian cinema that I think of in this context. What unites these masterworks is the willingness of their directors to give us no easy clues as to what we are seeing. In Abbas Kiarostomi’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards (made at the age of 21), and Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot, it seems that professional actors and filmmakers are intervening in the daily lives of some isolated group of indigenous people; but how can this be? How can “real people” (or are they?) whose lives are wholly defined by their isolation, be allowing these alien city folks to move them around like chessmen on a board? The potentially devastating effect of this kind of intervention is precisely the subject of Kiarostomi’s film, which is, I believe, the greatest cinematic reflection ever on the ethical dilemmas involved in making a documentary movie about “the Other;” just as Makhmalbaf’s movie is an unparalleled account of culture clash, and Payami’s of the birth, a la Rousseau’s social contract, of political democracy.
In other, more urban and less anthropological-seeming films–Kiarostomi’s Ten or A Taste of Cherry, Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold--the director seems to have turned the camera on a person who is just a person instead of an actor (in fact the most difficult of impersonations for an actor to carry off), and filmed the passing interactions of that person with...whom, exactly? Actors? Passersby?
In any event, the great pleasure of these films is that at the obvious risk of seeming either slow or boring or alienating, they maintain an unyielding concentration on protagonists who do not exist merely to intersect with the next exciting turn of the plot screw, but who steadfastly go on doing what they are doing regardless of whether anything of fictive invention happens to them while they are doing it–or not, as is usually the case in reality. I would say that all these films must absolutely be seen, but the length of this discourse perhaps merely demonstrates my own peculiar version of “pleasure.” Considering (see below) that I once incorrectly assumed that no one could possibly be bored by Children of Paradise, there’s obviously a lot about enjoyment that I don’t know. What I do know, though, is the fascinating plurality of it.
7) Kinetic pleasure–some great examples are The Naked Spur, The French Connection, The Warriors, each of them eternally memorable, and capable of being enjoyed through many viewings. In one way this, the opposite as we might say of the kind I’ve just been describing, is obviously the cinematic pleasure, since cinematic art is specifically the art of moving pictures. And audible pictures as well. The sound of rushing water, the clink of spurs on rock, the rack of the slide in a rifle: all these sonic experiences and more make The Naked Spur a doubly wonderful 90 minutes of intense external pleasure. And the musical scores of, e.g., The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Once Upon a Time in the West, Viva Zapata!, Abel Gance's Napoleon, The Informer, The Dead Poets Society, Chariots of Fire, are almost worth the price of admission in their own right.
Yet in another way this is also the most limiting type of pleasure, not because it’s inferior in any way, but because if it gets out of hand--the very worst aspect by far of contemporary Hollywood films--it tends to overwhelm everything else in a film and so eliminate or attenuate the quite distinct pleasures of emotional connection, aesthetic contemplation, etc. That is, a movie that’s too totally plunged into the experience of kinesis--defined as fast or violent action--is poorly placed to take advantage of the many other opportunities offered by cinema as a pleasure-giving narrative form.
For a cautionary example, see the recent The Invasion. A second remake of the original and gripping Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about half-way through it turns into an extended chase film full of implausibly smashing cars, narrow escapes from foot-races that surely should have been lost, and so on and on. All the intense anxiety and fear of the original and its first remake disappear into the framework of a standard woman-in-peril movie, even more so because Nicole Kidman is far too charismatic, too iconic, to stand in for the endangered human species--compare the relatively mundane personae of Kevin McCarthy or Donald Sutherland. In the same way, as I remarked earlier, the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma is woefully inferior to its prototype, washing away in an unending wave of pointlessly frenetic activity the areas of quietude and plaisanterie that made the original so enjoyable.
8) Literary pleasure. I am not referring here only to movies that seem like visualized books-- The Age of Innocence, Sense and Sensibility, the entire Merchant/Ivory corpus, The Past Recaptured, successful or unsuccessful adaptations of Shakespeare. As well or even more so, we experience in what I am calling a literary sense any film in which the primary source of pleasure is not only visually but verbally and narratively imaginative to a heightened degree–e.g., thoughtful explorations of the way things are such as Renoir’s Grand Illusion; or satires such as his The Rules of the Game or Paddy Chayevsky’s The Americanization of Emily and Hospital (no one remembers the names of the directors of those Chayevskian films); or vividly realized explorations of other worlds such as Blade Runner, or explorations of others’ lives such as Joan Scott’s Strangers in Good Company; or cinematic operas such as Antonio das Mortes, or faithfully filmed dramas such as A Streetcar Named Desire (which I sat through twice at its world premiere, unable to tear myself away from the intensity of its desperation); or even the blank verse dialogue of Polonsky’s film noir, Force of Evil. In fact, oddly enough given his own fondness for the films of Samuel Fuller and his New Wave commitment to the non-dramatic, Jean-Luc Godard has probably been the pre-eminent cinematic provider of literary pleasure, as in Masculine-Feminine, Contempt, the first half of Weekend, Two or Three Things I Know About Her.
But above all, and more generally, the idea of literary pleasure also encompasses movies, such as, e.g., Children of Paradise, The Earrings of Madame De..., Ran (Kurosawa’s version of Lear), that convey cinematically the sweep and scope of the novel as pre-eminent narrative form. That I have often called the first of these “the best movie of all time” (as distinguished from “my favorite movie of all time,” Viva Zapata!), proves nothing about anything, not even myself, since it has so many other magnificently aesthetic and iconic (Arletty and Barrault) elements that raise it to the stars. But then a middle American colleague and her husband once asked what movie they should see when they visited New York City, and noting that Children... was being revived that week I incautiously said, “you mustn’t miss this, one of the great movies of all time.” Their comment: “we were bored to tears.” Ah well, de gustibus...
9) Finally, last but maybe not least–visceral pleasure: Basic Instinct, Halloween, Psycho, hardcore porn, the Marx Brothers. Horror, sex, slapstick comedy, sex, violence, sex. In one form or another, the most felt and the least admitted of all the pleasures: not serious. But you are a strange person indeed if you get no kind of visceral pleasure at all out of movies–what else can I say?
And now, on to my final posting here, to answer the question with which I began.
6) Intellectual pleasure–and I don’t mean a filmed interview with Noam Chomsky. There are at least three quite distinct types of movies that can be described here. First, there are those movies that provide the pleasures of mimesis–that imitate what we think we know about “the real world” so vividly, so grittily, that after seeing them we feel “reality” has been exposed to us in a way it never had been before. Post-World War II neo-Realism is considered the great exemplar of this kind of film-making: not just the Italian version, as de Sica’s Shoeshine and Umberto D., but also Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, or Clouzot’s Wages of Fear; or in a somewhat different vein, Bresson’s Un Condamne a Mort est Echappe (A Condemned Man Escaped).
There’s also a special kind of pleasure we can get from movies that astonish us and expand our consciousness with their presentation of a world previously unknown to us. Of course documentaries sometimes tell us what we didn’t quite know before (e.g., Frederick Wiseman’s Welfare or High School), but there’s also a kind of fiction film that unfolds primarily like a sociological or anthropological treatise, to greater or lesser effect, as Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Nicholas Ray’s exploration of Eskimo life in Savage Innocents, or Herzog’s Stroszek or Truffaut’s The Wild Child.
At this time in cinema history, there is for me a third, more exciting form of cinematic pleasure. This is cinema that focuses so intensely on a person, a community, a slice of life, a moment of time, that at some point in watching the film we realize that we don’t know what kind of film we’re watching or if we’re even watching what we usually think of as a film. In some of the films I’m thinking of it’s unclear whether what is unfolding before us is fiction or a sociological or anthropological documentary or some hard-to-grasp combination of both. In the magnificent Romanian film The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (it earned all of $60,000 in the U.S.), a bored ambulance driver whose shift should be over tries with stubborn and finally desperate commitment to get her failing charge into a hospital emergency room in Bucharest, all of them being filled with victims of a terrible mass highway accident, and none of their personnel having any interest in what they assume to be just another self-destructive alcoholic. Halfway through the movie my companion (as Ed Koch would say) turned to me and said, “I don’t remember–is this a documentary?” We know the driver is an actress, and the victim is probably an actor, but who are all these doctors and nurses and patients, and are all these hospitals just parading their impenetrability before us or are they participating in a fiction that looks as “real” as St. Vincent’s on a bad Saturday night?
In the same way, though to quite different emotional effect, Ulrike Ottinger’s Joan of Arc of Mongolia, takes us aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, on which a film crew headed by star Delphine Seyrig–who seems to function as an intellectual and producer as much as an actress on the trip–heads to Mongolia to make a film; and after encountering various angry, threatening, or merely interested groups of Siberian peoples along the way, winds up in the midst of a tribe of hard-riding Mongolians led by a scimitar-waving Princess who, it turns out, wants to be an actress herself–or maybe she already is one, or had become on by the time the shooting finished? We can’t say, but the fascination of the trip, and its strange climactic confrontation, is endless.
I speak also of Charles Burnett’s two mesmerizing films of black life in South Central L.A., Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding. It took 30 years for him to get a commercial distributor for them, and yet, amateurish as the acting sometimes is, they take us more intensely into the lives of the people we see–actors? neighborhood hangers-on?–than almost any other American movies of this period. We can accept that they are after all fictions, and yet it’s impossible not to believe in their absolute truth.
Above all, it’s some of the products of recent Iranian cinema that I think of in this context. What unites these masterworks is the willingness of their directors to give us no easy clues as to what we are seeing. In Abbas Kiarostomi’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Samira Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards (made at the age of 21), and Babak Payami’s Secret Ballot, it seems that professional actors and filmmakers are intervening in the daily lives of some isolated group of indigenous people; but how can this be? How can “real people” (or are they?) whose lives are wholly defined by their isolation, be allowing these alien city folks to move them around like chessmen on a board? The potentially devastating effect of this kind of intervention is precisely the subject of Kiarostomi’s film, which is, I believe, the greatest cinematic reflection ever on the ethical dilemmas involved in making a documentary movie about “the Other;” just as Makhmalbaf’s movie is an unparalleled account of culture clash, and Payami’s of the birth, a la Rousseau’s social contract, of political democracy.
In other, more urban and less anthropological-seeming films–Kiarostomi’s Ten or A Taste of Cherry, Jafar Panahi’s Crimson Gold--the director seems to have turned the camera on a person who is just a person instead of an actor (in fact the most difficult of impersonations for an actor to carry off), and filmed the passing interactions of that person with...whom, exactly? Actors? Passersby?
In any event, the great pleasure of these films is that at the obvious risk of seeming either slow or boring or alienating, they maintain an unyielding concentration on protagonists who do not exist merely to intersect with the next exciting turn of the plot screw, but who steadfastly go on doing what they are doing regardless of whether anything of fictive invention happens to them while they are doing it–or not, as is usually the case in reality. I would say that all these films must absolutely be seen, but the length of this discourse perhaps merely demonstrates my own peculiar version of “pleasure.” Considering (see below) that I once incorrectly assumed that no one could possibly be bored by Children of Paradise, there’s obviously a lot about enjoyment that I don’t know. What I do know, though, is the fascinating plurality of it.
7) Kinetic pleasure–some great examples are The Naked Spur, The French Connection, The Warriors, each of them eternally memorable, and capable of being enjoyed through many viewings. In one way this, the opposite as we might say of the kind I’ve just been describing, is obviously the cinematic pleasure, since cinematic art is specifically the art of moving pictures. And audible pictures as well. The sound of rushing water, the clink of spurs on rock, the rack of the slide in a rifle: all these sonic experiences and more make The Naked Spur a doubly wonderful 90 minutes of intense external pleasure. And the musical scores of, e.g., The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Once Upon a Time in the West, Viva Zapata!, Abel Gance's Napoleon, The Informer, The Dead Poets Society, Chariots of Fire, are almost worth the price of admission in their own right.
Yet in another way this is also the most limiting type of pleasure, not because it’s inferior in any way, but because if it gets out of hand--the very worst aspect by far of contemporary Hollywood films--it tends to overwhelm everything else in a film and so eliminate or attenuate the quite distinct pleasures of emotional connection, aesthetic contemplation, etc. That is, a movie that’s too totally plunged into the experience of kinesis--defined as fast or violent action--is poorly placed to take advantage of the many other opportunities offered by cinema as a pleasure-giving narrative form.
For a cautionary example, see the recent The Invasion. A second remake of the original and gripping Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about half-way through it turns into an extended chase film full of implausibly smashing cars, narrow escapes from foot-races that surely should have been lost, and so on and on. All the intense anxiety and fear of the original and its first remake disappear into the framework of a standard woman-in-peril movie, even more so because Nicole Kidman is far too charismatic, too iconic, to stand in for the endangered human species--compare the relatively mundane personae of Kevin McCarthy or Donald Sutherland. In the same way, as I remarked earlier, the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma is woefully inferior to its prototype, washing away in an unending wave of pointlessly frenetic activity the areas of quietude and plaisanterie that made the original so enjoyable.
8) Literary pleasure. I am not referring here only to movies that seem like visualized books-- The Age of Innocence, Sense and Sensibility, the entire Merchant/Ivory corpus, The Past Recaptured, successful or unsuccessful adaptations of Shakespeare. As well or even more so, we experience in what I am calling a literary sense any film in which the primary source of pleasure is not only visually but verbally and narratively imaginative to a heightened degree–e.g., thoughtful explorations of the way things are such as Renoir’s Grand Illusion; or satires such as his The Rules of the Game or Paddy Chayevsky’s The Americanization of Emily and Hospital (no one remembers the names of the directors of those Chayevskian films); or vividly realized explorations of other worlds such as Blade Runner, or explorations of others’ lives such as Joan Scott’s Strangers in Good Company; or cinematic operas such as Antonio das Mortes, or faithfully filmed dramas such as A Streetcar Named Desire (which I sat through twice at its world premiere, unable to tear myself away from the intensity of its desperation); or even the blank verse dialogue of Polonsky’s film noir, Force of Evil. In fact, oddly enough given his own fondness for the films of Samuel Fuller and his New Wave commitment to the non-dramatic, Jean-Luc Godard has probably been the pre-eminent cinematic provider of literary pleasure, as in Masculine-Feminine, Contempt, the first half of Weekend, Two or Three Things I Know About Her.
But above all, and more generally, the idea of literary pleasure also encompasses movies, such as, e.g., Children of Paradise, The Earrings of Madame De..., Ran (Kurosawa’s version of Lear), that convey cinematically the sweep and scope of the novel as pre-eminent narrative form. That I have often called the first of these “the best movie of all time” (as distinguished from “my favorite movie of all time,” Viva Zapata!), proves nothing about anything, not even myself, since it has so many other magnificently aesthetic and iconic (Arletty and Barrault) elements that raise it to the stars. But then a middle American colleague and her husband once asked what movie they should see when they visited New York City, and noting that Children... was being revived that week I incautiously said, “you mustn’t miss this, one of the great movies of all time.” Their comment: “we were bored to tears.” Ah well, de gustibus...
9) Finally, last but maybe not least–visceral pleasure: Basic Instinct, Halloween, Psycho, hardcore porn, the Marx Brothers. Horror, sex, slapstick comedy, sex, violence, sex. In one form or another, the most felt and the least admitted of all the pleasures: not serious. But you are a strange person indeed if you get no kind of visceral pleasure at all out of movies–what else can I say?
And now, on to my final posting here, to answer the question with which I began.
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.
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.
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
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
"So What Did You Think?"--Fear and Loathing at the Movies
It’s the most dreaded conversational beginning in the English-speaking world. No one cares what you thought of Exit Ghost, or whether you liked Will and Grace. But movies...that’s different. Going with friends, or rather exiting with friends, can be an ordeal. Being a mild-mannered sort you begin by prattling meaninglessly about what restaurant to go to next, but one of your not so mild-mannered friends is not having any: “So what did you think?”
Of course the problem may have begun much earlier. You and some friends wanted to go to a movie together, but he loves car chases, she can’t stand the sight of blood, your partner thinks anything made in Europe is “obscure,” you will see anything with Nicole Kidman, whom he hates...and so on. And the worst position to be in is to be the one who has made the final suggestion, since that person will then have assumed the awesome responsibility of engaging in a communal activity which we can be certain not everyone is going to enjoy equally. If that was you, that only makes it worse when the moment of truth comes.
To be sure, there are strategies for temporary avoidance. One tack, for example, is to try to beat everybody to the punch with your own avoidance maneuver, a tentative left jab such as “she was really something, wasn’t she?” That sort of empty comment has the virtue of sounding firm while actually being doubly non-committal: “she” probably refers to Nicole Kidman, but just in case, you might have been speaking about Catherine Keener in a minor role, who everyone knows is a great actress. And furthermore you said “something,” not “great,” which still leaves a lot of room for further maneuver: maybe “something” is short for “the worst acting you’ve ever seen?”
But these are all evasions of having to deal with what will sooner or later be upon you: “So, what did you think?” I can’t tell us how to avoid this event horizon, but perhaps I can give some useful advice on how to deal with it when it appears.
This is where to begin: The purpose of going to a movie is to experience pleasure. If you want information, there are libraries and lecture halls (or perhaps documentaries, but we’re talking about fiction films–the “what did you think?” problem rarely arises with documentaries). But there are many different kinds of pleasure, and to imagine that your preferred version of it is the only real thing is to be narcissistic. What is necessary is to be (self)-aware of one’s own preferences in the world of pleasure, and aware also that your companions may have entirely different ones: or even, so open-ended is the scope of cinematic narrative, an entirely different experience. So in subsequent postings I will be annotating a helpful (I hope) though undoubtedly incomplete list, with examples, of the types of pleasure that a movie can give. Of course no movie is created to give us only a single type of pleasure (with the exception of the one genre that no male–and this means yours truly--will admit paying any attention to); the examples therefore are of films that especially incarnate or forefront a particular type of pleasure.
However, any discussion of pleasure in movie-watching has to be preceded by an important caveat. There is finally a kind of cinematic pleasure not accessible to most people, and that is the pleasure of being an expert on cinema, an insider who knows the vocabulary and standards generally accepted by other insiders. (The rules that constitute the field, in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase). The expert in film studies or film criticism derives pleasure from engaging in the knowledgeable activities of formal or comparative or historical analysis (auteur theory, e.g.), so that a film can always be viewed in the light of other films. Such informed viewing is itself a considerable source of pleasure, a kind of meta-pleasure in the activity of movie-watching taken as a whole.
In other words, the expert knows something that the rest of us don’t know. Sometimes this can help us in our dilemma, if we’ve gone to a movie with an expert, and the expert is the kind who takes over a stalled conversation right away without any false modesty: “Yes, that was minor Techine, but Emanuelle Beart was luminous as always, and Julien Hirsch’s cinematography once again framed the narrative perfectly.” Comments like that can be very useful, in that one can go either way with them. Maybe you thought it was a terrific movie, but that’s ok because from the sound of it even minor Techine might be “terrific.” Or conversely, you can simply say “I guess Techine isn’t my cup of tea” with a faint air of populist superiority. Of course you don’t want to utter a sentence like that in a group of cinephiles; but you probably don’t want to go to a movie with them either.
This is because the main problem in discussing movies with experts, if you’re not one yourself, is that you may tend to feel put down or excluded by their special knowledge. This feeling may be enhanced by their ability to relate every movie they’ve seen to every other movie they’ve seen, in such a way that we are all supposed to derive some kind of insight from noting the relationships. You didn’t even know there was major Techine, and all of a sudden it turns out you can be a Techine feinschmecker. The occasion of this ability is that part of the experts’ life’s work is to rank every movie in an informal but real hierarchy that is based on terms like “complexity,” “ambiguity,” formal accomplishment,” “depth,” etc. Reader alert: I implicitly do myself all the time, as when, e.g. apologizing for my immense enjoyment of say The French Connection compared to...oh, 8 1/2. Most of all, cinema professional usually, if only by implication, adopt a dualistic ranking of the types of pleasure themselves: the cerebral in at least its highest forms over the bodily in all its forms. Even Pauline Kael did that.
This is the temptation that must be resisted if we really want to enjoy movies first of all, and think about how “good” they are later; which is probably what most of us want to do if left to our own devices. So if you read (I hope) the discussions of different types of cinematic pleasure, I suggest we all try to remember that in the long run, which for some of us draws closer every minute, all cinema amounts to in life is another source of pleasure. Well, better than that: another source of immense pleasure.
Of course the problem may have begun much earlier. You and some friends wanted to go to a movie together, but he loves car chases, she can’t stand the sight of blood, your partner thinks anything made in Europe is “obscure,” you will see anything with Nicole Kidman, whom he hates...and so on. And the worst position to be in is to be the one who has made the final suggestion, since that person will then have assumed the awesome responsibility of engaging in a communal activity which we can be certain not everyone is going to enjoy equally. If that was you, that only makes it worse when the moment of truth comes.
To be sure, there are strategies for temporary avoidance. One tack, for example, is to try to beat everybody to the punch with your own avoidance maneuver, a tentative left jab such as “she was really something, wasn’t she?” That sort of empty comment has the virtue of sounding firm while actually being doubly non-committal: “she” probably refers to Nicole Kidman, but just in case, you might have been speaking about Catherine Keener in a minor role, who everyone knows is a great actress. And furthermore you said “something,” not “great,” which still leaves a lot of room for further maneuver: maybe “something” is short for “the worst acting you’ve ever seen?”
But these are all evasions of having to deal with what will sooner or later be upon you: “So, what did you think?” I can’t tell us how to avoid this event horizon, but perhaps I can give some useful advice on how to deal with it when it appears.
This is where to begin: The purpose of going to a movie is to experience pleasure. If you want information, there are libraries and lecture halls (or perhaps documentaries, but we’re talking about fiction films–the “what did you think?” problem rarely arises with documentaries). But there are many different kinds of pleasure, and to imagine that your preferred version of it is the only real thing is to be narcissistic. What is necessary is to be (self)-aware of one’s own preferences in the world of pleasure, and aware also that your companions may have entirely different ones: or even, so open-ended is the scope of cinematic narrative, an entirely different experience. So in subsequent postings I will be annotating a helpful (I hope) though undoubtedly incomplete list, with examples, of the types of pleasure that a movie can give. Of course no movie is created to give us only a single type of pleasure (with the exception of the one genre that no male–and this means yours truly--will admit paying any attention to); the examples therefore are of films that especially incarnate or forefront a particular type of pleasure.
However, any discussion of pleasure in movie-watching has to be preceded by an important caveat. There is finally a kind of cinematic pleasure not accessible to most people, and that is the pleasure of being an expert on cinema, an insider who knows the vocabulary and standards generally accepted by other insiders. (The rules that constitute the field, in Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase). The expert in film studies or film criticism derives pleasure from engaging in the knowledgeable activities of formal or comparative or historical analysis (auteur theory, e.g.), so that a film can always be viewed in the light of other films. Such informed viewing is itself a considerable source of pleasure, a kind of meta-pleasure in the activity of movie-watching taken as a whole.
In other words, the expert knows something that the rest of us don’t know. Sometimes this can help us in our dilemma, if we’ve gone to a movie with an expert, and the expert is the kind who takes over a stalled conversation right away without any false modesty: “Yes, that was minor Techine, but Emanuelle Beart was luminous as always, and Julien Hirsch’s cinematography once again framed the narrative perfectly.” Comments like that can be very useful, in that one can go either way with them. Maybe you thought it was a terrific movie, but that’s ok because from the sound of it even minor Techine might be “terrific.” Or conversely, you can simply say “I guess Techine isn’t my cup of tea” with a faint air of populist superiority. Of course you don’t want to utter a sentence like that in a group of cinephiles; but you probably don’t want to go to a movie with them either.
This is because the main problem in discussing movies with experts, if you’re not one yourself, is that you may tend to feel put down or excluded by their special knowledge. This feeling may be enhanced by their ability to relate every movie they’ve seen to every other movie they’ve seen, in such a way that we are all supposed to derive some kind of insight from noting the relationships. You didn’t even know there was major Techine, and all of a sudden it turns out you can be a Techine feinschmecker. The occasion of this ability is that part of the experts’ life’s work is to rank every movie in an informal but real hierarchy that is based on terms like “complexity,” “ambiguity,” formal accomplishment,” “depth,” etc. Reader alert: I implicitly do myself all the time, as when, e.g. apologizing for my immense enjoyment of say The French Connection compared to...oh, 8 1/2. Most of all, cinema professional usually, if only by implication, adopt a dualistic ranking of the types of pleasure themselves: the cerebral in at least its highest forms over the bodily in all its forms. Even Pauline Kael did that.
This is the temptation that must be resisted if we really want to enjoy movies first of all, and think about how “good” they are later; which is probably what most of us want to do if left to our own devices. So if you read (I hope) the discussions of different types of cinematic pleasure, I suggest we all try to remember that in the long run, which for some of us draws closer every minute, all cinema amounts to in life is another source of pleasure. Well, better than that: another source of immense pleasure.
No More Politics: On To Movies!
I am about to post a five-part blog (short parts!) on movie-going, and pleasure, and what to do about that annoying friend who asks you, “So, what did you think of it?,” before you’re halfway up the aisle.
But first, I've had few entries on my blog in the past several months, and I feel that an explanation is due to the all the friends and relatives and colleagues who aren’t reading it. I thought I’d be writing mostly about politics–what else should a political scientist/theorist do? At the present moment, however, this seems to me to be just about impossible, at least for a paid-up inhabitant of the United States of America.
This is a stupid society and very often a lunatic society. The opening words of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground–“I am a sick man; I am a spiteful man; I think my liver is diseased”–could easily be adapted to describe an entire nation of 300 million people: not all the people, but the nation as a whole. Nothing intelligent or sane can get done, only stupid or insane projects can go forth. This may change in 2009, though I strongly counsel against optimism on that score, for the institutional and social roots of national stupidity and insanity run too deep by now to be easily uprooted: not to mention that for the first time in American history, a genuine Fascist has a 50-50 chance of becoming president. Real political debate or discussion cannot take place, in that there is really nothing to debate, and nowhere to debate it if there were anything resembling serious ideas.
There is one seriously asserted idea, which consists of one part outright lies and one part ideological madness, and the mere fact of my saying that demonstrates the point, if you agree with me. You can’t debate with liars and lunatics, and when they own or control so much of the institutional spectrum where talk is permitted--but not encouraged, never encouraged–and have established such institutional hegemony that no practicing politician is allowed to tell the simple truth about their duplicitous imbecility or madness, what is left to be done or said? So I’ve stopped writing about politics. Anyone who might be reading this already knows all there is to know about the Occupation, or the health-care system, or the destruction of the welfare state, or or or... No one needs another run-through from me. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about–well, I would have nothing to say to you anyway.
Before getting to movies, though, I do have a story to tell that might be interesting both to old and more recent friends, and family, just as a matter of historical record.
My mother hired Norman Podhoretz as Editor of Commentary, and set him on the path to becoming who he is: the leading advocate of neo-totalitarianism in the United States. Of course he would furiously deny the appellation and insist that he’s the one great opponent of totalitarianism (“Islamofascism”), but that’s like Hitler saying he was the one real anti-Stalinist.
Though she later castigated herself for, as she put it, knowing Podhoretz was an opportunist and yet going ahead anyway, and though she was expressing despairing regret almost on her deathbed, it was really a no-brainer at the time. As the founding editor of Commentary, Elliot Cohen, declined into deep depression, there were only 3 serious candidates to replace him: Podhoretz, Clement Greenberg, and a lightweight New York intellectual named Marty Greenberg. Greenbergs had the numbers but not the weight. Marty was the kind of editor who belongs at a publishing house, not an intellectual journal, and Clement had settled into the role of High Priest of Abstract Expressionism; there was little reason to believe that he could take the kind of generalized intellectual approach to other subject matters that the job required. Norman seemed at least like a somebody with generalized interests and a dedication to keeping the magazine on the same path that Cohen had charted. To be sure, technically it was up to the American Jewish Committee’s supervising Editorial Board to make the decision, but as the AJC’s representative on the magazine, General Manager of it, and de facto CEO, it was my mother’s recommendation that would govern. And so it was.
Years later we would discuss–to the extent that years later she could still engage in linear discussions–what happened to turn the Pod into a monstrous Pod Person. With Irving Kristol the explanation was simple, or so she thought–he was a corrupt social climber who fell in with the ruling-class types who could make him money, lots of it, and never looked back. The Pod was not so easy to explain, though you could always go with the malevolent force of his Svengali, Midge Decter. Still, Norman was no Trilby; he had always been full of some inexplicable rage of the kind that when I encounter it always leads me to look back with nostalgia at Else Frankel-Brunswick’s classic and (wrongly) much maligned study of The Authoritarian Personality.
I know the anti-Right conclusion of that study is out of keeping with the kind of shoddy intellectual relativism that these days posits “Left” and “Right” as “extremes” within whose boundaries moderate liberal realism falls, but that’s the way it is. For a long time genuine rage has had almost nowhere to go on the American Left, except the convulsive violence of late SDS and its Maoist successors: and these are simply not in the American grain, nor do they promise anything but total exclusion from American life (and maybe a prison sentence). The rage of race, or of thwarted power, including sexual power and the power of patriarchy, is entirely of the Right, and indeed explains the persistence of the Right even as it descends into genuine madness. It is also, sadly, very much in the American grain.
To see not the psychological (who knows?) but the chronological origins specifically of the Pod’s rage, you have to look back at the essay everyone looks back at (most recently Ian Buruma, in reviewing his book on “World War IV” in the New York Review of Books), “My Negro Problem and Ours.” “Ours” indeed–unless “we” consists of the Pod and that other Norman, the postal clerk, who had a similar problem. The “problem” was this: Negroes were tough, and nice Jewish boys weren’t, and Negroes were scary and nice Jewish boys were scared, and we were all supposed to be together in one big happy liberal family, and under such circumstances that just couldn’t work. My own tough-guy problem was with Italians, but that didn’t call one’s whole liberal pluralist upbringing into account (especially if it was founded in anti-Catholicism, to which I still cheerfully plead guilty).
The Pod has usually been acquitted of racism in that article, on the grounds that he advocated racial intermarriage (miscegenation) as a solution to American racism: perhaps following the notorious Hannah Arendt article on Little Rock that Commentary had been going to publish until my mother vetoed it, on the grounds that its opposition to school integration would lead to a fracturing of the Jewish/Negro coalition. (I won’t even mention all the historical ironies there.) But in his seeming recognition of the virtues of blackness, chief among them physical prowess, he was exactly like the kind of anti-Semite who insists on having a Jewish lawyer when big money or long prison terms are involved. More revealing, perhaps, this is the man, after all, who once said that the decline of Western civilization was due to the prevalence of homosexuals. Just substitute the word “Jews” in there and we know exactly where we’re at.
In the end it’s the same syndrome: the thwarting of “masculinity,” or rather of the wistful expectations of masculinity, and the rage that being thwarted–read “the real world”–produces. In women too, it must be said, since the pleasures of patriarchy are promised to male and female alike; more to the former, but who am I to say why people should believe or not believe, or what price they pay or compensation receive for their beliefs? In any event, you can find this kind of out-of-control masculinism everywhere in the world, of course: but in the so-called West, it is strong enough to exert real power, sometimes even hegemony, only in America. Yes, Harry Golden, Only In America. Why, who knows? but what and how, is at the present moment all too clear. Read Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream.
So, no more politics. On to movies, and pleasure.
But first, I've had few entries on my blog in the past several months, and I feel that an explanation is due to the all the friends and relatives and colleagues who aren’t reading it. I thought I’d be writing mostly about politics–what else should a political scientist/theorist do? At the present moment, however, this seems to me to be just about impossible, at least for a paid-up inhabitant of the United States of America.
This is a stupid society and very often a lunatic society. The opening words of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground–“I am a sick man; I am a spiteful man; I think my liver is diseased”–could easily be adapted to describe an entire nation of 300 million people: not all the people, but the nation as a whole. Nothing intelligent or sane can get done, only stupid or insane projects can go forth. This may change in 2009, though I strongly counsel against optimism on that score, for the institutional and social roots of national stupidity and insanity run too deep by now to be easily uprooted: not to mention that for the first time in American history, a genuine Fascist has a 50-50 chance of becoming president. Real political debate or discussion cannot take place, in that there is really nothing to debate, and nowhere to debate it if there were anything resembling serious ideas.
There is one seriously asserted idea, which consists of one part outright lies and one part ideological madness, and the mere fact of my saying that demonstrates the point, if you agree with me. You can’t debate with liars and lunatics, and when they own or control so much of the institutional spectrum where talk is permitted--but not encouraged, never encouraged–and have established such institutional hegemony that no practicing politician is allowed to tell the simple truth about their duplicitous imbecility or madness, what is left to be done or said? So I’ve stopped writing about politics. Anyone who might be reading this already knows all there is to know about the Occupation, or the health-care system, or the destruction of the welfare state, or or or... No one needs another run-through from me. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about–well, I would have nothing to say to you anyway.
Before getting to movies, though, I do have a story to tell that might be interesting both to old and more recent friends, and family, just as a matter of historical record.
My mother hired Norman Podhoretz as Editor of Commentary, and set him on the path to becoming who he is: the leading advocate of neo-totalitarianism in the United States. Of course he would furiously deny the appellation and insist that he’s the one great opponent of totalitarianism (“Islamofascism”), but that’s like Hitler saying he was the one real anti-Stalinist.
Though she later castigated herself for, as she put it, knowing Podhoretz was an opportunist and yet going ahead anyway, and though she was expressing despairing regret almost on her deathbed, it was really a no-brainer at the time. As the founding editor of Commentary, Elliot Cohen, declined into deep depression, there were only 3 serious candidates to replace him: Podhoretz, Clement Greenberg, and a lightweight New York intellectual named Marty Greenberg. Greenbergs had the numbers but not the weight. Marty was the kind of editor who belongs at a publishing house, not an intellectual journal, and Clement had settled into the role of High Priest of Abstract Expressionism; there was little reason to believe that he could take the kind of generalized intellectual approach to other subject matters that the job required. Norman seemed at least like a somebody with generalized interests and a dedication to keeping the magazine on the same path that Cohen had charted. To be sure, technically it was up to the American Jewish Committee’s supervising Editorial Board to make the decision, but as the AJC’s representative on the magazine, General Manager of it, and de facto CEO, it was my mother’s recommendation that would govern. And so it was.
Years later we would discuss–to the extent that years later she could still engage in linear discussions–what happened to turn the Pod into a monstrous Pod Person. With Irving Kristol the explanation was simple, or so she thought–he was a corrupt social climber who fell in with the ruling-class types who could make him money, lots of it, and never looked back. The Pod was not so easy to explain, though you could always go with the malevolent force of his Svengali, Midge Decter. Still, Norman was no Trilby; he had always been full of some inexplicable rage of the kind that when I encounter it always leads me to look back with nostalgia at Else Frankel-Brunswick’s classic and (wrongly) much maligned study of The Authoritarian Personality.
I know the anti-Right conclusion of that study is out of keeping with the kind of shoddy intellectual relativism that these days posits “Left” and “Right” as “extremes” within whose boundaries moderate liberal realism falls, but that’s the way it is. For a long time genuine rage has had almost nowhere to go on the American Left, except the convulsive violence of late SDS and its Maoist successors: and these are simply not in the American grain, nor do they promise anything but total exclusion from American life (and maybe a prison sentence). The rage of race, or of thwarted power, including sexual power and the power of patriarchy, is entirely of the Right, and indeed explains the persistence of the Right even as it descends into genuine madness. It is also, sadly, very much in the American grain.
To see not the psychological (who knows?) but the chronological origins specifically of the Pod’s rage, you have to look back at the essay everyone looks back at (most recently Ian Buruma, in reviewing his book on “World War IV” in the New York Review of Books), “My Negro Problem and Ours.” “Ours” indeed–unless “we” consists of the Pod and that other Norman, the postal clerk, who had a similar problem. The “problem” was this: Negroes were tough, and nice Jewish boys weren’t, and Negroes were scary and nice Jewish boys were scared, and we were all supposed to be together in one big happy liberal family, and under such circumstances that just couldn’t work. My own tough-guy problem was with Italians, but that didn’t call one’s whole liberal pluralist upbringing into account (especially if it was founded in anti-Catholicism, to which I still cheerfully plead guilty).
The Pod has usually been acquitted of racism in that article, on the grounds that he advocated racial intermarriage (miscegenation) as a solution to American racism: perhaps following the notorious Hannah Arendt article on Little Rock that Commentary had been going to publish until my mother vetoed it, on the grounds that its opposition to school integration would lead to a fracturing of the Jewish/Negro coalition. (I won’t even mention all the historical ironies there.) But in his seeming recognition of the virtues of blackness, chief among them physical prowess, he was exactly like the kind of anti-Semite who insists on having a Jewish lawyer when big money or long prison terms are involved. More revealing, perhaps, this is the man, after all, who once said that the decline of Western civilization was due to the prevalence of homosexuals. Just substitute the word “Jews” in there and we know exactly where we’re at.
In the end it’s the same syndrome: the thwarting of “masculinity,” or rather of the wistful expectations of masculinity, and the rage that being thwarted–read “the real world”–produces. In women too, it must be said, since the pleasures of patriarchy are promised to male and female alike; more to the former, but who am I to say why people should believe or not believe, or what price they pay or compensation receive for their beliefs? In any event, you can find this kind of out-of-control masculinism everywhere in the world, of course: but in the so-called West, it is strong enough to exert real power, sometimes even hegemony, only in America. Yes, Harry Golden, Only In America. Why, who knows? but what and how, is at the present moment all too clear. Read Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream.
So, no more politics. On to movies, and pleasure.
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