Reflections from the side of the pool
at the Beverly Hills Hotel
“Bring your bathing suit,” said the movie producer, who was
phoning me to confirm our date for lunch at his hotel, and before I could think
of a way to explain that I didn’t have one with me, he added, “And remember,
you’re meeting people for cocktails in my suite at six, so just bring your
change of clothes.” Now I was completely out of my depth: I just said I would
join him at 2:30 and hung up. Somehow I didn’t want to come right out and say
that I didn’t have a change of clothes in the evening sense that he meant. Los
Angeles dislocates my values, makes me ashamed of not being all the things I’m
not and don’t ordinarily care to be. Each time I get on the jet to return to San
Francisco it’s like turning the time-machine backward and being restored to an
old civilization that I understand.
Los Angeles is only 400 miles away
from where I live and so close by jet that I can breakfast at home, give a noon
lecture at one of the universities in LA, and be back in time to prepare dinner.
But it’s the city of the future, and I am more a stranger there than in a
foreign country. In a foreign country people don’t expect you to be just like
them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don’t consider
that you might be different because they don’t recognize any values except their
own. And soon there may not be any others.
Feeling rather seedy in the black and
brown Italian suit which had seemed quite decent in San Francisco, I arrived at
the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel, sans bathing suit or change of clothes. And
as I walked past the recumbent forms to the producer, also recumbent, who was
limply waving to me, I remembered Katherine Hepburn as poor Alice Adams in her
simple organdy frock among the plushy overdressed rich girls at the party. Only
here it was I who was overdressed; they were expensively undressed. They didn’t
look young, and they didn’t act old, these people eating and drinking and
sunning themselves around the pool. They seemed to be ageless like crocodiles;
and although they weren’t fat, they were flabby.
Despite the narcissism of their
attitudes, and the extraordinary amount of loving care they lavished on their
bodies, each giving way to the sun-blessed fantasy of himself, stretching this
way and that to catch or avoid the rays, it was impossible to feel superior to
them. They could afford to make this spectacle of themselves.
In San Francisco, vulgarity, “bad
taste,” ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or
encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power
connected with ostentation that it is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of
respect. For if the might behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you
can’t afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little
ashamed of your modesty and propriety. Big money and its way of life is
exciting; the vulgarity of the powerful is ugly, but not boring. This, you being
to feel, is how people behave when they’re strong enough to act out their
fantasies of wealth. In this environment, if you’re not making it in a big way,
you’re worse than nothing—you’re a failure. But if you can still pass for young,
maybe there’s still time to make it; or, at least, you can delay the desperation
and self-contempt that result from accepting these standards that so few can
meet. It’s easy to reject all this when I’m back in San Francisco. But not here.
You can’t really laugh at the Beverly Hills Hotel and people who pay $63 a day
for a suite that’s like a schoolboy’s notions of luxury. It’s too impressive.
Laughter would stick in the throat—like sour grapes.
What “sensible” people have always
regarded as the most preposterous, unreal and fantastic side of life in
California—the sun palace of Los Angeles and its movie-centered culture—is
becoming embarrassingly, “fantastically” actual, not just here but almost
anywhere. It embodies the most common, the most widespread dream—luxury in the
sun, a state of permanent vacation. And as it is what millions of people want
and will pay money for, the Hollywood fantasy is economically practical. Across
the country, homes become as simple, bare and convenient as simulated motels,
and motels are frequently used as residences.
But pioneers suffer from stresses we
don’t know about, and the people I met in Los Angeles seem to have developed a
terrible tic: they cannot stop talking about their “cultural explosion.” The
producer went on and on about it, about their new museums, and their concerts,
and their galleries, and their “legitimate” collegiate theater. It was like my
first trip to New York, when I wanted to see skyscrapers and go to shows and
hear jazz, and New Yorkers wanted me to admire the flowers blooming in
Rockefeller Plaza. I wanted to talk about the Los Angeles that fascinated and
disturbed me, and about movies and why there were fewer good movies in 1963 than
in any year in my memory. He discussed the finer things in life, trying to
convince me and maybe himself that Los Angeles, in its cultural boom, was making
phenomenal strides toward becoming like other cities—only, of course, more so.
I dutifully wrote in my notebook but
not about what he was saying. Perhaps, because the whole scene was so
nightmarish, with all the people spending their ordinary just-like-any-other-day
at the pool, conducting business by the telephones whose wires stretched around
them like lifelines, and this earnest man in wet trunks ordering me double
Bourbons on the rocks and talking culture while deepening his tan, I began to
think about horror movies.
Zeitgeist and Poltergeist;
Or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?
The week before, at home, some academic friends had been
over and as we talked and drank we looked at a television showing of Tod
Browning’s 1931 version of Dracula. Dwight Frye’s appearance on the
screen had us suddenly squealing and shrieking, and it was obvious that old
vampire movies were part of our common experience. We talked about the famous
ones, Murnau’s Nosferatu and Dreyer’s Vampyr, and we began to get
fairly involved in the lore of the genre—the strategy of the bite, the special
earth for the coffins, the stake through the heart versus the rays of the sun as
disposal methods, the cross as vampire repellent, et al. We had begun to
surprise each other by the affectionate, nostalgic tone of our mock erudition
when the youngest person present, an instructor in English, said, in clear, firm
tone, “The Beast with Five Fingers is the greatest horror picture I’ve
ever seen.” Stunned that so bright a young man could display such shocking
taste, preferring a Warner Brothers forties mediocrity to the classics, I
gasped, “But why?” And he answered, “Because it’s completely irrational. It
doesn’t make any sense, and that’s the true terror.”
Upset by his neat little
declaration—existentialism in a nutshell—by the calm matter-of-factness of it,
and by the way the others seemed to take it for granted, I wanted to pursue the
subject. But O. Henry’s remark “Conversation in Texas is seldom continuous”
applies to California, too. Dracula had ended, and the conversation
shifted to other, more “serious” subjects.
But his attitude, which had never
occurred to me, helped explain some of my recent moviegoing experiences. I don
mean that I agree that The Beast with Five Fingers is a great horror
film, but that his enthusiasm for the horror that cannot be rationalized by the
mythology and rules of the horror game related to audience reactions that had
been puzzling me.
Last year I had gone to see a famous
French film, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, which had arrived in
San Francisco in a dubbed version called The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus
and was playing on a double-horror bill in a huge Market Street theater. It was
Saturday night and the theater, which holds 2646, was so crowded I had trouble
finding a seat.
Even dubbed, Eyes Without a Face,
which Franju called a “poetic fantasy,” is austere and elegant: the exquisite
photography is by the great Shuftan, the music by Maurice Jarre, the superb
gowns by Givenchy. It’s a symbolist attack on science and the ethics of
medicine, and though I thought this attack as simpleminded in its way as the
usual young poet’s denunciation of war or commerce, it is in some peculiar way a
classic of horror.
Pierre Brasseur, as a doctor,
experiments systematically, removing the faces of beautiful young kidnapped
women, trying to graft them onto the ruined head of his daughter. He keeps
failing, the girls are destroyed and yet he persists—in some terrible parody of
the scientific method. In the end, the daughter—still only eyes without a
face—liberates the dogs on which he also experiments and they tear off his
head.
It’s both bizarrely sophisticated
(with Alida Valli as his mistress doing the kidnapping in a black leather coat,
recalling the death images from Cocteau’s Orpheus) and absurdly naive.
Franju’s style is almost as purified as Robert Bresson’s, and although I dislike
the mixture of austerity and mysticism with blood and gore, it produced its
effect—a vague, floating, almost lyric sense of horror, an almost abstract
atmosphere, impersonal and humorless. It has nothing like the fun of a good old
horror satire like The Bride of Frankenstein with Elsa Lanchester’s hair
curling electrically instead of just frizzing as usual, and Ernest Thesiger
toying with mandrake roots and tiny ladies and gentlemen in glass jars. It’s a
horror film that takes itself very seriously, and even though I thought its
intellectual pretensions silly, I couldn’t shake off the exquisite, dread
images.
But the audience seemed to be
reacting to a different movie. They were so noisy the dialogue was inaudible;
they talked until the screen gave promise of bloody ghastliness. Then the
chatter subsided to rise again in noisy approval of the gory scenes. When a girl
in the film seemed about to be mutilated, a young man behind me jumped up and
down and shouted encouragement. “Somebody’s going to get it,” he sang out
gleefully. The audience, which was, I’d judge, predominantly between fifteen and
twenty-five, and at least a third feminine, was as pleased and excited by the
most revolting, obsessive images as that older, mostly male audience is when the
nudes appear in The Immoral Mr. Teas or Not Tonight, Henry. They’d
gotten what they came for: they hadn’t been cheated. But nobody seemed to care
what the movie was about or be interested in the logic of the plot—the reasons
for the gore.
And audiences have seemed indifferent
to incomprehensible sections in big expensive pictures. For example, how is it
that the immense audience for The Bridge on the River Kwai, after all
those hours of watching a story unfold, didn’t express discomfort or outrage or
even plain curiosity about what exactly happened at the end—which through bad
direction or perhaps sloppy editing went by too fast to be sorted out and
understood. Was it possible that audiences no longer cared if a film was so
untidily put together that information crucial to the plot or characterizations
was obscure or omitted altogether? What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was
such a mess that Time, after calling it “the year’s scariest, funniest
and most sophisticated thriller,” got the plot garbled.
In recent years, largely because of
the uncertainty of producers about what will draw, films in production may shift
from one script to another, or may be finally cut so that key sequences are
omitted. And the oddity is that it doesn’t seem to matter to the audience. I
couldn’t tell what was going on in parts of 55 Days at Peking. I was
flabbergasted when Cleopatra, with no hint or preparation, suddenly demonstrated
clairvoyant powers, only to dispense with them as quickly as she had acquired
them. The audience for The Cardinal can have little way of knowing whose
baby the priest’s sister is having, or of understanding how she can be in labor
for days, screaming in a rooming house, without anybody hearing her. They might
also be puzzled about how the priest’s argument against her marriage, which they
have been told is the only Catholic position, can, after it leads to her
downfall and death, be casually dismissed as an error.
It would be easy to conclude that
people go to see a “show” and just don’t worry if it all hangs together so long
as they’ve got something to look at. But I think it’s more complicated than
that: audiences used to have an almost rational passion for getting the story
straight. They might prefer bad movies to good ones, and the Variety list
of “all-time top grossers” (such as The Greatest Show on Earth and
Going My Way) indicates that they did, but although the movies might be
banal or vulgar, they were rarely incoherent. A movie had to tell some kind of
story that held together: a plot had to parse. Some of the appreciation for the
cleverness of, say, Hitchcock’s early thrillers was that they distracted you
from the loopholes, so that, afterwards, you could enjoy thinking over how you’d
been tricked and teased. Perhaps now “stories” have become too sane, too
explicable, too commonplace for the large audiences who want sensations and
regard the explanatory connections as mere “filler”—the kind of stuff you sit
through or talk through between jolts.
It’s possible that television viewing, with all its breaks
and cuts, and the inattention, except for action, and spinning the dial to find
some action, is partly responsible for destruction of the narrative sense—that
delight in following a story through its complications to its conclusion, which
is perhaps a child’s first conscious artistic pleasure. The old staples of
entertainment—inoffensive genres like the adventure story or the musical or the
ghost story or the detective story—are no longer commercially safe for
moviemakers, and it may be that audiences don’t have much more than a TV span of
attention left: they want to be turned on and they spend most of their time
turning off. Something similar and related may be happening in reading tastes
and habits: teen-agers that I meet have often read Salinger and some Orwell and
Lord of the Flies and some Joyce Cary and sometimes even Dostoyevsky, but
they are not interested in the “classic” English novels of Scott or Dickens, and
what is more to the point, they don’t read the Sherlock Holmes stories or even
the modern detective fiction that in the thirties and forties was an accepted
part of the shared experience of adolescents. Whatever the reasons—and they must
be more than TV, they must have to do with modern life and the sense of urgency
it produces—audiences can no longer be depended on to respond to conventional
forms.
Perhaps they want much more from
entertainment than the civilized, but limited rational pleasures of genre
pieces. More likely, and the box-office returns support this, they want
something different. Audiences that enjoy the shocks and falsifications, the
brutal series of titillations of a Mondo Cane, one thrill after another,
don’t care any longer about the conventions of the past, and are too restless
and apathetic to pay attention to motivations and complications, cause and
effect. They want less effort, more sensations, more knobs to turn.
A decade ago, The Haunting, an
efficient, professional and to all appearances “commercial” genre piece, might
have made money. By the end of 1963, its grosses in the United States and
Canada, according to Variety, were $700,000. This may be compared with
$9,250,000 for Irma La Douce, $4,600,000 for The Birds, $3,900,000
for 55 Days at Peking—all three, I think, much less enjoyable movies, or
to be more exact, terrible movies, and in varying degrees pointless and
incomprehensible. A detective genre piece, The List of Adrian Messenger,
also incomparably better than the three films cited, and with a tricky “star”
selling campaign, grossed only $1,500,000. It’s easy to imagine that Robert
Wise, after the energetic excesses of West Side Story, turned to The
Haunting for a safe, sane respite, and that John Huston, after wrestling
with Freud, turned to an intriguing detective story like Adrian
Messenger for a lucrative, old-fashioned holiday. But what used to be safe
seems now to be folly. How can audiences preoccupied with identity problems of
their own worry about a case of whodunit and why and how? Following clues may be
too much of an effort for those who, in the current teen-age phrase, “couldn’t
care less.” They want shock treatment, not diversion, and it takes more than
ghosts to frighten them.
The Haunting is set in that
pleasantly familiar “old dark house” that is itself an evil presence, and is
usually inhabited by ghosts or evil people. In our childhood imaginings, the
unknowable things that have happened in old houses, and the whispers that
someone may have died in them, make them mysterious, “dirty”; only the new house
that has known no life or death is safe and clean. But so many stories have used
the sinister dark house from-which-no-one-can-escape and its murky gardens for
our ritual entertainment that we learn to experience the terrors as pleasurable
excitations and reassuring reminders of how frightened we used to be before we
learned our way around. In film, as in story, the ambiance is fear; the film
specialty is gathering a group who are trapped and helpless. (Although the women
are more easily frightened, the men are also powerless. Their superior strength
doesn’t count for much against unseen menaces: this may explain why the genre
was often used for a male comedian—like Bob Hope in The Ghost Breakers.
Russ Tamblyn serves a similar but feeble cowardly-comic function in The
Haunting.) The action is confined to the house and grounds (the maze); the
town is usually far away, just far enough away so that “nobody will hear you if
you scream.”
In recent years film festivals and
art houses have featured a peculiar variant of the trapped-in-the-old-dark-house
genre (Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel is the classic new example), but
the characters, or rather figures, are the undead or zombies of the vampire
movies. “We live as in coffins frozen side by side in a garden”—Last Year at
Marienbad. “I’m dead”—the heroine of Il Mare. “They’re all dead in
there”—the hostess describing the party of La Notte. Their vital juices
have been sucked away, but they don’t have the revealing marks on the throat. We
get the message: alienation drains the soul without leaving any marks. Or, as
Bergman says of his trilogy, “Most of the people in these three films are dead,
completely dead. They don’t know how to love or to feel any emotions. They are
lost because they can’t reach anyone outside of themselves.” This “art” variant
is a message movie about failure of communication and lack of love and spiritual
emptiness and all the rest of that. It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a new
genre but it has some peculiarities. The old dark house was simply there, but
these symbolic decadent or sterile surroundings are supposed to reflect the
walking death of those within the maze. The characters in the old dark house
tried to solve the riddle of their imprisonment and tried to escape; even in
No Exit the drama was in why the characters were there, but in the
new hotel-in-hell movies the characters don’t even want to get out of the
maze—nor one surmises do the directors, despite their moralizing. And audiences
apparently respond to these films as modern and relevant just because of this
paralysis and inaction and minimal story line. If in the group at the older dark
house, someone was not who we thought he was, in the new dull party gatherings,
it doesn’t matter who anybody is (which is a new horror).
Although The Haunting is
moderately elegant and literate and expensive, and the director gussies things
up with a Marienbadish piece of statuary that may or may not be the key to
something or other, it’s basically a traditional ghost story. There is the
dedicated scientist who wants to contribute to science in some socially
unacceptable or scientifically reproachable area—in this case to prove the
supernatural powers of the house. (The scientist is, somewhat inexplicably, an
anthropologist; perhaps Margaret Mead has set the precedent for anthropologists
to dabble in and babble on anything—so that the modern concept of the
anthropologist is like the old concept of the philosopher or, for that matter,
the scientist.) And, in the expository style traditional for the genre, he
explains the lore and jargon of psychic research, meticulously separating out
ghost from poltergeist and so on. And of course the scientist, in the great
tradition of Frankenstein, must have the abnormal or mad assistant: the
role that would once have belonged to Dwight Frye is here modernized and becomes
the Greenwich Village lesbian, Claire Bloom. And there is the scientist’s
distraught wife who fears that her husband’s brilliant career will be ruined,
and so on. The chaste heroine, Julie Harris (like an updated Helen Chandler,
Dracula’s anemic victim), is the movies’ post-Freudian concept of the virgin:
repressed, hysterical, insane—the source of evil.
It wasn’t a great movie but I
certainly wouldn’t have thought that it could offend anyone. Yet part of the
audience at The Haunting wasn’t merely bored, it was hostile—as if the
movie, by assuming interests they didn’t have, made them feel resentful or
inferior. I’ve never felt this kind of audience hostility toward crude, bad
movies. People are relaxed and tolerant about ghoulish quickies, grotesque
shockers dubbed from Japan, and chopped-up Italian spectacles that scramble
mythologies and pile on actions, one stupidity after another. Perhaps they
prefer incoherent, meaningless movies because they are not required to remember
or connect. They can feel superior, contemptuous—as they do toward television
advertising. Even when it’s a virtuoso triumph, the audience is contemptuous
toward advertising, because, after all, they see through it—they know somebody
is trying to sell something. And because, like a cheap movie obviously made to
pry money out of them, that is all advertising means, it’s OK. But the few,
scattered people at The Haunting were restless and talkative, the couple
sitting near me arguing—the man threatening to leave, the woman assuring him
that something would happen. In their terms, they were cheated: nothing
happened. And, of course, they missed what was happening all along, perhaps
because of nervous impatience or a primitive notion that the real things are
physical, perhaps because people take from art and from popular entertainment
only what they want; and if they are indifferent to story and motive and blank
out on the connections, then a movie without physical action or crass jokes or
built-in sentimental responses has nothing for them. I am afraid that the young
instructor in English spoke for his times, that there is no terror for modern
audiences if a story is carefully worked out and follows a tradition, even
though the tradition was developed and perfected precisely to frighten
entertainingly.
No wonder that studios and producers
are unsure what to do next, scan best-seller lists for trends, consult
audience-testing polls, anxiously chop out what a preview audience doesn’t like.
The New York Times chides the representatives of some seven companies who
didn’t want to invest in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? but how could
businessmen, brought up to respect logic and a good commercial script, possibly
guess that this confused mixture of low camp and Grand Guignol would delight the
public?
And if I may return for a moment to
that producer whom I left sunning himself at the side of the pool—”Did you know
that Irma La Douce is already the highest-grossing comedy in film
history?” he asked me at one point, not in the droning voice of the civic-minded
man discussing the cultural development of the community, but in the voice of
someone who’s really involved in what he’s saying; “Yes,” I said, “but is it
even a comedy? It’s a monstrous mutation.” The producer shrugged his dark round
shoulders helplessly: “Who knows what’s a comedy any more?”
It is not just general audiences out for an evening’s
entertainment who seem to have lost the narrative sense, or become indifferent
to narrative. What I think are processes of structural disintegration are at
work in all types of movies, and though it’s obvious that many of the old forms
were dead and had to be broken through, it’s rather scary to see what’s
happening—and not just at the big picture-palaces. Art-house films are even more
confusing. Why, at the end of Godard’s My Life to Live, is the heroine
shot, rather than the pimp that the rival gang is presumably gunning for? Is she
just a victim of bad marksmanship? If we express perplexity, we are likely to be
told that we are missing the existentialist point: it’s simply fate, she had to
die. But a cross-eyed fate? And why is there so little questioning of the
organization of My Name Is Ivan with its lyric interludes and patriotic
sections so ill assembled that one might think the projectionist had scrambled
the reels? (They often do at art houses, and it would seem that the more
sophisticated the audience, the less likely that the error will be discovered.
When I pointed out to a theater manager that the women in Brink of Life
were waiting for their babies after they had miscarried, he told me that he had
been playing the film for two weeks and I was his first patron who wasn’t
familiar with Bergman’s methods.)
The art-house audience accepts lack
of clarity as complexity, accepts clumsiness and confusion as “ambiguity” and as
style. Perhaps even without the support of critics, they would accept
incoherence just as the larger audience does: they may feel that movies as
incomprehensible as Viridiana are more relevant to their experience, more
true to their own feelings about life, and more satisfying and complex than
works they can understand.
I trust I won’t be mistaken for the
sort of boob who attacks ambiguity or complexity. I am interested in the change
from the period when the meaning of art and form in art was in making complex
experience simple and lucid, as is still the case in Knife in the Water
or Bandits of Orgosolo, to the current acceptance of art as technique,
the technique which in a movie like This Sporting Life makes a simple,
though psychologically confused, story look complex, and modern because
inexplicable.
It has become easy—especially for
those who consider “time” a problem and a great theme—to believe that fast
editing, out of normal sequence, which makes it difficult, or impossible, for
the audience to know if any action is taking place, is somehow more “cinematic”
than a consecutively told story. For a half century movies have, when necessary,
shifted action in time and place and the directors generally didn’t think it
necessary to slap us in the face with each cut or to call out, “Look what I can
do!” Yet people who should know better will tell you how “cinematic” The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner or This Sporting Life is—as if
fiddling with the time sequence was good in itself—proof that the “medium” is
really being used. Perhaps, after a few decades of indoctrination in high art,
they are convinced that a movie is cinematic when they don’t understand what’s
going on. This Sporting Life, which Derek Hill, among others, has called
the best feature ever made in England, isn’t gracefully fragmented, it’s
smashed. The chunks are so heavy and humorless and, in an odd way, disturbing,
that we can tell the film is meant to be bold, powerful, tragic.
There’s a woman writer I’d be tempted
to call a three-time loser: she’s Catholic, Communist, and lesbian; but she
comes on more like a triple threat. She’s in with so many groups that her books
are rarely panned. I thought of her when I read the reviews of This Sporting
Life: this film has it made in so many ways, it carries an identity card
with all the outsiders. The hero is “bewildered,” the heroine “bruised” and
“afraid of life,” the brutal rugby games are possibly a “microcosm of a corrupt
society,” and the film murkily suggests all sorts of passion and protest, like a
group of demonstrators singing “We Shall Overcome” and leaving it to you to fill
in your own set of injustices. For Show magazine, “The football scenes
bear the aspect of a savage rite, with the spectators as participants hungry for
sacrifice. The love story . . . is simply another kind of scrimmage, a battle
between two people who cannot communicate . . .” For the New York Times,
the film “translates the confusions and unrequited longings of the angry young
men and women of our time into memorable universal truths.” (I wish the reviewer
would spell out one or two of them for us.) The Times has an unusual
interpretation of the love story: “The woman . . . only succumbs to him
physically and the real roots he seeks are unattainable.” This reminds me of my
confusion as a schoolgirl when a jazz musician who had been introduced to me
during the break called out “Dig you later” as he went back to the stand.
In the Observer, Penelope
Gilliatt offers extraordinary praise: “This Sporting Life is a stupendous
film. It has a blow like a fist. I’ve never seen an English picture that gave
such expression to the violence and the capacity for pain that there is in the
English character. It is there in Shakespeare, in Marlowe, in Lawrence and
Orwell and Hogarth, but not in our cinema like this before. This Sporting
Life is hard to write about because everything important about it is really
subverbal.” But then so are trees and animals and cities. Isn’t it precisely the
artist’s task to give form to his experience and the critic’s task to verbalize
on how this has been accomplished? She goes on to write of the hero, “The events
almost seem to be happening to him in the dark. Half of them are told while he
is under dentist’s gas, in flashback, which is a clumsy device if one is telling
a story but the natural method if one is searching around a character.” English
dental hygiene is notorious; still, isn’t telling a story, with or without gas
and flashbacks, a pretty good “natural” method of searching around a characters?
But something more seems to be involved: “The black subjective spirit of
the film is overpowering. It floods the sound track, which often has a peculiar
resonance as though it were happening inside one’s own head.” Sort of a sunken
cathedral effect? The bells are clanging in the reviewers’ heads, but what’s
happening on the screen?
In one way or another, almost all the
enthusiasts for a film like this one will tell you that it doesn’t matter, that
however you interpret the film, you will be right (though this does not prevent
some of them from working out elaborate interpretations of Marienbad or
The Eclipse or Viridiana). Walter Lassally says that “Antonioni’s
oblique atmospheric statements and Buñuel’s symbolism, for example, cannot be
analyzed in terms of good or bad . . . for they contain, in addition to any
obvious meanings, everything that the viewer may read into them.” Surely he can
read the most onto a blank screen?
There’s not much to be said for this
theory except that it’s mighty democratic. Rather pathetically, those who accept
this Rorschach-blot approach to movies are hesitant and uneasy about offering
reactions. They should be reassured by the belief that whatever they say is
right, but as it refers not to the film but to them (turning criticism into
autobiography) they are afraid of self-exposure. I don’t think they really
believe the theory—it’s a sort of temporary public convenience station. More and
more people come out of a movie and can’t tell you what they’ve seen, or even
whether they liked it.
An author like David Storey may stun
them with information like “[This Sporting Life] works purely in terms of
feeling. Only frivolous judgments can be made about it in conventional terms of
style.” Has he discovered a new method of conveying feeling without style? Or
has he simply found the arrogance to frustrate normal responses? No one wants to
have his capacity for feeling questioned, and if a viewer tries to play it cool,
and discuss This Sporting Life in terms of corrupt professional football,
he still won’t score on that muddy field: there are no goalposts. Lindsay
Anderson, who directed, says, “This Sporting Life is not a film about
sport. In fact, I wouldn’t really call it a story picture at all.... We have
tried to make a tragedy . . . we were making a film about something unique.” A
tragedy without a story is unique all right: a disaster.
In movies, as in other art forms, if
you are interested only in technique or if you reject technique, the result is
just about the same: if you have nothing to express it is very much like
thinking you have so much to express that you don’t know how to say it.
Something related to absorption in technique is involved in the enthusiasm of
young people for what is called “the New American Cinema,” though these films
are often made by those who reject craftsmanship as well as meaning. They tend
to equate technique with science and those who produced the Bomb. This approach,
which is a little like the attack on scientific method in Eyes Without a Face,
is used to explain why they must make movies without taking time to learn how.
They’re in a hurry, and anyway, technique might corrupt them.
The spokesmen for this cinema attack
rationality as if it were the enemy of art (“as/ the heavy Boots of Soldiers and
Intellect/ march across the/ flowerfields of subconscious” and so forth by Jonas
Mekas). They have composed a rather strange amalgam in which reason = lack of
feeling and imagination = hostility to art = science = the enemy = Nazis and
police = the Bomb. Somewhere along the line, criticism is also turned into an
enemy of art. The group produces a kind of euphoric publicity which is published
in place of criticism, but soon it may have semi-intellectually respectable
critics. In the Nation of April 13, 1964, Susan Sontag published an
extraordinary essay on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures called “A Feast for
Open Eyes” in which she enunciates a new critical principle: “Thus Smith’s crude
technique serves, beautifully, the sensibility embodied in Flaming Creatures—a
sensibility based on indiscriminateness, without ideas, beyond negation.” I
think in treating indiscriminateness as a value, she has become a real
swinger. Of course we can reply that if anything goes, nothing happens, nothing
works. But this is becoming irrelevant. In Los Angeles, among the independent
film makers at their midnight screenings I was told that I belonged to the older
generation, that Agee-alcohol generation they called it, who could not respond
to the new films because I didn’t take pot or LSD and so couldn’t learn just to
accept everything. This narcotic approach of torpid acceptance, which is
much like the lethargy of the undead in those failure-of-communication movies,
may explain why those films have seemed so “true” to some people (and why the
directors’ moralistic messages sound so false). This attitude of rejecting
critical standards has the dubious advantage of accepting everyone who says he
is an artist as an artist and conferring on all his “noncommercial” productions
the status of art. Miss Sontag is on to something and if she stays on and rides
it like Slim Pickens, it’s the end of criticism—at the very least.
It’s ten years since Dylan Thomas
answered Maya Deren’s call for a new poetry of film with “I’m not at all sure
that I want such a thing, myself, as a poetic film. I think films fine as they
are, if only they were better . . . I like stories, you know—I like to see
something going on.” Movies have changed in these ten years, disastrously in the
last few years; they have become “cinema.”
At the art-house level, critics and
audiences haven’t yet discovered the beauty of indiscriminateness, but there’s a
lot of talk about “purely visual content”—which might be called the principle of
ineffability. Time calls Resnais’s Muriel “another absorbing
exercise in style.” Dwight Macdonald calls Marienbad “‘pure’ cinema, a
succession of images enjoyable in themselves.” And Richard Roud, who was
responsible (and thus guilty) for the film selection at the New York Film
Festivals, goes all the way: films like La Notte, he says, provide an
“experience in pure form.”
Once matters reach this plane, it
begins to seem almost unclean to raise issues about meaning and content and
character, or to question the relevance of a sequence, the quality of a
performance. Someone is sure to sneer, “Are you looking for a paraphrasable
content? A film, like a poem, is.” Or smile pityingly and remind you that
Patroni Griffi had originally intended to call Il Mare “Landscape with
Figures”; doesn’t that tell you how you should look at it? It does indeed, and
it’s not my idea of a good time. After a few dismal experiences we discover that
when we are told to admire a film for its pure form or its structure, it is
going to exhibit irritating, confusing, and ostentatious technique, which will,
infuriatingly, be all we can discover in it. And if we should mention that we
enjoy the dramatic and narrative elements in movies, we are almost certain
to be subjected to the contemptuous remark, “Why does cinema have to mean
something? Do you expect a work by Bach to mean something?”
The only way to answer this is by
some embarrassingly basic analysis, pointing out that words, unlike tones, refer
to something and that movie images are rarely abstract or geometric designs, and
that when they include people and places and actions, they have implications,
associations. Robbe-Grillet, the scenarist of Marienbad, may say that the
film is a pure construction, an object without reference to anything outside
itself, and that the existence of the two characters begins when the film begins
and ends ninety-three minutes later, but, of course, we are not born when we go
in to see a movie—though we may want to die by the time we leave. And we can’t
even leave Marienbad behind because, although it isn’t particularly
memorable (it isn’t even particularly offensive), a kind of creeping
Marienbadism is the new aesthetics of “poetic” cinema. This can only sound like
pedantry to those interested in “pure” art who tend to consider analysis as an
enemy, anyway (though, many of them are in it). The very same people who say
that a movie shouldn’t mean anything, that art is beyond meaning, also say that
it must be seen over and over again because it reveals more meaning with
subsequent viewings. And although the structure of many of the new films is
somehow supposed to be the art, we are frowned upon if we question the
organization of the material. There is nothing, finally, that we are allowed to
question or criticize. We are supposed only to interpret—and that as we wish.
The leaders of this new left-wing
formalism are Resnais, who gives us his vision of a bomb-shattered, fragmented
universe, and Antonioni, the master practitioner of the fallacy of expressive
form, who sets out to demonstrate that boredom (and its accompanying eroticism)
is the sickness of our time (but doesn’t explain how it helps to add to it). If
their characters have a curious way of using their sophisticated vacuity as a
come-on, are they not in their creators’ image? They make assignations (as in
The Eclipse), but nobody comes.
The movie houses may soon look as
desolate as Il Mare—set in Capri in winter. I’ve never seen so many
people sleeping through movies as at Lincoln Center: no wonder there is talk of
“cinema” achieving the social status of opera. A few more seasons of such art
and it will be evidence of your interest in culture and your sense of civic
responsibility if you go to the movies.
The “techniques” of such films are so
apparent, so obtrusive, that they may easily be assumed to be “advanced,”
“modern,” “new.” It’s perfectly true you don’t come out of an older movie like
Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, or Flaherty’s Man of Aran, or
Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night saying, “What technique!” Nor do you
come out of a concert by Serkin exclaiming about his technique—you’re thinking
of the music. But those who adore José Iturbi always say, “What technique!”;
what else is there to respond to? And the comment—which means how fast he
can play or how ostentatiously—is not so very far from the admiration for
Antonioni or Torre Nilsson or Bresson’s Trial of Joan of Arc (though they
are generally admired for how slow they can play).
My attitude to what is happening to
movies is more than a little ambivalent. I don’t think that my own preferences
or the preferences of others for coherence and wit and feeling are going to make
much difference. Movies are going to pieces; they’re disintegrating, and the
something called cinema is not movies raised to an art but rather movies
diminished, movies that look “artistic.” Movies are being stripped of all the
“nonessentials”—that is to say, faces, actions, details, stories,
places—everything that makes them entertaining and joyful. They are even being
stripped of the essentials—light (The Eclipse), sound (The Silence),
and movement in some of the New American Cinema films (there is sure to be one
called Stasis). It’s obvious that the most talented film artists and the
ones most responsive to our time and the attitudes of Camus and Sartre are the
ones moving in this direction. The others, those trying to observe the older
conventions, are usually (though not always) banal, trivial, ludicrously
commercial, and out of touch, somehow. It is the highest talents, the most
dedicated, who are driven to the dead end of “pure” cinema—just as our painters
are driven to obliterate the image, and a dramatist like Beckett to reduce words
to sounds.
Cinema, I suspect, is going to become
so rarefied, so private in meaning, and so lacking in audience appeal that in a
few years the foundations will be desperately and hopelessly trying to bring it
back to life, as they are now doing with theater. The parallel course is,
already, depressingly apparent. Clancy Sigal’s (admiring) account of Beckett’s
Endgame might have been written of Bergman’s The Silence:
Endgame’s two main characters . . . occupy a claustrophobic space and a deeply ambiguous relationship…. Outside, the world is dead of some great catastrophe.... The action of the play mainly comprises anxious bickering between the too principal characters. Eventually, Clov dresses for the road to leave Hamm, and Hamm prepares for death, though we do not see the moment of parting . . . none of the actors is quite sure what the play is about, Beckett affects complete ignorance of the larger implications. “I only know what’s on the page,” he says with a friendly gesture.
Is Beckett leading the way or is it all in the air? His direction that the words of Play should be spoken so fast that they can’t be understood is paralleled by Resnais’s editing of Muriel so fast that you can’t keep track of what’s going on. Penelope Gilliatt writes, “You may have to go to the film at least twice, as I did, before the warmth of it seeps through . . .”; Beckett has already anticipated the problem and provided the answer with the stage direction, “Repeat play exactly.”
When movies, the only art which everyone felt free to enjoy
and have opinions about, lose their connection with song and dance, drama, and
the novel, when they become cinema, which people fear to criticize just as they
fear to say what they think of a new piece of music or a new poem or painting,
they will become another object of academic study and “appreciation,” and will
soon be an object of excitement only to practitioners of the “art.” Although
L’Avventura is a great film, had I been present at Cannes in 1960, where
Antonioni distributed his explanatory statement, beginning, “There exists in the
world today a very serious break between science on the one hand . . . ,” I
might easily have joined in the hisses, which he didn’t really deserve until the
following year, when La Notte revealed that he’d begun to believe his own
explanations—thus making liars of us all.
When we see Dwight Macdonald’s
cultural solution applied to film, when we see the prospect that movies will
become a product for “Masscult” consumption, while the “few who care” will have
their High Culture cinema, who wants to take the high road? There is more
energy, more originality, more excitement, more art in American kitsch
like Gunga Din, Easy Living, the Rogers and Astaire pictures like
Swingtime and Top Hat, in Strangers on a Train, His Girl
Friday, The Crimson Pirate, Citizen Kane, The Lady Eve,
To Have and Have Not, The African Queen, Singin’ in the Rain,
Sweet Smell of Success, or more recently, The Hustler, Lolita,
The Manchurian Candidate, Hud, Charade, than in the
presumed “High Culture” of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Marienbad, La
Notte, The Eclipse, and the Torre Nilsson pictures. As Nabokov
remarked, “Nothing is more exhilarating than Philistine vulgarity.”
Regrettably, one of the surest signs
of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him
down. Macdonald believes that “a work of High Culture, however inept, is an
expression of feelings, ideas, tastes, visions that are idiosyncratic and the
audience similarly responds to them as individuals.” No. The “pure” cinema
enthusiast who doesn’t react to a film but feels he should, and so goes back to
it over and over, is not responding as an individual but as a compulsive good
pupil determined to appreciate what his cultural superiors say is “art.” Movies
are on their way into academia when they’re turned into a matter of duty: a
mistake in judgment isn’t fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is. In this
country, respect for High Culture is becoming a ritual.
If debased art is kitsch, perhaps
kitsch may be redeemed by honest vulgarity, may become art. Our best work
transforms kitsch, makes art out of it; that is the peculiar greatness and
strength of American movies, as Godard in Breathless and Truffaut in
Shoot the Piano Player recognize. Huston’s The Maltese Falcon is a
classic example. Our first and greatest film artist D. W. Griffith was a master
of kitsch: the sentiment and melodrama in his films are much more integral to
their greatness than the critics who lament Griffith’s lack of mind (!)
perceive.
The movies are still where it
happens, not for much longer perhaps, but the movies are still the art form that
uses the material of our lives and the art form that we use. I am not suggesting
that we want to see new and bigger remakes of the tired old standbys of the film
repertory: who wants to see the new Cimarron, another Quo Vadis?
And meanings don’t have to be spread out for us like a free-lunch counter. There
are movies that are great experiences like Long Day’s Journey into Night,
and just a few years back there were movies which told good stories—movies like
The Treasure of Sierra Madre, From Here to Eternity, The Nun’s
Story.
People go to the movies for the
various ways they express the experiences of our lives, and as a means of
avoiding and postponing the pressures we feel. This latter function of
art—generally referred to disparagingly as escapism—may also be considered as
refreshment, and in terms of modern big city life and small town boredom, it may
be a major factor in keeping us sane.
In the last few years there has
appeared a new kind of filmgoer: he isn’t interested in movies but in cinema. A
great many of the film makers are in this group: they’ve never gone to movies
much and they don’t care about them. They’re interested in what they can do in
the medium, not in what has been done. This is, of course, their
privilege, though I would suggest that it may explain why they have such limited
approaches to film. I’m more puzzled by the large numbers of those who are
looking for importance in cinema. For example, a doctor friend called me
after he’d seen The Pink Panther to tell me I needn’t “bother” with that
one, it was just slapstick. When I told him I’d already seen it and had a good
time at it, he was irritated; he informed me that a movie should be more than a
waste of time, it should be an exercise of taste that will enrich your life.
Those looking for importance are too often contemptuous of the crude vitality of
American films, though this crudity is not always offensive, and may represent
the only way that energy and talent and inventiveness can find an outlet, can
break through the planned standardization of mass entertainment. It has become a
mark of culture to revere the old slapstick (the Mack Sennett two-reelers and
early Chaplins that aren’t really as great as all that) and put down the new.
But in a movie as shopworn as Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? there is,
near the end, an almost inspired satirical striptease by Carol Burnett. The
Nutty Professor is too long and repetitive, but Jerry Lewis has some scenes
that hold their own with the silent classics. I enjoyed The Prize, which
opens badly but then becomes a lively, blatant entertainment; but there’s no
point in recommending it to someone who wants his life enriched. I couldn’t
persuade friends to go see Charade, which although no more than a
charming confectionery trifle was, I think, probably the best American film of
last year—as artificial and enjoyable in its way as The Big Sleep. The
word had got around that it isn’t important, that it isn’t serious,
that it doesn’t do anything for you.
Our academic bureaucracy needs
something alive to nourish it and movies still have a little blood which the
academics can drain away. In the West several of the academic people I know who
have least understanding of movies were suddenly interested by Laurence
Alloway’s piece called “Critics in the Dark” in Encounter. By suggesting
that movie criticism had never gotten into the right hands—i.e., theirs, and by
indicating projects, and by publishing in the prestigious Encounter,
Alloway indicated large vistas of respectability for future film critics.
Perhaps also they were drawn to his condescending approach to movies as a pop
art. Many academics have always been puzzled that Agee could care so much
about movies. Alloway, by taking the position that Agee’s caring was a
maladjustment, re-established their safe, serene worlds in which if a man gets
excited about an idea or an issue, they know there’s something the matter with
him. It’s not much consolation, but I think the cinema the academics will be
working over will be the cinema they deserve.
December, 1964