Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Schnitzler, let us remember, said that the flight into stupidity is a flight away from responsibility. But soaring beyond any human absurdity that even Schnitzler could imagine, Richard Burton’s hairstyle in Where Eagles Dare is a flight into stupidity and away from the barber. Burton plays a British agent who is possibly also a German agent, although we can be fairly sure that he will turn out to be a British agent in the end, because Richard Burton’s agent would never agree to a deal by which his client was shot at dawn. Burton the almost certainly British agent is sent, with Clint Eastwood and other agents—some of whom actually do turn out to be German agents—on a mission to a castle deep behind German lines, there to rescue, or possibly confirm the credibility of, or perhaps betray the real identity of, an actor pretending to be an American general in possession of the Plans for a Second Front. The actor playing the actor need not detain us, and considering how he acts it is a wonder that the Germans have detained him. (There is a lot more to wonder at about the behaviour of the Germans, but we’ll get to that later.) The actors who matter are Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Clint, already a top box office draw at the time, has been cast as the simple, straight-talking American assassin who helps the fiendishly ingenious British spy: it’s the same relationship as Felix Leiter to James Bond, but beefed up to equal status to meet the requirements of the American marquee. Apart from saying “hello” so as to make Germans turn around before he shoots them with his silenced pistol—if he had merely mouthed “hello” before shooting them in the back, it would have been a different kind of movie, i.e., a realistic one—Clint’s character has nothing anachronistic about him except his cataleptic taciturnity, which we are glad to recognize as a minimally equipped actor’s career-long habit of overdoing the understatement. Burton’s own style of acting is equally dissonant with the time, but in the opposite direction: he always overdid the overstatement, and from the beginning to the end of his career on screen he looked exactly like a stage actor projecting to the upper circle, except when a director with animal-training skills (Martin Ritt in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, to take one of the few examples) either whipped him into submission or else slipped a sedative into his morning triple. Burton always moved his lips so much when he enunciated that they would stick out past the end of his nose, and there are episodes in Where Eagles Dare in which they practically leave the frame, as if yet another triple were waiting out there, begging to be imbibed.

  It isn’t the stuff he does with his face, however, that makes Burton look out of place in this castellated anteroom of World War II. It’s the stuff on top of his head. It’s his hairstyle. It was probably still all his own hair at that stage, but it’s a hairstyle: an item, that is, which not even women found it easy to obtain during World War II, and which for men was unknown. (In the movie, Mary Ure has obviously taken a hairstylist into action with her, but we never see him: although if he had wandered into shot holding a crimping iron he would have looked no more futuristic than her miraculously smooth coiffure, shining with a blonde lustre that Eva Braun, even with her connections, could only dream of.) The high command of the Romanian army did indeed issue an order that no officer below the rank of major should wear makeup, but the British army and the German army both made a policy of short back and sides for all ranks, and the German army was particularly close-cropped. Yet Burton, intending to be accepted as a German officer in order to penetrate the enemy redoubt, has gone into action sporting a pageboy hairstyle so fulsome that it spills abundant curls and waves below the back of his collar. Burton had a big head anyway. I interviewed him once, and found out why he always looked so stocky on screen: it was because his upper works were so broad you had to lean sideways to see past him. Even if close-shorn he would have had to wear a cap rare for its size in the whole of the Wehrmacht. But with his hairstyle added to his massive cranium, his cap has to be big enough for a buffalo, and it still does nothing to disguise—does a lot, indeed, to emphasize—the anomalous abundance of hair protruding at the back. On several occasions in the movie he has to pass a German checkpoint, and you can only deduce that the garrison has been recruited from an institute for the blind. Later in the war, when the regular German forces were in a state of collapse, Volkssturm units were organized from the old, the adolescent, the lame and the sick, but I can’t remember that very many sightless people were issued with a Panzerfaust and asked to shoot in the direction of the noise kicked up by Allied tanks. Here at the castle there is no discrimination against the optically handicapped.

  Whether as a single, double or triple agent (“Triple, please,” you can imagine him saying) the Burton character would have been barely free of his parachute harness before being placed under arrest. He would have been locked up on the basis of his appearance alone. Every other anachronism is explicable, within the screenplay’s purely cinematic parameters. In the Geman pub below the castle, Burton, Eastwood and the other agents—the others are notable chiefly for their expendability—talk very loudly in English. Yes, English is their chosen language when they discuss their plans about fooling the Germans, and they do not lower their voices when members of the garrison pass by closely behind them. It could be said, however, that a convention is being observed here, and that our agents are really speaking German. (It could also be said that if they were speaking German, the closely attendant Germans would be even more likely to notice that plans to fool them were being loudly discussed, but let that pass.) There is also the consideration that English seems to be the adopted language of every German in the area. Similarly it could be put down to an equally hallowed cinematic convention when the German commandant arrives in the castle courtyard by helicopter. There were no operational helicopters in World War II, but there were no operational cannon in ancient Rome either, and Shakespeare still put a few in. Shakespeare pioneered Hollywood’s flexible attitude to temporal authenticity, as any Hollywood mogul with a tertiary education will be glad to tell you. For every howler in the movie there is a good justification, the principal one being that the people who made the movie must have known it was a howler, but correctly judged that nobody they cared about would notice. In the majority of big-budget war films since World War II, and in all the small budget ones, the enemy has always fired a special kind of bullet that goes around, instead of through, the actors on our side, occasionally penetrating only at the shoulder or in a sexually neutral section of the upper thigh. In Sands of Iwo Jima John Wayne finally got killed by a Japanese bullet while he was sitting down, but only after the Japanese machine-gunners had vainly fired thousands of bullets at him when he was running very slowly. In Where Eagles Dare, whole German machine-gun nests equipped with multiple examples of the lethal MG42 (rate of fire: 1200 rounds per minute) are unable to graze Richard Burton’s hairstyle. Big enough for a slowly moving cow to graze it, for cinematic reasons it is impervious to speeding lead. But there are precedents for that. There is no precedent for the hairstyle per se.

  This is where the pundit clinches his seemingly open-and-shut case for Schnitzler’s flight into stupidity as the principal motivation of the film’s creators, or perpetrators. He might concede that some of the perps are technically clever, but in that case he will insist that there is still a collective perp: the system itself. And he will be right, but not as right as he thinks. He has overlooked the factor of star power, which is what made him see the movie in the first place. Letting Burton keep his everyday hairstyle was the studio’s only chance of getting him into this sector of World War II. (He kept a bit less of his thatch for his cameo appearance in The Longest Day, but it still wasn’t buoyant enough to get him arrested by his own side, let alone by the enemy.) And Burton wasn’t being stupid either. He had realized that the point was not to look like a British agent plausibly pretending to be a German officer: the point was to look like Richard Burton. The reality of star power depends on exactly that. Malleability is for actors. For screen stars, recognizability is what matters. Much later, and in a better movie, Robert Re
dford proved it all over again by declining at the last moment to adopt an English accent when he played Denys Finch Hatton in Out of Africa. He was right. Out of Africa was a serious venture, but it was still a blockbuster, and it needed Redford as a draw on the marquee, not as a paragon of authenticity on the screen. Redford was content to leave all that to Meryl Streep and Klaus Maria Brandauer. He wasn’t just content, he insisted. And it was by making such demands that he became Robert Redford. If we doubt the value of that, we should remember that he would never have been in a position to set up the Sundance Festival, and thus alter the whole course of independent and intelligent film-making in America, if he hadn’t been Robert Redford in the first instance. He is a very clever man, and so, between drinks, was Burton, who could recite English poetry by the mile. Burton was clever enough to intuit a deeply awkward truth, and incorporate it in the hairstyle he carried into action in one of the most lucrative movies he ever made. To one side of the world’s great events, there is the interpretation of them. To one side of the interpretation, there is entertainment. And to one side of entertainment, there is absurdity. But if the absurdity is correctly judged, it will be found entertaining, even by those who are well aware of the real importance of the events being travestied. There can be a willing, mass participation in the flight into stupidity, because there can always be an agreed moment when the flight away from responsibility becomes irresistible. To pick that moment takes a kind of talent. It might be a spoiled talent, but mediocrity will never make it.

  In all those big, bad movies that ought to have been better (I don’t mean the big, bad movies that couldn’t be worse, like The Avengers or Pearl Harbor) the stupidity is institutionalized, and you can take it for granted that if they make a big score on the opening weekend, almost everyone concerned is very clever indeed, and often dauntingly cultivated. But these masterminds are smart and suave enough to know that their target audience for the opening weekend is neither of those things. The masterminds are after the young, who know nothing. It is usually a mistake to overestimate their degree of dumbness—the movie has to make some kind of sense—but to overestimate their ignorance is impossible. The disparity of intellect between the manufacturers and the consumers would be frightening if the manufacturers were not at the consumers’ mercy, instead of vice versa. Hence the tendency of Californian film moguls to revel in their own superiority: they have nowhere else to hide from the consequences of a mistake. Their flight is not into stupidity, but into sophistication. In the British cinema you can meet plenty of people who know something about Frank Lloyd Wright, but only in Los Angeles can you meet a movie executive who lives in a house that Frank Lloyd Wright built, and who devotes time, taste and knowledge to restoring it. His name is Joel Silver, and he is the same man who, in Die Hard, sent Bruce Willis hurtling barefooted through a plate-glass window to settle the hash of two dozen combat-trained terrorists instead of slicing himself to hamburger. Luckily the guns of the terrorists were loaded with the standard magic bullets rigged to swerve around any actor on our side with star billing, and nobody virtuous got killed except a Japanese executive, possibly as a payback for Iwo Jima.

  These functional anomalies of the mass media teach us to look out for whether the rules of the game induce clever people, in other fields as well, to behave in stupid ways. In the year when Senator John Kerry challenged President George W. Bush, the question of why Bush pretended to be able to speak English was never as interesting as the question of why Kerry pretended not to be able to speak French. In the United States, the free democracy whose electoral system most nearly approximates a free market, an historical consensus of extremely clever operatives has decreed that a candidate should not only keep things simple, but seem simple himself. Cultural memory is difficult: too much detail. Cultural amnesia is easier. Eventually there will be nobody alive who knows for certain that there was never such a thing in World War II as Richard Burton’s hairstyle in Where Eagles Dare, so why don’t we forget it straight away? President Bush’s speechwriters encourage him to forget that World War II even existed before Pearl Harbor was attacked. Not even he could not know that: but it is deemed expedient that he should seem not to. How these decisions about utilitarian ignorance are taken is a study in itself. But it is the very study that intellectuals as a class are least equipped to make. For past catastrophes, dull intellectuals try to blame a dumb individual: hence the notion that all the soldiers in the trenches of World War I were murdered by Field Marshal Douglas Haig. Slightly smarter intellectuals try to blame a dumb collectivity: hence the notion that the escalation in Vietnam was the work of the CIA. (In fact, the CIA warned JFK not to commit troops on the ground: he ignored the warning.) Clever intellectuals can analyse a complex event, but tend to attribute a simple motive: hence the notion that the Cold War and the arms race were American inventions designed to stifle the socialist aspirations of liberated Europe. It takes a very smart intellectual, however, to accept that those vast, costly and even criminal stupidities were brought about by people no less bright than he. Clever contemporary thinkers who proceed on the assumption that their predecessors were stupid are apt to write the superior nonsense that works mischief. It is a consideration that Schnitzler left out of his aphorism: there is indeed a flight from responsibility into stupidity, but the flight from responsibility into cleverness can be equally destructive.

  “But what if,” said Leo, “the execution fires should be lit again?”

  “In that case,” said Heinrich, “I solemnly promise I will come straight to you.”

  “Oh,” George objected, “those times will never return.”

  —ARTHUR SCHNITZLER, Der Weg ins Freie

  On some unspecified day around the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, the three Jewish boys have been lolling on a well-appointed hillside. They have been conducting a long, lazy argument about whether to dream of Palestine is really an appropriate response to the petty, everyday anti-Semitic snobbery of Vienna. After all, none of them is religious. But the argument gets quite heated, and they break the tension with this joking exchange. Looking back across eight decades, we can see it as one of the most prophetic moments in modern literature. But it should also remind us of the dangers of historicism: hindsight is not a view of the world, it is an indulgence of the self. It puts us in control of history, whereas the first thing we should realize about history is that we are not in control of it: not by looking backward, and still less by looking forward. Only one of the three young characters believes that assimilation is a dangerous illusion, and even if all three of them did, they would still be characters: they would not be Schnitzler. If Schnitzler himself had really thought that the future was cut and dried, he would never have written another line. But the idea of a possible disaster is undoubtedly being floated, and it comes from the author’s heart. Schnitzler understood Theodor Herzl’s views about the ignis fatuus of Jewish assimilation. He himself was about as assimilated as someone of Jewish background could well be. Even after World War I, with the old empire broken up, Schnitzler’s prestige in Vienna’s cultural life was on the scale that Mahler’s had been when Franz Joseph still ruled. At the Burgtheater Schnitzler, the unchallenged master playwright, was accustomed to multiple curtain calls for every successful first night: sometimes he seemed to be on stage almost as long as the actors.

  But he also knew what it meant to feel insecure even in his eminence. Some of his best plays have that for a subject. Professor Bernhardi is a play about a man of Schnitzler’s prestige finding out how little his prestige avails him against the perennial hatreds. Schnitzler never betrayed the same sort of nervousness as, say, Jakob Wassermann, a novelist who despaired of a social acceptance to match his big sales. Schnitzler took his popularity as a sign of approval. But he knew that the contempt was always there, a tincture in the culture. For two reasons, he was particularly stung by the essayist Alfred Polgar’s critical notices. One reason was that Polgar wrote so well: limiting judgements hurt most
when they come from a writer of talent. The other reason was the one that barely shows up even in Schnitizler’s private correspondence, but it is detectable between the lines. Polgar was a Jew, and should, Schnitzler felt, have found less hostile language for his belittling judgements. Franz Werfel had a right to feel the same way about Karl Kraus. In the first year of the twenty-first century, the eminent art historian E. H. Gombrich, nearing the end of long life, protested against the misguided consensus of commentary which seemed to assume that there had ever been such a self-conscious body as The Jews before Hitler so portentously invented it. Solidarity had to be imposed, and was never really felt even then. Among the prosperous, fully assimilated Jews of the professional classes who found themselves bewilderingly subject to Nazi proscription, there were plenty who went to their doom still convinced that the whole thing would never have happened if not for the resentment aroused by the influx of all those strangely dressed and unsociable Ostjuden refugees from the accursed east. But you can still see why a prominent Jewish artist who was cut down to size by a Jewish critic should feel betrayed: things were tough enough without being done down by your own people. Things were even tougher if, as an assimilated Jew, you had rejected the idea of there being such a thing as your own people. Like so many stars who have been told too often and too glibly that they embody the hopes of a race, Schnitzler wanted to be an individual, not a representative. The anguish aroused by your own principles is hard to take.