Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  To put it bluntly, the old guys had to tell a story because they couldn’t blow up the world. There were limitations you couldn’t spend your way out of, and in overcoming them lay the essence of the craft, its economy and brio. Don Siegel says it for all the others when he unveils the secret of shooting on the back lot: ‘For instance, if there’s an area which looks weak, I decide that I’ll pan down to the feet of the guys walking and then come up where the area’s good . . . At the moment where it’s weak, I’m closest to the feet. This is no hard and fast rule, just an example.’ When you remember that one of the main reasons that Heaven’s Gate nearly bankrupted United Artists was that Michael Cimino couldn’t live with the idea of a background that looked weak for even a single square yard, you realize that there is a whole aesthetic, and hence a morality, embodied in Siegel’s attitude. To accept and transcend limitation can be a source of creative vibrancy, whereas to eliminate it with money almost always leads to inertia. On his seventeenth, and last, day of shooting Baby Face Nelson, Siegel did fifty-five separate camera setups, and they’re all in the picture. (‘It cost $175,000 to make,’ Siegel told Bogdanovich, ‘and it took a lot of bookkeeping to make it up to $175,000.’) Warren Beatty, given the choice, would have gone on editing Reds forever, but no amount of editing could lend tension to the footage, in which only Jack Nicholson behaved as if he owned a watch. Reds, a pioneering effort in the annals of modern wastage, was made in order to indulge the creative whims of its maker. Baby Face Nelson was a cynical, cost-conscious piece of exploitation. Which was the work of art? All right, which would you rather see again tonight?

  Reality is a useful brake on megalomania. Besides this key point (continually and hearteningly endorsed by almost everyone in the book), there is plenty of other stuff that merits thoughtful attention from the current generation of moviemakers, who so often not only can’t do anything small but don’t even want to, except as a career move on the way towards doing something big. Leo McCarey took credit for very few of the hundred or so Laurel and Hardy films that he was effectively responsible for, but his vision shaped that of his actors. ‘At that time,’ he says, ‘comics had a tendency to do too much.’ (There has never been a time when they had any other tendency, but let that pass.) In From Soup to Nuts, Hardy as the maître d’ came in to serve a cake. He tripped, fell, and buried his head in the cake. It was McCarey who shouted (in 1928 the audience couldn’t hear him), ‘Don’t move! Just don’t move! Stay like that!’ Seeing it now, all you get to look at is Hardy’s back, stock-still as you rock back and forth with the best kind of laughter – the kind you bring to the joke, participating in it with your imagination.

  The movies are a collaborative art, then – or, rather, they were a collaborative art then, back at a time when the audience didn’t feel left out. But this is to talk like a curmudgeon. Actually, there are more good, solid, humane, well-plotted, and well-acted movies being made now than ever before. Compare a densely textured political thriller like City Hall with the average FBI gangbusting melo of the forties – one of those movies in which the agents sneak up on the spies while a yelping commentator on the soundtrack tells you what they are doing (sneaking up on the spies). But there is no comparison. The movie business now is immeasurably more sophisticated than it used to be. Sophistication, however, is a two-edged sword. It abrades the innocent delight necessary for the making of, say, a screwball comedy. (Bogdanovich’s triumphant latter-day contribution to the genre – What’s Up, Doc? – is the surest testimony that we should put the best possible construction on everything that has happened to him since the death of Dorothy Stratten: only a man capable of deep love could celebrate a wild girl’s pilgrim soul with so much joy.) And, above all, it erodes the concept of a modest sufficiency. It ought not to – in almost any other field, the sophisticated rein themselves in – but in the movies it somehow does. People who have made small, intelligent movies dream of making big, dumb ones, persuading themselves that if all values except production values are left out some kind of artistic purity will accrue.

  So the creators get carried away. And they want to carry us away with them, but without giving us anything to hold on to except a train being chased by a helicopter through a tunnel. To adapt the famous words of Gertrude Stein, it is amazing how we are not interested. The hero couldn’t be doing that, even if it looks as if he were, so the only point of interest is how they worked the trick. Whereas in the old days, even if he didn’t especially look as if he were doing that, he could have been doing that. So we were with him, and we didn’t care how they worked the trick. We let them care. That was their job. They didn’t expect to have articles written about it, or to be interviewed – least of all in advance, before the movie was even finished. They worked from pride, but the pride was private. Somewhere in there is the difference between then and now. Then we participated in the movie without participating in its making. Now it’s the other way around, and now will pretty soon become intolerable if we don’t remember then. This book will help, like all of Bogdanovich’s other books.

  It might even help us remember his movies, which were marked from the beginning by a rare compassion for those blasted by fate. The great scene in his first great success, The Last Picture Show, was when Ben Johnson told the normal boys off for their ‘trashy behaviour’ in humiliating a halfwit. In one of his later movies, Mask, the director’s challenge, met with subtlety and grace, is to transmit the awful self-consciousness of a superior mind as its grotesque containing skull closes in on it. Bogdanovich’s understanding of fate’s unbiddably cruel workings is rare among filmmakers anywhere in the world and almost unheard-of in America. He seems to have been blessed with it from birth. But the blessing brought a curse with it. Fate came for him, too. The killing of the Unicorn left him inconsolable. Since then, he has been living a story so sadly strange that not even he could plausibly make a movie of it. One would like to believe that he doesn’t want to, since without a deep, literate conviction that the movies can’t do everything, he would have less of a gift for celebrating everything they have done.

  New Yorker, 7 July, 1997

  FRONT-PAGE MONARCHY

  PLAIN-CLOTHES POLICE STATE

  A hidden camera is far enough. Intercepted telephone calls were already far enough, but we were too fascinated with the results to be sufficiently disgusted by how they were obtained. The results obtained by the hidden camera are nothing remarkable, if you discount the good looks of the subject, which we knew about anyway. The manner by which those good looks were on this occasion recorded, however, was so repellent that even the tabloid editors – including, apparently, the editor of the Sunday Mirror, after his fellow editors rounded on him – finally realized that a line had been crossed, although none of them seemed to grasp that they had all crossed the same line years before. Thugs who had been making a good living beating up helpless victims suddenly discovered that one of their number had supplemented his bare hands with brass knuckles. ‘You fool,’ they cried, ‘don’t you realize it’s supposed to be fists?’

  One of the characteristics of the totalitarian mentality is to erect opportunism to the status of a principle. To describe the behaviour of a pack of not very bright journalists in totalitarian terms might sound extreme. But it is another kind of wishful thinking, and a dangerously misleading one, to suppose that totalitarian impulses don’t exist in a democracy. They are repressed, but they are there. One totalitarian impulse is to create a subhuman class which may be persecuted without compunction because it is beneath compassion. The moral squalor of French journalism under Nazi occupation was no sudden putrefaction. The rot set in with the Dreyfus case. Anti-Semitism polluted French journalism – even the higher, literary journalism – in a long process which had established the Jews as a special case well before the Nazis arrived to round them up.

  Mass murder was only the sudden physical translation of a long spiritual contempt which had been propagated in French journals. Some of the journalists were
not without talent. But they were without pity, and what had given their callousness free play was the principle of free speech. It was a cruel paradox.

  In Britain the same paradox now ensnares the famous. It takes a less cruel form, and is scarcely likely to have such a vile outcome; but while being careful not to diminish a great tragedy by equating it with something inherently more trivial, one can still suggest that there is an instructive comparison to be drawn. In recent years there has been a steadily growing tendency to treat the famous as if they were without the right to a private life – always an important step in depriving a group of human dignity, even if, as in this case, there is no further wish to deprive it of life itself. (Quite the opposite: to ensure a supply equal to the demand, the press is ready to help almost anyone become famous, if only to provide fodder for the style-file supplements that we all deplore even as we fight over the first look.)

  It can be said that with politicians and other public officials the private life and the public role are intertwined, so that everything they want concealed, even if it breaks no laws, should be open for inspection. (It was said, often, by Richard Ingrams of Private Eve, although when his turn came he was quick enough to decide that he had been a private citizen all along.) But the thin argument grows thinner still when it comes to those public figures who are famous for their achievements. Some of them seek publicity for all they do, and so should be ready to take the flak with the kudos; but clearly most do not, or, if they once did, learned better, holding, surely correctly, that the appreciation they attract is for their public performance, and that their private lives are their own business. Since most journalists obviously feel the same way about themselves, they know they are wrong to contend otherwise, but increasingly they have done so anyway, the contention growing more hysterical as its self-serving basis stands revealed. It has been years now since anyone prominent in any field could offer himself to be the subject of a profile without taking his life in his hands. By the time open season was declared on the Prince and Princess of Wales, bad faith among journalists had already whipped itself up into a righteous passion. It is often said in print, in the more august journals, that the royal family made a mistake in letting publicity into the Palace; but this is just a pious way of saying that they asked for it. The idea that they brought it on themselves is basic to the cast of mind which invents a subhuman class as a preparation for giving it the treatment. From the Peloponnesian war onwards, for the guards watching the prisoners starving in the rock quarry there has always been that consoling thought: It’s all their fault for letting us do this to them.

  The more august journals have had good sport in recent days pointing out that the less august ones are steeped in confusion, what with the Sun high-hatting the Mirror over tactics scarcely less questionable than its own. Posh editors ought to shed their delusions. To anyone on the receiving end of this stuff – which includes the public, who feel far closer to the Princess than to any editor – the press looks like one thing, and that thing is a juggernaut: oppressive, relentless and overwhelmingly nasty, a sort of plain-clothes police state. The cheap press stirs up the muck and the expensive press sifts through it, spreading it about so that everyone gets a whiff.

  This unfortunate vertical integration of grunge and informed comment is naturally best exemplified by the Murdoch papers, whose upper-echelon editors have long been obliged to pretend that their colleagues down in the yellow depths have nothing to do with them. Wehrmacht commanders who claimed to have got all the way from Berlin to Moscow and back again without noticing what the SS was up to were not believed. Those who did notice but said it wasn’t their responsibility deserved a hearing, but couldn’t complain if they were heard sceptically. Not that I hold, as some do, that Rupert Murdoch is an evil tyrant. My energetic compatriot is not to be dismissed so easily. He is a man of principle. But the principle is commercial. He has well-reasoned intellectual objections to any institution that can’t be quoted on the stock exchange. His broadsheet editors, however strong their illusion of independence, are perforce caught up in his heroic voyage to a future where no tradition, however hallowed, will restrain enterprise.

  But other broadsheet editors should be slow to assume that they aren’t at least partly in the same boat, even if they are kicking in the opposite direction to its drift. By discussing the mess that the tabloids have created, they can’t help but reinforce the impression that the press has turned into a remorseless machine for chewing up the private lives of eminent people and spitting out the pieces.

  Editors of responsible broadsheets and magazines, suitably horrified by this latest excess, nevertheless announce that a privacy law would be a cure more virulent than the disease. They are probably right, but could be surprised by the dearth of public outrage if such a law is brought in. Nobody outside the system really believes that voluntary curbs will work for long. Like Mr Murdoch’s sudden conversion to a decent reticence, they will be seen as a stratagem, a lull declared by the storm. The best answer would be for the posh papers to leave the pop papers strictly alone in their strange world of softcore pornography and freeze-frame soap opera. The pops would be less noxious if they were isolated. For that to happen, however, the political parties, and especially the Conservative Party, would have to stop cooperating with them. Hillary Clinton has never written a column for the National Enquirer. It is not pleasant for admirers of Virginia Bottomley’s sunny face to see it smiling above her byline in some festering rag featuring transsexual mud-wrestlers on the opposite page, and it was always a poser, when Lady Thatcher was in power, to see her keeping company with Woodrow Wyatt, considering the company he was keeping in the News of the World.

  Both in money and in votes it pays to slum, but the poisonous side-effect is to lend the junk papers legitimacy, and so foster the illusion that journalism is a profession, instead of what it is, a trade. Plumbing is a trade because the man who fixes your tap and the man who wrecks your sink are both called plumbers. Medicine is a profession because the man who takes out your diseased kidney is called a doctor and the man who takes out your healthy one and sells it is called a criminal. The solidarity between good and bad journalists is illusory. It would help if they were not all so keen to sit down together at such functions as the annual What the Papers Say luncheon, which I myself lost the urge to attend when I realized that I might inadvertently clink glasses with the editor who helped to kill Russell Harty.

  Splitting the quality press from the trash press would not be easy, especially within the Murdoch empire as at present constituted, but if it could be done it would at least have the benefit of resolving the permanent identity crisis of Peter McKay, who fills half his column in one kind of paper lamenting the fatigue induced by reading about the Princess of Wales in the other kind of paper, to which he himself regularly contributes on the subject of the Princess of Wales. Ben Jonson would have made him the hero of a play. Kinder spirits would put him out of his misery.

  Meanwhile the Princess of Wales is in hers, and the Prince along with her, if I know him. I do know him to speak to, and her too, but in both cases the speaking acquaintance will undoubtedly evaporate when this piece comes out, because both of them must have long ago grown sick of having their relationship talked about in the press, and the press definitely includes this part of the press talking about that part of the press. But with the damage done, I might as well throw in my two cents’ worth, to go with the million dollars’ worth of unsolicited advice that the sundered twain are inundated with every day. I think that the Prince and Princess of Wales, much as they both loathe what press intrusiveness has done to them since their separation, have rather underestimated its role in driving them apart in the first place, and that if they could put some of the blame where it belongs, instead of all of it on each other, they might be persuaded to get back together behind the barricades, if only to put up a fight against this monster before it consumes the rest of us.

  The monster is not republicanism, but press
intrusion into private life. As it happens, I am for the monarchy, but only as a preference. In my own homeland, Australia, the alleged tide of republicanism is already flowing the other way, largely because the people have begun to remember that Prime Minister Keating, who is so certain about Australia’s future as a self-assertive nation state, was once equally certain, when he was Treasurer, about its future as an economic miracle. The benefits of retaining an off-shore, cost-free head of state who is out of politics and sets a limit to ambition have begun to sink in, helped by the stridency of the abolitionists, whose personal aspirations are all too apparent.

  Even if Australia were to go republican, however, the monarchy here, though it would be badly damaged, would probably survive. It will probably survive even if the Prince and Princess of Wales divorce, although if the explosion propels young William early to a tottering throne he won’t thank his parents for giving him a broken home as a prelude. What might or might not happen to the monarchy, however, is not the main reason why these two should renew their alliance. The main reason – and this comes from conviction, not from mere preference – is that they have let the press define for them what a marriage is, and in so doing have made a mistake with potentially ruinous consequences for everybody.