Those were legitimate feelings for 1972. One had spent a large fraction of a life by then watching TV, and one had long ago had the education of putting oneself on shows. Back in ’53 and ’54, however, stoned on pot, wafted up and down on Seconal, jammed with ambition, terror, and the common lust to learn the secrets of the world some easy way, the immersion into TV was profound. By it, one could study the world, and the tricks of the world.
So, for instance, would he examine people as strange to him as Igor Cassini, who had a show in those years for snobs and it was hard as fiberglass. TV proved to be more interesting then, for you could see a genuine article regularly, well-groomed, Republican, rich enough to own horses, sexy enough to marry up, and empty enough to find any topic of conversation amusing provided it was void of content. Those were Igor Cassini’s guests. Mailer would on such occasions peer right into the tube to get a little nearer to the novelistic wealth.
Or: studying the tourist, he learned much about American fellatio. TV was scintillating for that. Next to the oil of Dynaflow and the spiral in the washing machine came the phallic immanence of the microphone. A twinkle would light up in Steve Allen’s eye as he took the mike and cord down the aisle and in and out of impromptu interviews with his audience, snaking the rounded knob right up to the mouth of some starched skinny Middle West matron, lean as whipcord, tense as rectitude, a life of iron disciplines in the vertical wrinkles of the upper lip; the lady would bare her teeth in a snarl and show a shark’s mouth as she brought her jaws around to face and maybe bite off that black dob of a knob so near to touching her tongue.
A high school girl would be next, there with the graduating class on a trip to New York, her folks watching back home. She would swoon before the mike. She could not get her mouth open. She would keep dodging in her seat, and Steve would stay in pursuit, mike extended. Two nights ago she dodged for two hours in the back seat of a car. My God, this was in public. She just wouldn’t take hold of the mike.
A young housewife, liberal, sophisticated, happy to present her congenial point of view, compliments Mr. Allen on the quality of his show. “We watch you regularly, Steve, and like to think we’re not too far behind the times up in Norfolk, Connecticut. That’s right, Norfolk, not Norwalk.” Her mouth, which has regular lips, is held a regular distance from the microphone. She has been ready to accept. She shows no difficulty with it, no more than she would have with a phallus; two fingers and a thumb keep the thing canted right. There can be nothing wrong, after all, in relations between consenting adults. So speaks her calm.
Then there is a big heavy-set man who owns a grain-and-feed store in Ohio. He prides himself on imperturbable phlegm, and some thrift with words. He is not quite aware of the mike. If a man came into his store and proceeded to expose himself, this proprietor would not see it right away. He might, after all, be explaining the merits and demerits of one feed-mix to another; since he chews no gum when he walks, neither does he offer attention to tangentia as he talks. Now, singled out from the audience to be interviewed, he is stiffnecked, and responds only from that side of his mouth adjacent to the cheek on which Steve is asking the questions; he allows, “New York is a good place to visit, but, yessir, I’ll be glad to start up for home,” then, bla-looh! he sees it, black blimp-like little object! he blinks, he swallows, he looks at Steve: “I guess I’ve had my say, Mr. Allen,” he says, and shuts up shop. Later he will tell a pinochle partner about the crazy people in New York. “Yes,” the friend will acknowledge.
“You bet, Steve,” says the next fellow. “I’m awfully glad you selected me. I’ve always wanted to talk to you.” He is fully aware of the mike and what it portends. “Yes, yes, I’m a male secretary, love the work.” “It doesn’t bother you,” asks Steve, “if people say, ‘What is that, a male secretary, isn’t it supposed to be women’s work?’ ” “Oh, Steve, that doesn’t bother me a bit. Here,” he says, reaching for the mike. “Do you mind? I’m much more comfortable when I hold it.”
“Help yourself,” says Steve.
“Oh, I intend to,” says the guest. “Life is a feast, and I think we should all get what we can, don’t you?”
FILM
The making of my first underground movie probably had a good bit to do with the decision many months later to treat myself as the third-person protagonist of The Armies of the Night. When I sat down to write the book, I had already edited Wild 90, in which I was the leading character. Since there had been way too much of me in the rushes, I had come to see myself as a piece of yard goods about which one could ask “Where can I cut this?” The habit of looking at myself as if I were someone other than myself—a character ready to be described in the third person—had already been established. Parenthetically, I think it’s also a way of getting your psychiatry on the cheap. I’ve never gone to an analyst—I always felt it was not wise to look for the taproot—but I have certainly been more balanced after the years it took in the editing room to extract one hundred minutes of underground movie film from forty-five hours of sound-on-film—Maidstone, my failed cinematic masterpiece!
Movies are more likely than literature to reach deep feelings in people. Movies are more primitive, or so I would argue. Film delves into deeper states of consciousness. People who can’t read are quite able to reach profound reactions in the dark of a theatre. I would also say that to the degree film reaches us in a precise way, it’s not very good. Film is best when ambiguous. A truly good film will affect two people profoundly, but often, they will argue for hours over the message. For one, it’s a satire, to the other, a tragedy. That’s as it should be. Film should reach so far inside the psyche that one person will react in horror even as another is laughing his head off. That’s good film. Bad film is when everybody laughs on cue, for then they are being manipulated. They have entered the engines of manipulation of the powertrip institutions.
Time is your money in a film—literally, it’s your money. If you, as the director, don’t finish a scene scheduled to be done by lunch, then you are going to come back after lunch and possibly lose not half an hour or an hour but two hours. So you’re gambling to finish the scene before the break, even if you’re not wholly satisfied with the result. Then you find out in the dailies if your gamble was too costly. The scene brought in before lunch needed one more setup. Making movies, you’re absolutely in the world. You’re a gambler. Whereas in literature, you withdraw from the world in order to perceive it. So movie directing uses another, even opposite, side of yourself from writing. I think you can get closer to your soul in a book, but you come to appreciate the effective or ineffective working of your psyche with a movie. Let me amplify this if I can. In writing a book, there are exceptional moments when you feel as if you’re beaming a flood lamp down into the abyss of your soul. By the light of your intuition, you do, in the course of writing a novel, get out to some astonishing places. But when you are making a film, particularly after you’ve shot it and start editing it, you have to look at the same scene over and over in order to clean out little dead spots. Makes you feel like a surgeon. What it also involves is your taste, and your concentration. Seeing one piece of film over and over, you must still keep your taste alive even as you exercise your ability to concentrate again and again upon the same material. Since I am the one who wrote “Repetition kills the soul,” I thought of that remark more than once while working with the movie editor. Of course, it was not meaningless repetition. Rather, I was altering the given a little each time.
All this is easy. Much too easy. What is more to the point is that you can lose your mind looking for the point. When it comes to understanding film, we can feel with some justice that we are still at the edge of an aesthetic continent all but uncharted.
The piece that follows, taken from an exposition of my motives in trying to make Maidstone, is, I believe, as good as anything I’ve done in criticism. If your reaction on reading it comes down to “Why is he making it so complicated? I just want to enjoy movies,” then let us salut
e each other and part on mutual terms, since I am obviously not the writer for you.
Perhaps a thousand actors and two thousand films can be cited where the movie frame comes alive and there is no dip at the foot of consciousness because something is false at the root. Nonetheless any such appearance of talent was close to magic. The conventional way of making most films usually guaranteed its absence. For there was an element which interfered with motion pictures as much as the blurring of print would hinder the reading of a book, and this flaw derived from the peculiar misapprehension with which the silent film gave way to sound, the supposition that sound-and-film was but an extension of the theatre, even as the theatre was but an extension of literature. It was assumed that movies were there to tell a story. The story might derive from the stage or from the pages of a book or even from an idea for a story, but the film was asked to issue from a detailed plan, which would have lines of dialogue. The making of the movie would be a fulfillment of that script, that literary plan; so each scene would be shaped like a construction unit to build the architecture of the story. It was one of those profoundly false assumptions which seem at the time absolute common sense, yet it was no more natural than to have insisted that a movie was a river and one should always experience, while watching a film, emotions analogous to an afternoon spent on the banks of a stream. That might have been seen instantly as confining, a most confining notion; but to consider the carryover of the story from literature to the film as equally constricting—no, that was not very evident.
For few people wished to contemplate the size of the job in transporting a novelist’s vision of life over to a film; indeed, who in the movie business was going to admit that once literary characters had been converted over to actors, they could not possibly produce the same relation to other actors that the characters once had to each other? Interpretations had to collide. If each actor had his own idea of the dialogue he committed to memory, be certain the director had a better idea. And the producer! Lifetimes of professional craft go into halving such conceptual differences. The director gives up a little of his interpretation, then a little more, then almost all of it. The actor is directed away from his favorite misconceptions (and conceptions). Both parties suffer the rigor mortis of the technical conditions—which are not so close to a brightly lit operating theatre as to a brightly lit morgue. Then the scriptwriter has dependably delivered the scenario with his own private—and sometimes willful—idea buried in it (and if the work is an adaptation, odd lines of the novelist are still turning over). The coherence of the original novel has been cremated and strewn. Now the film is being made with conflicting notions of those scattered ashes. Of course the director is forced back willy-nilly to his script. It is all he can finally depend upon. Given the fundamental, nay, even organic, confusion on a movie set over what everybody is really doing, the company has to pool all differences and be faithful to the script even when the script has lost any relation to the original conception, and has probably begun to constrict the real life which is beginning to emerge on the set. No wonder great novels invariably make the most disappointing movies, and modest novels (like The Asphalt Jungle) sometimes make very good movies. It is because the original conception in modest novels is less special and so more capable of being worked upon by any number of other writers, directors, and actors.
Still, the discussion has been too narrow. The film, after all, is fed not only by literature but by the theatre, and the theatre is a conspicuous example of how attractively a blueprint can be unfolded. In fact, the theatre is reduced to very little whenever the collaboration between actors and script is not excellent. Yet the theatre has had to put up with many a similar difficulty. Can it be said that something works in the theatre which only pretends to work in the film? If the first error perpetrated upon movies has been to see them as an adjunct of literature, perhaps the second is the rush to make film an auxiliary of the theatrical arts, until even movies considered classics are hardly more than pieces of filmed theatre.
Of course a film lover could counter by saying that he was not necessarily thinking only of such monuments as Gone with the Wind when he used the term classic. In fact, he would inquire about A Night at the Opera or The Maltese Falcon.
The difficulties had obviously begun. The Marx Brothers, for example, stampeded over every line of a script and tore off in enough directions to leave concepts fluttering like ticker tape on the mysterious nature of the movie art. Certainly, any attempt to declare The Maltese Falcon a piece of filmed theatre would have to confess that The Maltese Falcon was more, a mysterious ineffable possession of “more” and that was precisely what one looked for in a film. It was a hint to indicate some answer to the secrets of film might begin to be found in the curious and never quite explained phenomenon of the movie star. For Humphrey Bogart was certainly an element of natural film, yes, even the element which made The Maltese Falcon more than an excellent piece of filmed theatre. Thinking of the evocative aesthetic mists of that movie, how could the question not present itself: Why did every piece of good dramatic theatre have to be the enemy of the film? It was unhappily evident that any quick and invigorating theses on the character of movie stars and the hidden nature of the movie might have to wait for a little exposition on the special qualities of theatre.
A complex matter. You might, for instance, have to take into account why people who think it comfortable to be nicely drunk at the beginning of a play would find it no pleasure to go to a movie in the same condition. Pot was more congenial for a film. If the difference for most hardworking actors between movies and theatre seemed hardly more than a trip across a crack, the split to any philosopher of the film was an abyss, just that same existential abyss which lies between booze and the beginnings of the psychedelic.
Existentially, theatre and film were in different dominions (and literature was probably nearer to each of them than they were to each other). The theatre was a ceremony with live priests who had learned by rote to pool their aesthetic instincts for a larger purpose. So theatre partook of a near obscene ceremony: It imitated life in a living place, and it had real people as the imitators. Such imitation was either sacrilege to the roots of life, or a reinforcement of them. Certainly, sentiments called religious appeared ready to arise whenever a group of people attended a ceremony in a large and dimly lit place. But in fact anyone who has ever experienced a moment of unmistakable balance between the audience, the cast, the theatre, and the manifest of the play, an awe usually remarked by a silence palpable as the theatrical velvet of an unvoiced echo, knows that the foundation of the theatre is in the church and in the power of kings, or at least knows (if theatre goes back to blood sacrifices performed in a cave—which is about where the most advanced theatre seems ready to go) that the more recent foundations were ecclesiastical and royal. Theatre, at all of its massive best, can be seen as equal to a ceremony, performed by noblemen who have power to chastise an audience, savage them, dignify them, warm them, marry their humors, even create a magical forest where each human on his seat is a tree and every sense is vibrating to the rustle of other leaves. One’s roots return then to some lost majesty of pomp and power. Of course, theatre is seldom so good. None of us have had a night like that recently. Still, theatre has its minutes. While the actor is engaged in an emotional transaction which is false by its nature (because he knows by heart the lines of apparently spontaneous passion he will say next), still he has to be true to the honest difficulty of not knowing whether the audience will believe him or not. His position on stage is existential—he cannot know in advance if his effort will succeed or not. In turn, the audience must respect him. For he is at the least brave enough to dare their displeasure. And if he is bad enough … well, how can he forget old nightmares where audiences kill actors? So the actor on stage is at once a fraud (because he pretends to emotion he cannot by any Method feel absolutely—or he would be mad) and yet is a true man engaged in a tricky venture, dangerous in its potentialities for humilia
tion. That is the strength of the theatre. A vision of life somewhat different each night (because each audience is different) comes into existence between the actors and the theatregoers. What has been lost in the playwright’s vision is sometimes transcended by the mood of a high theatrical hearth.
We are speaking of course only of the best and freshest plays. Even in a good play something dies about the time an actor recognizes that he can be mediocre in his performance and survive. The reputation of the play has become so useful that the audience has become a touch mediocre as well; at this point in the season the actor inevitably becomes as interesting as a whore in a house after her favorite client has gone for the night.
The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing Page 21