The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  In his coy way, Brando would say, “Last Tango in Paris received a lot of praise, though I always thought it was excessive. Pauline Kael in particular praised it highly, but I think her review revealed more about her than about the movie.” By 1972, film critics had become deserving, too. They had a voice and their own desire, and in her way, Kael was as ready to go naked as Maria Schneider. That’s why she was so cheerful about Jeanne in the film:

  Maria Schneider’s freshness—Jeanne’s ingenuous corrupt innocence—gives the film a special radiance. When she lifts her wedding dress to her waist, smiling coquettishly as she exposes her pubic hair, she’s in a great film tradition of irresistibly naughty girls. She has a movie face—open to the camera, and yet no more concerned about it than a plant or a kitten.

  Kael was so readable. But even in 1972, I think, more anguish or confusion was showing, and being felt in the dark. Maria Schneider died on February 3, 2011. She was fifty-eight, and hers wasn’t a movie face anymore. She had done drugs and had breakdowns and had not made many films—though she is excellent in Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975). There’s no need to make her into a forlorn icon, or another Marilyn, but still, the pattern cannot be denied—it goes from William Holden to Maria Schneider—that being the object of intense, impossible desire can suck your life away. Perhaps it has a similar effect on us in the dark.

  The test of how to determine what we were seeing was becoming increasingly complex, and the alleged process of education was lumbering along behind the serene technological innovations and the unruly cultural departures. In most big cities, by the early 1970s, you could see “serious” pictures that involved sex and nudity—films such as Midnight Cowboy and Carnal Knowledge—where, more or less, the artistic conscience of the works was actually adhering to one old Production Code tenet: that if you were going to show extramarital sex, you had to make clear it was no fun and a lot of anguish. But around the corner, in officially designated red-light districts, you might get Warhol’s Blue Movie (1969), the Swedish I Am Curious Yellow (1967), Behind the Green Door (1972), or Deep Throat (1972). The overlap of taste and tastelessness was becoming more challenging. And the inherent disorder of experience was forcing its way into our systems of seeing.

  In Pierrot le Fou (1965) there is a moment when the lost lovers, Ferdinand and Marianne, have met again. She takes him back to her place, and it is clear that they have slept together, though Godard does not show us that. But here’s what happens the morning after, as she makes a little breakfast for her man:

  Long shot of the other room, Marianne enters from the patio roof and goes and pours the water from one pan into another. She opens the door of a fridge, looking over her shoulder anxiously all the time to the left. The camera pans with her as she moves left, passing a photograph of Tshombe and a Modigliani painting. She bends down at the side of a double bed on the left of the room and, as she takes a breakfast tray from the bed, we see for the first time the body of a man lying face downwards. A pair of scissors is embedded in his neck. His shirt is covered with blood. She picks up the tray, as if the body did not exist.

  Then, as Ferdinand eats his breakfast, she sings a love song to him.

  In Godard’s coolest manner, the adjacencies are never explained, but the film and Godard’s whole approach know that the cut has entered into our sensibility in a new way—things are simultaneous but irrational, until we begin to appreciate that the rhythm of experience and the impossible challenge of understanding are embodied in this kind of tranquillized shock cut. Pierrot le Fou feels like the audacity of a new artistic vision, but when we watched television, it was also a function of that neglected but radical breakthrough, the remote control (which became generally available in the late 1970s). It wasn’t long before a kid on his own sofa could travel through the multiplying range of American TV channels, observing the gravity of Walter Cronkite reporting on some trouble spot and mismatching it with the hollow earnestness of a daytime soap opera, going to third and ten in one more “big game,” to Johnny Carson being wry about it all, to an airy ideal kitchen where a pretty housewife with a great hairdo and porno eyes was offering a Butterball turkey, to floodwater lapping in Arkansas, to some strange studio fabrication where another Butterball turkey might fall at the feet of a man looking like Richard M. Nixon, who looked up and said, “Sock it to Me!” while a daffy blonde in a bikini and bodypaint shimmied past him.

  At first television had been hard to see; then we stopped bothering, and treated it as radio with pictures. The awesome power of the imagery of movies, the way it monopolized us, was traded away. Did we prefer to relax? And yet I remember and treasure certain television programs, and here I cannot extinguish the experience of being British until 1975.

  Many of the attitudes in BBC broadcasting were still paternalistic. But just because the system was saying “these things are good for you” didn’t always preclude their benefits. So I recall four “educational” series that had profound effects: Civilisation, “a personal view” by the art historian Kenneth Clark (1969); America (1972), “a personal history” by Alistair Cooke; The Ascent of Man (1973), yet another “personal view,” by Jacob Bronowski; and The World at War, produced by Jeremy Isaacs (1973–74)—and done on ITV, the commercial television channel. Still, in a concession to taste, the episode that dealt with the concentration camps was not interrupted by commercials.

  The BBC series (sometimes with Time-Life as a publishing partner) stressed the personal touch but came loaded with authority. All three shows had an on-camera host or professor, and those three men were immaculate performers, even if Clark might have been created by Trollope, Cooke by Scott Fitzgerald, and Bronowski by Primo Levi. The series were expensive productions that won high viewing figures and led to bestselling books. They were filmed with an absolute confidence in the documentary process and an approach to it that belonged to the 1930s: look at this, it’s the real thing and it’s amazing, whether it’s a painting by Titian, the Hoover Dam, or the soil at Auschwitz. But it worked, and the “personal view” was eclipsed by the epic scale and institutional thrust of the programming. Moreover, this was a documentary confidence and a television showmanship that did not seem to exist in America, though the series all played well in the United States.

  The BBC soon fell upon the idea of the nation’s classic or semiclassic literature. A series of novels by John Galsworthy was adapted by producer Donald Wilson into a twenty-six-part series that played in 1967 as The Forsyte Saga. In fact, the story had made a dull 1949 movie, That Forsyte Woman, with Greer Garson and Errol Flynn. The material was novelettish, but the BBC produced it with meticulous period detail, accomplished acting (Eric Porter was a notable Soames), and the same confidence that had inspired the educational series. By the last episode, the British audience was eighteen million (over a third of the nation). In turn, the series was shown in America on the new Public Broadcasting System, started in 1967, and that would lead to a years-long parade, Masterpiece Theatre (launched in 1971), introduced on camera by Alistair Cooke in a comfortable library/salon set. You can always trust a masterpiece.

  All of this may make Britain of the late 1960s seem a staid and settled country. The truth was more complicated. British television had created a live Saturday night show (hosted by the newcomer David Frost), That Was the Week That Was (1962), which provided a satirical look at the news, and found a surprisingly large audience at the end of Saturday evenings. The drama format that still regarded its material as “plays” presented Cathy Come Home (1966), a story about working-class people thrown out of their home and at risk of losing their child. This was written by Jeremy Sandford, directed by Ken Loach, and produced by Tony Garnett, and its neorealist treatment of unhappy lives in Britain got an audience of twelve million (playing right after the news and, in some eyes, deliberately confusing fact and fiction). It was not as “nice” or as well furnished as The Forsyte Saga, but people watched and seemed to be troubled by the point of it all.

  T
here was a wide range of comedy on British television—Tony Hancock, Morecambe and Wise, Benny Hill, and then, in 1969, the BBC gave a modest go-ahead to a show that ended up being called Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It was surreal, elitist, essentially made out of university talent and writing; it was startlingly amateur and irreverent; but it ran four years, and still plays all over American cable television. Moreover, it was a show permitted to hijack the BBC’s standard logo of the day—a revolving globe used to separate different programs—to convey the delightful threat that the whole of the BBC, the whole medium, might be taken over by this dementia.

  So, at that time, there was never any question about the chance for “quality” work on British television, or educational value. The careers of the writer Dennis Potter and, filmmakers Alan Clarke, Stephen Frears, and Tony Palmer were in many respects television achievements. Moreover, British television regularly flirted with programs that might be banned, such as Peter Watkins’s 1965 film on a world after nuclear war, The War Game. The young Ken Russell was doing his best work in a series of dramatized portraits of artists: these included films on Elgar, Debussy (with Oliver Reed playing the composer), and Delius. More than that, the BBC had the apparatus and the will—most notably in a live show called Late Night Line-Up (begun in 1964)—to examine itself. As the last show at night, it could run for as long as the talk was worth it—sometimes longer.

  I don’t mean to call American television a wasteland. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1967–73) was a Hollywood equivalent of Monty Python—fragmented, impulsive, satirical, and based on the inherent craziness of TV’s vulnerability to self-interruption. There had always been comics of high daring—Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, Jackie Gleason, the Smothers Brothers (canceled by CBS because their satire was too “dangerous”). There were sit-coms such as All in the Family (actually derived from a British series), and shows that commanded great affection and delivered the same amount of reassurance: the Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore shows, The Waltons, The Rockford Files…Shows without end that worked off comfortable star personalities—such as James Garner, who had never quite made it in the movies (Garner’s all-time coup may still be the Polaroid commercials he did with Mariette Hartley)—and that reiterated standards of personal and public morality stale for decades but likely to facilitate the digestion of the advertising funding the show.

  There was very little documentary, next to no open-ended talk, and hardly any purpose-made drama after the first wave of live productions in the 1950s. Instead, there was a remorseless supply of series fiction (sitcoms, Westerns, crime stories) that usually came out of television studios in the Los Angeles area, where different genres actually followed the same rutted narrative tracks. There were some interesting talk shows: The Tonight Show had smart guests who were sometimes given a chance to talk, and there was the opportunity of beholding or being with Johnny Carson. There was also Dick Cavett, bright enough to appreciate rare talent and let it talk; he once had Jed Harris on for five nights in a row (but maybe you don’t know now who Harris was).

  There are at least two other American television events of the highest order. One is the steady newscast coverage of the war in Vietnam, with color from 1965 onward—which meant red blood. At that stage, the government was still too innocent to restrict or “embed” journalistic coverage of the war. Cameras might go wherever their operators were brave enough to be, and the networks took on the challenge of the coverage. It was regarded as a turning point when Walter Cronkite (the CBS anchor) declared in 1968 that he feared the war was unwinnable. Liberals would later argue that the TV coverage helped take away confidence in the war—helped end it, even. The proof is elusive. Another reading is available: that a steady viewing of slaughter may habituate or numb the viewer. For if television seldom seems “beautiful” (in the way of movies), can it ever get ugly? If it’s always “on,” doesn’t that encourage the thought that its material is not quite our concern? Does the mass really want to make trouble? Or does its unease explain the media diet of reassurance? It’s easier to worry about body odor than world hunger.

  On the other hand, the prolonged and often tedious TV coverage of the various Watergate hearings seemed compulsory viewing. There had never been anything like it before, and it was a tempting mix of the news and a courtroom drama. (In other words, did it risk becoming a show, as opposed to a real event with consequences and responsibilities?) Nearly forty years later, can we credit American television as an ongoing education on “the news” in which the public’s critical faculty has been honed?

  In fact, by the late 1970s, many enlightened and responsible writers were troubled by television, and most of them were the parents of children who might be spending five to seven hours a day with the small screen. One of the most striking expressions of anxiety was Jerry Mander’s book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (published in 1977)—it was much to the point that Mander came from the advertising business. But as a man of the TV age, informed by brainwave research on how television was a passive experience while reading was active, Mander headlined his arguments. Here they are:

  As humans have moved into totally artificial environments, our direct contact with and knowledge of the planet has been snapped. Disconnected, like astronauts floating in space, we cannot know up from down or truth from fiction. Conditions are appropriate for the implantation of arbitrary realities. Television is one recent example of this, a serious one, since it greatly accelerates the problem.

  It is no accident that television has been dominated by a handful of corporate powers. Neither is it accidental that television has been used to re-create human beings into a new form that matches the artificial, commercial environment. A conspiracy of technological and economic factors made this inevitable and continue to.

  Television technology produces neuro-physiological responses in the people who watch it. It may create illness, it certainly produces confusion and submission to external imagery. Taken together, the effects amount to conditioning for autocratic control.

  Along with the venality of its controllers, the technology of television predetermines the boundaries of its content. Some information can be conveyed completely, some partially, some not at all. The most effective telecommunications are the gross, simplified linear messages and programs which conveniently fit the purposes of the medium’s commercial controllers. Television’s highest potential is advertising. This cannot be changed. The bias is inherent in the technology.

  Mander’s book may be as rarely retrieved now as the name Jed Harris (the most famous American stage director of the 1920s and ’30s, and a phenomenal bastard). But it’s hard to read his warnings without an extra chill sinking in as we project his concerns forward to the age of the Internet. The only thing that seems dated or nostalgic—I hope I’m being ironic instead of tragic—is his note of distress. (We have had to learn Godard’s cool: if there’s a bloody corpse in the room next to where our lover is waiting for breakfast, try not to notice it.)

  A couple of years after Mander’s book, while teaching at Dartmouth, I sought to introduce a course called An Introduction to Television. If approved, it would be the first course at the school to consider that medium. This required describing the course to the Committee on Instruction. One member of that committee was Leonard Reiser, the provost at Dartmouth and a man who had been part of the Manhattan Project when younger. He heard my case and noted that I had said that television for some of our students was the central experience of their lives. In fact, I had suggested that while Dartmouth taught spelling, grammar, logic, and writing, it offered nothing that taught students to examine the experience of television or its ways of finessing “reality.” (I could have pointed out that Dartmouth’s neglect had already educated Pat Weaver, inventor of the Today and Tonight shows, and Grant Tinker, the head of Mary Tyler Moore Productions.) I didn’t say what I believed: that this instruction should have begun when the kids were five.

  But surely, asked Reiser, aren�
�t nuclear weapons the most profound shadow hanging over our students? I never want to minimize the Bomb, but I replied that while “it” was undoubtedly up there, out there, a threat and a shadow, the television was “on” six hours a day. It was a moment when I realized what could have been grasped earlier: While the movies might be great or satisfying, they were no longer what the world was really looking at. We were looking at screens.

  So, in 1967, on television we were still turning on for Bonanza, The Red Skelton Hour, The Andy Griffith Show, The Lucy Show (minus Desi now), The Jackie Gleason Show, Green Acres, Daktari, Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies—were we living in a rest home? Or a place trying to ignore the actual tumult of the United States?

  Or you could go see Bonnie and Clyde and feel the blaze, the ringing gunfire, and the thrill of the big screen. This was a picture from Warner Bros., who once had owned gangster movies—but with this one the studio was at a loss, and doubly perplexed when it turned into a hit. The violence, the talk, the cars and the motor courts, the music, the blood, and the lipstick—all looked spiffily American. For Texas, they went on location to Texas. But it was a picture with French blood in its veins, too. Seen from this vantage it looks like an inspired throwback as well as the start of a new age.

  Robert Benton and David Newman were on the staff at Esquire under the editorship of Harold Hayes. In 1963 they saw Truffaut’s Jules and Jim in New York and felt that it deepened their excitement over Les Quatre Cents Coups and Tirez sur le Pianiste. There really was a stylistic urgency and a respect for behavioral daring in French films that put American cinema to shame in the somnolent season of Cleopatra, How the West Was Won, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. So it occurred to them to write an American script, one they might even offer to Truffaut. Benton recalled Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Texas outlaws of the early 1930s. His father had been to their funeral, and the son had grown up in Waxahachie, Texas, hearing stories of their exploits. The two men didn’t know how to write (or type) a script, so it ended up more like a treatment or a novella: “We described a scene, including camera shots…but we didn’t put dialogue in…The next day we would talk about the scene, and say, no, that’s all wrong, and if David had written it, I would take it home and rewrite it, and if I had written it, David would redo it.” They loved the freedom and speed of it all, and they told themselves that most American pictures were being planned to death.