The 60s
Page 60
It was Cuellar and Seaver again the next day, and this time the early homer was provided by Donn Clendenon—a lead-off shot to the visitors’ bullpen in the second. Seaver, who had not pitched well in two weeks, was at last back in form, and Baltimore manager Earl Weaver, trying to rattle him and to arouse his own dormant warriors, who had scored only one run in the past twenty-four innings, got himself ejected from the game in the third for coming onto the field to protest a called strike. Weaver had a longish wait in his office before his sacrifice took effect, but in the top of the ninth, with the score still 1–0 and the tension at Shea nearly insupportable, Frank Robinson and Boog Powell singled in succession. Brooks Robinson then lined into an out that tied the game but simultaneously won the World Series for the Mets. It was a low, sinking drive, apparently hit cleanly through between Agee and right fielder Ron Swoboda. Ron, who was playing in close, hoping for a play at the plate, took three or four lunging steps to his right, dived onto his chest, stuck out his glove, caught the ball, and then skidded on his face and rolled completely over; Robinson scored, but that was all. This marvel settled a lengthy discussion held in Gil Hodges’ office the day before, when Gil and several writers had tried to decide whether Agee’s first or second feat was the finest Series catch of all time. Swoboda’s was. Oh, yes—the Mets won the game in the tenth, 2–1, when Grote doubled and his runner, Rod Gaspar, scored all the way from second on J. C. Martin’s perfect pinch bunt, which relief pitcher Pete Richert picked up and threw on a collision course with Martin’s left wrist. My wife, sitting in the upper left-field stands, could not see the ball roll free in the glazy, late-afternoon dimness and thought that Martin’s leaping dance of joy on the base path meant that he had suddenly lost his mind.
So, at last, we came to the final game, and I don’t suppose many of us who had watched the Mets through this long and memorable season much doubted that they would win it, even when they fell behind, 0–3, on home runs hit by Dave McNally and Frank Robinson off Koosman in the third inning. Jerry steadied instantly, allowing only one single the rest of the way, and the Orioles’ badly frayed nerves began to show when they protested long and ineffectually about a pitch in the top of the sixth that they claimed had hit Frank Robinson on the leg, and just as long and as ineffectually about a pitch in the bottom of the sixth that they claimed had not hit Cleon Jones on the foot. Hodges produced this second ball from his dugout and invited plate umpire Lou DiMuro to inspect a black scuff on it. DiMuro examined the mark with the air of a Maigret and proclaimed it the true Shinola, and a minute later Donn Clendenon damaged another ball by hitting it against the left-field façade for a two-run homer. Al Weis, again displaying his gift for modest but perfect contingency, hit his very first Shea Stadium homer to lead off the seventh and tie up the game, and the Mets won it in the eighth on doubles by Jones and Swoboda and a despairing but perfectly understandable Oriole double error at first base, all good for two runs and the famous 5–3 final victory.
· · ·
I had no answer for the question posed by that youngster in the infield who held up—amid the crazily leaping crowds, the showers of noise and paper, the vermillion smoke-bomb clouds, and the vanishing lawns—a sign that said “WHAT NEXT?” What was past was good enough, and on my way down to the clubhouses it occurred to me that the Mets had won this great Series with just the same weapons they had employed all summer—with the Irregulars (Weis, Clendenon, and Swoboda had combined for four homers, eight runs batted in, and an average of .400); with fine pitching (Frank Robinson, Powell, and Paul Blair had been held to one homer, one RBI, and an average of .163); with defensive plays that some of us would remember for the rest of our lives; and with the very evident conviction that the year should not be permitted to end in boredom. Nothing was lost on this team, not even an awareness of the accompanying sadness of the victory—the knowledge that adulation and money and the winter disbanding of this true club would mean that the young Mets were now gone forever. In the clubhouse (Moët et Chandon this time), Ron Swoboda said it precisely for the TV cameras: “This is the first time. Nothing can ever be as sweet again.”
Later, in his quiet office, Earl Weaver was asked by a reporter if he hadn’t thought that the Orioles would hold on to their late lead in the last game and thus bring the Series back to Baltimore and maybe win it there. Weaver took a sip of beer and smiled and said, “No, that’s what you can never do in baseball. You can’t sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You’ve got to throw the ball over the goddam plate and give the other man his chance. That’s why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”
A NOTE BY ADAM GOPNIK
TWO ARCS OF ambition, both still very much in motion today, arrived in New Yorker criticism in the 1960s. First, its brow got pushed ever higher, taking in erudite and even academic voices and manners. What twenty years earlier would have been seen as material for The Partisan Review became, in the sixties, material for the one-time “comic weekly,” as a Harold Rosenberg or a Hannah Arendt found a home in the magazine’s pages.
The other phenomenon, one set seemingly at right angles, though in truth part of the same process, was that the magazine became ever more attentive to pop culture, its pleasures and its discontents. If the “middlebrow” was the great problem of the fifties—how to respond to the spread of high art previously limited to a self-approving, educated audience—the “pop” question had the same force in the sixties: how could you talk intelligently about television and the movies and, above all, the new rock music? The question wasn’t treating them with seriousness. The trick was finding the right kind of seriousness to treat them with.
And so the tone of our shared sentences—most of what really matters in criticism—became oddly both more polemical and more personal. It became more polemical because there were now arguments to make rather than just attitudes to register; more personal because the only way to give those arguments the shapeliness and grace demanded by a magazine always meant to be read for pleasure in the first instance was to find ways to fill them with “voice,” personal address. Both new sounds captured a sense that the stakes mattered more than before. So we found passionate polemics, making the case against passionate polemics, or both sides of the case for sex onstage made by competing critics, with our own Brendan Gill taking on our own Kenneth Tynan over Oh! Calcutta!
The newly arrived movie critic Pauline Kael brought the most influential and distinctive voice to emerge in that decade, and her work, reread, continues to prove that a great critic can be interesting about anything while being wrong about everything. Though she went after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with a hatchet, it remains a legendary entertainment even today. Still, her tone taught a generation a new way to argue over such things: passionately, intelligently, unfairly, at length.
Rock music was the great event of the time, but it was not the only event: we can read both Whitney Balliett’s matchlessly precise registry of the sounds of jazz at sunset—a vibraphone that “suggests a bedspring swinging in the wind”—and Ellen Willis’s hyper-astute analysis of the coming of age of rock music, a piece whose first sentence includes, significantly, the word “sociology.” (Rock was not all sociology, but the social life of rock, she knew, was a huge part of its artistic presence.)
In the midst of it all, John Updike kept his almost unreal charm and almost Shakespearean serenity of tone. Yet the charm and serenity did not conceal his increasing seriousness of purpose. The light poet who had written in the fifties of usherettes and Harry Truman here began to take on, one by one, the austere masters of modernism and what was only becoming to be known as postmodernism, where “literature—that European empire augmented with translations from remote kingdoms—is now the only world capable of housing and sustaining new literature.” If literature were to be locked forever in that hall of mirrors, what might happen to criticism? Well, the best of it reminds us that criticism remained in the sixties, as before, just writing, with
the same difficulties, and the same delights.
ROGER ANGELL
FEBRUARY 11, 1961 (BREATHLESS)
IN AN ART medium whose potentials appear to be almost continuously beyond the reach of its practitioners, a masterwork is likely to be handicapped by excessive praise. Since there is no help for this that I can see, I must risk injuring a French film called Breathless (created by the New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard) by saying quickly that it is far and away the most brilliant, most intelligent, and most exciting movie I have encountered this season. Its virtues are so numerous and so manifest that I am confident not only that it will survive the small burden of my superlatives but that it will be revisited almost instantly by many of its viewers, that it will be imitated endlessly, and probably ineptly, by dozens of film-makers, and that it may even threaten the Kennedys as the warmest topic of local conversation for weeks to come.
The adventurous, almost inconsequential story of Breathless deals with a Parisian cool cat who steals cars for a living. In the short time span of the movie, he murders a policeman and begins a casual, painfully erratic flight from the authorities, in the course of which he attempts to collect a shady debt, offhandedly commits a mugging and two or three car thefts, and recommences a love affair with a pretty but equally unadmirable American girl, who betrays him to the police. Lacking even the tiny moral energy to attempt escape, he is shot down, and the film ends. This, of course, sounds like a routine policier, but it is immediately evident that M. Godard and his associates have something vastly more fascinating in mind, which is nothing less than to make comprehensible, and therefore touching and serious, the lives of two disorderly, disconnected, nihilistic young moderns—and to do so, moreover, by seeing and hearing their unlovely world with exactly the same nervous glances and flighty inattentiveness that they themselves must rely on. To say that the film almost entirely succeeds in this awesome undertaking may explain why, in my estimation, it achieves the heights and confirms the men of the New Wave as the makers of a powerful new tradition in the art of the film.
The camera in Breathless, which was wielded by Raoul Coutard, is jumpy, fluid, irritable, and comic—alive with glimpses, sudden turns, rude stares, and angry changes of mood. It moves in and about the boulevards and side streets and bars and bedrooms of Paris, pausing to glance at every distraction and ridiculous detail with which city people fill their days. The microphone is equally irresponsible, picking up horns, sirens, scraps of music, and fragments of conversation that add marvellously to the tone and excitement of the movie. It must not be surmised from this that the film depends on the kind of artificial rapid-fire action and cutting that sustain most contemporary screen adventures. The most important and astonishing passage in Breathless is a slow, incredibly protracted bedroom scene between the two lovers that is built out of pauses, non sequiturs, cigarettes, heart-breakingly intimate games, tiny cruelties, revelations, and small talk about death, automobiles, childhood, books, phonograph records, sex, and loneliness. At the end of this, we have not simply “understood” the murderer and his girl for the self-destructive, attractive, and frightening narcissists that they are; we have, to a large degree, become them, because the scene has been allowed to continue so long that it has taken us into its own time and pace, and we can no more believe of the film than we can of life itself that it is moving toward some known, prearranged ending.
The risk this kind of movie runs is that of succumbing to mere flashiness, and Breathless avoids this only by the skin of its teeth. What saves it is the sensitivity and perception of its script (written by M. Godard), particularly in the closing moments, when the girl reports her lover to the police for no intelligible reason, and he, instead of taking to his heels, bemusedly announces that prison might be an experience as valid as any other, and so awaits his destruction with a detached, chilling curiosity. Here and in the conversation that follows—an overlapping double monologue in which the two of them can only talk about their own feelings—we comprehend the egotism of their sexual attraction and the extent of their unconscious commitment to any violent emotion for its own sake. I cannot conceive of a clearer, more intuitive delineation of the kind of icy animalism that apparently infects so many of our young and terrifies so many of the rest of us.
M. Godard, who is thirty, is the newest of the nouvelle-vague directors, and Breathless is his first full-length film. His genius was recognized by two better-known members of the group—François Truffaut, who made the estimable The 400 Blows, and Claude Chabrol—after they had seen several short films he had made, and they offered their own services (Truffaut by writing the original story and Chabrol by supervising the production) in order to lure him into attempting Breathless. It would be presumptuous of me to congratulate any of these gentlemen for this dedicated collaboration, but it is pleasant to be able to report that À Bout de Souffle (as the movie was called in its native tongue) has been a financial as well as an artistic triumph in France, and that M. Godard is now the most discussed and sought-after director in Europe.
Another new celebrity created by this movie is Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays the unhappy thief in this, his first film role. A former prizefighter, with a thick, wonderfully battered face, he is a born actor who manages, without drawing a visible deep breath, all the lightning changes—from arrogance to humor to insouciant stupidity to childlike innocence—that his huge part demands. The American is played by Jean Seberg, and I must report that I am unable to decide whether she acts beautifully or not at all. Her role requires her to be pretty, wooden, and apparently entranced by her own confusions, and Miss Seberg is all of these and no more. In any case, both of these young people and their hopeless plight are now so permanently fixed in my mind that they must be accepted as full partners in this masterpiece, and to them and to M. Godard I offer my distinguished homages.
PENELOPE GILLIATT
APRIL 13, 1968 (2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY)
I THINK STANLEY KUBRICK’S 2001: A Space Odyssey is some sort of great film, and an unforgettable endeavor. Technically and imaginatively, what he put into it is staggering: five years of his life; his novel and screenplay, with Arthur C. Clarke; his production, his direction, his special effects; his humor and stamina and particular disquiet. The film is not only hideously funny—like Dr. Strangelove—about human speech and response at a point where they have begun to seem computerized, and where more and more people sound like recordings left on while the soul is out. It is also a uniquely poetic piece of sci-fi, made by a man who truly possesses the drives of both science and fiction.
Kubrick’s tale of quest in the year 2001, which eventually takes us to the moon and Jupiter, begins on prehistoric Earth. Tapirs snuffle over the Valhalla landscape, and a leopard with broken-glass eyes guards the carcass of a zebra in the moonlight. Crowds of apes, scratching and ganging up, are disturbingly represented not by real animals, like the others, but by actors in costume. They are on the brink of evolving into men, and the overlap is horrible. Their stalking movements are already exactly ours: an old tramp’s, drunk, at the end of his tether and fighting mad. Brute fear has been refined into the infinitely more painful human capacity for dread. The creatures are so nearly human that they have religious impulses. A slab that they suddenly come upon sends them into panicked reverence as they touch it, and the film emits a colossal sacred din of chanting. The shock of faith boots them forward a few thousand years, and one of the apes, squatting in front of a bed of bones, picks up his first weapon. In slow motion, the hairy arm swings up into an empty frame and then down again, and the smashed bones bounce into the air. What makes him do it? Curiosity? What makes people destroy anything, or throw away the known, or set off in spaceships? To see what Nothing feels like, driven by some bedrock instinct that it is time for something else? The last bone thrown in the air is matched, in the next cut, to a spaceship at the same angle. It is now 2001. The race has survived thirty-three years more without extinction, though not with any growth of spirit. There are no
Negroes in this vision of America’s space program; conversation with Russian scientists is brittle with mannerly terror, and the Chinese can still be dealt with only by pretending they’re not there. But technological man has advanced no end. A space way station shaped like a Ferris wheel and housing a hotel called the Orbiter Hilton hangs off the pocked old cheek of Earth. The sound track, bless its sour heart, meanwhile thumps out “The Blue Danube,” to confer a little of the courtliness of bygone years on space. The civilization that Kubrick sees coming has the brains of a nuclear physicist and the sensibility of an airline hostess smiling through an oxygen-mask demonstration.
Kubrick is a clever man. The grim joke is that life in 2001 is only faintly more gruesome in its details of sophisticated affluence than it is now. When we first meet William Sylvester as a space scientist, for instance, he is in transit to the moon, via the Orbiter Hilton, to investigate another of the mysterious slabs. The heroic man of intellect is given a nice meal on the way—a row of spacecraft foods to suck through straws out of little plastic cartons, each decorated with a picture of sweet corn, or whatever, to tell him that sweet corn is what he is sucking. He is really going through very much the same ersatz form of the experience of being well looked after as the foreigner who arrives at an airport now with a couple of babies, reads in five or six languages on luggage carts that he is welcome, and then finds that he has to manage his luggage and the babies without actual help from a porter. The scientist of 2001 is only more inured. He takes the inanities of space personnel on the chin. “Did you have a pleasant flight?” Smile, smile. Another smile, possibly pre-filmed, from a girl on a television monitor handling voice-print identification at Immigration. The Orbiter Hilton is decorated in fresh plumbing-white, with magenta armchairs shaped like pelvic bones scattered through it. Artificial gravity is provided by centrifugal force; inside the rotating Ferris wheel people have weight. The architecture gives the white floor of the Orbiter Hilton’s conversation area quite a gradient, but no one lets slip a sign of humor about the slant. The citizens of 2001 have forgotten how to joke and resist, just as they have forgotten how to chat, speculate, grow intimate, or interest one another. But otherwise everything is splendid. They lack the mind for acknowledging that they have managed to diminish outer space into the ultimate in humdrum, or for dealing with the fact that they are spent and insufficient, like the apes.