I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Sarris with his love of commercial trash and Mekas who writes of the “cul-de-sac of Western culture” which is “stifling the spiritual life of man” seem to have irreconcilable points of view. Sarris with his joys in Raoul Walsh seems a long way from Mekas, the spokesman for the “independent film makers” (who couldn’t worm their way into Sarris’s outer circle). Mekas makes statements like “The new artist, by directing his ear inward, is beginning to catch bits of man’s true vision.” (Dear Lon Chaney Mekas, please get your ear out of your eye. Mekas has at least one thing in common with good directors: he likes to dramatize.) But to love trash and to feel that you are stifled by it are perhaps very close positions. Does the man who paints the can of Campbell’s soup love it or hate it? I think the answer is both: that he is obsessed by it as a fact of our lives and a symbol of America. When Mekas announces, “I don’t want any part of the Big Art Game” he comes even closer to Sarris. And doesn’t the auteur theory fit nicely into the pages of an “independent film makers” journal when you consider that the work of those film makers might compare very unfavorably with good films, but can look fairly interesting when compared with commercial products. It can even look original to those who don’t know much film history. The “independent film makers,” Lord knows, are already convinced about their importance as the creative figures — the auteurs; a theory which suggested the importance of writing to film art might seriously damage their egos. They go even farther than the auteur critics’ notion that the script is merely something to transcend: they often act as if anyone who’s concerned with scripts is a square who doesn’t dig film. (It’s obvious, of course, that this aesthetic based on images and a contempt for words is a function of economics and technology, and that as soon as a cheap, lightweight 16mm camera with good synchronous sound gets on the market, the independent film makers will develop a different aesthetic.)

  The auteur theory, silly as it is, can nevertheless be a dangerous theory — not only because it constricts the experience of the critics who employ it, but because it offers nothing but commercial goals to the young artists who may be trying to do something in film. Movie with its celebration of Samuel Fuller’s “brutality” and the Mackie Mekas who “knows that everything he has learned from his society about life and death is false” give readers more of a charge than they get from the limp pages of Sight and Sound and this journal. This is not intended to be a snide remark about Sight and Sound and Film Quarterly: if they are not more sensational, it is because they are attempting to be responsible, to hoard the treasures of our usable past. But they will be wiped off the cinema landscape, if they can’t meet the blasts of anti-art with some fire of their own.

  The union of Mekas and Sarris may be merely a marriage of convenience; but if it is strong enough to withstand Sarris’s “Hello and Goodbye to the New American Cinema” (in the Village Voice, September 20, 1962), perhaps the explanation lies in the many shared attitudes of the Mekas group and the auteur critics. Neither group, for example, is interested in a balanced view of a film; Mekas says he doesn’t believe in “negative criticism” and the auteur critics (just like our grammar-school teachers) conceive of a review as “an appreciation.” The directors they reject are so far beyond the pale that their films are not even considered worth discussion. (Sarris who distributes zero ratings impartially to films as varied as Yojimbo, The Manchurian Candidate, and Billy Budd could hardly be expected to take time off from his devotional exercises with Raoul Walsh to explain why these films are worthless.) Sarris, too, can resort to the language of the hipster — “What is it the old jazz man says of his art? If you gotta ask what it is, it ain’t? Well, the cinema is like that.” This is right at home in Film Culture, although Sarris (to his everlasting credit) doesn’t employ the accusatory, paranoid style of Mekas: “You criticize our work from a purist, formalistic and classicist point of view. But we say to you: What’s the use of cinema if man’s soul goes rotten?”. The “you” is, I suppose, the same you who figures in so much (bad) contemporary prophetic, righteous poetry and prose, the “you” who is responsible for the Bomb and who, by some fantastically self-indulgent thought processes, is turned into the enemy, the critic. Mekas, the childlike, innocent, pure Mekas, is not about to be caught by “the tightening web of lies”; he refuses “to continue the Big Lie of Culture.” I’m sure that, in this scheme, any attempt at clear thinking immediately places us in the enemy camp, turns us into the bomb-guilty “you,” and I am forced to conclude that Mekas is not altogether wrong — that if we believe in the necessity (not to mention the beauty) of clear thinking, we are indeed his enemy. I don’t know how it’s possible for anyone to criticize his work from a “purist, formalistic and classicist point of view” — the method would be too far from the object; but can’t we ask Mekas: is man’s soul going to be in better shape because your work is protected from criticism? How much nonsense dare these men permit themselves? When Sarris tells us, “If the auteur critics of the Fifties had not scored so many coups of clairvoyance, the auteur theory would not be worth discussing in the Sixties,” does he mean any more than that he has taken over the fiats of the auteur critics in the fifties and goes on applying them in the sixties? Does he seriously regard his own Minnelli-worship as some sort of objective verification of the critics who praised Minnelli in the fifties? If that’s his concept of critical method, he might just as well join forces with other writers in Film Culture. In addition to Mekas (“Poets are surrounding America, flanking it from all sides,”) there is, for example, Ron Rice: “And the beautiful part about it all is that you can, my dear critics, scream protest to the skies, you’re too late. The Musicians, Painters, Writers, Poets and Film-Makers all fly in the same sky, and know Exactly where It’s ’AT.’ ” Rice knows where he’s at about as much as Stan Brakhage who says, “So the money vendors have begun it again. To the catacombs then . . .” In the pages of Film Culture they escape from the money changers in Jerusalem by going to the catacombs in Rome. “Forget ideology,” Brakhage tells us, “for film unborn as it is has no language and speaks like an aborigine.” We’re all familiar with Brakhage’s passion for obstetrics, but does being a primitive man mean being a foetus? I don’t understand that unborn aborigine talk, but I’m prepared to believe that grunt by grunt, or squeal by squeal, it will be as meaningful as most of Film Culture. I am also prepared to believe that for Jonas Mekas, culture is a “Big Lie.” And Sarris, looking for another culture under those seats coated with chewing gum, coming up now and then to announce a “discovery” like Joanne Dru, has he found his spiritual home down there?

  Isn’t the anti-art attitude of the auteur critics, both in England and here, implicit also in their peculiar emphasis on virility? (Walsh is, for Sarris, “one of the screen’s most virile directors.” In Movie we discover: “When one talks about the heroes of Red River, or Rio Bravo, or Hatari! one is talking about Hawks himself. . . . Finally everything that can be said in presenting Hawks boils down to one simple statement: here is a man.”) I don’t think critics would use terms like “virile” or “masculine” to describe artists like Dreyer or Renoir; there is something too limited about describing them this way (just as when we describe a woman as sensitive and feminine, we are indicating her special nature). We might describe Kipling as a virile writer but who would think of calling Shakespeare a virile writer? But for the auteur critics calling a director virile is the highest praise because, I suggest, it is some kind of assurance that he is not trying to express himself in an art form, but treats moviemaking as a professional job. (Movie: Hawks “makes the very best adventure films because he is at one with his heroes. . . . Only Raoul Walsh is as deeply an adventurer as Hawks. . . . Hawks’ heroes are all professionals doing jobs — scientists, sheriffs, cattlemen, big game hunters: real professionals who know their capabilities. . . . They know exactly what they can do with the available resources, expecting of others only what they know can be given.”) The auteur critics are so enthralled with their
narcissistic male fantasies (Movie: “Because Hawks’ films and their heroes are so genuinely mature, they don’t need to announce the fact for all to hear”) that they seem unable to relinquish their schoolboy notions of human experience. (If there are any female practitioners of auteur criticism, I have not yet discovered them.) Can we conclude that, in England and the United States, the auteur theory is an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence — that period when masculinity looked so great and important but art was something talked about by poseurs and phonies and sensitive-feminine types? And is it perhaps also their way of making a comment on our civilization by the suggestion that trash is the true film art? I ask; I do not know.

  [1963]

  Morality Plays Right and Left

  Advertising: Night People

  Ads for men’s suits show the model standing against a suspended mobile. But the man who buys knows that the mobile doesn’t come with the suit: it’s there to make him feel that the old business suit is different now. The anti-Sovietism of Night People serves a similar function. But the filmgoer who saw the anti-Nazi films of ten years ago will have no trouble recognizing the characters in Night People, just as ten years ago he could have detected (under the Nazi black shirts) psychopathic killers, trigger-happy cattle rustlers, and the screen villain of earliest vintage — the man who will foreclose the mortgage if he doesn’t get the girl. The Soviet creatures of the night are direct descendants of the early film archetype, the bad man. Those who make films like Night People may or may not be privately concerned with the film’s political message (the suit manufacturer may or may not be concerned with the future of wire sculpture); in the film politics is period décor — used to give melodrama the up-to-date look that will sell.

  Night People is set in Berlin: a U.S. soldier is kidnaped; he is rescued by a U.S. Intelligence Officer (Gregory Peck) who knows how to deal with the Russians. They are “head-hunting cannibals” and must be treated as such. The film is given a superficial credibility by documentary-style shots of American soldiers, by glimpses of Berlin, and by the audience’s knowledge that Americans in Europe have in fact been kidnaped. One might even conceive that someone who understood the nature of Communism might view certain Communists as “cannibals.” But it would be a mistake to confuse the political attitudes presented in Night People with anything derived from historical understanding. Nunnally Johnson, who wrote, directed, and produced the film, has referred to it as “Dick Tracy in Berlin.” His earlier anti-Nazi production The Moon is Down could be described as “Dick Tracy in Norway,” and many of his films could be adequately designated as just plain “Dick Tracy.”

  Actual kidnapings have posed intricate political and moral problems. Should the victim be ransomed by economic concessions, should a nation submit to extortion? Were some of the victims observers for the U.S. and where does observation stop and espionage begin? We know that our government must have espionage agents in Europe — can we believe in the innocence of every victim? If they were guilty of some charges but not guilty of all the charges, what kind of protest is morally possible? The drama in the case of a Robert Vogeler or a William Oatis is in the fathoming of moral and political ambiguities. While purportedly about an East-West kidnaping, Night People presents a crime and a rescue. The hero has righted the wrong before we have even had a chance to explore our recollections of what may be involved in political kidnapings. Soviet ambitions and intrigue become a simple convenience to the film maker: the label “Communism” is the guarantee that the hero is up against a solid evil threat. For the sake of the melodrama, the Communism cannot be more than a label.

  Night People is not much worse or much better than a lot of other movies — they’re made cynically enough and they may, for all we know, be accepted cynically. David Riesman has pointed out that nobody believes advertising, neither those who write it nor those who absorb it. And the same can be said for most of our movies. Somebody turns the stuff out to make a living; it would seem naive to hold him responsible for it. In a state of suspended belief a writer can put the conflict of East and West into the capable hands of Dick Tracy: the film wasn’t really written, it was turned out. And the audiences that buy standardized commodities may be too sophisticated about mass production to believe films and advertising, but they are willing to absorb products and claims — with suspended belief. Audiences don’t believe, but they don’t not believe either. And when you accept something without believing it, you accept it on faith. You buy the product by name. Who would believe in Rose-Marie? Yet the audience, after taking it in, emerges singing the Indian Love Call and it becomes a substantial part of American sentimental tone. Who would believe that Night People presents a political analysis? Yet the political attitudes that don’t originate in political analysis become part of national political tone. Acceptance is not belief, but acceptance may imply the willingness to let it go at that and to prefer the accessible politics (to which one can feel as cynical and “knowing” as toward an ad) to political thought that requires effort, attention, and involvement.

  The bit players who once had steady employment as S.S. guards are right at home in their new Soviet milieu; the familiar psychopathic faces provide a kind of reassurance that the new world situation is not so different from the old one (we beat these bullies once already). Perhaps Night People can even seem realistic because it is so familiar. The make-believe that is acted out often enough attains a special status: it becomes a real part of our experience. (Films like Quo Vadis, The Prisoner of Zenda, Showboat, The Merry Widow have been made so many times that to the mass audience they have the status of classics; are they not immortal if three generations have seen them?) Advertising, using the same appeals — the familiar with the “new” look — also depends upon repetition to make its point. If we believed an advertising claim, hearing it once would be enough. It is because we do not believe that advertising uses repetition and variation into infinity to get its claims accepted.

  The suggestion that politics as used in melodrama is advertising décor is not intended metaphorically. I wish to suggest that films (and other forms of commercial entertainment) are becoming inseparable from advertising, and that advertising sets the stage for our national morality play.

  Advertising has been borrowing from literature, art, and the theater; films meanwhile are taking over not merely the look of advertising art — clear, blatant poster design — but the very content of advertising. Put together an advertising photograph and a movie still from How to Marry a Millionaire (another Nunnally Johnson production) and they merge into each other: they belong to the same genre. The new young Hollywood heroine is not too readily distinguishable from the model in the Van Raalte ad; if the ad is a few years old, chances are this is the same girl. In a few months she will be on the front of movie magazines and on the back of news magazines endorsing her favorite cigarette. She is both a commodity for sale and a salesman for other commodities (and her value as one depends upon her value as the other). In any traditional sense, Gregory Peck is not an actor at all; he is a model, and the model has become the American ideal. Advertising dramatizes a way of life with certain consumption patterns, social attitudes and goals, the same way of life dramatized in films; films are becoming advertising in motion.

  Is Executive Suite* in substance any different from an institutional ad — “This Company Believes in the Future of America”? Break it down into shots — the hero’s home, the manufacturing process scene, the mother playing catch with her son, and you are looking at pages in Sunset, Life, and Today’s Woman. Then open Time, and there are the actors from the film speaking into dictaphones to illustrate the message: “Cameron Hawley, author of Executive Suite, says ‘I use my Dictaphone TIME-MASTER constantly and with great success.’ ” If we are no longer sure what medium we are in, the reason is that there are no longer any organic differences.

  The common aim of attracting and pleasing the public ha
s synthesized their methods and their content. The film and the ad tell their story so that the customer can take it all in at a glance. They show him to himself as he wants to be, and if flattery is not enough, science and progress may clinch the sale. The new toothpaste has an activating agent; new shirts and shorts have polyester fibers running through them; Night People is filmed in CinemaScope with Stereophonic Sound. Can we balk at technical advances that “2000 years of experiment and research have brought to us”? New “technical advances” increase not only the physical accessibility of cultural goods, the content of the goods becomes increasingly accessible. The film’s material has been assembled, the plot adapted; sound engineers have amplified the hero’s voice, and the heroine’s figure has been surgically reconstructed (actresses who scorn falsies can now have plastic breasts built-in). The new wide screen surrounds us and sounds converge upon us. Just one thing is lost: the essence of film “magic” which lay in our imaginative absorption, our entering into the film (as we might enter into the world of a Dostoyevsky novel or Middlemarch). Now the film can come to us — one more consummation of the efforts to diminish the labor (and the joy) of imaginative participation.

  All this has been done for us; all that’s left for us is to buy. Suppose an audience does buy a film — what do they do with it? The audience is not exactly passive, it has its likes and its dislikes and it expresses them — in terms drawn more from advertising, however, than from art. The audience talks freely about the actor’s personality, the actress’s appeal, the likableness of their actions. Film critics become experts in “craftsmanship” and mechanics; Dreyer’s Day of Wrath is considered impossibly slow and dim, while Night People is found to be “racy,” “well-made,” and “fast-paced” — praise more suitable to the art of a Studebaker than to the art of the film. A patron who wanted to mull a Hollywood film over for a while would be judged archaic — and rightly so. There is nothing to mull over: a trained crew did all that in advance.