I Lost It at the Movies Read online

  The social psychology of Twelve Angry Men is perfectly attuned to the educated audience. The hero, Henry Fonda — the one against the eleven — is lean, intelligent, gentle but strong; this liberal, fair-minded architect is their hero. And the boy on trial is their dream of a victim: he is of some unspecified minority, he is a slum product who never had a chance, and, to clinch the case, his father didn’t love him. It isn’t often that professional people can see themselves on the screen as the hero — in this case the Lincolnesque architect of the future — and how they love it! They are so delighted to see a movie that demonstrates a proposition they have already accepted that they cite Twelve Angry Men and The Defiant Ones as evidence that American movies are really growing up.

  It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both), and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness. Not implicit social awareness (Antonioni isn’t “saying anything,” they complain of L’Avventura) but explicit, machine-tooled, commercialized social consciousness. “The old payola won’t work any more,” announces the hero of The Apartment, and even people who should know better are happy to receive the message. How reassuring The Apartment is, with its cute, soft-hearted Jewish doctor and his cute, soft-hearted, fat, mama-comic Jewish wife — so unworldly and lovable that they take the poor frustrated sap for a satyr (almost as deadly in its “humor” as Rock Hudson being mistaken for a homosexual in Pillow Talk). In The Apartment, the little people are little dolls; the guys at the top are vicious and corrupt and unfaithful to their wives as well. The moral is, stick at the bottom and you don’t have to do the dirty. This is the pre-bomb universe; and its concept of the “dirty” is so old-fashioned and irrelevant, its notions of virtue and of vice so smugly limited, that it’s positively cozy to see people for whom deciding to quit a plushy job is a big moral decision. The “social consciousness” of the educated is so unwieldy, so overstuffed, that the mass audience may well catch up before the intellectuals have found any grounds to move on to — though surely many should be happy to vacate the premises of Freud and Marx.

  The art-house audience is at its dreamiest for Russian films like Ballad of a Soldier and The Cranes Are Flying. How eager they are to believe the best about the Soviet Union, to believe that love is back, propaganda is out, and it’s all right to like Russian movies because the Russians are really nice people, very much like us, only better. These sentiments have been encouraged by the theaters and by the cultural exchange agreement, and at showings of The Cranes Are Flying there was a queasy little prefatory note: “At the same time you are watching this Soviet film, Soviet audiences are watching an American motion picture.” I was happy for the voice in the theater which piped up, “But it’s six A.M. in the Soviet Union.”

  The Cranes Are Flying and Ballad of a Soldier are both good examples of nineteenth-century patriotism and nineteenth-century family values; neither seems to belong to the Communist period at all — they’re reminiscent of American war epics of the silent era. And sophisticated Americans love the simple, dutiful characters that they would laugh at in American movies. It’s a long time since audiences at art houses accepted the poor, ravished unhappy heroine who has to marry the cad who rapes her. They go even farther toward primitivism at Ballad of a Soldier: they love the “touching” and “charming” hero and heroine who express such priggish repugnance at a soldier’s unfaithful wife (how would these two react if they caught the wife sleeping with a German, like the heroine of Hiroshima Mon Amour?). Ballad of a Soldier takes us back to the days when love was sweet and innocent, authority was good, only people without principles thought about sex, and it was the highest honor to fight and die for your country. These homely values, set in handsome, well-photographed landscapes, apparently are novel and refreshing — perhaps they’re even exotic — to art-house audiences. It’s a world that never was, but hopeful people would love to associate it with life in the Soviet Union.

  Are these recruiting posters so morally superior to American lingerie ads like Butterfield 8? Are they as effective in the U.S.S.R. as in the outside world? We can see the results of Butterfield 8: half the junior-high-school girls in America are made up to look like Elizabeth Taylor, and at the Academy Award Show it was hard to tell the stars apart — there were so many little tin Lizzies. It’s more difficult to gauge the effects of Russia’s antique middle-class morality. Perhaps educated Americans love the Russians more than the Russians do. All over America people are suddenly studying Russian; and they sometimes give the impression that the first word they want to learn is “Welcome.”

  A congressional subcommittee headed by Kathryn Granahan, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who is known as America’s leading lady smut-hunter, is exploring the possibility that the influx of foreign films, most especially the French film Les Liaisons Dangereuses, may be a Communist plot to undermine American moral structure — that is to say that Americans are being offered a preoccupation with sex so that they will become degenerate, corrupt, too weak to combat the Communist threat. Mrs. Granahan has stated that the social, cultural and moral standards of France are among the greatest impediments to a strong NATO stand against international Communism.

  In other words, she takes the position that a strong state, a state capable of defending itself, must be a Puritan state, and that individual freedom and the loosening of sexual standards threaten the state. This is, of course, the present Communist position: even American jazz is regarded as a threat. Nothing could be cleaner — in nineteenth-century terms — than Russian movies. Observers at the Moscow Film Festival reported that the Russians were quite upset after the showing of The Trials of Oscar Wilde: they had been under the impression that Wilde was imprisoned for his revolutionary politics — for socialism, not For sodomy. Russians have been protected from just such information, discussion and art as Mrs. Granahan would protect us from. Apart from what appears to be a wholly unfounded notion that the Russians are trying to poison us via French sexual standards, there is an interesting issue here. For absurd as the Granahan position seems to be, I have heard a variant of it from many people who would scoff at the way she puts it.

  Everywhere in the United States enthusiasts for La Dolce Vita explain that it’s a great lesson to us — that Rome fell because of sexual promiscuity and high living, and we will too — that the Communists are going to win because of our moral laxity, our decay. It’s as if poor old Gibbon had labored in vain, and the churches’ attitudes have triumphed. Even those who no longer believe in God seem to accept the idea that European and American habits and values are loose and sinful and will bring destruction down upon us.

  May I suggest that this is just as nonsensical as the Granahan line? If all Europeans and all Americans suddenly became heterosexual and monogamous — if everyone took the pledge and there were no more drinking, if all nightclubs were closed, and if the rich turned their wealth over to the poor — I cannot see that our power position in this nuclear age would in any way be affected. And it’s astonishing that sensible people can get so sentimental about Russian movies with their Puritan standards, the bourgeois morality that developed out of the rising salaried classes and the Stalinist drive to stamp out individual freedom. Queen Victoria squats on the Kremlin; and Americans who fought to rid themselves of all that repressive Victorianism now beat their breasts and cry, look how good they are, look how terrible we are — why, we don’t deserve to win. Has Puritanism so infected our thinking that we believe a nuclear war would be won by the pure in heart?

  [1961]

  The Glamour of Delinquency

  On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Blackboard Jungle . . .

  A “regular” movie says yes to the whole world or it says not much of anything. What is there in The Long Gray Line, A Man Called Peter, The Prodigal or Not as a Stranger that can stir an audience out of its apathy — an exposed beating heart, a man fighting a vulture — and who cares? And who really cares about the bland prospe
rity that produces these entertainments? The United States has now achieved what critics of socialism have always posited as the end result of a socialist state: a prosperous, empty, uninspiring uniformity. (If we do not have exactly what Marx meant by a classless society, we do have something so close to it that the term is certainly no longer an alluring goal.) What promises does maturity hold for a teen-ager: a dull job, a dull life, television, freezers, babies and baby sitters, a guaranteed annual wage, taxes, social security, hospitalization insurance, and death. Patriotism becomes a series of platitudes; even statements that are true seem hypocritical when no longer informed with fire and idealism. It may be because this culture offers nothing that stirs youthful enthusiasm that it has spewed up a negative reaction: for the first time in American history we have a widespread nihilistic movement, so nihilistic it doesn’t even have a program, and, ironically, its only leader is a movie star: Marlon Brando.

  Our mass culture has always been responsive to the instincts and needs of the public. Though it exploits those needs without satisfying them, it does nonetheless throw up images that indicate social tensions and undercurrents. Without this responsiveness, mass culture would sink of its own weight. But it doesn’t sink — there is a kind of vitality in it. Even the most routine adventure pictures, with Jeff Chandler or Rory Calhoun or Randolph Scott or John Wayne, empty and meaningless as they are, cater to unsatisfied appetites for action and color and daring — ingredients that are absent from the daily lives of patrons. But if films and other areas of mass culture did not produce anything that moved us more directly, they would become as rigid and formalized as ballet — a series of repeated gestures for a limited audience of connoisseurs (the western has reached this point). When more ambitious film makers want to make a film with dramatic conflict, they draw upon the hostility to conformity embodied in the crazy, mixed-up kid.

  The phenomenon of films touching a social nerve is not new. The gangster films in the thirties expressed a fundamental hostility to society and authority; the gangsters made their own way, even if they paid for it by prison or death. But in the thirties the gangsters were not the only rebels, there was a large active body of political rebellion, given partial expression in films by the dispossessed heroes who asked for a job, a home, and a life. In the fifties there is no American political rebellion, there is not even enough political theory to give us a feasible explanation of delinquency itself — the new dissidents who say that a job, a home, and the life that goes with them aren’t worth the trouble. One thing seems evident: when the delinquent becomes the hero in our films, it is because the image of instinctive rebellion expresses something in many people that they don’t dare express. These kids seem to be the only ones who are angry about apathy: they seem to be the only ones with guts enough, or perhaps they are the only ones irresponsible enough, to act out a no to the whole system of authority, morality and prosperity.

  The depth of Brando’s contact with some sections of the public may be gauged by the extraordinary resentments expressed toward James Dean for what was considered an imitation of Brando in East of Eden (though Dean’s acting suggests Montgomery Clift as much as it does Brando, while his facial qualities suggest Gregory Peck); and the jeers and walkouts on Blackboard Jungle because Vic Morrow employed a Brando style. The reaction is quite archaic — as if Brando fans feared that other actors were trying to take some power away from their god, that the public might worship graven images instead of the true god.

  Alienation

  Alienation, the central theme of modern literature, has, like everything else, entered mass culture. Films borrow the artist-hero of literature only to turn him into the boob of A Song to Remember, Rhapsody in Blue, Moulin Rouge, Limelight; the alienation of a Stephen Daedalus or a Marcel, the heroic expense of extending consciousness, becomes inexplicable, but glamorous, misery. (The artist suffers because he can’t get the girl; she, lacking the audience’s hindsight, doesn’t know that he’s so good a catch that one day a movie will solemnize his life. The irony of the artist’s suffering is his inability to guess that Hollywood will make him immortal.) Those at work in films have, however, to one degree or another, projected alienated non-artist heroes and heroines in some of the best, though not always commercially successful, films of recent years: The Stars Look Down, Odd Man Out, An Outcast of the Islands, The Men, The Member of the Wedding, A Streetcar Named Desire, From Here to Eternity. In these films, alienation is not merely the illusion of cynicism or cowardice which is dispelled in the rousing finish of a Casablanca or a Stalag 17.

  The subject matter of On the Waterfront is alienation at the lowest social level. In From Here to Eternity Prewitt had formulated his position (“If a man don’t go his own way, he’s nothin’ ”) and was willing to take the risks. Terry Malloy, the hero of On the Waterfront, is alienated at the instinctive level of the adolescent and the bum, and the drama, as those who made the film see it, is in his development of consciousness and responsibility, his taking his place as a man.

  The attempt to create a hero for the mass audience is a challenge and a great big trap. On the Waterfront meets the challenge, falls into the trap. The creation of a simple hero is a problem that doesn’t come up often in European films, where the effort is to create characters who move us by their humanity — their weaknesses, their wisdom, their complexity — rather than by their heroic dimensions. Our films, however, deny the human weaknesses and complexities that Europeans insist upon. It’s as if we refused to accept the human condition: we don’t want to see the image of ourselves in those cheats and cuckolds and cowards. We want heroes, and Hollywood produces them by simple fiat. Robert Taylor or John Wayne is cast as the hero and that’s that; any effort to relate the hero’s actions to his character is minimal or routine. Real heroism is too dangerous a subject for Hollywood — for there is no heroism without failure risked or faced, and failure, which is at the heart of drama, is an unpopular subject in America.

  On the Waterfront succeeds brilliantly in creating a figure out of the American lower depths, a figure simple in reasoning power but complicated in motivation and meaning; it fails to win complete assent when it attempts to make this figure into a social and symbolic hero — by fiat. But how should we interpret the view of Harper’s that, “if the makers of On the Waterfront had chosen to have it merely a decadently sophisticated underworld travelogue, a kind of American ‘Quai des Brumes,’ they would have been truer to themselves, their subject and their art. Still better, they could of stood in bed.” If I read this right, the implication is that if the film dealt with defeat, it would be more honest, but it would be decadent. This is a view which quite possibly has affected those who made the film, and Harper’s, inadvertently and revealingly, justifies the artists’ fear of “decadence” by its contempt for “decadence.”

  It’s likely that those who made the film — Kazan, Schulberg, Spiegel, Brando, Bernstein — share in the American fantasy of success, a fantasy which they spectacularly act out in their own careers, and want to believe that their material fits into a drama of man’s triumph. A drama of man’s defeat would seem somehow antisocial, un-American, “arty,” and even decadent. It’s quite likely also that art to them is a call to action as much as a reach into consciousness, so that they feel bound to demonstrate a victory of good over evil; they want the film to “come out right” politically, though this demonstration probably moves the audience much less than if it had to take home an unresolved, disturbed recognition of social difficulties. (The motive power behind much of our commercial entertainment is: give the public a happy ending so they won’t have to think about it afterwards.) Perhaps the artists of On the Waterfront fear the reality of failure not only for their hero but for themselves. If the film did not resolve its drama in triumph, it might not reach the mass audience, and if it reached a smaller audience, that — in America — would be failure.

  From Here to Eternity did not convert its hero into a socially accepted leader, did not reduce is
sues to black and white, and it was a huge popular success. But a curious displacement occurred in the course of the film: Prewitt’s fate as hero got buried in the commotion of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and it was easy to get the impression that it didn’t really matter what happened to him as he would probably have gotten killed anyway. And, as a related phenomenon, Montgomery Clift’s fine performance as Prewitt was buried in the public praise for Frank Sinatra and Burt Lancaster. It was almost as if Prewitt wasn’t there at all, as if the public wanted to forget his troublesome presence. Lancaster, an amazingly kinesthetic actor, has built-in heroism; his Sergeant Warden was closer to the conventional hero stereotype, and he had managed to stay alive. Or perhaps Prewitt wasn’t troublesome enough: there was no mystery or confusion about why he behaved as he did. He had his own value system, and perhaps his clarity prevented him from stirring the audience. Formulated alienation seems already part of the past; Prewitt is the last Hollywood representative of depression-style alienation.

  On the Waterfront is a more ambitious film, though its moral scheme is that battle of good versus evil which is a film commonplace. No doubt those who made the film, and many of those who see it, view the conflict in the film not as a commonplace, but as a rendering of the “supreme” theme. But this “supreme” theme has never been the theme of great drama because it tends to diminish man’s humanity, rather than to illuminate it. Working with this theme, it is natural for the artists to take the next step and to employ the most easily accessible symbols that are ready-to-hand to the artists and perfectly familiar to the widest audience. The priest stands for conscience and humanity; the pure, selfless girl is the hero’s reward; the union boss represents brutal avarice. And crucifixion is used in the broadest sense as an equivalent for suffering.