To a considerable extent, and increasingly, many of the films of the past two decades have been a betrayal of the medium's origins. Films today take the world for granted. Fewer and fewer films are being shot on location or on elaborate sets. But in more subtle ways, filmmakers - pressed for time, as always - are uninterested in showing us anything more of a specific locale than they need to get a story moving. If a film is set in New York City, for example, it would be established by an opening shot of the familiar skyline. Afterward, the setting needs no more reason to be evoked or explored. In fact, an audience's belief in the reality of a setting is expected to be manipulated, but in ways significantly different from theater's suspension of disbelief.
Eighty years ago, if a film wanted to show us an office worker going to work, it would be cut in such a way that would show us the worker getting off the bus or the trolley on the street and walking into a building. Then a cut to inside the building would show him coming through the door and walking to the stairs. Then another cut would show him reaching the first landing and walking up another flight of steps, and so on until he reaches a certain floor and walks through the door of his office. Critics like to argue that this is simply unnecessary today, that we no longer have to see the man walking through all that scenery, and that a simple jump-cut would eliminate all that useless footage.
Anyone who has seen Godard's breakthrough film, A Bout de Souffle, will remember how Godard used jump cuts to surprising effect. What they don't know is that Godard, novice filmmaker, shot a great deal more footage that he then had to eliminate because the producer told him to shorten the film's running time to ninety minutes. So the famous scene in which Jean-Paul Belmondo is on the phone with a girlfriend, tells her he wants to see her, and in an instant is there standing beside her was not the result of Godard's design but of the producer's demand for a shorter film.
Many film critics and filmmakers argue that audiences have changed since the 1950s, that, having long since been familiar with the language of film, they're sophisticated enough to know that Belmondo wasn't just teleported miraculously from a phone booth to his girlfriend's room; and that they know that Belmondo must have walked the intervening distance and that they didn't need to see Belmondo covering all that ground.
I think, however, that when Werner Herzog made up his mind that the best way to represent the life of Fizcarraldo (a visionary or a madman with whom Herzog seemed to identify), who employed an army of Amazon natives to haul a huge riverboat over a mountain in his quest to build an opera house in the jungle, was to stage virtually the same stunt in front of his cameras, he performed a service to realism that went largely unappreciated.
There is a marvelous scene in the Buster Keaton film The Cameraman in which Buster is talking on the telephone with Sally, a young woman he wants to go out with him. When she tells him that her date with another man is off, before she can hang up the phone, Buster runs at top speed the several blocks between his boarding house and hers. When, startled, she turns to find him standing right behind her, he says, "I'm sorry if I'm a little late."
The scene is very funny and charming, and it shows off Keaton's superb athleticism. But its comedic impact relies on the film showing us as much of the intervening landscape between those two boarding houses as time and comedic timing allowed. But Keaton was also expecting viewers of his film to appreciate the views of the real world that he included in his gags - a lost world of real weight and dimensions that is practically forgotten today.
If one were to ask an audience of virtually any movie today if they could tell you whether a scene took place in the morning or the afternoon, or even what season it was, they probably could not. The time of day or the season, they might suggest, didn't matter. These details obviously don't matter to most filmmakers. This is possibly due to a belated modernist indifference to the world and to experience. It's commonplace for any contemporary visual artist to avoid references to what he actually sees, let alone indicating whatever feelings he might have for it, lest he be accused of being in the rear guard rather than avant. This would certainly explain the growing preponderance of CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) in films.(1) Why spend money on actors or wait for the right light to shoot a scene when a computer can do it all for you? I've noticed a common trick filmmakers now use to create the illusion of cold weather: computer generated steam emerging from actors' mouths.
But what if images of specific locales and particular weather that may seem to be incidental to a film's construction were, in fact, intended to be an essential part of its attempt to establish not just certain aspects of reality but the verity of the film's story and its characters? Very early in its development, film acquired a close relationship with the world. We know, for example, that the the detail that most fascinated the first audiences of the Lumiere Brothers' film Feeding the Baby in 1895 [see photo above] was the wind stirring the trees in the background. It surprised them because the trees in the scenery of theater performances had always been painted on backdrops. They were astonished to notice that the trees in the film were moving because they were looking at real trees, that the films existed in a reality that a theater production could only suggest.
We have also learned to think about film actors differently. Although we know they are actors playing parts in a made up story, we believe sufficiently in the world that they inhabit for the duration of the film to believe that, unlike stage actors who drop the pretense of acting when they walk offstage, film actors, when they leave a scene, go on living their made up lives, unseen by the camera or by us. It's possible to imagine a filmmaker following a character out of a scene on a tangent that takes the film in a totally different direction. In his film, Shoot the Piano Player, Francois Truffaut introduces us to a piano student leaving Charles Aznavour's flat and his camera follows her for a few minutes for no other reason than to introduce us to the possibility of the film going somewhere else entirely. After following the girl for awhile, Truffaut returns us to the film's central story.
Some of the greatest filmmakers demonstrate to us their love of the world by paying attention to seemingly minor - but actually major - details. When Erich von Stroheim adapted Frank Norris's novel Greed to the screen in 1924, he was encouraged by the big budget provided by his producers at MGM to go to some absurd extremes for the sake of the novel's reality. For example, when a character is sitting inside a house and Harris mentions that a particular car was parked in the street outside, Stroheim took the liberty of actually having a car of the exact same make parked in the street outside the house. Even though we never see the car in the scene, Stroheim believed that its presence there outside the house was somehow essential to the reality he was trying to re-create. I've written before about how Stroheim insisted on taking his cast and crew down an actual mineshaft to shoot a scene, rather than just re-create the mineshaft on a studio set. Viewers of the film in 1924 may never have known that Stroheim had gone to such lengths for the sake of realism, but, like Werner Herzog taking his cast and crew up a remote Amazon tributary rather than using some placid backwater for his scenes in Fitzcarraldo, but going to such lengths derived from a faith in verity, in truth, that is being forgotten.
Robert Bresson announced at the start of his extraordinary 1970 interview with Charles Thomas Samuels that "For me, filmmaking is combining images and sounds of REAL things in an order that makes them effective. Later on in the same interview, Samuels pointed out to Bresson how, in many of his films, he dwells on a setting a few beats longer than anyone else:
Samuels: "Before a character enters a place or after he exits from it, the camera holds on a set. . . In Diary of a Country Priest he rides his bicycle to the house of the Bishop of Torcy. He enters the house, and you hold outside the house. It happens repeatedly in Pickpocket. . . In Une Femme douce the couple comes into the house, and the camera remains on the door. Then they walk upstairs and the camera holds on the landing. We see the door to their apartment before they open it and after they close it etc. You weren't conscious of this?"
Bresson: "Of course I was conscious. Let me tell you something about doors. Critics say, 'Bresson is impossible: he shows fifty doors opening and closing;' but you must understand that the door of the apartment is where all the drama occurs. The door either says, 'I am going away or I am coming to you.' When I made Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, I was also accused of showing too many doors. And Cocteau said I was criticized for being too precise: 'In other films you see a door because it just happens to be there,' he said 'whereas in your films it is there on purpose. For that reason each door is seen, whereas in other films the door is scarcely noticed.'"
Despite being known for his "transcendental" style, Bresson knew how important it was that a film should, in Auden's words, "be before it seems" - how it should establish itself in reality before attempting to be metaphorical. In his masterpiece, A Man Escaped (whose literal title is A Man Condemned to Death Escapes), Bresson carefully captures the experience of his protagonist, a Frenchman imprisoned during the German Occupation (an experience Bresson knew first-hand), through the smallest physical details, because he knew that it was only through such details that the experience could come alive for the viewer.
In his audio commentary of the DVD edition of his film, The Tailor of Panama, the film's director, John Boorman, stated that he would like to see a disclaimer in the end credits of some films that informs viewers that "no CGI was used in the making of this film." I don't think that Boorman's disclaimer is likely to catch on, or attract much interest among filmmakers, especially young ones who seem far more interested in creating fantasy worlds rather than looking closely at the world in which they live. The trend today is away from the aesthetic origins of film, away from images of the real world into images of digitally manufactured worlds. The people who fled from their seats when the Lumiere Brothers' train entered the station in 1895 - because they believed that it was a real train entering the room where the film was being screened - have been replaced by people who no longer expect that what they are being shown on the screen has much to do with reality, and are no longer amazed or moved by the truth.
(1) Like everyone else, I was appalled when I learned that Philip Seymour Hoffman had been found dead of a heroin overdose early in 2014. Recently, I was further saddened to discover that the makers of the final Hunger Games film resorted to using a digital mock up of Hoffman so that they could complete scenes left unfinished at his death. At least there is some consolation in the knowledge that Hoffman will be remembered for much more than just those colossally useless movies.
In one of the most memorable poems from his collection The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin wrote about August 1914, when the Great War began:
MCMXIV
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not caring:
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat’s restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
17 May 1960
From the perspective of 1960, Larkin knew that an enormous, impassable gulf separates us from the world before the Great War. He looks at a photograph of men lined up to enlist in the Army, who know nothing of the hell into which they are about to be plunged. Siegfried Sassoon, in his poem "Prelude: The Troops," made it clear:
They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy
Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all
Is ruin . . .
But they look like they're embarking on a "bank holiday lark." The very everyday quality of the scene - of a world that "changed itself to past" with unprecedented speed, as if it couldn't wait another moment to throw itself away - is haunting. Everyone (except the very few who already knew the truth) expected it all to be over by Christmas. By the time it was finally over, on this day in 1918, the world that existed before the war had not just vanished without a trace, it was regarded with some distaste. How could they have been so willing, so eager to throw their generations of men away? No one seemed to recall their own innocence.
As James Wood pointed out, this poem is "an acute examination of nostalgia, a poem which sees that our loss of innocence is that we can no longer see their loss of innocence without nostalgia. When the poem tries to see that lost Edwardian world, it deliberately distances and pictorialises its blurry subjects:
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark . . .
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens . . ."(1)
I can only wonder what Larkin, who died in 1985, would have made of September 11, and how carelessly Americans kissed the past - that turned to past so suddenly - goodbye. By now, a mere fourteen years later, America on September 10 seems like a long-gone, faraway country.
Another terror attack, the blowing up of a Russian commercial jet in flight, and all the old boogey men have once again emerged from our closets. The term "boogey man" derived from "bogey-man," which itself originated in "boney-man," who was none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. Parents in early 19th century Britain would frighten their children with warnings that, if they didn't behave, the "boney-man" would get them. Today, we're being frightened again with a shadowy threat that is as remote and as insubstantial as Napoleon was to British children.
On the twentieth anniversary of the dissolution of the USSR, I wrote on this blog about why I believed it was the most important historical event (so far) of my lifetime. One of the effects of the end of the Cold War was that the one great superpower left in the world - the U.S.A. - was left without a suitable enemy, an opposing power that represented its opposite in every way. Since then, what Dwight Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex" has been busy trying to locate another reason for being. One was found, apparently, on 9/11. We are once again engaged in a war of indeterminate length, except that instead of a Cold War, it's now a Hide 'n' Seek War.
The Great War changed the world irrevocably and left its terrible mark on the 20th century. November 11 is memorialized by the wearing of the "remembrance poppy" in the UK. In the U.S., the end of the war is commemorated as Veterans Day.
The extent to which September 11 changed the world and marked the 21st century will only be known when the century nears its end. Based on how it has changed America in just fourteen years makes me wonder how much worse things will get in what's left of my lifetime. I remember the freedoms we enjoyed before 9/11, living in an open society. I miss them. Of course, that very openness made us vulnerable. But that is the price to be paid - that we seemed willing to pay - for living in such a society. What is more surprising is how willingly people are surrendering their freedoms, one after another, out of fear.
Men and women whose job it is to predict the actions of terrorists, based on the information gathered from a multitude of sources, managed to conclude a short time prior to 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning to hijack planes and crash them. They also managed to present their conclusions to the President Bush. But the president disregarded the warning. Unlike the rest of us, he can't have been surprised when their forecasts came true. Bush's efforts to keep us safe, that have resulted in nothing but further loss for everyone, were a little late. Oops. Caught napping, he made sure he'd never be caught napping again - while telling the rest of us that, under the rest of his "watch," we could sleep soundly.
Who wants to sleep any more? Never such innocence again.
(1) James Wood, "The Slightest Sardine," London Review of Books, Volume 26 No. 10, May 20, 2004.
In one of his shimmering short stories, John Updike described being fascinated when he was a boy by the light emanating from the radio in his father's truck, and the music lilting from it while he was riding around in 1940s rural Pennsylvania. He claimed that it inspired in him a lifelong fascination with popular music, defined as the musical noise always being piped in from somewhere at every strategic moment of our lives.
For reasons of my own, this is precisely why I have always hated popular music: it is unsolicited and inescapable. Like everyone else, alas, there are occasions in my life that are inextricably linked to whatever pop song happened to be playing at the time. Of course, the songs were never the ones I would've wanted to hear at the time - songs of beauty and meaning quite beyond the emotion with which such moments were freighted. I learned quickly enough in my youth that I was born out of my time when I learned that the song that my mother and father called "our song" was Nat King Cole's "Stay As Sweet As You Are"(1) while I was forced to settle for one or another fatuous rock anthem. (Although, I must admit, there was a particular party from the 8th grade that will always be evoked by the mellifluous Love Unlimited song, "Walking in the Rain with the One I Love.")
Most of the time, the words of a popular song are its least memorable part. Normally, they are nothing but words strung together that make merely platitudinous sense. When Rolling Stone recently published its list of the "100 Greatest Songwriters" (Bob Dylan was number 1), what they failed to make clear was that the "songwriters" to which they were referring were only those that their readers would have known - writers of pop songs for the past fifty-odd years. Those readers grew up (well, some of them anyway) listening to songs whose lyrics were either too silly or forgettable - or both - for them to make their writers' names worth remembering. There were occasionally pop or rock songs from the last half of the 20th century that had something to say, but practically no one expected or required them to do so. Songs normally overheard on the radio, the musical equivalent of wallpaper, were rarely credited as anything more than bubblegum for the brain.
When I was married in 1995 in the Philippines, a reception was held in a local Chinese restaurant. Since I had a video camera, but was otherwise occupied, the occasion was videotaped by one of my bride's neighbors, named Pia. The music that was playing in the background wasn't of my choosing. I'm not sure if the person who chose it knew that it was supposed to accompany a wedding reception. They were suitably generic and innocuous. Sometimes, an English-language song would become popular in the Philippines without anyone making any sense out of the song's lyrics. I often heard Philippine radio stations playing rap songs in the '90s that contained some of the most scabrous and obscene language without the slightest attempt at censorship.
There was one particular song that stands out in my memory of the wedding reception, Matt Monro singing "Walk On." I remember it because it wasn't just another stupid pop ballad, but a torch song, an older "standard" that might've been sung by the likes of Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett. I'd heard the song before, oddly enough on a dinner date more than a year before with my future (now my ex-) wife, but I never listened closely to the words until this past week when I heard it being played on a radio show that the woman I now live with listens to almost every day. Here are the words to the song - and bear in mind that it was offered up as muzak at a wedding reception:
Walk away, please go
Before you throw your life away
A life that I could share for just a day
We should have met some years ago
For your sake I say
Walk away, just go.
Walk away, and live
A life that's full
With no regret,
Don't look back at me.
Just try to forget.
Why build a dream that cannot come true?
So be strong, reach the stars now.
Walk away, walk on.
If I heard your voice,
I'd beg you to stay.
So don't say a word.
Just run, run away.
Goodbye my love.
My tears will fall.
Now that you've gone,
I can't help but cry.
But I must go on.
I'm sad that I, after searching so long,
Knew I loved you, but I told you
Walk away, walk on, walk on.
Not very distinguished as song lyrics go, but to the point.
As chance would have it, my marriage didn't work out as planned. The name of this blog is something of a giveaway on the subject of my marital status. (I'm not, in fact, a widower. The woman in question didn't die, at least not in any physical sense.) Just think, I said to myself when I understood those words for the first time, of all the time and emotion and ultimate disappointment I could've spared myself if she or I had just hearkened to the words Matt Monro was singing - to the two of us - on that day twenty years ago. No matter how many times my sister, who believes that everything happens for a reason, would've told me that it had to be so, that I had to go through with marrying that woman just so that everything that has happened in my life subsequently - including my meeting the woman who now lives with me, a meeting that took place on December 4, 2007 precisely five years after my divorce was finalized by judge back in Colorado - could've happened, I can't resist wondering where I would be now if I hadn't, in the words from Barrie's "The Admirable Crichton," so "sentimentalized" my pleasant time with her that I made the mistake of thinking that I could make it last for the rest of my life. The rest of one's life is a very long time, after all.
The words of another old torch song, "One for My Baby," come to mind, sung by a man telling a familiar story to a bartender (named Joe):
"Well, that's how it goes
And Joe, I know you're getting
Anxious to close.
And thanks for the beer.
I hope you didn't mind
My bending your ear.
But this torch that I found,
It's got to be drowned,
Or it soon might explode.
Make it one for my baby,
And one more for the road."
1. While I won't call it poetry, such lyrics as "Like a song of love that clings to me,/How the thought of you does things to me" from another Nat Cole song, "Unforgettable" is almost worthy of Keats.
I was at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Having graduated Army Basic Training in late June, and finished AIT (Advanced Individual Training) in mid-August, I spent the next 2 1/2 months on "security hold" while the Army untangled some snags in my background investigation. It was ironic, since I was an artillery Cannon Fire Direction Specialist, requiring a secret security clearance (my job required the handling of radio encryption material), whereas in the Navy I had been an intelligence specialist for eight years, holding a top secret/SCI clearance. Since I had also, on my return to the military, been demoted in rank, perhaps the FBI was concerned that I had taken leave of my senses?
I already knew that I had orders to South Korea. I will never forget the day I got the news back in June. I went and hid under my bunk, contemplating having to spend another year away from my wife and my 79-year-old mother. (My orders were to Area One, too close to the DMZ for the Army to allow my wife to accompany me.) But between Fort Sill and Korea, the Army gave me two weeks leave to savor, enough time to be with my family and to say my goodbyes, knowing it would be six months before I would be with them again.
But that Halloween, my leave commenced at midnight - 0001 hours. I was scheduled CQ (Charge of Quarters) right up to midnight, so when my watch was over, I walked from my barracks straight over to the CQ desk in the headquarters of Second of the Eightieth Field Artillery, where the duty NCO took one look at my BDUs and told me I had to sign out on leave in my Class A uniform. So I had to walk back through the dark to the room I shared with three other soldiers, change into my Class A's, dress shoes, garrison cap and all, and return to the CQ desk. The NCO didn't expect to see ribbons on my chest and service stripes on my sleeve. To him, I was just another private, despite my being an E-4 and having turned 39 - with nobody noticing - in the middle of Basic Training. He signed my leave papers, officially setting me free from that awful place. I still had to wait until 0800 hours, when my bus would pick me up in front of my barracks and take me home. Until then, I was effectively invisible. With my leave papers safely in my pocket, I didn't have to worry about being present and accounted for, no longer subject to the whims of Sergeant Majors or First Sergeants.
I was standing at the bus shelter at the appointed hour in the bright sun of a Halloween Friday in Oklahoma, with two well-stuffed duffel bags behind me, when one of my roommates named Bill Muffler, who was coming back from breakfast in the chow hall, saw me and approached me with the usual cigarette in his hand. "Well, Harpis?" he said smiling, mispronouncing my name the same way that an especially clueless drill sergeant had done some weeks before.
"Well, Mueller?" I answered. He asked me what time my bus was coming. "Any minute now," I said. (The bus was already late.) He put the cigarette in his mouth and took my hand with both of his. We said nothing. There was such unexpected emotion in his eyes that words were unnecessary. He was 30, a prior service MP who, like me, had come back to active duty through a window that recruiters had opened briefly. We told each other our stories over the course of several drinking bouts and our friendship was as close as the two and a half months we were stuck together as roommates would allow. Some months later in Korea I learned that the security hold he was on lasted well into 1998, when they decided to pull his orders to Germany and station him permanently at Fort Sill, situated near a town called Lawton in the godforsaken southwest corner of Oklahoma. I have tried and failed a few times since then to find him, not knowing if he stayed in the Army until retirement or if he had quit after doing his three years and gone home to Big Torch Key. Fellow suffering always has the effect of fostering comradeship among the unlikeliest people. This is what the military has always depended on.
When my TNM&O (Texas, New Mexico & Oklahoma) bus drove out of Fort Sill's front gate, past the Korean barber shops, massage parlors and strip clubs, the sudden access of emotion that I felt didn't compel me to go so far as to look back. When one's life is full of so many departures, the only direction, it seems, is straight ahead. I settled back for a long ride.
Despite the direction to Denver being northwest from Lawton, my bus first took me south all the way to Wichita Falls, Texas. (Of course, it made me think of the long Pat Metheny/Lyle Mays piece, "As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls.") At the terminal, the wait for the bus connecting to all points northwest was mercifully short. Once on the road (U.S. and local highways - my bus didn't go near any Interstates) we traveled more or less straight past Amarillo all the way through brown grasslands into southeastern Colorado.
Being on leave means that you're on the clock, that every moment spent in travel is a moment stolen from your family. I heard that Denver and the front range had been hit with an early snowstorm, so I expected some delay. What I didn't expect was that my bus would lose its hydraulics somewhere near Pueblo, and that the trip home would take thirteen hours out of my leave.
I phoned my wife on finally arriving in Denver in the evening. Despite my being seated the whole journey, I was exhausted. I felt the straps of one of my duffel bags digging into my shoulders as I stood outside on the street, watching for our Mercury Tracer to come around some corner and pull up to the curb in front of me. When it did, and I looked into my wife's tired eyes, I didn't wonder that I had spoiled her Halloween, since I knew that it was, when all was said and done, the leaving Lawton, the reds and russets of West Texas, the mounting anticipation of arriving home, probably the sweetest Halloween of my life.
Election Day in America is more than a year away, but in our era of never-ending campaigns for political office it seems as if it might be next week. By the time the election takes place, hundreds of millions - perhaps billions - of dollars will have been spent, to what purpose is just another unholy American mystery.
Since the beginning of summer, when someone decided that all the campaigning should commence, we have been introduced, or re-introduced, to a few dozen candidates - most of them Republican. Since the Democrats don't seem to believe that Hillary Clinton is beatable, only a few others have had the chutzpah to stand against her.
In the few opportunities they've had to express themselves above the din of the front runner, these candidates have let us know, whether we needed to know it or not, what they believe in. Since a reliably entertaining television personality - Donald Trump - is in the race for the Republican ticket, voters of every persuasion have watched the Republican debates. This has given the more innocent Liberals among them something of a fright at some of the more extreme views expressed by people who mistakenly thought they were preaching exclusively to the choir, which accounts for most of the "blowback" in the press.
One of the biggest differences between the candidates that I've noticed goes to the heart of the difference between the two sides. When it comes to success in life, at whatever pursuit, it seems that there are two kinds of people: the ones who react to their success by believing that they are blessed and those who think they are simply lucky. (1) The former inspires, one can easily appreciate, an overabundance of confidence and egoism. Kanye West is the poster child for this interpretation of success. He apparently believes that the riches he has accrued merely by "rapping" into a microphone are proof of some sort of divine approval.
The trouble with this interpretation of success is: the opposite of "blessed" is "cursed." The same divinity that dispenses a blessing can as easily (and as inexplicably) dole out a curse. Some people have no apparent problem believing in a divine power that can reward the labors of some while rejecting the labors of an overwhelming majority of others.(2) I am often surprised at how some of the unlikeliest people, whom one would have thought were immune to such a view, were, in fact, subject to it. Mark Twain, George Orwell pointed out, could never "wean himself from the notion, which is perhaps especially an American notion, that success and virtue are the same thing." (3)
The other interpretation of great personal success, however, inspires an overweening humility in the recipient, who sees it as the one in a million accident that fell on him rather than someone else, like winning a lottery or being struck by lightning - and living to tell the tale. He knows that he wasn't singled out because of any particular talent or achievement (because he knows there are colleagues who are at least as worthy as he is), but that a mindless and indifferent force focused randomly on him.
Last summer I watched Patrick Stewart in an interview with the BBC. He had become the spokesman for a charity organization, and the interviewer asked him why celebrities always seem to be attracted by such activities. While he disparaged celebrity sponsorship that is nothing more than self-promotion, Stewart said that most celebrities understand how incredibly lucky they are. They do something that they love and they get paid a fortune for it and they want to give something back.
Stewart's words are also a handy explanation for why so many celebrities are politically leftist (Stewart is a socialist). It's rare to find one who isn't. The ones who stand out, who embrace right-wing politics, probably don't think they are lucky - they probably believe that they are blessed, that, for whatever reason, their good fortune is the result of some divine payback, that they deserve it. Like football players who point to heaven when they score a touchdown, they believe that a divinity is actively involved in the performance of - and reward for - their work.
Of the two explanations for the absurd salaries that A-listers and athletes routinely draw for their "work," it's easy to see how preposterous the belief in blessedness is - an egoistic belief in divine intervention in the lives of completely unimportant people. They make the big mistake of thinking that the amount of money they make is also an estimation of moral value. Like Kanye West, their only explanation for their enormous fame and fortune is that they deserve it.
On another BBC program I watched called "Hard Talk," the American composer Phillip Glass defended his work against its unanimously dim critical appraisal by saying how wealthy it has made him and how his concerts play to packed houses. This is the worst possible defense of anyone's work, since there is no connection whatsoever between financial and critical success. Glass should've defended himself against critics' attacks with Liberace's famous line, "I cried all the way to the bank."
(1) By "success" I don't necessarily mean financial reward, which is a dubious measure of success.
(2) Here is Charles Darwin's assessment: "I hardly see how anyone ought to
wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text
seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my
Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly
punished. And this is a damnable doctrine."
(3) George Orwell, "Mark Twain - The Licensed Jester" (1943).
Having had a chance to watch a few more episodes of Downton Abbey Season Five, with Season Six coming down the pike, I find myself more in agreement with Simon Schama's harsh assessment of the series' "clammy delirium of nostalgia." In my post "Upton, Downton" I compared Downton Abbey to the series on which it was modeled, Upstairs, Downstairs, which aired on PBS forty years ago and which I watched from my late teens into my early twenties with the same rapt attention that audiences now lavish on Downton. Among the many differences between the two shows that I neglected to point out - and that Simon Schama singled out for scorn - is Downton's overpowering and noxious air of nostalgia.
Upstairs, Downstairs was a period drama about the lives of the people occupying one household in London's Eaton Belgravia district from 1903 to 1930. Because it covered such a long period in the history of England, many of the country's historical events - the sinking of the Titanic, the Great War, the General Strike, the Great Depression - were refracted through the fictional lives of the Bellamy household. And it represented history honestly. At the end of the series, the maid Rose loses her life's savings in the 1929 stock market crash, and Lord Bellamy's only son, James, who survived the Great War, commits suicide.
The historical period of Downton Abbey is more narrow: historical events (the Titanic, the Great War, the Irish Rebellion) are heard rumbling in the distance, but have little impact on the magnificent house and its occupants. Though popular in Britain, Downton Abbey has been especially successful in the U.S. The Anglophilia that the series seems to satisfy, however, appears to be more like necrophilia. Simon Schama, who clearly hates Downton's overwhelmingly rosy view of England's class-ridden past, and wants Americans to see the truth about the world that the series re-invents, agrees:
"Nothing beats British television drama for servicing the instincts of cultural necrophilia. . . In the current series, historical reality is supposed to bite at Downton in the form of the Great War. Sorry, but history’s meant to be a bummer, not a stroll down memory lane. Done right, it delivers the tonic of tragedy, not the bromide of romance."
When the BBC dramatization of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet novels The Jewel in the Crown was aired in the UK in 1984, the whole nation, it was said at the time, held its breath. Everyone, it seemed, took a time out to watch the program - not because they were fans of the novels, but because Britons in the 80s evidently felt overwhelmed by a nostalgia for its lost empire, its lost global prestige.
Perhaps because I wasn't British or because I wasn't particularly interested in India, I watched only the first few episodes of the series when it aired on PBS before giving upon it. European fascination with the world before the fall - whether it was World War I or II (or, indeed, the Berlin Wall) - certainly has some justification, but history shows how, on many levels, they should've seen it coming.
It was Robert Graves, I think, who called nostalgia "crying over spilled milk." It's a harmless but ultimately pointless exercise - until it tries, for whatever reason, to misrepresent the past.
After having to wade through the fetid swamp of the BBC's 100 Greatest American Films last July,(1) what a relief it was to be presented last month with The Guardian's list of the 100 Best Novels Written in English, reinforcing my conviction that, even if the film medium survives another hundred years (and even if works of great merit continue - stubbornly - to be made), it will never completely escape its origins as a carnival sideshow attraction.
Robert McCrum spent two years compiling the list, which was published in the Observer and theguardian.com. That he spent so much time coming up with the list seems astonishing given the results. One of the authors with a novel on his list - Anthony Trollope - had a daily routine of writing two thousand words before going to his full-time job at the Royal Mail. McCrum compiled his list after establishing a set of draconian rules that severely limited the quantity (only one novel per author) and quality of his choices. To mention only one example: when he compiled his 100 Greatest Novels of All Time in 2003, McCrum could only name one novel by Tolstoy, so he named Anna Karenina and left out War and Peace, which is one of the biggest sins of omission ever committed.
His defense of his choices is rather more impressive than the choices themselves:
In the parlour game called 'Humiliation', in David Lodge's 70s campus novel Changing Places, the players score points by confessing the famous works of literature they have never read. In a memorable comic climax, ambitious academic Howard Ringbaum admits he has never read Hamlet, instantly wrecking his career.
Lodge's insight into the practice of literature is that everyone who steps into the world of books and letters risks humiliation. Rightly, for the well-being of culture and society, this is a competitive affair. Beneath the eye of eternity, it's a matter of life and death: either some kind of literary afterlife or (more likely) oblivion.
Casual browsers sometimes took a moment to grasp that my list of 'top novels' was a) derived exclusively from fiction written in the English language; b) strictly chronological; and c) gave each writer equal space, an especially restrictive criterion. With a prolific writer, the selection of one 'classic' text became almost intolerable. To cite an unfair example - Dickens (No 15, David Copperfield) and Wilde (No 27, The Picture of Dorian Gray) appear in the list on the same footing, with one novel apiece. With such rules, every thoughtful person must concede that my list is bound to have its ridiculous side.
After answering the question "what is a classic?" McCrum admits that "thereafter, the issue becomes subjective. Classics, for some are books we know we should have read, but have not. For others, classics are simply the book we have read obsessively, many times over, and can quote from. The ordinary reader instinctively knows what he or she believes to be a classic. While our preferences inevitably reflect gender, nationality, class, and education, there is no accounting for taste."
But there are perfectly sensible ways of accounting for taste. McCrum admitted that it's "a competitive affair," otherwise known as "criticism." Not only are there books (and films) around which all the conflicting and contradictory subjectivities sometimes agree, but there are standards that exist - that must exist - to which every critic can appeal. George Orwell, who was an insightful literary critic, knew that "ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion."(2)
While admitting, like McCrum, that so much of serious criticism consists of emotional responses reinforced by often shaky rational arguments, Orwell also insisted that there was something called "intellectual detachment": "Supposing that there is such a thing as good or bad art, then the goodness or badness must reside in the work of art itself."
It would be irresponsible of me not to object to some of McCrum's list, but what is more interesting to me are the little inconsistencies that have appeared between this list and McCrum's 2003 100 Greatest Novels of All Time. For instance, of the many novels in English that made the Greatest Novels list, McCrum chose Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang rather than his Oscar and Lucinda, Roth's American Pastoral rather than his Portnoy's Complaint, Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians rather than his Disgrace, Bellow's Herzog rather than his The Adventures of Augie March, Greene's The Quiet American rather than his The End of the Affair, Beckett's Malone Dies rather than his Murphy, Dos Passos's USA rather than his Nineteen Nineteen, and Conrad's Nostromo rather than his Heart of Darkness. And Mailer's The Executioner's Song, which is one of McCrum's Greatest Novels of All Time, was omitted by him two years later because he thought Mailer was "too much of an American celebrity in thrall of the medium."
While I strongly object to a few of McCrum's choices (Bram Stoker? Jack Kerouac?), I had far less to quibble about with McCrum's list of best novels than I had with the BBC's list of greatest American films. Why? Only one person compiled the list of novels, but sixty-three people submitted suggestions to the list of films. So why does the opinion of one person seem so much more authoritative and acceptable than the opinions of sixty-three people?
Clearly, Robert McCrum was given the job of evaluating three hundred years of English fiction because a) he has done a good deal of reading and only someone who has read as much has any business making such determinations; and b) there happens to be a much broader concensus among literary critics about who is in the winner's circle and who is out. With film, as anyone who has taken the medium seriously knows, consensus is practically nonexistent. For every film critic who thinks that the best films are the ones that employ screenplays and actors, there are others who argue that documentaries or experimental films or silent films are the medium's purest examples; or that only the Russian masters of montage or the Italian neo-realists or Bresson or Straub had it figured out; or that Godard is as important to film as Dante is to literature, and so on. Every ten years since 1952, the British Film Institute has managed to locate enough critics to vote for a handful of films that they think represent some sort of core value, even if that value shifts so erratically from poll to poll that it mitigates all notions of authority.
In his book, Movies Into Film, John Simon suggested that there is a difference between a film and a movie. For instance, Bicycle Thieves is a film, whereas Psycho is a movie. The two words not only imply a difference in quality, they represent wholly different pursuits. I recently watched To Each His Cinema (2006), a compilation of short films by many different filmmakers which captures - or attempts to capture - their nostalgic feelings about the pursuit of filmgoing. Watching it, I thought that, while the ceremonious act of filmgoing, of attending a film screening in a pre-arranged place - whether it's an actual theater or a village square - is dying out, the activities in front of the screen that each filmmaker eulogizes in the To Each His Cinema - the ecstatic attention to the events unfolding on the screen or the interactions of the filmgoers - has nothing whatever to do with the films being presented. One filmmaker depicts people sitting in the dark watching a Bresson film, another shows us people watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but the people and the films seemed to me interchangeable.(4)
I think McCrum's list is intended to be prescriptive. Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who made a canonical list of a thousand greatest films, confessed that when he bought the issue of Sight and Sound in 1962 that contained the BFI Film Critic's Poll of the Top Ten Films of All Time, he set out to find and to watch every film on the list. That must have been a daunting task in the 60s, even in a big city. I found it just as daunting in the 70s, when I was on the hunt. The amount of trash I had to hew my way through to find a worthwhile film sometimes made it seem like a sleeveless errand.
If David Lodge's parlor game were to concentrate, instead, on film, the players wouldn't face humiliation because they hadn't seen The Passion of Joan of Arc, nearly ninety years old and still one of the three or four greatest films ever made. The winner would always be someone like Quentin Tarantino - not because he has seen every film and is proud of this dubious accomplishment, but because he obviously can't distinguish the good ones from the bad.
(1) If you wanted a list to provoke the greatest number of howls of execration, you could not improve on the Rolling Stone's recently published list of The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, which seems to use the premise that songwriting originated in Lubbock, Texas in 1955. Instead of commissioning the Rolling Stone, Apple Music might just as well have commissioned someone who was both illiterate and stone deaf.
(2) George Orwell, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool."
(3) In a stab at fairness, The Guardian asked its online readers to submit titles that they thought belonged on the list. They published fifteen titles, seven of which were written by what one reader called Straight White Men (some of whom are dead, and who once would have fit the horrible term DWEM from the 90s, or Dead White European Men. Now the word Straight has replaced European as a mark of contemptible distinction). The rest of the novels on the list were written by three straight white women, one African male, two Anglo-Indians (one male, one female), and two African-American women, one straight, the other lesbian.
(4) Despite the fact that the title of Walker Percy's novel is The Moviegoer, which has a far different meaning than if it were called The Filmgoer, which was, of course, Percy's intention.
