How to Watch a Movie, page 19
But it is rare for them to examine the deprived life, no matter that we are not just living through a deep depression but uncertain whether we can emerge from it. There is nothing less than social violence in the nation, in the form of unemployment, reduced educational opportunities, repossessed properties, credit card extortion, banks behaving as if run by Mr. Potter instead of George Bailey, and the organic failure of the economic system to sustain our old hopes for progress. There have been a few honorable film exceptions in recent years—Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Mud, Fruitvale Station, Blue Valentine, Frozen River, and Margin Call (uncommonly aware of impoverishment in the moneyed class)—but as the hardship on screen seems to induce an unpleasing budgetary severity and a bitter aftertaste, so it seems that no one believes there is an audience for pictures about the actual condition of the members of the audience. The notable situation comedies—like Friends— show young people without money worries.
Just as the commercials continue to assert that if we buy something—a Cadillac, a shampoo, an insurance policy, a voluptuous new burger combo—we will flourish, so movies are intoxicated with the sight of money itself. Cash is a genre. This began, I suppose, with crime movies where the outlaws treated their plunder like confetti. Too Late for Tears (1949), an intricate film noir, begins at night on a highway. Arthur Kennedy and Lizabeth Scott are driving, an uneasy married couple. A car passes aggressively close and a bag is tossed into the back of their vehicle. We see the dread and desire on their faces as they look into it and lift out packs of money—it is what will pry them apart, a dream of wealth but an infection.
In The Brinks Job (1978), an exuberant working-class comedy, hapless small-time crooks cavort in a room so full of bills they are like leaves in the forest. In The Getaway (1972) and Indecent Proposal (1993), there are love scenes where couples embrace amid dollar bills that are like nymphs and cupids in mythological paintings. The Russian mafia in The Equalizer possess blocks of money the size of rooms. In The Wolf of Wall Street, one of the more surreal and deranged of modern comedies, the tycoon figure (Leonardo DiCaprio) nearly sweats cash. This is all part of the dislocation in which rich people, made of money, are depicted as gaudy rascals—yet our guys. Thus the title American Hustle stands not for indictable offenses but a mock-heroic dance with such things. The cultural warnings are so steady, one has to assume resolute fantasy or self-deception in minds that both treasure money and hate it. This confusion reaches across all of our lives, but it is in movies (and maybe Las Vegas) that the image of money is most alarming.
14
THE DOCUMENT AND THE DREAM
When you watch a movie, or any moving imagery, you have to decide the balance of documentary and dream in what you are seeing. Or truth and fiction. But those schisms are dangerous because they begin to suggest we can settle on one or the other—like guilty or not guilty, the easy way out. Whereas, it was always the confusion that was special—the delicious mistake. When Auguste and Louis Lumière first showed that steam engine in December 1895, in Paris, I don’t think the audience was ever fooled. What they loved was the license for pretending. After all, the Lumières had chosen a very nice, amiable locomotive, such as you might find in books for children. It was nowhere near as menacing as the 1930s loco Magritte had like a hard-on in an empty hearth in his painting La Durée Poignardée. The Magritte is a night train to nowhere. But the story goes that some of that first Parisian audience believed the force and weight of the steam engine was about to break out of the screen and crash into them. So they ran out of the salon screaming. There is no verification of this, no documents, no film of the frightened audience. Even if there was, would you trust it? Or were those people simply joining in the game, entering into the spirit of the moment? Sometimes it’s fun to scream.
You are smarter than that—aren’t you?—though you may like to think of it as being more sophisticated. But how we relate to a scene we’re seeing is still perplexing. In Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) there is a mounting dread. We know enough about the history of slavery or the dynamic of movies to guess that there is going to be a violent crisis, an explicit rendering of the cruelty that was inherent in slavery. Surely it must come in a picture that has been announced in the opening titles as “based on a true story.”
This is what happens. Epps (Michael Fassbender) is a hideous, drunken plantation owner and slave master. He is married, but he and his wife loathe each other and Epps keeps one of his slaves, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), as a mistress. His wife knows this and hates them all the more. She wants Patsey dead or gone. Patsey is young, slender, with close-cropped hair, and she is the prettiest female slave in the film—it’s not fair to exclude that. At one point, she leaves the plantation briefly and is insolent to Epps when he rebukes her. On the spur of the moment, he decides she must be punished. There is no trial, because slaves did not qualify for such things. There is a whipping post on the plantation, a stout trunk some eight feet high. Of course, this is a film that takes pains to make the setting credible and accurate. It was shot on several old plantations in Louisiana close to where the real events must have occurred in the life of Solomon Northup, a free man from the North who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery.
At first, Epps appoints Solomon to whip Patsey. This is especially callous in that Solomon is fond of Patsey, without any hint of a romantic relationship. It is simply that the slaves have become a family. Patsey is tied to the post and stripped of her clothes—this is clear, but it is not treated as more than fact. Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) begins to apply the lash, but he is doing what he can to go lightly. That does not mean he is not inflicting pain and damage. Patsey cries out in anguish. But Epps is so tormented by the situation that he seizes the whip himself and applies it with such force that he will eventually collapse in exhaustion. Patsey’s cries are more desperate now. Her back is torn to pieces. She wilts at the post. The appalling thing has been accomplished for us to see.
It is plainly a purpose of the scene to be educational. Yes, you know there was slavery—but do you know what it was like? This is what it was, and surely there’s value in a careful re-creation, just as there is a need to run the footage from Bergen-Belsen. No historian could dispute the way the whipping is shown, and the director, McQueen, uses a prolonged, unbroken shot to make us feel the horror of the situation. He succeeds at the level of education, or art, or moral lesson. And remember that before 12 Years there really had not been American movies that dealt with slavery in so complete a way. It is worth wondering why not.
But no one believes that Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fass-bender actually whipped Lupita Nyong’o. Even in one full shot, the sound of the whip and of her cries are real enough (although we know now that they are sounds laid in like extra flowers put in a bouquet). When we get the shot of her back, it is not her back wrecked by the lash, but a skilled makeup job that may have taken hours to apply. We know all this. Even our children know. And if we do not hide our eyes as much as once we did, or run headlong from the theater in tears, it is because of our sophistication. All of which leaves us on perilous ground, anxious to support the suspension of disbelief, yet trusting that every screen contrivance is a trick—so that we can suspend belief. What a nightmare we have made for ourselves.
Or consider Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013). This is a movie that traces some seven years or so in the life of Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a girl living in the French provinces. We see her first in high school, feeling her way into an awkward and disappointing love affair with a boy. Then she meets an older girl, Emma (Léa Seydoux), a painter in the making, who has blue in her hair. They become lovers in an affair that drives everything except carnality out of their lives. Time passes. Emma is a painter with a career; Adèle teaches young children. The affair slackens. Adèle starts seeing a man; Emma veers back toward a former lover. They break up, though they are friendly still. What will become of Adèle?
The film is three hours long, and it is subtitled The Life of Adèle: Chapters 1 and 2. It is not based on fact (it comes from a graphic novel), yet this subtitle gives an illusion of a real world that contains the events. The film is shot in an unremarkable provincial town (Lille and Roubaix were used), often in closeups. Adèle grows older and more beautiful in fascinating ways: growing older is not a frequent topic in films and often it is done clumsily. This movie is remarkable and it overcomes any hesitations we may have about its length, and its relative dullness. I use that word carefully. Not a lot happens in terms of action, except that there are extensive love scenes between the two characters, enough to get the picture an NC-17 rating in America. It also won the Palme d’Or in Cannes.
The consequence of showing the lovemaking is not simply assessed. As I described the plot, I think it’s possible that the film could stand on its own with the briefest of love scenes. But those scenes are as important as they are powerful. The two actresses are naked. They kiss, they work on each other’s breasts, they worship each other’s private parts with their hands, their mouths, and their striving bodies. No doubles were used, as far as I can see, though I have read that artificial genitalia were employed. I’m not sure I understand that, unless it means that substitute or prosthetic erogenous zones were pasted on the women’s bodies. (Nicole Kidman employed that modesty on Eyes Wide Shut.) But considering that takes one a long way from the impulsive experience of Emma and Adèle. The film does not show pubic hair and there is the briefest glimpse of pudenda. There are cries of ecstasy and orgasm, but it is left to us to judge how much of that is acting and how much helpless. (In both scenes I am talking about, the quality of the human cries is of the utmost importance.) In thinking of that, we also have to weigh the nature and reliability of helplessness in human beings, and that can lead to the deli scene in When Harry Met Sally, where Meg Ryan imitated an orgasm for her character.
But the scene is candid and educational. Some men will learn at last what women do together; although the same men will probably be erotically aroused by the sight of two very pleasing bodies in careful abandon. Were the actresses lovers? Does that matter? Does it matter in heterosexual films that we know or wonder about the chemistry between, say, Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, or Truffaut and Jeanne Moreau during their films together? The love scene is, I think, the most striking part of the movie; it is certainly the most controversial and the thing most viewers have heard about in advance. There is always the question as to how far that preparation is there to help sell a film. Yet Blue Is the Warmest Color is a touching and uncommon study of a woman, Adèle, coming of age, and the sex scenes are essential because they let us feel her maturation, her grasp of her own feelings, and her likely exposure to heartbreak. The film needs that much sexual activity to show how far Adèle has been altered by it, and to convey the daily regularity of this direct contact. If the sex was not so close to complete, that feeling would not be as potent. Does that mean that every film with a love scene needs to be so graphic?
I don’t think it’s fanciful to say that most of these questions arise in the course of the scene—there is time. So our getting to know Adèle cannot be separated from our ruminations over the engineering and the protocol of showing sexual behavior on screen (while remaining in the dark about what it means in our heads). How different would the scene be if the actresses playing Adèle and Emma were less lovely, and less lithe? But have we begun to complain about the generality of leading characters in movies being so good looking? Following the life of Adèle is a very rewarding experience, but how can it be managed without the simultaneous internal debate over watching how it is done? I am not dismayed by that. I have tried to argue all along in this book that as you watch a film more closely, its manufacturing process is so intricate, and so beset by decisions, that we become students of film and not simply people watching stories. But that delicate balance does not do anything to ease or settle our relationship with reality. This is what I mean by proposing that we are lost.
Historically, audiences turned to what they called “documentary” as they lost faith and patience in fiction films. There were many reasons for that. The Second World War was a helpless inducement to travel, and travel broadens the mind even if its first resorts are destroyed cities, concentration camps, and the lines of refugees who seemed to have won nothing. People saw new worlds, and movie newsreels gave cocksure, inadequate reports of such places with inadvertent disclosures in the footage—one-legged women and three-legged dogs waiting for soup. The dark-eyed wraiths in what looked like over-large pajamas. I can still recall a newsreel for the 1948 presidential election where a grinning Harry Truman dropped his hat on the camera lens as if to stop coverage. By the mid-1950s, Alain Resnais had made Night and Fog, a simple, blunt, and stricken account of Auschwitz in which the ghastly state of the camp was poeticized by the commentary of Jean Cayrol, music by Hanns Eisler, and Resnais’s aloof editing. More or less, in ten years of peace the world had not seen or realized what Auschwitz was like, just to look at and breathe in.
The devastation revealed in 1945—to the world’s fabric and hopes—left some audiences guilty at having fallen for happy endings. In newsreel and in new features like Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, the home audiences in the victorious countries saw what bombing, artillery, and occupation had done. The displaced person was a new character on screen. Italian neorealism—Rome Open City, Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D—was a valiant attempt to show real life, and common stories as they had been ignored for decades. In Bicycle Thieves, there is that heavy-handed irony that the man whose job of sticking up posters of Rita Hayworth in Gilda has his bike stolen so he’s out of work again. People beyond Italy were moved to tears by the film. David Selznick dreamed of remaking it—in America!—with Cary Grant as the man!! There was an extra irony to this outburst of sentimentality: Gilda, an innovative picture about sadomasochism and the exploitation of beautiful women (written by Marion Parsonnet and produced by Virginia Van Upp), is a subtler picture than Bicycle Thieves.
Whatever movies did with reality (and they were inconsistent), television lurched like a drunk Dad into our home, boasting of news and actuality and documentary. The legend goes that it was unmediated footage from Vietnam (in color after 1966) that turned the public against the war there. That begs only one question: that the American public at large never gave up its support for that war.
As television drained away the mass audience so movies, in desperation, turned in many new directions: wide-screen, 3D, rock and roll, and, later on, special effects, unlimited violence, and censor-free sex. They even thought of making tough films about difficult material, without happy or reassuring endings, but movies that worked in the way of novels and which aspired to the company of Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, and the directors of the French New Wave. And so we have 12 Years a Slave instead of Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind (you can’t say we haven’t advanced) and Blue Is the Warmest Color instead of the shriveled daring of The Children’s Hour. All of which is for the better, yet it gives up on the old ideal that the movies might be for everyone as it casts the shadow of shame on so many of our earlier films. The Birth of a Nation made the business: it funded and inspired the building of theaters and the origin of production companies. But it is a disgrace, no matter that Griffith hammers away all through his specious film about how this scene and that was most meticulously based on the real thing.
Based on fact—just like lies: there is no such thing as a lie unless there is something we can regard as fact or truth. Astonishing documentaries have been made in the last fifty years: The Sorrow and the Pity and Hotel Terminus by Marcel Ophüls; Shoah by Claude Lanzmann; the collected studies of American institutions by Frederick Wiseman; the hallowed reassurances by Ken Burns that America’s dying institutions still exist; the brilliant, nagging analyses of our chirruping media by Adam Curtis; as well as striking single events like Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog; the idiosyncratic laments over America by Michael Moore. At the respectable level of art house cinema, these films have found an audience and appreciation. Ken Burns’s series on the Civil War was one of the greatest successes public broadcasting has ever had. Bowling for Columbine, a rambling essay on guns and America but personal and provocative, won an Oscar and earned $21 million in America. Hotel Terminus (about Klaus Barbie) is one of film’s best and least glamorizing portraits of evil—it was made in the era when wicked men were becoming movie heroes (just think of Michael Corleone, Hannibal Lecter, Tony Soprano, Walter White). Grizzly Man is not just as good a film as Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, but a companion piece in that it cannot rid itself of fascination for a demented but charismatic adventurer. Errol Morris’s The Fog of War is an anguished picture of Robert McNamara left in distress by political decisions in which he assisted from World War II to Vietnam.
But what is the achievement of these films? For doesn’t documentary imply that it wants to do something with our problems? Shoah leaves one in no doubt about the nature of the Holocaust, but did it change minds? On the other hand, Conspiracy, a modest feature film made in 2001 for television (based on actual transcripts) about the Wannsee Conference of 1943 on the final plans for disposing of Jews, written by Loring Mandel and directed by Frank Pierson, with Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and Stanley Tucci as Eichmann, is as clear and chilling a film about the fascist personality as any I have seen. The melancholy air of The Fog of War did not prevent the bumptious confidence of Donald Rumsfeld in a later Errol Morris film, The Unknown Known. Rumsfeld told Morris that he hated The Fog of War, because “that man had nothing to apologize for.” The point of Bowling for Columbine did not deter so many subsequent killings in the American heartland, at schools and malls, by guns, guns, guns.
