How to Watch a Movie Read online

  Let me explore the existence of Heat (1995) on screen a little further. As written and directed by Michael Mann, it is an absorbing picture, a suspenseful narrative for its full 171 minutes. I watch it a lot, and I can tell myself it is for the craft, the art or the performances (it is one of De Niro’s last good pictures). But I know I am drawn to it by the licensed fantasy of watching alleged cops and robbers strutting their stuff—with guns, but with talk, too. It is a potent male dream. The women in the film are often intriguing, but they are not permitted to rival the male ideology. And Heat is a fire that doesn’t burn me. I can watch its immense street gun battles with excitement; I can be carried away by the notion that De Niro and Pacino are alike in their characters. But my wife once was mugged and I know that that suggestion of parity is insane. A brush with violent crime in life can be searing and traumatic. Yet on screen it is indulged. Film only works in the dark, and because of that safe distance from life.

  The intrinsic deal in the movies was to say, Look, for a very modest sum—a nickel, say—we’ll give you an opportunity to see not just the wonders of the world, not just people who are beautiful beyond your dreams, but a set of conditions to which we know you aspire: sexual splendor, thrilling violence, clothes, décor, space, timing, and ultimate happiness; in short, the chance to bathe in the light. It’s the treat of the new age, and here’s the kicker: you can watch the sex and violence without ever being identified, or known. The beautiful men and women will come right up to the screen and gaze into your darkness alight with desire and availability. They may start to slip off their clothes and their inhibitions. But they won’t notice you. They won’t cry out, “Peeping Tom!” and shame you. Your voyeur rapture will be condoned. You can cough or sigh and the music of the movie will smother the guilty sounds. There’s only one drawback: you can’t come up on screen or pass through the window. You stay in the dark. You are invisible, anonymous; you are part of the mass for a medium made of light.

  Historically, it is still a great puzzle, yet one can try to track the consequent disillusion. I suspect it started with sound, for that enhancement of the love of reality does seem to have wiped out a great deal of innocence. Consider Fritz Lang’s first sound film, M (1931).

  Lang was a visionary of silent cinema, audacious and ambitious, and possessing one of the greatest composing eyes the medium has ever known. He had done Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge as parts of Wagner’s Die Nibelungen; in Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler he had created one of the most spectacular mad genius criminals of the age; in Metropolis, he had delivered a future society in which the precious few lived in penthouse light while the masses labored underground. In Woman in the Moon he had broken into science fiction. Then in 1931, he and his wife, the screenwriter Thea von Harbou, noticed a rash of serial killings in Germany. They asked themselves, How can you make a movie about a serial killer?

  Lang remembered a stage actor he had seen a few years earlier in Berlin in Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. He was short, squat, and so far from conventionally handsome it was disturbing. You could not take your eyes off him, just as his own popping eyes seemed to feed on anything he looked at. He was close to grotesque, and yet he was funny, amusing, dreamy, and in some lights he had the face of a wounded angel. He was a phenomenon; Lang had seen no one like him, and cinema has always wanted to show us things never seen before. His name was Peter Lorre. Lang approached him and asked, “You have done a movie?” Lorre said he had not, and the director made him promise he would not do a picture before Lang put him in one. “Of course,” said Lorre, “but what film is this?” I don’t know yet, said Lang.

  So Lorre became Hans Beckert in a film intended to be called “Murderers Among Us” until Lang had the brainwave of branding simplicity—call it M, for that insolent panache refused to be daunted by the dark material. Wasn’t there a key moment in the film when a blind beggar identified Beckert—because he was whistling a theme from Greig’s Peer Gynt (this was a sound film)—and then another street criminal scrawled a white chalk M on the palm of his hand and slapped it on Beckert’s shoulder? That allowed one of the famous shots in film history where Beckert looks in a mirror and sees the M on his back (like a frightened man gazing at a screen).

  M is a classic now, among our great films, but it was unprecedented in pushing the regular process of audience identification to a new limit. Beckert kills children. You know you are against that. In 1931, it was not possible for a movie to show that action—today, we have become more sophisticated and tolerant. But there is an alarming moment in Lang’s film where he cuts to a sudden close-up of Beckert taking a knife from his pocket. He flicks it open—and peels an orange for a little girl. Even now, it’s ample suggestion; in 1931, it must have been more frightening still (we all know that moment when we guess a film is going to show us something so awful we may not be able to watch).

  In the 1931 movie, the child killer is such a disturbance to organized crime that the underworld hunts the killer along with the police. He is captured at last and accused in a mock trial staged by the criminals. Beckert breaks down and admits to his irresistible impulse—he is crazy, but he can explain it. He may be the most appalling movie killer shown to that time, but he is the one who makes the most insidious appeal for sympathy in which the pathology of the murderer is infernally tangled with Lorre’s eloquence as an actor.

  I suspect the piercing shot of Beckert seeing himself in the mirror (or on a screen) was instinctive on Lang’s part, but he was a fervent psychologist of screen dynamics, and he created imagery with the spontaneity of a poet—albeit a cold one. The image speaks to the new ambiguity that M has uncovered and the way we are gazing at, and beginning to want to understand, a figure who would be alien and alarming in most circumstances. Suppose at a screening of M in Berlin a man had been caught attacking a child in the audience, mob fury would have descended on him without mercy (and Lang was very good on mob fury). But that same audience is breaking perilous ground in contemplating Beckert’s justification. The “ordinary” status of reality is being undermined by a new detachment. The dilemma will recur throughout this book, but M is one of the first times the slippage was clear. And it is a great film, as beautiful as it is sinister. Is that mix really possible? Or is it something cinema invented? Everyone liked M, from Graham Greene to Joseph Goebbels, who wrote in his journal, “Fantastic! Against humanitarian soppiness. For the death penalty. Well made. Lang will be our director one day.”

  The consequences are as fascinating as the film itself. For Peter Lorre, it was a breakthrough and a curse. No one in the business ever forgot his performance, or believed he should depart from it. He felt imprisoned by the assumption that he was perfect casting as a murderer. About two years after the movie was made, in the spring of 1933, Lang was called in for an interview by Goebbels. The new head of propaganda and the Führer himself had been thrilled by Lang’s pictures. So they wanted him to take charge of film for the Third Reich. Not long thereafter (though not as swiftly as he claimed later), Lang left Germany (Lorre quit, too). They went their separate ways to Hollywood, yet never worked together again. As for M, it was some time before its insights flowered—for censorship stood in the way to protect us. But over time the medium shrugged that off, and so we were in for a run of extraordinary films and shows: Psycho (no director learned more from Lang than Hitchcock), The Godfather, The Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo … The Sopranos, Dexter, Breaking Bad.

  That’s too dark a view? How many real killings have you seen? I’m guessing and hoping very few—zero perhaps. And how many have you seen presented and pretended to on some screen? Well, if you’re thirty and American, the number is around thirty thousand. Does that imbalance amount to an attention disorder?

  3

  A LONE TOGETHER?

  In the last chapter, I was treasuring the community of film-going in the late 1940s. But I wonder if I was being unduly sentimental or nostalgic, for I know in my innermost being that another thing that has always appealed to me about the movies is the solitude, or the aloneness, they foster. How can those reactions coexist?

  The community wasn’t simply a mythic idea promoted by the business. Moviegoing was the national pastime. By the late twenties, a third of Americans were going to the pictures once a week. In the war years, that figure reached 70 million admissions on a population of about 140 million. Immediately after the war it was 80 million—or still half the population. The average admission price was less than 50 cents. The theaters were crowded or packed. People went in groups and they saw friends there. The spirit of the war was reinforced by the movies and enshrined by them. It was in theaters that we formed our idea of what war looked like, granted that the newsreels were carefully controlled and very positive. But the mood of the audience was already in favor of the war and these regular gatherings for entertainment focused team spirit as well as the pathos of those who were “away” or in danger.

  Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) is set in 1904, and it delights in the prettiness of period clothes and an idealized home built on the M-G-M lot in Culver City. We meet three generations of the Smith family all living in the same house. They are excited about the World’s Fair coming to St. Louis, but then a fresh adventure appears on their horizon. Alonzo, the father, is offered an important new job in New York City. If he accepts it, the family must move, and suffer the disruption and transience that many regard as characteristic of American life. But then comes Christmas Eve (the picture opened in November 1944). The teenage Esther (Judy Garland) sings to her sleepless kid sister, Tootie (Margaret O’Brien), “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as they look out at the backyard with the snowmen they have built,

  The song is one of the most beautiful and melancholy in the American songbook (by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin), and the film and its director, Vincente Minnelli, use it to bring a tear to our eye—an honest tear and an innocent eye. Tootie is so torn about leaving St. Louis that she rushes down to the yard in her nightgown and destroys the snowmen. This is an M-G-M musical, but still it is one of the best domestic moments in American film. The father hears and sees this, and on the spot he quenches his own ambition and his urge to move. The Smiths will stay in St. Louis. There’s no place like home. (It was the same message as delivered in another Garland film, The Wizard of Oz—and so the war was bookended.) But surely Alonzo is more alone amid togetherness.

  The American home had not been bombed—think of the education if it had. But American families had been split apart, and here was a film that reassured the troops overseas (they were an extra audience on top of the domestic box office) that home would still be there waiting for them and their old life would resume. Those were white lies, and anyone shrewd enough would have guessed that. But the audience wanted to believe in stability, persistence, and the war being worthwhile. So the movie houses were home away from home, and strongholds of a positive and conservative state of mind.

  Meet Me in St. Louis would have played with a newsreel, a couple of cartoons maybe, and a nice war bond display in the lobby. The prints of those movies still bear the legend “Buy War Bonds as You Leave This Theatre.” It was a good place to be. The best time I saw my parents together—or the only time—was when they took me to the movies. This was the audience that even the rebellious John L. Sullivan reconciled himself to after a spell on the chain gang.

  Moreover, the war years made classics: the history goes from Gone With the Wind to The Best Years of Our Lives, and along the way it takes in Casablanca, Road to Morocco (a bigger hit than Casablanca and equally uninterested in North Africa), Meet John Doe, and To Have and Have Not. These are emblems from a golden age eager for comfort, and it’s easy to assume that they conform to the code of the happy ending. But that’s not the case. Scarlett O’Hara is actually left alone, and we reckon she deserves it. The Best Years of Our Lives is wholesome and decent and it trusts to the good nature of ordinary people, but it admits how greed and opportunism had flourished in the war. In Casablanca our guy gives up his girl for higher causes. Meet John Doe is not just rueful, it’s close to ruined in its feeling for hysteria within the American dream. Road to Morocco knows that Hope and Crosby should never trust one another. The only one of those classics with an unequivocally serene ending is To Have and Have Not, which has Bacall shuffling off with Bogart into a cockamamie future, and so contrary to the Hemingway novel it claims as its source. It’s about as daft as the Road film, even if it’s also more insolent, sexy, and knowing than any other wartime romance.

  The rapture was short-lived. By 1950, attendance was down to 55 million people a week; by 1960, it was 30 million, or less than a sixth of the population. When the war ended there were many objections to the culture of the happy ending, for it seemed like a cruel lie as the truths of the war years were uncovered, from Dachau to the prospects for further wars in the bright light of Hiroshima. All over the world, there were promises to make cinema more “real,” or more aware of the world’s difficulties.

  The old culture of Hollywood had many dissenters. The Supreme Court, seeing monopolistic tendencies, separated production and exhibition. The fear of a Communist presence in America fixed on the movie industry to gain public attention. There were brave new films about the movie business—aware of fear, exploitation, and madness: Sunset Blvd., In a Lonely Place, The Bad and the Beautiful, and even Singin’ in the Rain, one of the cheekiest satires on Hollywood. There were also small crime films, as aware of the anxieties in America as the best pulp fiction—Detour, Crossfire, Force of Evil. In time, these pictures were called “film noir,” which had the defect of covering up their social criticism. In Crossfire, about a killing in the military prompted by anti-Semitism (it was homophobia in the original book), there is a throwaway scene, barely remembered now, with Gloria Grahame and Paul Kelly, that has a contempt for life as trenchant as Jim Thompson or Nathanael West. It was West who had known in 1939, in The Day of the Locust, that Hollywood was a depraved and deluding cultural center that deserved to be overthrown. The doubts were there. Norman Mailer, who had done some time in Hollywood and loved movies, wrote The Deer Park (1955), a scathing novel so much tougher than the pained hero-worship in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished The Last Tycoon.

  But the happy ending struggled on. There are always too many movies for safe generalizations. So Crossfire, In a Lonely Place, and Robert Aldrich’s savagely disenchanted Kiss Me Deadly were smothered by the blancmange of An American in Paris, The Greatest Show on Earth, Roman Holiday, The Glenn Miller Story, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, and Around the World in Eighty Days, all the way to Twelve Angry Men and Ben-Hur, epitomes of rational, liberal optimism. Of course, by the end of the 1950s, easygoing cinema was in a losing competition with the effortless mini-movies and the sublime, recurring entertainment of I Love Lucy and other hits from television. Movies never stood a chance against technology and its progress and the zeal of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Those “outsiders” (failures once in the Hollywood system) were so successful they would end up purchasing the tottering studio RKO. The innocent bliss of being a movie audience (or a studio) was over.

  The crowd loved the sudden outburst of Lucy, and it fell in love with its new piece of furniture that revolutionized the practice of watching moving film. There were so many things that let you know you were trying to watch (as opposed to entering a dream): the image was small and harsh, as movies strove for more color and wider screens; it came back every week, with variations on the same situation—a TV star was suddenly working five times harder than movie stars—and for Lucy and so many other shows there was the sound of the studio audience. The act of watching and responding was part of the experience. The medium was becoming a conscious part of the message, just as academics like Marshall McLuhan were beginning to see that the technology often surpassed the alleged core of the show—the story. Moreover, it was always a delightful, hectic puzzle disentangling Lucille and Lucy. In the early fifties, TV was already flirting with its own slipping reality.

  A few observers were prescient. In 1950, when only 9 percent of American households possessed a television set (with laughable reception), Ray Bradbury wrote a story now known as “The Veldt.” It was regarded as science fiction and it envisaged a house that is still beyond our means. The Hadley family live in their “HappyLife House.” The two children, Peter and Wendy, love the nursery because its walls are screens that can play whatever scene and scenery they desire. They prefer the African veldt, with lions prowling in the distance. The parents are troubled by this obsession (profound concentration in children can alarm parents who urge the kids to look). A psychologist advises them to switch the nursery off and go live in the country. But the children contrive to lock their parents in the nursery, and their last awareness is that the lions are coming closer and have been feeding on human bodies. When this story was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post it was called “The World the Children Made.”

  Four years later, Graham Greene (once a film critic and then screenwriter for The Fallen Idol and The Third Man) published a story, “The Blue Film.” It is set in an unnamed country, often assumed to be Thailand, where the Carters are stationed. They are midde-aged and their marriage has soured. But they have an appetite for sensation still and the husband arranges for them to see a dirty movie show. It plays on a screen “about the size of a folio volume.” It must be an old print on a creaking 16 mm projector. The second film they see is more intriguing than the first, more arousing, with an odd tenderness. It involves a man and a young prostitute. The wife realizes that the man is her Carter from twenty years earlier. The wife says the film is disgusting and she can’t believe what her husband did for the camera. He was in love with the girl and his wife may read that in the film. The gap between the husband and wife seems wider and more bitter, and Greene was always better at seeing lost love than the freshly discovered thing. But the wife is now “dry and hot and implacable in her desire,” and after they have had sex she says, “It’s years since that happened.” But Carter is left empty and desolate, feeling he has betrayed his girl from the past, the lost love of his life.