And Maybe an Executive Producer Credit

So we touched on postmodernism in architecture yesterday. We kinda wandered pretty far afield from the original topic: What the hell happened to movies? This is not “old man yells at cloud” territory, no matter how much the people who are systematically destroying the movie business would like to make it. I don’t think your movies suck because I’m cranky. I’m cranky because your movies suck. In the words of Beavis and Butthead, “I hate movies that suck.”

We mentioned Lawrence of Arabia the other day. I gave it a glowing review, others gave it a meh. Different strokes. But I’d like to point out something in the movie that stuck way too hard in Hollywood’s extremely low foreheads. The story is deliberately told out of order:

Three minutes into a three-and-a-half-hour movie, and the main character is deader than disco. I wasn’t around in 1962 to see it, but that little bit blew a lot of people’s minds. I’m not sure the movie business ever got over it. Because it was the first big example I can think of a movie that didn’t close the same week at the arthouse theater that exalted a postmodernist idea about how to make movies. They didn’t really know what they were looking at, and it morphed into this (from the Wikiup):

Postmodernist film is often separated from modernist cinema and traditional narrative film by three key characteristics. One of them is an extensive use of homage or pastiche. The second element is meta-reference or self-reflexivity, highlighting the construction and relation of the image to other images in media and not to any kind of external reality. A self-referential film calls the viewer’s attention – either through characters’ knowledge of their own fictional nature, or through visuals – that the film itself is only a film. This is sometimes achieved by emphasizing the unnatural look of an image which seems contrived. Another technique used to achieve meta-reference is the use of intertextuality, in which the film’s characters reference or discuss other works of fiction. Additionally, many postmodern films tell stories that unfold out of chronological order, deconstructing or fragmenting time so as to highlight the fact that what is appearing on screen is constructed. A third common element is a bridging of the gap between highbrow and lowbrow activities and artistic styles – e.g., a parody of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling in which Adam is reaching for a McDonald’s burger rather than the hand of God. The use of homage and pastiche can, in and of itself, result in a fusion of high and low art.

But David Lean, the director, wasn’t deconstructing anything for shiggles. He was solving a problem. The movie was made in 1962. T.E. Lawrence died in 1932. The movie portrays his exploits in WW I. Lawrence might seem like someone from a very obscure and far away time to people now, but there were plenty of moviegoers in 1962 for whom Lawrence was a real person. They knew all about him. The public knew he was dead, dead, dead, and many knew how mundane the circumstances of his death were.

Lean didn’t want the climax of his movie to be an anticlimax, because leading the revolt in the desert certainly trumps a motorbike accident for stirring the blood. Life gave Lean lemons, so he made lemonade. He killed the hero while the opening credits rolled to instruct the audience to take it as read: we all know how he died. This wasn’t about that. It wasn’t a cheesy biopic. It was about great themes. Identity. Heroism. Populism. Yellow journalism. It jumped all over the place, but it had an underlying theme, and the story had a trajectory.

Postmodern movies are just messes. Look at that description of it again. They can try to tart it up with ten-cent words like intertextuality, but what they’re dancing around is a more cogent description: they’re a mess.

Stories generally require a trajectory. Kurt Vonnegut might be the ultimate poster boy for postmodern writing, and even he knew how to operate a story:

So James Joyce can write 762 pages about a guy that walks around Dublin and nothing happens. Vonnegut can write about the bombing of Dresden and Tralfamadorians in the same book. But Ulysses is weightlifting. Vonnegut is assigned reading. They are burdens placed on the audience. Movies have a different job. And postmodern movies show up late, leave early, and hide in the break room all day at their job.

Postmodern movies are mostly just disconnected scenes chucked in a cutting room Cuisinart. Some of the scenes might be pretty good, but they don’t really knit themselves into a coherent narrative. If you question them about what they’re doing, they simply say, “I meant to do that.” Postmodernism is the artistic version of a Get Out of Jail Free card.

I’ll  give you one example. In one of the great “Thanks Dad” moments in Hollywood history, they gave Coppola’s kid an Oscar because Bill Murray is plain funny. Here’s the ending of Lost in Translation:

The whole movie is a mishmash of what I did on my summer vacation on my dad’s gold card. Like most of its oeuvre, it is, as Homer Simpson so aptly put it, “Just a bunch of stuff that happened.” It was immensely successful, of course, because mind-numbing solipsism is a way of life for entire generations at this point. A Rambo movie for girls. But as a story, outside of Bill being amusing, it’s just slides of someone else’s trip to the Luray Caverns.

So Bill wanders around maybe three-quarters of a script she wrote and they get to the end and the payoff is Bill Murray whispering something in her ear. Sofia Coppola can clutch the same statue they gave Herman J. Mankiewicz, and say I meant to do that all she wants, but I know how it works. She didn’t know where she was going in the first place, so how could she possibly know what to do when she got there? We’re supposed to fill in the blank for her with the most romantic thing evar…. Duh, you just know it was. Totally.

If I have to supply the dialog in your movie, honey, I’m going to need to see a check first.

Are Movies Art?

In order to talk about movies as an art form, I’m going to have to talk like Oswald Spengler for a minute. I ain’t shaving my head or anything, but I have read the books. Anyway, if The Decline of the West had a Cliff Notes version (yikes, there’s a thought), it would probably boil down to: a definable people produce a culture which produces a civilization which eventually destroys the culture that made it and you go back to trying to assemble people into a group that can produce a culture. Rinse and repeat.

Further along his loopy exposition of this worldview, he points out lots of examples of things that got very popular indeed, and then went past popular to very important indeed, but eventually took the same trajectory to destruction as everything else. And by destruction, he didn’t mean they disappeared.  He meant that The Action moved elsewhere. I tend to agree with him. For example, harness racing still exists. It was pretty popular with a generation or two before mine. Football was third-tier sport back then. They built Foxboro Stadium on a demolished harness racing track. Quod erat demonstrandum, people.

So movies still exist. They’re still making ’em, after a fashion. But The Action has moved elsewhere. Some commenters yesterday pointed out television serials that are more popular than movies are at this point. Being popular doesn’t make them art, however. Television pretty much killed the studio system that made movies back in the day, and when movies rose from the ashes and became a big deal again, cable TV killed that, too.

I suppose we should define what is art, and what isn’t, before we go shooting our mouths off more than we already have.

The Merriam Webster, which is no longer reliable, because linguistic exactitude isn’t where The Action is, politics is, says,

the conscious use of skill and creative imagination in the production of aesthetic objects, or the works so produced

That’s not bad. Now, what’s entertainment?

amusement or diversion provided especially by performers

I think that’s bad grammar, and needs a comma after “diversion” at the very least to fix it, but we’ve already pointed out how unserious grammar has become. Let’s play it as it lies.

I figure art can be entertaining. Likewise, entertainment can be art. The people who make movies all think they are artists, of course, and take themselves very seriously, but nearly all their output is trivial. Even the best of them are craftsmen, not artists. In their hearts they know it, so they’re testy on this point. There’s a reason why actors are famous for acting like raging buttholes to everyone they encounter who isn’t a producer with a checkbook. They’re afraid they’ll be found out. They’re seriousness porcupines, with a very soft underbelly.

So in my opinion, which is the only one that matters, naturally, because that’s what makes it an opinion, when did movies become an art form, and when did it run out of gas? I’ll spare you titles like Birth of a Nation and the Battleship Potemkin, and stick to things you might have seen, or could at least get your hands on. Beside, just because they were trying to make art, doesn’t mean they made it. The medium would have to catch up first.

Let’s skip through the calendars and see how the movies tried to get into the pantheon with the other artistic genres:

Chaplin worked for the producers of the lowest form of slapstick entertainment. He needed to get on. But he always had the idea that cinema (yikes! that word has finally appeared here) could be so much more. He always believed in himself, and plowed all his money and efforts into making movies that melded gags and pathos and grace and sentiment and social commentary. Unfortunately for him, talking movies killed his milieu dead as soon as he had perfected it. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t art.

None of the first talkies were art. Silent movies started out barbaric, and so did talkies. They were still trying to figure out what to do. You can watch The Jazz Singer or Rudolf Valentino movies if you want to, but they’re artifacts, not art.

That was the twenties. The thirties produced lots of good movies. Too many to list. But art? I’m going to stick my neck out, and ignore all the imported German auteurs and American stage imports and pick out the only real art produced in the cinema in the thirties:

Historian Paul Johnson remarked that Walt Disney is the only genius to ever work in Hollywood. Brilliant people did, sure, and a lot of them, but only one dude transformed an industry to make art. Disney’s modern iteration, not-so-lovingly called Mauschwich by a lot of people who work there, has long since lost its way, but there was nothing like this before, and little that could compete with it after, unless Walt did it himself.

People forget that the material, and the themes they explored, were challenging and offbeat for the time. The music was very, very sophisticated, and the artwork was stunning. It would be hard to imagine what it would be like to sit in a giant theater in ’37 and watch this on the screen. Mindblowing. It cost 1.5 million bucks to make, an enormous risk for Disney, and it eventually did $418 million at the box office to pay him back. Picasso was a piker compared to Disney.

Then the forties rolled around and people were getting used to lurid color and big pageants like Cecil B. DeMille movies. There was a lot going on, and a lot of it was very good. But it was a black and white job that stuck a flag in a hill and called itself art right from the get-go. It even included a breakdown of the fourth wall of the entertainment business with a frenetic look at what goes on to make something into art:

Most everything about Kane was either sublime or entertaining, usually both. It’s routinely voted as the best movie ever made for reasons the voters don’t really understand themselves: The theme of lost childhood innocence is the core of artistic desire.

Whoo boy, and then the fifties rolled around. Movie studios were taking themselves very seriously by then, and there was so much dough in the business that you could afford to try to make art out of anything as a sort of side order. Everything was over the top. Technicolor, huge casts, huge sets, gigantic orchestras sawing away at scores written just for the movies with an eye towards the same sort of importance as Broadway and opera and even Romantic symphony music. Hell, the opening credits got sophisticated. There were overtures and entr’actes and run times over three hours, which really got going, and metastasized into the 60s big budget spectacles.

We’ll have to look at a modestly failed attempt to make true art out of melodrama and spectacle to get us on the scent:

William Wyler had big ideas about The Big Country. In some ways, it’s a triumph of movie making. It looks amazing, an important aspect of making art. The story about rectitude vs. brashness in a man is worthwhile, if a bit hamfisted in the telling. But Wyler was an important commodity in Hollywood, and they sent him off to make Ben Hur before he was finished with The Big Country, and it shows. Robert Swink, a second unit director and editor finished the movie, but only technically. It completely runs out of gas at the end. Directors matter.

But the road in The Big Country didn’t lead to Rome, although Ben Hur is a stone cold blast. It led to the desert. David Lean must have seen the landscapes included almost as characters in The Big Country, and used what he saw to make the high water mark of movies as an art form:

It takes nerve to point a movie camera at a sunrise, and get away with it. But Lean had all sorts of nerve. He thought of the movies as art, and put together the right people to make it so.

My father took me to see this movie when it was re-released, and told me it was the greatest movie ever made, or ever would be made. I never argued with my father. I’m not going to start now.

[Everyone can mention a movie they think meets the artistic threshold in the comments]