As of March 23, Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes is shipping! Order a copy, then email me with your comments.
One of the movies I remember seeing while in high school is Mirage (Edward Dmytryk, 1965) with Gregory Peck and Walter Matthau. At one point, Peck’s character descends a staircase he has descended before—only to find it ending at a wall where it had earlier continued down. This, of course, is a common device in film, just as it is in fiction—but it seems to bother us more in movies. Well, sometimes. I do remember feeling annoyed and manipulated as it dawned on me that most everything in William Golding’s Pincher Martin was a dying man’s fantasy… something that hadn’t happened when I first watched La rivière du hibou (Robert Enrico, 1962), a film version of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which contains a similar structure.
The difference may be that Golding does not rely on surprise to the degree that Bierce and Enrico do. In Pincher Martin, we figure out quite early what is going on (even the subtitle helps give it away). In La rivière du hibou, we don’t know until the last moment. Perhaps there’s resentment, when we decide we’ve figured it out and there’s still a long way to go, that is not present when the surprise is absolute and comes at the very end.
Still, the lie presented as ‘truthful’ narrative generally seems easier to accept in books than in movies—at least when the lie is told visually. There was long a sense that Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright would have been more successful had he not shown a lie rather than simply let the character tell it. Seeing something seems to provide a verification that reading about it doesn’t quite match. Perhaps, then we have a different suspension of disbelief when seeing a movie than when reading.
Though that really doesn’t make much sense.
It’s all fiction, and many of us seem to like movies best when the lie is so obvious and outrageous that the whole thing becomes an outright fantasy.
The other day, I saw Chloe (Atom Egoyan, 2009) starring Julianne Moore, Amanda Seyfried, and Liam Neeson—a recent movie using visualization of lies. The lies are framed much as is the one in Stage Fright, by a character starting to recount what we then see, which is sometimes called a ‘lying flashback.’ Quite quickly, I whispered to my wife, “She’s lying.” And settled back to enjoy the performances, forgetting the suspense.
Unfortunately, like the lying flashbacks, the performances were a little too pat. The characters the actors were trying to bring to life have little to them beyond cliché and class assumptions. So, when Seyfried’s Chloe lets go at the end, we watch with relief, not horror or even new understanding.
To be used to effect, the lying flashback (like any deception within the greater deception of the fiction) needs to have relevance to the unfolding of the narrative that is the movie or even the book. The problem in Chloe, as in Stage Fright isn’t the lying flashback itself, but the way it is used, its point in terms of the telling. In both cases, it becomes an unnecessary distraction from the character-driven drama… successful in the case of Hitchcock (we really come to care about Jane Wyman’s character) and not so much in the Egoyan film.
If there is a reason to fool the audience for a while, the lying flashback (or any other deceit within the film) could certainly be an effective device. Unfortunately, the old rule of fiction, ‘show, don’t tell,’ isn’t always one that should be followed. Just because one can show something doesn’t mean that one should. Hitchcock certainly learned that lesson, never again resorting to that particular technique. In a sense, Hitchcock throws out the baby with the bath, abandoning a technique that might be perfectly appropriate in another setting. Egoyan, one might suspect, uses the lying flashback to flesh out a movie that might otherwise seem rather too thin (and to give Neeson a larger part)—a bad reason for using any device. That he was tempted to do so should have alerted him to the weakness of his material, leading him to turn back to his writers for a strengthened story instead of relying on trickery to enhance what is hardly there in the first place.
For more on flashbacks, visit David Bordwell’s website.
Here’s Jane Wyman, playing the serving girl (a role within a role) to Marlene Dietrich’s stage star:
I hope we don’t push ownership rights to the point where something like this can never happen!
Movies are wonderful. What fans do with them, just as much.
In an article in The New York Times on March 31, resident movie critic A. O. Scott talks about the oft-suggested ‘death’ of the movie critic. He doesn’t see it. He writes:
Criticism is a habit of mind, a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them. As such, it is always apt to be misunderstood, undervalued and at odds with itself. Artists will complain, fans will tune out, but the arguments will never end.
So I’ve come full circle. The future of criticism is the same as it ever was. Miserable, and full of possibility. The world is always falling down. The news is always very sad. The time is always late.
But the fruit is always ripe.
Though I do think he is right, he does not address what I see as the problem behind the receding importance of the paid film critic working for traditional media.
Naturally enough, given that it is his business (and he is good at what he does), Scott does not want to show film criticism in a negative light. Quite the contrary. He implicitly places today’s film criticism with literary criticism as it was practiced a hundred, two hundred years ago.
No.
What Scott has done instead is create something of a “faux ami” or homophone, taking two words that sound alike and assuming that they share meaning. In this case, the distinction occurs through time, not through languages separation. Today, “criticism” does not mean what it once did.
Once, there was a distinction between “reviews” and “criticism.” A reviewer (or critic—a conflation that is part of the problem) wrote shorter pieces, often for daily publications, while criticism was something more scholarly, more in depth. A review passed judgment, and quickly. Criticism shied away from simple good/bad dichotomies. But reviewers got uppity, feeling they could match the scholars in acumen and knowledge—and the academics got more and more esoteric. The result was that the best of the reviewers turned into real critics—people like James Agee and Pauline Kael—while the academics retreated into ‘theory’ and technique, or turned their attention to history and context.
The new film critic wrote for the general public but on topics that stretched towards the most cerebral. And that would have been well and good, had the level of the work in reviews consistently reached the heights explored by Agee and Kael, et al. But it did not. Few reviewers could manage that, and fewer attempted to. By the 1990s, most of them found it easier, and more lucrative, to concentrate on industry, personality, and box office rather than on the films themselves. In other words, they retreated back to the simple review. The rest had moved into academia, recreating the older reviewer/scholar split.
Having turned to questions significant only to those within what had grown to be its own area of study, few of the next generation of film scholars were able to step back into a role of writing for wide audiences. They were no longer those who had created the field, people who had come to it from positions where they had been writing that real film criticism for a broader public. Today’s new generation of scholars, though often brilliant, has very little experience writing for the general public, and (often) even less desire to do so.
The rise of the Internet, with its explosion of writings about everything imaginable, seems to have cemented the reviewers and the scholars into their corners, leaving barren that fertile middle ground that Agee and Kael once seeded. The reviewers need to make news—and can only do that by providing what others cannot. They have access to films before the general public does, so write reviews that appear before anyone else has seen the film—but write them too quickly. Or they make use of their industry contacts, residue of a time when their role meant a great deal more, to provide bits of gossip that amuse (but do little to inform). The scholars, caught in the whirlpool of peer review, can’t afford to step into the popular discussion until they have reached tenure and have managed promotion—and, by then, often seem to have lost their drive.
Scott’s headline, “A Critic’s Place, Thumbs and All,” refers to the thumbs-up/thumbs-down shorthand established decades ago by Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel for their television show, a rapid-fire (but often delightful) glimpse at five or more movies is half an hour. Though fun, this never was criticism—and is not, even when done by Scott and Michael Phillips, whose version of the old Siskel/Ebert show has just been cancelled. That’s not to say that none of these four produced (or produces) writings on film of the sort that Agee or Kael might have approved of. It’s simply that what they are best known for is little more than snippet reviews.
Though film criticism is not dying, little of it that reaches a mass audience has much more than momentary value. It’s nice that Scott recognizes that there’s life yet in film criticism but it is understandable, given the majority of what passes for it, that it is feared for.
It’s going to be up to the rest of us to prove Scott right. For film criticism, as a result of the Internet, is becoming once more a discussion and not simply lectures to passive audiences. The passionate among us become our own Agees, our own Kaels.
And that’s the real place of the critic.
Back when I was writing The DVD Revolution: Movies, Culture, and Technology, I bought the two volumes of The Chaplin Collection and included them in my overview of examples of special-edition DVDs. At the same time, I was exploring Tarantino’s work more seriously than I had before, and used the DVD of Pulp Fiction in that same overview. It should be no surprise to anyone who follows my work (me and, well… me), then, that Charles Chaplin and Quentin Tarantino are somehow paired in my imagination. In Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes, I make the pairing explicit, comparing the ends of Pulp Fiction and Monsieur Verdoux, the final speeches of Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) and Henri Verdoux (Chaplin), evil men struggling to find a moral compass in a world as evil as they.
The two are as different as they are similar, of course–more so. Chaplin came to fame first as an actor, as the greatest pantomimist of his time, his tramp becoming the best known film personality in the world (achieving a universal fame that has never been matched, only Mohammed Ali and Michael Jackson perhaps coming close). Tarantino offers very little as an on-screen personality and has had no impact comparable in any way to Chaplin’s. Though both write (or wrote, on Chaplin’s case) their own screenplays, direct, and act (though Tarantino just in a little way), others have done the same (Orson Welles, anyone?), and continue to.
Similarities come more from later parts of Chaplin’s career, when he became more overtly the moralist, taking his views on the world directly into his films. Tarantino, for all that he is called a maker of movies about movies, does much the same. Neither puts movies aside as fantasies unrelated to the lives we (or they) actually lead–and it was this that sparked my use of Monsieur Verdoux to illuminate my feelings about Pulp Fiction.
Both Chaplin and Tarantino (to move beyond specific movies) are often seen as “auteurs,” as film-makers focused on their individual talents, producing movies that reflect their visions alone. They have more claim to this than do most, for the movies of each come from scripts they created themselves.
Both have been accused of theft, also. Chaplin settled a plagiarism suit over The Great Dictator, paying Konrad Bercovici almost $100,000, though he claims in his autobiography that he did so simply for expediency. There was also something of a brouhaha over Orson Welles’ relation to the story of Monsieur Verdoux. Certainly, Chaplin credited Welles and paid him a small sum, but the extent of Welles’ contribution has been disputed. Tarantino constantly faces similar situations, and has since the start of his career.
What lies behind the problems each has faced is the idea that there is (or can be) an individual creative force that brings art into existence from nowhere but the fertile mind. Of course, this is nonsense, but it does lie behind much of our copyright law, and behind our ideas of intellectual (and creative) property.
No one creates from nothing (or for no one). This is the problem (as I have written, for a small journal not online: “Intentionalism: On the Assumption of Authority in Literature,” Perspectives XXVII, 2004/2005) with what the New Critics called “the intentional fallacy,” claiming that the personality and experience of the author are irrelevant in consideration of the work. All artists work under what Harold Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence,” fighting against the art they have experienced but also using it. The languages we used, after all, are not our own creations–not even the visual languages of painting or film. Everything we create is torn from the past. Everything we make is, in a very real sense, plagiarized.
The idea of ownership of creative acts is, then, based on a fallacy of individualization. Thing is, it is a convenient fallacy–and maybe belief in the individual is a necessary oil for human interaction. Without it, our machine might grind to a halt.
Whatever. We have it, enshrined in law as well as in our ways of thinking.
Sometimes, though, we take it too far, as the debates over the concept of the “auteur” in film (such as that between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael) have shown us. Still, whether we like the concept of the “auteur” or not, we do have to recognize that there is a highly personal stamp on the films of entertainers such as Chaplin and Tarantino–even as we also recognize that they created their movies within an artistic continuum and not from the ether.
In film, the issue of individual creativity is further muddied, of course, by the fact that no one, not even Chaplin, makes a successful motion picture completely alone.
Today, more than fifty years after the concept of the “auteur” was first posited, many film-makers seem to have put concern for the concept aside, seeing what they do as essentially collaborative even though the vision of one does need primacy for any one individual project. That is, few contemporary film-makers see themselves as “auteurs,” but as people with capabilities that can be turned to a number of different projects, some headed by themselves, some headed by others. They have replaced the primacy of the artist with the primacy of the product.
Chaplin did not want to be directed by others, or to be involved in projects where the creative force was not primarily his own. In that sense, he was a classic example of the “auteur.” Tarantino, on the other hand, loves working on the films others are making–and likes bringing outside creators into his own works. This difference between the two is also, I believe, the difference between their times. Chaplin was working when a studio system arose and encroached on the individual film-maker, making him or her part of a process. He and Welles, and a few others, successfully fought against this. To succeed, however, they had to focus strongly on themselves, developing weight of personality that could balance out the heavy hand of the studio system. Today, when most every project gathers people together for its own completion only, a different attitude has developed.
In an interview with David Letterman right before Inglourious Basterds opened, Letterman joked, “We’re glad you’re here but, in all honesty, we’d rather have Brad Pitt.” A comparable joke could never have been made, concerning Chaplin or a Chaplin film:
Quentin Tarantino’s fictional Shosanna Dreyfus in Inglourious Basterds wasn’t the first to substitute a film for showing to a Nazi military crowd. Though there were no luminaries in the audience, that honor probably goes to Nikola Radosevic, who recounts in The Tramp and the Dictator how he switched movies shown to a crowd of German soldiers in Yugoslavia, putting up Charles Chaplin’s lampoon of Hitler, The Great Dictator, instead of the expected fare. “At the start of the show,” he says, “people didn’t immediately realize what was going on. But after 40 minutes, an SS man pulled out his gun and opened fire at the screen. All the others rushed out of the hall.” Whether Tarantino was aware of this or not, it confirms his point about the power of film.
In his autobiography, Chaplin writes, “Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.” But The Great Dictator remains one of the few enduring propaganda films. Its aim to convince came from the heart, and not from cynicism or patriotism. It could not be parodied directly the way the Audie Murphy biopic (starring Murphy as Murphy) To Hell and Back is through Nation’s Pride, Tarantino’s fictional German propaganda film, also starring its hero in a re-creation of his heroics.
Part of the attraction even today of The Great Dictator is the charming and naïve speech given by Chaplin’s Jewish barber, who has been mistaken for the anti-Semitic dictator Adenoid Hynkel. A speech those German soldiers in Belgrade never got to see, for it comes at the very end of the movie–after they had rushed out. It starts like this:
I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone—if possible—Jew, Gentile—black men—white.
We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.
I’ve always loved that line–at least, I’ve loved the way it is used in the Kingston Trio’s version of “The Streets of Laredo”–though I never did manage to like the Kingston Trio (but that’s another story). They end the song with:
You can see by my outfit that I am a cowboy
So get yourself an outfit and be a cowboy, too
We judge by appearance. To some degree, we have to. Often, there isn’t the time to explore, to see what’s really “there,” so we are forced to rely on stereotypes and on first impressions. When there’s too much to read, too many different blogs (for example) to look at, we end up shying away from those containing “alot,” “there house,” “rather this then that,” or “basterds.”
There’s another side of that, too. That’s well expressed by the lines from Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore:
Things are seldom what they seem,
Skim milk masquerades as cream.
Highlows pass as patent leathers;
Jackdaws strut in peacock’s feathers.
As I put it in Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes:
One of the points of the movie, and the ultimate reason for the various juxtapositions it presents, is simply that surface and depth are not the same thing. An inability to attain command of the minutiae of conventional spelling (or even of its broader “principles”) does not mean that the thought expressed is similarly chaotic (or, more accurately, similarly rule bound). And the evil underneath is not always reflected in surface appearances. Raine and his men may worry about Nazis “hiding” in civilian clothing, but they themselves hide in Nazi uniforms—in order to kill more effectively. Dreyfus and her lover Marcel (Jackie Ido) use the thug tactics of fascists to get developed the film that will be projected as “the giant face.” The question arises: are the Basterds “good” because their real uniform is the American uniform? Are they (and Dreyfus) good because they are Jews (all except for Raine), not Nazis? Does the fact of being Jewish, in other words, carry more weight (on the good/bad scale) than the fact of having worn a Nazi uniform?
Tarantino, whatever his spelling abilities, makes his idiosyncratic title spelling consistent with one of the themes of the movie: what you see isn’t always what you get. Don’t, in other words, judge by appearances or first impressions.
Like all of Tarantino’s movies, Inglourious Basterds gets better on second and third viewing. Once we get past the surfaces, we can begin to see the real strengths of the film. Once “surprise” is no longer a factor, we can get down to the real watching and analysis.
As I have said before, I believe that Inglourious Basterds will be one of those films returned to again and again by film students and scholars. It has the depth to accommodate changing cultural stances and the artistry to sustain continuing critical examination. Sunday, it may do well at the Oscars (those awards based, really, on immediate impressions), but it will last because it haunts us, its themes and questions lurking within us and not because of what it may first “seem” to be.
36
Using Movies
One of the things I like about Inglourious Basterds is the use in the movie of the fact that celluloid–especially that used for film stock to and through World War II–is extremely flammable and unstable. Tarantino may not be afraid of movies, but movies are dangerous. And the danger was once physical as well as metaphorical.
In the fire scene in the theater, film is burning as well as being shown, the image reflected on the smoke. In addition, that reflection reflects at least one past movie. As I write in Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes:
When Shosanna Dreyfus’s (Mélanie Laurent) image and voice come through the smoke and flames of the theater at the end of the movie, few in the real theater won’t recall The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), the wizard’s voice coming through smoke and fire surrounding his gigantic and ghostly head, intoning, “I am Oz, the great and powerful.” Nor can we forget Dorothy’s response, “I am Dorothy, the small and meek.” Even so, it is not movies we are supposed to be thinking of as we watch the scene, but of the relationship between the small and meek and the great and powerful. Fleeting recognition of the connection between the two films is all that is called for—if that. After all, the topic is something else, and this is merely one of the images used to build it. Nevertheless, who is it but Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) who manages to destroy the Wicked Witch of the West? Who was it but Shosanna Dreyfus who destroyed Hitler—in this movie, at least? Both have help, but it is the drive of these young women that provides the momentum. This chapter of the movie is called “Revenge of the Giant Face,” making sure that the audience recognizes the importance of the image that continues to be seen, projected onto the smoke, as the theater burns. Making sure that people will see and understand the significance of the film image and not simply the planning behind its appearance and impact. The burning desire of the small and meek to exact revenge on the great and powerful remains central to the message of the movie. The role of film in making that happen follows close behind.
Movies are no more scary than books, but they certainly can be dangerous–both. Yeah, we’ve been fighting the desire to protect people from their dangers ever since they first appeared (printed Bibles available to the masses scared the Church–and with reason… the Protestant Reformation would have proven impossible without them). Today, it’s arguments that movies somehow make people more violent.
One of the points of Inglourious Basterds (not really a very violent movie, by action movie or war movie standards) is that equating violence onscreen and off is ridiculous. On the other hand, the movie does insist that violence is real, and has real consequences. But film violence does not cause “real” violence or its consequences–something many people still refuse to accept.
The danger from movies is not the danger that they will spark violence, but the danger that they will spark conversation. That was the danger, too, of the printed Bible. When people are able to read for themselves they will also start to talk for themselves… and the same goes for movie viewing. When people talk for themselves, they often end up in conversations whose direction goes well beyond the safe.
And even the possibility of that is dangerous (though maybe we should be embracing that danger, not avoiding it).
Inglourious Basterds has eight Oscar nominations:
- Best Achievement in Cinematography (Robert Richardson)
- Best Achievement in Directing (Quentin Tarantino)
- Best Achievement in Editing (Sally Menke)
- Best Achievement in Sound (Michael Minkler, Tony Lamberti, and Mark Ulano)
- Best Achievement in Sound Editing (Wylie Stateman)
- Best Motion Picture of the Year (Lawrence Bender)
- Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (Christoph Waltz)
- Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen (Quentin Tarantino)
The awards ceremony will start, of course, next Sunday, at 8 PM, on ABC television.
Frankly, I was surprised that Inglourious Basterds got any nominations–though I love the movie. It’s not an easy movie, and it raises questions that few want to face (American soldiers with bombs strapped to their bodies intent on killing through suicide a crowd that includes innocents, for example). In Quentin Tarantino: Life at the Extremes, I try (vainly) to encapsulate it:
It’s an attack, after all, on preconceptions and expectations, but one that uses preconceptions and expectations as major parts of its argument. In some ways, it is something of a romp—when it is not a criticism of the shallowness of the romp. In other ways, it is satire, but it hates the deadly seriousness of satire and its moral smugness. It screams to us that a movie is just a movie, not history, not anything with any weight at all, yet it has an intelligent and deadly point to make about what we mean by “history” and about the modern world, a point as significant as any in any movie in recent memory, though the film does seem to hide it. Right out in the open, of course.
So, my bow to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for refusing to be flummoxed, for seeing the movie as a whole without being bothered by the contradictions that are an integral part of it!
What do I think Inglourious Basterds will win? Not Best Picture, though I think it will be watched and analyzed far more often and for more years than any of the other nominees. Perhaps Sally Menke will get an Oscar. She’s been Tarantino’s editor virtually from the start, so certainly deserves some recognition. I think Tarantino will get either Best Director or Best Screenplay, but not both. Waltz will probably win for Best Supporting Actor. For the others, I really don’t know, but I’m hoping the movie will do well. One Oscar will be a triumph, but I do think Inglourious Basterds can reasonably expect to gather four.
I hope it does.
Here’s a bit of fun with the movie:
The other morning, I awoke wanting to see a little more of Alec Guinness. Given that it was snowing deeply, I decided to forego guilt about watching a movie at nine in the morning and popped The Horse’s Mouth into the DVD player. It’s a movie I’ve taught (in a course on film adaptations of novels), but one that remains close to my heart even through familiarity—though perhaps not quite as much as the novel by Joyce Cary that it comes from.
Actually, when I was young, I hated the movie. Guinness, who wrote the screenplay, changed the ending from that of the novel, where Gully Jimson dies in the destruction of his last great work of art. In the movie, he survives—and is the instrument of the destruction of his art. When I taught the two together, I began to see the reasons for the changes—the role played by the first-person narrative itself cannot be reproduced on the screen, for one thing—and to appreciate the slightly different statement Guinness was making from that of Cary.
To Jimson, in both the novel and the movie, the passion of the artist is creation, not possession, of art. The desire to possess, to benefit from art, is certainly there, but it’s something that gets Jimson into trouble more than it helps him. He does feel, like most artists do, that he should benefit from the art he has created, benefit even as value of early work grows—even though he has long ago sold it. A product of his society, and of the growing idea of creativity as property, Jimson exemplifies dueling impulses, to create and to possess. The possession side, in his case, constantly loses (though it never accepts defeat): each time Jimson does possess anything (money, it doesn’t matter what), he squanders it. He even squanders fame. Creation is the victor.
This goes against our contemporary cultural grain. We’ve created a culture, in the West, where having has a lot more power (and earns more respect) than doing. “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” is a question that rings in most ears. For Jimson, as for many artists in this milieu, there’s real resentment in the fact they, though the one doing, are not the ones, ultimately, who are getting to have—not unless they turn their focus from (again) doing to having.
Oddly enough, it’s only over the last 300 years that the creator has been linked to ownership of the creation in any substantial way–in legal terms, that is. The person who commissioned a work of art was the one with rights to it. Those rights are still will us, and they are part of the property rights at the base of our society. But these rights were changed to also provide protection for the artist who creates without commission, and who then wishes to profit on it. In the first English laws, writers were given control over their works for fourteen years (renewable for one additional fourteen), in recognition of the reproducibility of written works. Today, we have a dual system, then, that protects the rights of the author for lifetime plus seventy-five years and of corporate owners for nearly a century.
Unfortunately, this system primarily rewards having, not doing. One can assign the rights—and one loses them completely at that point, authorship notwithstanding. This happens when one sells a work of art or even a song—as happened to Richard Berry, who sold his song “Louie, Louie” for almost nothing—considering the fortune it has earned, since. The fact of creation only remains relevant as long as the artist doesn’t sell the rights to the work.
Though our society lauds the doing, it rewards the having. It is this dichotomy that drives creators crazy, leading Jimson, ultimately, to give up having completely.
By the way: Mike Morgan, who plays Nosey (the young man in the clip below) died towards the end of filming–of meningitis.