The Month in Crime
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
The Month in Crime
We used to like the idea that the main character of a Woody Allen film was Woody Allen. It took guts back in the chest-hair-and-slacks seventies to be a guy who looks like Woody Allen, and to walk around smack dab in the center of the screen with a handsome brute like Tony Roberts or a babe like Diane Keaton and to basically directly address the camera and announce yourself as the romantic lead. Once our lizardlike stem brains move from wanting to throttle him to preserve our fresh-faced blonde American cinematic resources we come to root for him fervently to get the girl: when he doesn't, it feels honest and sad. His worried face and direct address added to our list of cinematic archetypes, and it (certainly not Bergman references) became the baseline aesthetic for his movies. Our tolerance of the movies had entirely to do with our tolerance of the man. So sure, he repeated himself and recycled themes and bits from his stage act and later from the movies themselves--but we went to go see his face. We went to go see if he'd make a good movie or a bad movie with it. Then the whole stepdaughter thing happened and our lizard brains took over again. Which is to say that he should have been making movies like his latest, Match Point long ago. It's stripped down to the basics, includes a terrifying murder sequence with more emotional bite than anything Allen has done in a decade, minimal New York corn-pone philosophizing, and, most importantly, no scenes of an elderly Allen pawing over fresh feminine meat in a way that has become increasingly unseemly. In fact, no Allen at all. A blessing.
The Film Forum had a Hitchcock retrospective early in the month. Chief among the moments I remember: the twitchy, self-satisfied comb of the moustache the inspector performs at the end of Dial M for Murder; in Vertigo, the sickening green light that bathes Kim Novak as she steps out of the bathroom in her "second" twisted performance as Madeleine Elster; the mummified "body" which so often changes shape and which is refered to as both man and woman throughout the chuminess of The Lady Vanishes; the dizzying tracking shot in Notorious, which descends down, almost nervously, shakily, from the rafters of a mansion, into the spinning blacks and whites and silvers of a society party and further, right into Ingmar Bergman's hand, where a little key glistens with which she might disrupt the entire affair.
I saw James Cagney die three times this month: each time was a little dance and worth the price of admission; hopping up and down the curb in the rain in The Public Enemy; a stylized Japanese shadow on the wall in Angels With Dirty Faces; up and down the cathedral stairs in The Roaring Twenties. Cagney dies so artfully in his movies that the all-singing, all-dancing Yankee Doodle Dandy seems like the throes of some agonizing death spiral, as if he were being tommy-gunned for the full 126 minutes of the movie, leaping around like a beached mackerel.
There are very few movies which are crimes in themselves. The Triumph of the Will is one of them. After finishing the first two volumes of Richard J. Evans' history of the Third Reich I felt compelled to watch it, this time all the way through. You can say what you want about the sensuality and eroticism of Leni Riefenstahl's imagery. It's still the glorification of spitting old men from which everything erotic is meant to emanate; that is to say it's a celebration of power, and its imagery is that of politics itself. It's boring. It's like watching television in an election year.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:23 AM, ,
Grizzly Man
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Grizzly Man
Throughout Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell, the movie's star, constantly talks like a junior executive pumping himself up in front of a mirror before a big presentation. Except in this case, Treadwell is in the Alaskan wilderness in front of a camera, and his presentation is not in front of a bunch of senior executives but in front of a few 500 pound grizzly bears. "No one knew," he says to the disembodied and presumably harshly judgemental presence behind the camera, "no one ever fucking knew, that there are times when my life is on the precipice of death. That these bears can bite, these bears can kill, and if I am weak, I will go down." In true cinematic fashion, these words come true: he goes down. We're told the results are too horrible to be presented. Like Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross, Treadwell starts this movie dead, both literaraly and figuratively. Like him, he is a criminal. As a criminal, he can enjoy nothing. He has only a singular goal, one which will get him out of his life: to criminally shove cameras into the faces of wild bears.
So he begins his movie, spliced together reverently by Werner Herzog, in a maniacal mode from which he does not swerve. He never takes a moment to enjoy the reserve around him or pass affectionate words to his girlfriend. He claims to be protecting bears by living among them: in doing this, he acclimates them to human life and therefore endangers them. He's dead: and to top it off, he has the mild indignity of Werner Herzog reading over his final testament in a tone of prickly but worshipful reverence which nonetheless comes across as slightly condescending.
There's something here that Herzog doesn't get about American life--namely, that the Treadwells in this country are a dime a dozen. I can't feel any sympathy for Timothy Treadwell. It's not just that he represents the "dark side" of superimposing a professional attitude over a neccessarily pragmatic one. It's not just that he reminds me of some of my worst bosses--he reminds me of every "fully-engaged" character I've ever met. In him dwells the flop sweat of every neocon politician, every university Marxist in opposition to him, every avant-garde poet ("contemporary poetic models have grown stale, etc."), every overzealous Cubs fanatic who mourns the World Series victory last year of the White Sox, every paranoid schizophrenic, Robotussin guzzling heavy metal kid who could pinpoint with increasingly myopic certitude which bands were "posers" and which were real. It's certain that Herzog sees these as "his" people (excepting the ones who are not)--I suppose he thinks of them as visionaries, worthy of documentation. I don't think he understands that every American mind is wired this way. One can't have a job here, or an academic distiction, or a love of music, without also having a fanatical devotion to it and a repulsion of all those who don't. Think of all those Wal-Mart middle managers doing jumping jacks and yelling Red Army like affirmations about Wal-Mart. This fanatacism lasts eight hours a day, after which we sleep fitfully, drink dangerously, and go to see the movies. Timothy Treadwell is no Isadore Ducasse: his was not a European suicide.
To quote the sole voice of reason in Grizzly Man (one which Herzog is impatient to move past), Sven Haakanson, the direstor of Kodiac's Alottiiq Museum: "I think he did damage to the bears. Where I grew up the bears avoid us and we avoid them...[this is a boundary] that we have lived with for 7,000 years. It's an unspoken boundary, but when we've crossed it we've paid the price."
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:47 PM, ,
The Conversation
Saturday, January 07, 2006
The Conversation
I wanted to start this by saying that American movies are about professionalism, but that's a little like saying that American movies are about Americans. Movies have at their core a strict morality: in America, moral life is defined by professionalism. The transcendent and fairly socialist nature of Christian faith would have been debunked in American life long ago if it had not transformed itself from a legitamite religion into a fearfully organized political bloc.
So Godard has his indolent teenaged Marxists beset by the vacuous Americanized girls around them, and Howard Hawks has his go-to professionals, beset by greedy bosses from above and by mendacious or semi-crippled employees from below. Godard interrogates his actors and by implication the audience. Hawks makes himself, as he'd say, "indispensable" to both. His characters, From Cary Grant in Only Angels Have Wings to John Wayne in Rio Bravo, are always the best at what they do. His employees need him. His employers couldn't live without him. In short, his protagonists are always directors: like Hawks, super-competent, super-virile, super everything. The perfect middle managers.
Francis Ford Coppola's best movies have at their heart this Hawksian concern for professionalism: he wants to be more sympathetic to the European cast of mind but can't do it. It's not coincidental that his best films were made at the time he was most engaged in the struggle to launch his independent studio. Like every middle manager, he wanted to become the boss. And so he turned Michael Corleone's struggle into his own, and turned his professional obligations into classical drama. Almost too classical, actually, which makes Coppola's best (or at least his most Hawksian) film The Conversation.
If you haven't seen it, the film's titular "conversation" is recorded by Gene Hackman, playing a freelance surveillance specialist, in the masterful first scene. A proto-yuppie couple is walking through a park. We see that they are being followed, watched. Close-up on a shopping bag: it must be more than what it seems. The young couple are having a conversation. Close up on a mirrored van: we see that Hackman is inside, surrounded by a lavish assortment of sound equiptment. The conversation is being recorded using the most state-of-the-art, the most invasive--the most professionally standard--equipment available. The conversation itself is awash in banality and ambiguity. It's about nothing, about the scene around them. They may or may not be talking about a murder though the word is not used, and either way it doesn't matter. What is exciting is the way in which Hackman is recording it. We hear the conversation from his range of hearing--that is, behind the distorted crackling of his device. Like any professional, he knows this can be fixed later. But as viewers, we see their lips move at odds with the "false" recording. We are surveilling them, too, removed from the action, encouraged to settle in to watching the movie as if it were another job. Only later will the implications of that word--murder--become apparent, and this ambiguity tests Hackman's limitations as a professional as the film progresses because it is one thing to be professional with some object in mind and another to be professional in one's attitude towards the truth. None of this matters in the opening shot of the film. To watch Hackman work is exciting enough. The rest of the film--the growth of Hackman's conscious, his consideration of the meaning of that word, murder--is a fall from cinematic grace. There is no better scene in the film that this opening scene, no better question than the one which asks, will he get away with this?
I think that Coppola thought something different when he was making this movie. He was after "art" in the continental sense. He mentions Antonioni often enough when talking about this film that it's safe to bet he was striving for an American version of Blow Up. If he had followed that plan to the letter the result would have been awful. Blow Up is an indication that European art cinema is simply dumb in a different way than the Hollywood kind. It will suffice to say that I find the comparison of the free play of my spirit to a bunch of mimes playing tennis deeply offensive. But Robert Evans dug it, probably for the cheesecake, so what we're supposed to take away from Antonioni's "masterpiece" was that it was a core document of the American Cinema of the Seventies, and probably Coppola was as starstruck by it as the rest of them.
Coppola did not, fortunately, achieve the level of artiness that Antonioni achieved, falling back on the framework of most good American storytelling: crime. There is no mistaking the mimes that appear in The Conversation for anything but street hustlers, just one part of the action being caught, an ostentatiously silent and unrecordable presence among others not so ostentatious, all of which fall away as unnecessary to the ear of the professional surveillance man. In this role, Gene Hackman has no periphery and has not had one for a long time. To allow himself one would mean letting in not just some information but absolutely all of it, the whole myriad universe. Thus he is alone in the world and unable to deal with friendship or love. He keeps his girlfriend in an apartment and spies on her. he keeps his telephone in a desk drawer, like a gun. He is the only freak in the room who truly loves his job, alive and attentive to its every nuance. He is like every boss I've ever had. He runs on that mixture of fear and self-righteous, nearly adolescent, disgust for which ordinary moral choices are "not job-related" and which defines modern professional life from politics to academia to plumbing.
I think that Coppola can relate to Hackman. I would go so far as to think that Hackman is his avatar. And if that's not the case, Hackman is at least a stand-in for the film's sound editor, Walter Murch. Murch’s soundtrack is the star of the picture in a very real way. It dominates the picture like a thrash metal guitarist soloing on his back with a bowstring. It's fascinating to hear but somewhat distastefully showoffy. He must have missed a year's worth of his kid's baseball games in order to finish this film. If so, such professionalism paid off: it's a great performance, and his work on the titular conversation, the way it gets manipulated through static and interference gives it a life of its own. At a certain point someone begins innocently to play the tape of this conversation during a party and it's as if a monster began ballooning through the door.
So how are we to feel about the ending of this film, the idea that Hackman, in falling outside of his professional strictures and pursuing instead the "truth" of the crime his taped conversation only alludes to, would be led into insanity? Is Coppola telling us, stick to the job or you'll go nuts? What's happening here is the same thing that happens in old gangster movies. The explicit message is crime does not pay; the implicit message is, but look at all the liquor and women. The same thing happens in The Conversation. Sure Hackman winds up insane, playing his saxophone alone in a gutted apartment; but he was the best.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:45 PM, ,
Bogart
Monday, January 02, 2006
Humphrey Bogart
Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade is a prototype for ideal modern manhood--someone who can take any twist in the plot, any brutal first-hand experience, and put it in the context of his job. He remains glib and cheerfully horny throughout, calm at the center of a baroquely plotted storm. To an inhuman and hostile environment he presents something equally inhuman--impassive professionalism, a light attitude. This is part of what makes Hammett's books (and especially his short stories) so funny. He expects us to recognize that this character could only be fictional, less a real detective than an archetype. Sam Spade is to the art of detection as Jeeves is to the art of butlering.
By the time Raymond Chandler updated the formula a decade later, on the eve of war and mobilization on an apocalyptic scale, those assumptions could no longer be made. His invention, Phillip Marlowe, moves in the same circles as Sam Spade and takes the same kind of cases. He uses the same language and holds the same tenacious attitude to his work. He wisecracks and beds the femmes fatales who pass before his eyes. The difference is that Marlowe gets tired out. The whole parade affects him. This insanity, the bodycount, the teenaged thugs in big-boy suits--this is a life, anybody's life who has a superior officer or a boss or a rich client. Sam Spade is a heroic character: Philip Marlowe is tragic. This may be a more subtle version of the very old question of Dionysean versus Appollonian tendencies in art--the raw versus the cooked--restated as the archetypical, comically square-jawed Spadeian type versus the ironic-archetypical, somewhat neurotic, fatalistic but somehow-still-standing-in-the-end Marlowian type.
Humphrey Bogart had the distinction of playing both Marlowe and Spade, and for defining the look and bearing of both characters in the public's mind. He was good in both roles, but his limited understanding of how these characters worked is underscored by the fact that he played Sam Spade as Philip Marlowe and, three years later, he played Philip Marlowe as Sam Spade. In The Maltese Falcon, Bogart played Sam Spade on a painful knife edge--it's almost uncomfortable to see him take the impassive Mary Astor by the shoulders and spit through emotionally gritted teeth: "I love you but I won't play the sap for you," or to witness him knocking over settees and wailing about "the truth" in the middle of an overcivilised negotiation with the unctuously cool Sidney Greenstreet. Bogart has his back against the wall in The Maltese Falcon in a way Sam Spade never did in the book. You could see his consciousness clicking in this film.
But then, Bogart may have been thinking about his career. At middle age, he had finally broken out of the B-picture underworld, playing endless variations on Tough #2 for over a decade, and could finally lay claim to to the lead in a couple of pictures: High Sierra and this picture, in which he had been elevated to the status of Tough #1. I guess he probably thought of these pictures the way a gambler thinks of a good night at the table. He finally got his shot, and though he couldn't expect too much the next time he sat down at least he got one good payoff. And sure enough, his next role was in a B picture, though that B picture turned out to be Casablanca.
I like Casablanca in spite of its corny stylization. The film is supported by a girding of memorable quotes and one liners and overbroad characters piled up like a glass shelf full of kitten tzochkes. But it works. It never topples over. Every time a memorable line gets overworked another one falls hard-to and props it up. The effect is like an Oulipian mathematico-literary experiment. The flashback courtship between Bogart and Bergman, for instance, plays like a game of ping pong: "Where are you going? Where have you been?"... "Please, we said no questions"... "Here's looking at you kid." One almost expects it to continue: "On top of the world, Ma!"..."Tomorrow is another day"..."Rosebud," etc., like a classics reel at the Academy awards.
What I think really holds the film together is Bogart. His portrayal of Rick Blaine posits a film archetype that didn't come up very often before: the self pitying strongman. Imagine a millionaire weeping on his yacht, bitching that the maid won't sleep with him. This is Rick's moral equivalent, yet he's perhaps one of the more sympathetic characters in movie history. Why is this? Rick gets drunk in his own bar--where in the daytime he acts as absolute master--and commands Sam to play bittersweet tunes to him, as the boss indulges in bottomed-out melodramatic despair. His fatalism borders nearly on parody. "Of all the gin joints in all the cities in all the world," he says, "why did she have to step into mine?" It's an unusually self-indulgent performance, and Bogart risks turning the scene into comedy. Instead he taps into some strange thing in his audience: the desire to have enough capital (one's own piano player, an entire bar full of liquor) to pity oneself properly. We shouldn't underestimate this luxury. At the age of 43 we will all begin to feel ourselves disintegrate. We will no longer be quite as attractive to the opposite sex, our faces will begin to fold inward and our backs will begin to ache. Yet only a lucky few will be able to wallow in it. Bogart enacts this for us: it's a brave performance in that he risks the enmity of our better, un-self-pitying side. That he got away with it opened to door to untold male self-pity. Tony Soprano, murderous tyrant, millionaire, in need of constant female therapy, wouldn't exist today if it weren't for Rick Blaine.
So Bogart got away with something in that performance, and turned a B picture into a monument of modern male consciousness. This (and the terrifically glib proclivities of his next director, Howard Hawks) may explain his portrayal of Philip Marlowe two years later in The Big Sleep. He coasts in this film. Bogart's Marlowe has women--bookstore clerks, taxi girls, heiresses both evil and not--falling at his feet, and men he has crawling for cover, and that's all he does. He may as well be a Humphrey Bogart movie poster on a stick. A deep performance it is not, yet he's palpably enjoying himself in the way that only works in a Howard Hawks picture. He has so much fun in his role you can practically hear him turn to the audience witha leer and say: "check out the gams on this dame, huh, fellas?" It's something Sam Spade would do.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:24 AM, ,
