Some Came Running

Cameron Crowe, Victim Of Auteurism

Don't try this at home: Charles Boyer, Jennifer Jones, and Philip Morris, Cluny Brown, Ernst Lubitsch, 1946

Last evening, near the end of Film Twitter’s “We Need To Talk About Cameron” quasi-telethon, the critic Tina Hassannia registered some disapprobation thusly:

“ALOHA reviews are all framed in the auteurist framework, which inherently treats the white, male director as an artist worthy of discussion.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think of the movie, at the end of the day what’s important is: what’s going on with Cameron Crowe?”

“Now imagine trying to have a similar conversation about any mediocre, messy, or outright bad movie by a director who isn’t white or male.”

“When was the last time that happened?"

I have no trouble imagining having the “similar conversations” posited by Hassania, as I’ve had them, in the pre-Twitter days. “What’s going on with Spike Lee?” was a big question around the time of Girl 6, and again with She Hate Me; “What’s going on with Jane Campion?” was a big question for some with Holy Smoke (not for me—I loved it) and more so with In The Cut (yeah, that was bad).  The political sensitivities of young critics these days are so finely tuned that it’s hard to know sometimes whether a protest is part of an attempt to create a new critical paradigm centered around diversity, or just some kind of high-functioning troll activity (if I understand Hassannia’s subsequent Twitter updates correctly, Spike Lee doesn’t really count). But as we’re framing within the auteurist framework, and so much of the most interesting and provocative criticism happening today at least carries the implication that auteur-based criticism has somehow ruined almost everything, it’s worth noting that—judging from appearances, at least—a lot of Cameron Crowe’s current troubles stem from auteurism, or a misapprehension of auteurism.

Not that I’ve seen Aloha, or am in a particular hurry to. I began worrying about Cameron Crowe, like so many others, upon seeing Elizabethtown, in Toronto in 2005. Actually, not to get all inside baseball, but I had been worried about Crowe even before cameras started rolling on that picture. I knew that Crowe had written the script, an ambitious comedy-drama, with Leonardo DiCaprio in mind, and that DiCaprio was now determined to do only Serious Movies with Serious Directors such as Martin Scorsese, which left Crowe without a bankable leading man. And so it went. Anyway, I was at Toronto for the premiere of Elizabethtown, and Crowe personally returned to the scene of his Almost Famous triumph to deliver a quasi-apology at the beginning of the press screening of his new film, which was indeed, alas, Elizabethtown. I felt bad after seeing it. My thoughts were these: One, that Crowe was maybe the best-intentioned and most big-hearted of American directors (maybe I should have been thinking “of white male American directors,” but I wasn’t, I cannot tell a lie). Two, that because his kind of picture is so difficult to get produced nowadays, prior commercial triumphs or not (and let us not forget that between Almost Famous and Elizabethtown, there was Vanilla Sky), Crowe apparently feels compelled to cram EVERYTHING HE KNOW AND FEELS INTO EACH AND EVERY INDIVIDUAL FILM HE MAKES. The directors Crowe frequently cites as models and mentors, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, working within the studio system (Lubitsch was even, at one point, a studio executive), had the advantage of being able to produce with some consistency; if they couldn’t do something they wanted on Project X, they might be able to get it done on Project Y. They didn’t have the nagging consciousness of each individual film maybe being their last.

That consciousness is part of the artistic and intellectual DNA of at least two generations of “personal filmmakers.” Which Lubitsch and Wilder, both directors icons of critics and creators of the Possessory Credit School, were in fact not. One of the features of what we call "Auteurism," or "auteurism," as we know it, and so on, is how damned confused it is. The politique des auteurs as articulated by Bazin and Truffaut is a different kettle of fish from auteurism as articulated by Andrew Sarris. And while Sarris was in fact pretty careful about differentiating between illuminating evidence of a director’s personal signature and avowing that the director or “auteur” is the creative be-all and end-all of every artistically worthwhile film made, he might as well not bothered given the crude way such notions are bandied about on an almost daily basis. In any event, one thing that gets lost in the shuffle is that the “personal touches” that distinguish Lubitsch and Wilder films from more routine Hollywood fare of its time is that these touches were by-products of a process that Crowe either doesn’t have access to or doesn’t want. Reading Charles Brackett’s recently published diaries, one is struck by how often Brackett virtually roles his eyes at Wilder’s insistence on narrative coherence—“Billy’s terrifying neurosis that everything isn’t crystal clear to the audience” is how he puts it at one point. Contrast this “neurotic” precision with the loose baggy monsters Crowe has to fight tooth and nail to get made at all, and then has to cut by thirty minutes or however long. The self-consciousness of the contemporary “personal touch”—even when adapting an intriguing Spanish-language horror/sci-fi romance, Crowe was madly compelled to transform it into My Empathetic Tortured Biopic Of My Old Boss Jann Wenner—can be laid, I think, pretty squarely at the feet of slavish devotion to misunderstood auteurism. Combined, paradoxically enough, with the production-on-my-own-terms ethos of the early French New Wave. All of which seems to have left Crowe in a pretty, and seemingly inextricable, pickle. At least when Lee and Campion went off the rails, they did so trying to accomplish something a little different from their prior fare. One reason I’m not in a hurry to see Aloha is because the accounts of the movie have me thinking dog-returning-to-its-own-vomit. 

"Mad Max: Fury Road"

Tom Hardy and some probably very uncomfortable stuntmen. The movie really kind of IS about his character, maybe, I think. 

Last week an online movie columnist posted an early review of Kent Jones' documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut, and in the comments section there was a lot of "they-don't-make-'em'-like-that-anymore" sighing over a perceived ebbing of Hitchcock-influence on contemporary filmmakers. Now, I suppose that if we're strictly talking about a dearth of filmmakers interested in crafting movies that play and feel like Hitchcock movies, or that specifically treat what we refer to as Hitchcockian themes, then maybe, yeah, we don't get a lot of that. 

If, on the other hand, we're talking about filmmakers who combine a virtuosic grasp of technique with an avid passion for testing the elasticity of film language, we aren't doing so badly nowadays. Certainly more than a few of the directors who participate in Jones' documentary—I'm thinking of David Fincher, Wes Anderson, and, yes, Martin Scorsese among the Americans, for instance—fit into that category. (I admire the work of James Gray, yes, but I also think he's less bravura by design than the aforementioned.) Steven Soderbergh, too. Sometimes Steven Spielberg. Sometimes Francis Ford Coppola. Michael Bay even sort of fits into this category, in a "Bad Kirk" kind of way. And there are other examples, old and young, dotting the cinema landscape, all over the world. 

George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road is a really magnificent slab of cinema language at its most effectively elasticized. I've seen it twice within four days, once in 3D, and again in super-big-screen 2D (I prefer the latter, but the 3D wasn't bad), and both times I felt positively transported. The speediness and the suspense of the simultaneous car chases/firefights/hand-to-hand combats and more had, for me, the effect of being suspended; metaphorically holding my breath and waiting to get pulled out and up into a place to exhale. Every shift of cinematic gear accomplished by Miller does that job of manipulations perfectly.

I also love the movie's unapologetically bizarre and grotesque imagery, which draws a straight line all the way back to Lang's Metropolis and provides, as A.O. Scott pointed out in his New York Times review, a bracing rebuke to the bright corporate blandness of the Marvel Universe films. I love the way it lets it images do the talking: showing the lumpy, pasty, tumorous torso of Immortan Joe semi-camouflaged by a ripped and rippled and medal-covered plastic exosuit is a far more vivid way of saying "The Patriarchy is rot" than, you know, saying "The Patriarchy is rot." I love the cleanliness and, yes, the logic of its circular narrative; to anyone who finds the final quarter of the movie exhausting, I'm tempted to drag out the old classic rock bromide "if it's too loud, you're too old," or something. 

Miller and his crew and his money and his actors bring to life an unreal world that, as exhilarating as the action contained within it can be, one is glad to be watching from the remove of a movie theater. As with Alexei German's great Hard To Be A God (the only other 2015 U.S. release I'm as excited to see multiple times as this one), one admires all the performers, down the the last extra, not just for their work but for their seeming ability to withstand the depicted environment. 

As for the movie's much-vaunted feminism, it didn't really register for me as such. Which is one of the most commendable things about it, in a sense. There's never really any question in the movie as to the capabilities of Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa; there's never a moment in which she has to "prove" herself, or "earn" the respect of a male. (While Max's interaction with her is initially adversarial,  any inclination Max might have toward underestimating her is corrected very quickly.) Which isn't to say she doesn't represent an ideal; the scant information the viewer is given about her history makes that plain. Miller doesn't strut his progressive ideology in any way; he doesn't end the movie with some kind of bald statement that, for instance (implied spoiler alert) a matriarchal order is going to make The Citadel a paradise on earth for the previously downtrodden. He presents Max and Furiosa as equals, damaged warriors who manage to help each other out. To say that the movie is more Furiosa's narrative than Max's is maybe a little too easy; true, Miller purposefully sets a scene in which Max goes on his most effective rampage off-screen, but there's also the fact that Max is the only character in the film whose consciousness the viewer is made to inhabit for brief periods (not a comfy place to be, as you might have guessed).

You should see this film soon, and often. 

I Saw God And/Or "Avengers: Age Of Ultron" In IMAX 3D

Pretty girl!

I decided it would be a real fun idea to get fucked up on drugs and go see Avengers: Age of Ultron in IMAX 3D at Sony Lincoln Square, or is it AMC Lincoln Square, and then write a sort of review of it as a pastiche of my one-time idol Lester Bangs' famous 1977 piece  "I Saw God And/Or Tangerine Dream." This made sense to me for several reasons, the main one being that Lester had seen God and/or Tangerine Dream at the soon-to-no-longer-be-Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center (and wouldn't it give Lester a stroke to learn that the Hall will soon be given David Geffen's name!)  and that the Lincoln Square theater is just a stone's throw away from Lincoln Center, a place Lester found famously alienating and weird ("emerging from the subways into this slick esthete's Elysium is like crawling out of a ditch into Jackie Onassis' iris," he wrote). It didn't make sense for several other better reasons, one being I don't take intoxicants anymore and another being that even under the influence of Robitussin, which I'm told they don't make like they used to in 1977 anymore anyway, my ability to construct a convincing Bangs pastiche is questionable at best.

Still, although I would not be monetarily remunerated for any writing I would do about Avengers: Age Of Ultron, I decided I'd at least take notes. The first thing of note, for me, was that when you pay to see a movie in IMAX at the Lincoln Square theater (which I haven't done since 1999, to see Fantasia 2000, and I WAS fucked up on drugs then, so I don't really remember it all that well), you actually now get a reserved seat. I chose mine, K22, as close to the front as you imagine a row designated "K" would be, and apparently smack dab in the middle. I was surprised to see how many seats were taken on a beautiful spring afternoon. All the better, for I would enjoy a genuinely communal viewing experience. 

I was unflanked as I settled into my seat at almost exactly 3 p.m., but this would not last. The row filled.  To my left sat a young African-American fellow with a skateboard, sporting a medium sized afro and wearing a snappy blue blazer. Ultra presentable; with a smidgen more alt-attitude he could play auxiliary for TV On The Radio. He was soon joined by a perky blonde in a black minidress. On my right, a young fellow of Middle Eastern descent, it seemed, in a polo shirt; to his right, a young Chinese-American. "I love my row," I thought. "My row looks like America, just as the Furious films do."  I was already doing better than Bangs, who, as he left that Tangerine Dream show, hallucinated "a whole audience of shopping bag ladies." 

The lights dimmed; there were several trailers, including one introduced by Tomorrowland director Brad Bird, who requested that theatergoers "Get your tickets today," to which one wag in my row guffawed "Sure!" The subsequent scene from the film itself whetted MY appetite, for sure, but the Chinese-American guy complained, "It's coming out in two weeks and nobody knows anything about it." Well, they just showed three and a half or so minutes of it just now, dude; THAT'S not nothing, I thought. But I kept my mouth shut. There's just no pleasing some people. 

There were several other trailers, including one for Fantastic Four, which looks like it's gonna be a real career high for Miles Teller, and then the main feature began and it was...pretty smash-bangy, a little generic, a little on the nose, Downey wasn't registering for me and...meh. I thought it entirely risible that on the Avenger-jet (or whatever it's called) ride home, Science Genius Bruce Banner would be soothing his soul via Beats By Dre headphones, which you don't have to be a Science Genius to know are complete dogshit. But my malaise didn't last too long, and as the movie settled in to a story line that I had some vague recollections of from back when I was a regular superhero comic book reader, I got more in tune with it. Sure I could nitpick; Ocean's 13 had a better pretext for   Julia Roberts' and Catherine Zeta-Jones' non-participation than this movie does for Gwyneth Paltrow's and Natalie Portman's. But that really IS a nit, isn't it. I enjoyed the movie's conception of The Vision, one of my favorite Marvel characters (because he really DID take the "what does it mean to be human?" question to places that blew my mind back when I was 16 or so), although I found the pre-Scarlet-Witch-Scarlet Witch's "I'm not touching you? Am I bugging you?" hand gestures a little irritating, Young Elizabeth Olsen otherwise did a fine job with the character and this title seems to be a good entree into the world of high-revenue moviemaking for the actress. I think of all the directors who do comic-book movie, Whedon is the one who most consistently gets the closest to the tone of actual comic books, here specifically the Marvel books I found so diverting in the '70s. The knowingness of the humor and the earnestness of the "humanity will prevail" post hippie ethos that so many of the Marvel writers put forward is there; Whedon also knows that even when things are a big deal, they're not SO MUCH of a big deal; he plays cataclysm for a "whoa!" factor, not to spur genuine worries about apocalypse. He doesn't get bogged down in heavyosity the way even the admirable and ambitious Christopher Nolan can. Within the gargantuan there's a sense of scale. As for his characterizations, there's nothing in them that's particular galvanic, or even surprising (there really isn't) but he serves up his commonplaces with wit and sincerity and when he offers twists he makes his notes resolve attractively anyway. To me there was no real cause for indignation in the let's run away/let's face our responsibilities push-pull of the Hulk/Black Widow relationship, and no mystery to Hulk's self banishment at the end (and no, it doesn't have much or even anything to do with Widow). Part of the appeal of the stories these kinds of comic books tell is that of a world that ultimately makes sense. As loud and as tumultuous as they can get, they're still comfort food. They say everything's okay and heroes walk among us. The intricacies of the next challenge are the only part of the story that changes. The Hulk will be back, and many of us will be too. As the lights came up, I got up and shook it off and gave back my 3D glasses and intuited that the folks in my row were feeling pretty much as I did: that was fun, and now for the rest of the day.

I did not, as it happens, intuit that any of my row-mates had the the conviction that this massive entertainment was not just a massive entertainment but that it was art, and art that "matters," at that. Ten or twenty years ago, or maybe it was 25 years ago, it seemed as if everybody who was writing about the arts had read too much Guy Debord; these days I wonder if anybody under the age of 50 has even heard of the guy. Even online critics who don't seem too crazy about this movie—indeed, especially the people who are kinda ragingly pissed off about it— seem  frantically eager to surrender their wills and lives and entire sensibilities over to corporate-produced spectacle.

I don't think the endgame of the high/low culture debate was meant to be "Now that we have comic book movies that have character development, we can throw out Rules of the Game; it's no longer relevant." And I mean, you know, to a lot of people who are big boosters of this sort of thing Rules of the Game was never in their wheelhouse to begin with, but they really want to be acknowledged as being just as smart as people for whom...well, this has all been gone over over and over again and nobody's going to give any ground. And it's gotten so that I can't even thoroughly enjoy a comic book movie that I rather want to like.  So fuck it. I reserve the right to laugh out loud, and heartily, and with undisguised derision, at the phrase "we're going to talk about Black Widow...like adults." 

Nabokov famously said that the first "shiver of inspiration" for Lolita was "prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: the sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." I revere an ostensibly highbrow film like Alexei German's Hard To Be A God in part because it is the work of an artist in pursuit of  genuine freedom. This observation will not make me a lot of friends, but I think if you spend a great deal of time in earnest rumination over, say, the ostensibly anti- feminist compromises applied to Black Widow's "character arc," ultimately you're just grousing about the interior decoration of your cage. But hey, that's your prerogative.  But that is not a prerogative I feel I'm obliged to take seriously any longer, is all. 

Now I suppose it would be apt to trot out Bangs' "I will say goodbye to you" bit from his Elvis Presley obit, but that would be melodramatic. I'm not going anywhere and neither are people who want to talk about Black Widow like etc. etc. The more apt trope would be Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu in the railroad-track pissing match at the end of Bertolucci's 1900. It's a living.  

The "Paradine" Letters, Part 3

  "As if she could smell him..." M. Paradine (Alida Valli) senses the presence of Latour (Louis Jourdan)

Dear Farran,

Well thank you for sending me a nice slow Vertigo pitch across the plate. Your point is interesting and, I think, valid. But, given the structure of the extant film—it rather is a shame we’ll never be able to see the longer cuts—one has to look at Paradine sideways to get to that conclusion. But I like, anyway. It’s interesting too, that, during this particular period, the mid-to-late 40s (and for me, Hitchcock at the ABSOLUTE “height of his powers” is the stretch starting with ‘43’s Shadow of a Doubt and ending with ‘60’s Psycho), we find Hitchcock’s viewer-identification/sympathy strategies tilted to the female characters, e.g. Ingrid Bergman in both Notorious and Under Capricorn, Ann Todd to a somewhat lesser extent (strictly in terms of screen time, at least) here.

While it’s absolutely a stretch to call Hitchcock a feminist filmmaker, I think there’s still a lot of room to do some critical digging on his depictions of women. (Robin Wood’s chapter on Hitchcock and Bergman in his Hitchcock’s Films Revisited is a good start.)  Someone, it occurs to me, could get a nice paper out of the way Hitchcock used his own daughter, Patricia, in his films. As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, in The Paradine Case, the not-well-known-enough Joan Tetzel plays a sarcastic young woman affecting to be jaded beyond her years, an anticipation of Patricia’s snarky senator’s-younger-daughter in 1951’s Strangers on a Train. 

In any event, your alternative reading of the movie underscores an almost entirely irrefutable truth about what makes Hitchcock a great filmmaker. He conceived Paradine Case as a way to tell a story that related to his own fears/neuroses: that is, the tale of a good man’s sexual humiliation at the hands of a (Hitchcock’s words) “nymphomaniac” and a “clod.” He did not get that, largely due to Selznick’s hand. But, as you demonstrate, he didn’t get nothing, either. Even when Hitchcock’s explicit plans fail, his instinct does not, nor does his artistry.

One thing I’m increasingly fascinated by is what I hesitate to call the movie’s Pirandellian dimension. Hitchcock famously insisted that the production design recreated the actual interior of the Old Bailey to a very precise degree. This is very much the theatre in which a “real” drama is played. The main actors, or course, are in costume, as they are during a formal dinner party at the movie’s beginning. It’s at this latter scene that Hitchcock meant to establish a particular character dynamic. At this affair, the sight of Ann Todd’s bare shoulder electrifies Charles Laughton’s Judge Horfield. Hitchcock establishes this in a bravura feat of both shooting and editing. He begins with a medium close-up of Laughton entering the party, and then speedily dollies in on the actor/character as something catches his attention. He then cuts on motion to a medium shot of Todd, and this shot itself is already dollying in fast (this was all done before the zoom lens as we know it was developed) to Todd’s shoulder, and once the camera rests on a close-up of the shoulder, the scene cuts back to Laughton’s reaction. We get the picture as surely as getting hit by a lightning bolt. Then Laughton makes his intentions known and brazenly comes on to Todd’s Mrs. Keane. Her refusal to play along is ostensibly what leads to Horfield’s dismissive, contemptuous treatment of Gregory Peck’s Keane in court, but this isn’t followed through with the strength of this initial impetus. I suspect this theme was diluted in the film’s trimming.

 

Something not like the Kuleshov Effect: Charles Laughton fixates on Ann Todd. 

In any event, my point is that all of the main characters of the movie, save Laughton’s, are severely circumscribed by the formalities of their environment. Formalities that are so exacting that one can mistake this movie for a period piece. But it is not: its London features electricity and double-decker buses, and an establishing shot of the Old Bailey exterior shows it undergoing post-Blitz reconstruction. In any event, the only reason Laughton’s character is not similarly circumscribed is because of his power. He literally IS the law here. Everyone else is toiling under what the kids nowadays call “the dominant ideology,” and playing their roles within its hierarchy. There’s a definite sadness about this state of affairs expressed in the film. It’s not as if Hitchcock is going full Ford Madox Ford in bemoaning sexual repression (“Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness?”, as we remember from The Good Soldier), but there’s more than an implication of a similar sentiment. It comes across most definitely in the exchanges between Joan Tetzel’s Judy and Charles Coburn’s Simon, father-and-daughter sideline observers of the whole sorry business.

The ornate settings in which Laughton/Horfield plays with unabashed free range (it must be said though that Hitchcock gets a far more controlled performance out of Laughton here than he did in Jamaica Inn, in which Laughton’s super-glazed hamming is delightful nonetheless) are a stark contrast to the dingy confines of the prison where Valli’s Maddalena Paradine dwells through most of the film. If you’ll forgive me, in more sweeping philosophical terms, the difference is to me reminiscent of the red pill/blue pill worlds of The Matrix. No, really. Hitchcock’s intention was different, but not, ultimately, in political terms, THAT different: “What interested me in this picture was to take a person like Mrs. Paradine, to put her in the hands of the police, to have her submit to all their formalities, and to say to her maid, as she was leaving her home between the two inspectors, ‘I don’t think I shall be back for dinner.’ And then to show her spending the night in a cell, from which, in fact, she will never emerge. […]It may be an expression of my own fear, but I’ve always felt the drama of a situation in which a normal person is suddenly deprived of freedom and incarcerated […]”

As Leff relates, this mode of contrast did not please the movie’s producer: “At least three scenes between Valli and Peck occurred in a spare five by six conference room at Halloway Prison. […] Hitchcock often put his actors in confined places to make them (and the audience) sweat. The stark scenes in this virtually unfurnished room—the antithesis of the mahogany-and-marble home of Maddalena Paradine—adumbrate the documentary style of The Wrong Man. Valli and Peck worked on the set for nine days, producing footage remarkable for its severity. Selznick meanwhile badgered Hitchcock to leave the gangster-in-a-cell style to other, lesser studios […]” As astute as Selznick could be, he did not have much of an appreciation for mise-en-scène at times.

I feel bad for self-proclaimed Hitchcock nuts who pooh-pooh this picture, or any other non-thriller Hitchcock. (It’s true that I lean more to Robin Wood’s side than Rohmer and Chabrol’s on Mr. and Mrs. Smith; while Rohmer and Chabrol are correct in identifying that film’s most Hitchcockian scene, said scene is also borderline grotesque, and Wood is right in nailing down the film’s defining weakness, which is that Norman Krasna’s script is a borderline crass rehash of The Awful Truth.) Because no matter what the material, Hitchcock’s always inventing, stretching, testing, film language itself, which is never not interesting. As Rohmer and Chabrol state at the conclusion of their book, “In Hitchcock’s work form does not embellish content, it creates it.” And it’s almost always a kick to watch that miracle take place before one’s eyes. Don't you think?

GK

This is the third of a four-part series. See part one below; part two here; and I'll update when part four appears at the Siren's blog tomorrow, and maybe I'll put up a kind of post-game show when we're done...

UPDATE: The Siren's thrilling (it really is!) conclusion to this exchange is now posted, here.