(A Superhero Named) Tony

At one point, I was going to write about a particular film criticism website that shall remain nameless. I was going to rail on bitterly about its elitist “invitation only” members policy, about how the forums were Ain’t It Cool News for the academically deluded and how I wasn’t sure what was worse, the site’s refusal to feature thought-provoking criticism or the groundless pretension behind it. Then I realized that writing that article would be excessively obnoxious. My knee jerked. Sometimes I get this way. I think I have a problem.

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Watching an old BBC documentary on New German Cinema, I thought about the relationship of cinema to national identity, history, culture and all that. Here were a handful of misfits, post-post-War artists set on rerouting Germany’s patchy WWII film history of propaganda and escapism to let others know that the country was alive and kicking. In many ways, it was similar to what the Cahiers du Cinema boys had tried to do for cinema in general, only these guys were doing it for their country, for their culture.

I couldn’t help but ask myself, then, What constitutes American Cinema? The easy, obvious and absolutely depressing answer would be the industry of Hollywood — a.k.a. Genesis, the dream machine, the sausage factory, public money laundering, the big Whatever that lately avoids any introspection or acknowledgment of culture, except in the most insincere and pandering of ways. The depressing part comes in that, if Tinsel Town is our cinema, you have to look all the way back to the ’70s New Hollywood crew to find evidence of the last sort of identity or movement. And that era is quickly becoming mythologized to the point of meaninglessness, not to mention that more than a few reasons Hollywood has since fallen is because it’s run by those once-rebels, now grown up and protective of their fortunes. Since the ’70s, the Independents had their moment but petered out after studios caught whiff of the green potential, and only a handful of individuals have contributed anything cinematic that could be notably “American.” Among the few since John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch comes to mind. (But that might be because of his friendship with New German hero Wim Wenders.) Jarmusch took the stranger-in-a-strange-land model and brought it home as stranger-in-a-strange-homeland. Few other American filmmakers have managed to explore the mess of cross-culturalism in this country (Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man, Ghost Dog), and how others perceive and/or buy into it (Down by Law, Mystery Train). And he keeps coming up with new films, new examples. This place is just too much of a patchwork; it really is a sad and beautiful world.

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