Wherein we sneak up to the roof.
(A Superhero Named) Tony
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Again, not the Beatles but the Joan Didion.
As previously mentioned, the “In Hollywood” chapter of Joan Didion’s The White Album — rather a section of it — deserves special attention. In six swift paragraphs, Didion takes to task those who write about films, asserting “much of what is written about pictures and about picture people approaches reality only occasionally and accidentally.” In particular, Stanley Kauffman and Pauline Kael get served.
Call me a cynic, but that doesn’t sound like news. And I wonder if it was news in 1973 when Didion wrote it.
This website should make it painfully obvious how I feel about film criticism. I’ve said my piece (more in person than in print) about the incestuous institution of entertainment journalism, Gene Shalit-style buffoonery, and unmitigated fanboyism. But these should all be thought of differently than film criticism, which in my mind stems more from thoughtful debate. It needn’t be dry or emotionless to be criticism, but it should be without the clutter of condescension, corporate interest or thumbs pointing in various directions. By calling out Kauffman and Kael, Didion seems to be targeting critics rather than journalists (if there can be such a distinction), those who are often better protected by an ivory tower of big words, catchy phrases and some kind of intellectual or social credibility.
But what of writing on film barely approaching reality? Didion refers to it in the context of knowing the System or the mechanics of the film business, knowing deal memos and who gets final cut, etc. It’s a subject given short shrift by journalists and critics alike. We don’t get many Otis Fergusons anymore, writers who detail how day-to-day work really affects the outcome of a picture. Today this angle pops up on so-called infotainment shows broadcast on TV channels that share parent companies with studios, or in studio-sanctioned behind-the-scenes propaganda. (Anyone who has worked in the Industry can tell you that Hollywood could still teach the W. Bush White House a thing or two about controlling information access.)
But the truth is that executive meetings make movies, whims make movies, egos make movies, accidents make movies, and (most importantly) teams of tradespeople make movies. This seems to be Didion’s point: critics and reviewers ignore a certain reality.
Still, do we really need to be insiders or Industry employees to qualify as film critics? Do I need to know how a book was printed to relate to the story? Do I need to know how a shoe was made to know if it’s comfortable? Didion has a point that Kael has little authority in saying “now that the studios are collapsing,” since Kael didn’t work for a studio. By the same token, Didion has as little authority in saying the following:
Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place.
“Making judgments,” maybe (it’s all thumbs), but please, let’s keep a conversation going. Less judgments and more interpretation; let the text be a text. To write off writing about film altogether would deny that moving pictures offer a unifying cultural experience. They are our mythology, our cave paintings, almost a preferred form of communication at this point. It doesn’t matter how the Greeks produced a tragedy. What matters is that the audience responded to it. And that Aristotle wrote about it.
That movies are also big business is merely unfortunate, but so is journalism, and so we get crappy fluff about movies. No doubt we should take pains to pull the wizard out from behind the curtain, but only now and then. Don’t leave him naked for everyone to see. It’s cold out here.
I seem to remember that Didion herself wrote in the chapter “Notes Toward a Dreampolitik” that biker movies “have constituted a kind of underground folk literature for adolescents, have located an audience and fabricated a myth to exactly express that audience’s every inchoate resentment, every yearning for the extreme exhilaration of death.”
I don’t know about you, but that sounds film criticism to me. Pretty good stuff, too.
Wherein there is a BBQ, and promotional consideration is provided by Grolsch.
This is a single roll of super 8 film, unedited. It was shot with care by Donald Gray and processed with the help of Aaron Kraft. Audio is from a rehearsal of the defunct band Strip Minors.
Jonathan Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” blew my mind to the point of inspiration.
I was going to write about it and champion creative commons and free culture and the whole thing, but in fact my mind was blown to a point beyond action. All I came up with was a text file of quotes pulled from the essay. That file has sat on my desktop ever since. Inspiration without action, a cornerstone of laziness. Read the rest of this entry »
Not the Beatles but the Joan Didion. The White Album was given to me some years ago under the pretense that it had a lot to say about California. I was in college in New York City at the time, and I leafed through the book mostly out of homesickness. It was a used hardback edition probably purchased at The Strand, so it felt good in my hands and had an intelligent smell to it. I was probably too immature for any other part of it to stick. Except the part about Roger Corman’s film The Wild Angels. I promptly sought that out. A more vivid memory is of re-reading the book in Spring 2000. I was waiting for a delivery at an apartment I was moving into in Jersey City, New Jersey. I had since finished school, moved back to Los Angeles for a year and, in an obligatory post-collegiate funk, returned east. California and Los Angeles in particular carried new weight for me; I left them behind yet idealized them as undeniable parts of my personality. Didion’s Golden State occupied similar territory, a bygone era described objectively if not semi-wistfully, which only further idealized my image of home. It was a nice antidote to the smog, strip malls and Hollywood wannabes I’d fled (twice), a way to remain proud of home without having to return. So I sat on a milk crate by the window, remembering diamond lanes and deserts and water obsessions so as to restore an identity I’d just traded in at the DMV near Journal Square. Now that I’ve reclaimed Los Angeles as home (again) and regained that California driver’s license, I felt it time to revisit The White Album (again). And it begins with Didion revisiting the 1960s. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion begins. The book’s eponymous first section is about her struggle with how to to create a narrative out the chaotic events of the late 1960s. Her intent is to find a narrative where one doesn’t exist, to maintain sanity by inventing a cause and effect relationship where one might be impossible. The kind of thing historians do. Or the kind of thing mythology does. Indeed, the capital-S Sixties are the mythology fed to my generation. Archetypal heroes and gods and goddesses and wars abound as if they’re all part of some larger tale, a cultural revolution that I’m supposed to believe was organized. But the big story is more easily structured years down the line, thanks to the recorded history of Baby Boomers plus a huge oral history that is a brew of fact, hearsay and foggy memory. “The White Album” section of the book now exists as a part of that legend but certainly from an Angeleno’s perspective; the Manson murders on Cielo Drive are a huge signpost for Didion. Although descriptions of her exposure to the media-conscious Black Panthers and SDS are something else altogether: “…I considered the illusion of aim to be gained by holding a press conference, the only problem with press conferences being that the press asks questions” smacks of the spin and bureaucratic motions of the current White House. Did I say semi-wistful? Make that semi-cynical as well. So much more can be said about the Baby Boom generation’s marketing of itself and its history, but not here. For me the spiritual heart of The White Album has always been the second section, “California Republic.” My response to it, however, was a little different this time around. In 2000, I read about diamond lanes and tried to reinforce my fleeting identity. (“Hey, I’m from California, I know what those are!”) In 2007, I read about diamond lanes twice in one day, first Didion and then the L.A. Times. (“Goddamn it, they don’t need a car pool lane on the 405, they need a friggin’ train!”) In 2000, I was semi-wistful. In 2007, I read about a news cameraman directing California governor’s wife and former actress Nancy Reagan on what flowers to pick during a puff piece. I read about Jerry Brown sleeping on a mattress on the floor while governor. I read that J.Paul Getty built the Getty Villa because he didn’t want “one of those concrete-bunker-type structures.” I read about how The Wild Angels is part of a whole different mythology, that of Youth and the West in particular. I can’t help but wonder who will write the mythology of today. Because it should really mention how L.A. needs more trains. // Those familiar with The White Album will note I avoided mentioning the chapter titled “In Hollywood.” That’s a different write-up altogether. Some day. |
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