Trash, Art, and the Movies (IX)

Part of the fun of movies is in seeing “what everybody’s talking about,” and if people are flocking to a movie, or if the press can con us into thinking that they are, then ironically, there is a sense in which we want to see it, even if we suspect we won’t enjoy it, because we want to know what’s going on. Even if it’s the worst inflated pompous trash that is the most talked about (and it usually is) and even if that talk is manufactured, we want to see the movies because so many people fall for whatever is talked about that they make the advertisers’ lies true. Movies absorb material from the culture and the other arts so fast that some films that have been widely sold become culturally and sociologically important whether they are good movies or not. Movies like “Morgan!” or “Georgy Girl” or “The Graduate”—aesthetically trivial movies which, however, because of the ways some people react to them, enter into the national bloodstream—become cultural and psychological equivalents of watching a political convention—to observe what’s going on. And though this has little to do with the art of movies, it has a great deal to do with the appeal of movies. An analyst tells me that when his patients are not talking about their personal hangups and their immediate problems they talk about the situations and characters in movies like “The Graduate” or “Belle de Jour” and they talk about them with as much personal involvement as about their immediate problems. I have elsewhere suggested that this way of reacting to movies as psychodrama used to be considered a pre-literate way of reacting but that now those considered “post-literate” are reacting like pre-literates. The high school and college students identifying with Georgy Girl or Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin are not that different from the stenographer who used to live and breathe with the Joan Crawford-working girl and worry about whether that rich boy would really make her happy—and considered her pictures “great.” They don’t see the movie as a movie but as part of the soap opera of their lives. The fan magazines used to encourage this kind of identification; now the advanced mass media encourage it, and those who want to sell to youth use the language of “just let it flow over you.” The person who responds this way does not respond more freely but less freely and less fully than the person who is aware of what is well done and what badly done in a movie, who can accept some things in it and reject others, who uses all his senses in reacting, not just his emotional vulnerabilities. Still, we care about what other people care about—sometimes because we want to know how far we’ve gotten from common responses—and if a movie is important to other people we’re interested in it because of what it means to them, even if it doesn’t mean much to us. The small triumph of “The Graduate” was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate—which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him. “The Graduate” isn’t a bad movie, it’s entertaining, though in a fairly slick way (the audience is just about programmed for laughs). What’s surprising is that so many people take it so seriously. What’s funny about the movie are the laughs on that dumb sincere boy who wants to talk about art in bed when the woman just wants to fornicate. But then the movie begins to pander to youthful narcissism, glorifying his innocence, and making the predatory (and now crazy) woman the villainess. Commercially this works: the inarticulate dull boy becomes a romantic hero for the audience to project into with all those squishy and now conventional feelings of look, his parents don’t communicate with him; look, he wants truth not sham, and so on. But the movie betrays itself and its own expertise, sells out its comic moments that click along with the rhythm of a hit Broadway show, to make the oldest movie pitch of them all—asking the audience to identify with the simpleton who is the latest version of the misunderstood teen-ager and the pure-in-heart boy next door. It’s almost painful to tell kids who have gone to see “The Graduate” eight times that once was enough for you because you’ve already seen it eighty times with Charles Ray and Robert Harron and Richard Barthelmess and Richard Cromwell and Charles Farrell. How could you convince them that a movie that sells innocence is a very commercial piece of work when they’re so clearly in the market to buy innocence? When “The Graduate” shifts to the tender awakenings of love, it’s just the latest version of “David and Lisa.” “The Graduate” only wants to succeed and that’s fundamentally what’s the matter with it. There is a pause for a laugh after the mention of “Berkeley” that is an unmistakable sign of hunger for success; this kind of movie-making shifts values, shifts focus, shifts emphasis, shifts everything for a sure-fire response. Mike Nichols’ “gift” is that be lets the audience direct him; this is demagoguery in the arts. Even the cross-generation fornication is standard for the genre. It goes back to Pauline Frederick in “Smouldering Fires,” and Clara Bow was at it with mama Alice Joyce’s boyfriend in “Our Dancing Mothers,” and in the Forties it was “Mildred Pierce.” Even the terms are not different: in these movies the seducing adults are customarily sophisticated, worldly, and corrupt, the kids basically innocent, though not so humorless and blank as Benjamin. In its basic attitudes “The Graduate” is corny American; it takes us back to before “The Game of Love” with Edwige Feuillère as the sympathetic older woman and “A Cold Wind in August” with the sympathetic Lola Albright performance. What’s interesting about the success of “The Graduate” is sociological: the revelation of how emotionally accessible modern youth is to the same old manipulation. The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it’s one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet—one doesn’t expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn’t go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art.