Trash, Art, and the Movies (VII)

Does trash corrupt? A nutty Puritanism still flourishes in the arts, not just in the schoolteachers’ approach of wanting art to be “worthwhile,” but in the higher reaches of the academic life with those ideologues who denounce us for enjoying trash as if this enjoyment took us away from the really disturbing, angry new art of our time and somehow destroyed us. If we had to justify our trivial silly pleasures, we’d have a hard time. How could we possibly justify the fun of getting to know some people in movie after movie, like Joan Blondell, the brassy blonde with the heart of gold, or waiting for the virtuous, tiny, tiny-featured heroine to say her line so we could hear the riposte of her tough, wisecracking girlfriend (Iris Adrian was my favorite). Or, when the picture got too monotonous, there would be the song interlude, introduced “atmospherically” when the cops and crooks were both in the same never-neverland nightclub and everything stopped while a girl sang. Sometimes it would be the most charming thing in the movie, like Dolores Del Rio singing “You Make Me That Way” in “International Settlement”; sometimes it would drip with maudlin meaning, like “Oh Give Me Time for Tenderness” in “Dark Victory” with the dying Bette Davis singing along with the chanteuse. The pleasures of this kind of trash are not intellectually defensible. But why should pleasure need justification? Can one demonstrate that trash desensitizes us, that it prevents people from enjoying something better, that it limits our range of aesthetic response? Nobody I know of has provided such a demonstration. Do even Disney movies or Doris Day movies do us lasting harm? I’ve never known a person I thought had been harmed by them, though it does seem to me that they affect the tone of a culture, that perhaps—and I don’t mean to be facetious—they may poison us collectively though they don’t injure us individually. There are women who want to see a world in which everything is pretty and cheerful and in which romance triumphs (“Barefoot in the Park,” “Any Wednesday,”); families who want movies to be an innocuous inspiration, a good example for the children (“The Sound of Music,” “The Singing Nun”); couples who want the kind of folksy blue humor (“A Guide for the Married Man”) that they still go to Broadway shows for. These people are the reason slick, stale, rotting pictures make money; they’re the reason so few pictures are any good. And in that way, this terrible conformist culture does affect us all. It certainly cramps and limits opportunities for artists. But that isn’t what generally gets attacked as trash, anyway. I’ve avoided using the term “harmless trash” for movies like “The Thomas Crown Affair,” because that would put me on the side of the angels—against “harmful trash,” and I don’t honestly know what that is. It’s common for the press to call cheaply made, violent action movies “brutalizing” but that tells us less about any actual demonstrable effects than about the finicky tastes of the reviewers—who are often highly appreciative of violence in more expensive and “artistic” settings such as “Petulia.” It’s almost a class prejudice, this assumption that crudely made movies, movies without the look of art, are bad for people. If there’s a little art in good trash and sometimes even in poor trash, there may be more trash than is generally recognized in some of the most acclaimed “art” movies. Such movies as “Petulia” and “2001” may be no more than trash in the latest, up-to-the-minute guises, using “artistic techniques” to give trash the look of art. The serious art look may be the latest fashion in expensive trash. All that “art” may be what prevents pictures like these from being enjoyable trash; they’re not honestly crummy, they’re very fancy and they take their crummy ideas seriously. I have rarely seen a more disagreeable, a more dislikable (or a bloodier) movie than “Petulia” and I would guess that its commercial success represents a triumph of publicity—and not the simple kind of just taking ads. It’s a very strange movie and people may, of course, like it for all sorts of reasons, but I think many may dislike it as I do and still feel they should be impressed by it; the educated and privileged may now be more susceptible to the mass media than the larger public—they’re certainly easier to reach. The publicity about Richard Lester as an artist has been gaining extraordinary momentum ever since “A Hard Day’s Night.” A critical success that is also a hit makes the director a genius; he’s a magician who made money out of art. The media are in ravenous competition for ever bigger stories, for “trend” pieces and editorial essays, because once the Process starts it’s considered news. If Lester is “making the scene” a magazine that hasn’t helped to build him up feels it’s been scooped. “Petulia” is the come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-America-party and in the opening sequence the guests arrive—rich victims of highway accidents in their casts and wheel chairs, like the spirit of ’76 coming to opening night at the opera. It’s science-horror fiction—a garish new world with charity balls at which you’re invited to “Shake for Highway Safety. Lester picked San Francisco for his attack on America just as in “How I Won the War” he picked World War II to attack war. That is, it looks like a real frontal attack on war itself if you attack the war that many people consider a just war. But then he concentrated not on the issues of that war but on the class hatreds of British officers and men—who were not engaged in defending London or bombing Germany but in building a cricket pitch in Africa. In “Petulia,” his hate letter to America, he relocates the novel, shifting the locale from Los Angeles to San Francisco, presumably, again, to face the big challenge by showing that even the best the country has to offer is rotten. But then he ducks the challenge he sets for himself by making San Francisco look like Los Angeles. And if he must put carnival barkers in Golden Gate Park and invent Sunday excursions for children to Alcatraz, if he must invent such caricatures of epicene expenditure and commercialism as bizarrely automated motels and dummy television sets, if he must provide his own ugliness and hysteria and lunacy and use filters to destroy the city’s beautiful light, if, in short, he must falsify America in order to make it appear hateful, what is it he really hates? He’s like a crooked cop framing a suspect with trumped-up evidence. We never find out why: he’s too interested in making a flashy case to examine what he’s doing. And reviewers seem unwilling to ask questions which might expose them to the charge that they’re still looking for meaning instead of, in the new cant, just reacting to images—such questions as why does the movie keep juxtaposing shots of bloody surgery with shots of rock groups like the Grateful Dead or Big Brother and the Holding Company and shots of the war in Vietnam. What are these little montages supposed to do to us—make us feel that even the hero (a hardworking life-saving surgeon) is implicated in the war and that somehow contemporary popular music is also allied to destruction and death? (I thought only the moralists of the Soviet Union believed that.) The images of “Petulia” don’t make valid connections, they’re joined together for shock and excitement, and I don’t believe in the brilliance of a method which equates hippies, war, surgery, wealth, Southern decadents, bullfights, etc. Lester’s mix is almost as fraudulent as “Mondo Cane”; “Petulia” exploits any shocking material it can throw together to give false importance to a story about Holly Golightly and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The jagged glittering mosaic style of “Petulia” is an armor protecting Lester from an artist’s task; this kind of “style” no longer fools people so much in writing but it knocks them silly in films. Movie directors in trouble fall back on what they love to call “personal style”—though how impersonal it often is can be illustrated by “Petulia”—which is not edited in the rhythmic, modulations-of-graphics style associated with Lester (and seen most distinctively in his best-edited, though not necessarily best film, “Help!”) but in the style of the movie surgeon, Anthony Gibbs, who acted as chopper on it, and who gave it the same kind of scissoring which he had used on “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and in his rescue operation on “Tom Jones.” This is, in much of “Petulia,” the most insanely obvious method of cutting film ever devised; keep the audience jumping with cuts, juxtapose startling images, anything for effectiveness, just make it brilliant—with the director taking, apparently, no responsibility for the implied connections. (The editing style is derived from Alain Resnais, and though it’s a debatable style in his films, he uses it responsibly not just opportunistically.) Richard Lester, the director of “Petulia,” is a shrill scold in Mod clothes. Consider a sequence like the one in which the beaten-to-a-gruesome-pulp heroine is taken out to an ambulance, to the accompaniment of hippies making stupid, unfeeling remarks. It is embarrassingly reminiscent of the older people’s comments about the youthful sub-pre-hippies of “The Knack.” Lester has simply shifted villains. Is he saying that America is so rotten that even our hippies are malignant? I rather suspect he is, but why? Lester has taken a fashionably easy way to attack America, and because of the war in Vietnam some people are willing to accept the bloody montages that make them feel we’re all guilty, we’re rich, we’re violent, we’re spoiled, we can’t relate to each other, etc. Probably the director who made three celebrations of youth and freedom (“A Hard Day’s Night,” “The Knack,” and “Help!”) is now desperate to expand his range and become a “serious” director, and this is the new look in seriousness. It’s easy to make fun of the familiar ingredients of trash—the kook heroine who steals a tuba (that’s not like the best of Carole Lombard but like the worst of Irene Dunne), the vaguely impotent, meaninglessly handsome rotter husband, Richard Chamberlain (back to the rich, spineless weaklings of David Manners), and Joseph Cotten as one more insanely vicious decadent Southerner spewing out villainous lines. (Even Victor Jory in “The Fugitive Kind” wasn’t much meaner.) What’s terrible is not so much this feeble conventional trash as the director’s attempts to turn it all into scintillating art and burning comment; what is really awful is the trash of his ideas and artistic effects. Is there any art in this obscenely self-important movie? Yes, but in a format like this the few good ideas don’t really shine as they do in simpler trash; we have to go through so much unpleasantness and showing-off to get to them. Lester should trust himself more as a director and stop the cinemagician stuff because there’s good, tense direction in a few sequences. He got a good performance from George C. Scott and a sequence of post-marital discord between Scott and Shirley Knight that, although overwrought, is not so glaringly overwrought as the rest of the picture. It begins to suggest something interesting that the picture might have been about. (Shirley Knight should, however, stop fondling her hair like a miser with a golden hoard; it’s time for her to get another prop.) And Julie Christie is extraordinary just to look at—lewd and anxious, expressive and empty, brilliantly faceted but with something central missing, almost as if there’s no woman inside.