It is a somewhat common tendency of those who’ve grown up gawping at movies to be drawn back, time and again, to their first flush of attraction, as though looking for a clue to the present predicament of their selves.
I think of the telling scenes of children’s moviegoing that appear in the variously-autobiographical films of the French movie brats: Antoine Doinel and Rene playing hooky at the movies in François “I saw my first two hundred films on the sly” Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959); Michael Terrazon’s friend propping open the exit door to smuggle him into the theater in Maurice Pialat’s L’enfance nue (1968); Martin Loeb copying the gestures of seduction from the neighborhood drageur and Pandora and the Flying Dutchman in Jean Eustache’s Mes petites amoureuses (1974). It is worth noting that both Truffaut and Eustache were the products of broken homes and little hands-on upbringing, left to grow “like flowers,” per R.W. Fassbinder’s description of his own lackadaisical education. So where could these boys find role models, on the cheap…
The best description that I know of the instructive life-lessons provided a child raised by the movies is provided in a late piece by former Rolling Stone writer Grover Lewis, ‘Old Movies in My Mind,’ in which a perambulation through the precincts of Hollywood is occasion for the author (b. 1934) to reflect on his relationship with the local industry:
I followed the sidewalk tides to the east, remembering the girls I used to squire to the picture show, conjuring up faces without names and fumbling caresses in the brilliantined shadows and romances that sometimes didn’t last two reels. To please the sturdy-calfed maidens I courted as a boy, I aped the winning ways of the stars…
The issue, of course, was how to act, not merely in pursuit of the flesh, but in the conduct of life itself. For my generation, the combined physical and moral and spiritual impact of going to the movies was incalculable. Hollywood’s penny entertainments defined the shapes of reality for the age, and shaped the nation into a community of shared experience. All of us learned the proprieties of love and war at the picture show. The movies were a garden of dazzling light, and the verities were familiar and comforting—basic decency and unsullied justice and the promise of happy ending for all. Wasn’t that the universal goal? A common vision of goodness and virtue? Weren’t those the bonds that held civilization intact and kept the bad spirits at bay?
The movies turned us one and all every which way but loose. Still aping the stars when I reached young manhood, I went out in the world with the fixed idea that I wouldn’t let anybody run over me. I used that, at my worst, to run over others. But ten thousand and one flickering myths later, I rated myself a better character for having been to the picture show.
This last point seems to me essential—as is the University of Texas’s collection of Lewis’s writing, Splendor in the Short Grass, to any fan of American movies in the “New Hollywood” era, or plain old good prose (Lewis, it should be noted, was a close college chum of Larry McMurtry, author of that novelized meditation on movie-reared America, The Last Picture Show.) It is no new observation that Hollywood colonized the inner lives of America, if not the world, in its heyday. I think of the following Gore Vidal routine: “Tell me somebody’s favorite actor when he was ten years old, and I’ll tell you who he is. Could Norman Mailer have existed without John Garfield? He’s been playing Norman Mailer, and I’ve been doing George Arliss. You get hung up with an image.”
What I find rather charming in Lewis’s formulation, however, is the guarded but essentially affirmative tone, the statement: “Yes, I was provided most of my moral bearings, social inculcation, and models of behavior through moviegoing—and no, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.” (Lewis was from a broken home of the first order, his parents having shot and killed one another, per the police-report version, in 1943.) Our current Secretary of State popularized the phrase “It takes a village” in the middle ‘90s, but what this failed to take into account is that some villages are composed entirely of creeps, dullards, and worse. This is where what I will blandly call the Arts, a category in which the movies are happily included, come in.
Lewis’s thinking about the movies is in contrast to an entire line of dialogue about the mediated 20th century, most famously expounded by Guy Debord, who ever looked back to a “directly lived” yesterday, before reality and image were sundered by various forces of mental colonization (The last pocket of directly lived existence identified by Debord came, as I understand it, when he was in his early 20s and partying hard. While I often feel this way myself, it had never occurred to me to expand this personal experience into a universal principal.) Debord’s line of discourse continues in Neal Gabler’s Life: The Movie and God knows how many other books that I haven’t read because how many times do you need to ingest that “We’re-living-in-a-simulacra-blue-pill-or-red-pill?” thing anyways?
Now, Debord is one of my favorite comic writers, but the inherent superiority of “directly lived” life remains a rather difficult thing for me to grasp. This came into focus last fall as I was hillwalking in Scotland in grudgeful weather. The experience was unavoidably visceral, elemental, and, yes, “directly lived,” with slurping murk and stinging rain and clouts of wind which very literally threatened to dash me to oblivion after a good, steep plummet. At the same time this “direct” experience was had, it was being filtered through a whole range of “mediated” associations to wind-dashed hills—Lear’s “Blow winds and crack your cheeks” and Catherine Earnshaw and Hound of the Baskervilles and Jennifer Jones in Gone to Earth. Rather than diminished, the experience seemed to me augmented, multiplied through these associations, without which I would have been, after all, only a solitary man being blown about on a hill.
I haven’t seen Edward Yang’s Yi Yi since its release, but a particular scene has stuck with me and comes to mind now, in which a character enthuses about the ability of moviegoing to double, triple human lifespan through all the additional vistas of experience it opens (The quote is apparently “Two times as much life at the movies!”, which I found through Googling, cited in a book-that-I-will-never-read called Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives).
Well! I sat down to write this week’s column with a good mind to discuss the inevitable disappointments of chronic moviegoing, but have instead penned something like a vindication. I will endeavor to do better next week.
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.