Movies — which arouse special, private, hidden feelings — have always had an erotic potential that was stronger than that of the live theater. Enlarged so that they seem totally ours, movie actors are more purely objects of contemplation than people who are physically present. Since they’re not actually there on the stage, speaking, rushing off to change a costume, we can fantasize about them with impunity; by etherealizing the actors, film removes the contraints on our imaginations. This was obviously a factor in the early disapproval of movies, even if it wasn’t consciously formulated. Probably movies weren’t culturally respectable for a long time because they are so sheerly enjoyable; in a country with a Puritan background, the sensuality of movies was bound to be suspect. Even now, it’s common for older educated people to insist on the superiority of live theater. This may mean that they prefer the feeling of control which they can generally maintain at a play.
Movies can overwhelm us, as no other art form, except, perhaps, opera does — although folk and rock music can do it, too. For some people being carried away by a movie is very frightening: not everyone wants to have many senses affected at once. Some people feel that they’re on the receiving end, being attacked. The appeal of movies seems to go against the grain of everything they’ve been told during the processes of education — how they should learn to discriminate, learn to think for themselves, learn not to be led blindly.
No doubt movies attract us from earliest childhood because they excite us and work on us, and perhaps movies came to the fore in the sixties because, unlike books but like rock music, movies could be experienced tribally, yet they also provide aesthetic experiences of a sensual complexity that it’s merely priggish to deny. People bred on TV and weaned on movies often feel sensually starved at a play — and they experience that starvation as boredom. When they are used to movies, live theater no longer works for them on a fantasy level. There aren’t enough elements going for them in a play; they miss the constant flow of imagery, the quick shifts of place, the sudden rush of feeling. They miss all the compensatory elements which can sustain them during even a bad movie.
There’s a reason for that “Wow!” which often seems all that a person can say after coming out of a movie house. So many images, sounds, and awakened memories may contribute to the film’s effect on us that often we can’t quite sort out what we think about the way we’ve been moved. We’re not even sure sometimes if we liked it, but we certainly felt it. I think many people experience a sense of danger as part of the attraction of movies — they’re going to be swept up in they know not what. Unstable people, people with a record of nervous disorders, leap to see a hyped-up Gothic, such as The Exorcist, knowing they may flip out on it. That, maybe, is the extreme of what we all sometimes want from the movies — sensations we can’t control, an excitement that is a great high. Preferably a high without a sullen hangover, but sometimes moviegoers, particularly the generations of the counter-culture and after, want sensations so much that they don’t really mind the downers. Those who go to the documentary Janis may alternate between an exploding high and a nervous discomfort, yet that masochistic element can be what they want, too. It makes them feel closer to the subject of the film: it makes them feel that Janis Joplin went through what they’re going through, just as the young audiences of earlier generations did when they watched James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or the heroes of Easy Rider. However, Janis, with the raw erotic charge of the musical numbers one after another, affects them far more overpoweringly than those earlier films. And some, of course, go to it stoned to intensify the sensations of losing control. That’s what Janis Joplin, losing triumphantly, in a spirit of comic defiance, celebrates.
It says something about the nature of movies that people don’t say they like them, they say they love them — yet even those who love movies may feel that they can’t always handle the emotions that a film heats up. They need to talk to friends, to read critics, in order to understand why they’re reacting as they are, and whether it’s an aberration or others feel the same way. People didn’t have this same need when the movies they went to were on the order of Going My Way, The Greatest Show on Earth, or My Fair Lady.
The greater sensory impact of films in recent years — the acceleration in violence and in shock-editing — makes a critic’s job tougher than before. Moviegoers have very different thresholds of response and of gullibility; some are almost unbelievably susceptible to suspense devices. And large numbers of them — educated and uneducated alike — react to the incineration of characters in The Towering Inferno as marvelous entertainment. That indicates one of the problems of movies: they can be effective on shameless levels. Who isn’t terrified of burning to death? You don’t have to be an artist to frighten audiences by fire. Yet when a movie has startled people, like The Towering Inferno, or enlisted their sympathies and made them weep, like Walking Tall, or made them feel vindictive and sadistic, like the Charles Bronson film Death Wish, the hardest thing for a critic to do is to convince them that it isn’t necessarily a great picture. It’s almost impossible to persuade people that a shallow, primitive work can give them a terrific kick.
Movies operate in a maze of borderlines; criticism is a balancing act, trying to suggest perspectives on the emotions viewers feel, trying to increase their enjoyment of movies without insulting their susceptibilities to simple, crude pop. I know that I’ve failed in some of these reviews — dismissing big, bludgeoning movies without realizing how much they might mean to people, rejecting humid sentiment and imagining that no one could be affected by it. I still can’t quite get it through my head that tricks that I laugh at are being played on some moviegoers for the first time — and may trigger strong, anxious responses.
But if dealing with some of the thickset films has been a chore (and my crowbar writing shows it), there were also the opportunities that a reviewer dreams of. Film artists have the capacity to give us more than they consciously know, more than they could commit to paper. They can reach out beyond themselves; that is what the greatest film masters — highrollers, all of them — have tried to do. The artists who seem natural filmmakers — D. W. Griffith, Jean Renoir, Satyajit Ray, Bernardo Bertolucci — accept the simple pleasures of moviegoing and extend them. They use everything at hand, and yet imbue their films with their own emotion. That is what is beginning to happen once again among American directors: they’re trying to go all the way with movies. Expansionist personalities such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese allow for the surprises an actor may come up with; they seize whatever delights them and put it to fresh uses. They don’t simplify for a mass audience. They work in movies for the same reason we go to movies: because movies can give us almost anything, almost everything. There are moments in recent films when we get the mind-swaying sensation of experiencing several arts — at their highest — combined. We come out reeling.
When you think back on the movies of the past, or when you watch them on television, they’re like samples — swatches of cloth — of the period in which they were made: In the Heat of the Night belongs to the Lyndon Johnson age as clearly as Dirty Harry belongs to the heyday of the Nixon era. This book covers the end of that era — 1972–1975. Pictures such as Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, and Nashville don’t supply reassuring smiles or self-righteous messages, but they have something in common (and it’s something they share with films from abroad such as Last Tango in Paris and Jan Troell’s The Emigrants and The New Land) — a new openminded interest in examining American experience. This interest is at once skeptical, disenchanted, despairing, and lyrical. Our filmmakers seem to be on a quest — looking to understand what has been shaping our lives. A few decades hence, these years may appear to be the closest our movies have come to the tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the early 1850s.
There are so many good pictures written about in this book that when I look at the table of contents, it seems like a binge. I may not have rendered justice to the best, but I’ve done my damnedest. Once again, I owe gratitude to William Shawn of The New Yorker, William Abrahams of the Atlantic Monthly Press, and my exacting daughter, Gina James, who keeps pushing that damnedest further.