OKAY, SO TWO PEOPLE WALK OUT of a movie theater. I know, it sounds like the setup for a bad joke, but work with me here. Call them Lexi and Dave. They toss their popcorn tubs and soda cups into the garbage cans, and as they stroll out into the growing darkness, Lexi says, “Overall, the movie is quite faithful to its original. So what’d you think?”
“Great,” says Dave. “It’s Mad Max. Big, loud, and crazy. My kind of film. You?”
“Great here, too. Not the story, although that was all right. More like the vision behind it. It was like a piece of art.” Lexi thinks a moment. “A crazy, noisy piece of art.”
“Art? I don’t think so. Art is those foreign guys. Bergman, Fellini, who’s that Japanese guy? Maybe Woody Allen. You know, dull stuff.”
“So you’re saying that an action movie can’t be a work of art?”
“What I mean is, who cares if it’s art or not. It’s a good story with lots of action. That’s all that matters. Crashes, explosions, hot babes, flame-throwing guitars. What else is there?” Dave’s a little exercised now.
“Um, everything? The speed. The way things looked—you know, how the action was staged, where the camera was when a shot was taken. I don’t know, just the things that make the movie look the way it does. And the music, of course,” says Lexi, trying not to sound superior. “You know, all that other stuff.”
“I think you’re making all that other stuff up. Like what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” says Lexi. “Well, take the main villain. What’s he called? Immortan Joe? He’s like Darth Vader. You know, being helped into his mask and his breathing things, whatever they were. Although maybe he was more like Jabba the Hutt.”
“If we’re going there, I think the other dude, the one with feet like flowerpots and a silver nose—the People Eater—was Jabba the Hutt. He was gross enough.”
“Besides characters, the film was a visual masterpiece. Who could come up with those crazy guys on poles? You know, the ones who swing between cars like wacko pole-vaulters or something. And the way it was shot. The whole movie, every scene or shot or whatever, looked perfect. Like a perfect version of itself. I don’t know how to explain it. Art, you know. You either get it or you don’t.”
“Whatever you say,” says Dave, laughing, as they climb into the car. “You think too much, Professor. I’ll just stick to watching the movies. And you keep talking this smack, you’re buying the whole pizza.”
Welcome to the state of informal film criticism. We’ll let our young people go on to the pizzeria unaccompanied, while we consider the implications of that conversation. They’re both right, of course: Dave in asserting his right to watch movies the way he wants to, which is to say passively, treating them as simple entertainment, and Lexi in claiming that there just might be more going on than her pal acknowledges, even if he is not entirely sure himself what that something is.
We should stipulate here that the Max in question is Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), not the thirty-six-year-old original and not The Road Warrior and certainly not Beyond Thunderdome. Part of the difference is that the later version’s budget could eat the original movie as an hors d’oeuvre and not spoil its supper. Simply put, George Miller had resources available that he could not have imagined in 1979. And he used them.
So here is the question: what else makes up “all that other stuff”? Which leads to another: does it matter? And to a third: should we care, and if so, why?
Those three questions deserve answers, so here they are, slightly rearranged. First, whatever constitutes “all that other stuff” matters absolutely. If you do something as simple as rearrange the furniture in a room, the scene will play differently because the characters can’t navigate their way through the space the same way they did the first time. Instead of a right profile, you get the back of a head. Great, if that’s what you want. And that is one choice in one scene. In Mad Max: Fury Road, which our young friends have just seen, there is a sequence where, in the midst of the gigantic chase sequence that forms the bulk of the movie, the heroes must pass through a bottleneck. Which becomes the eye of a needle, when tons of rock are brought down, leaving, after some cleanup, an aperture through which the trucks must travel that is essentially a circle in the rock at the center of the steep canyon. The canyon is controlled by a motorcycle gang that dresses like psychotic Ewoks, excels at extortion for passage through the needle, and stands watch on outcroppings looking for all the world like the Apaches in about half the movies John Wayne ever made. Furiosa (Charlize Theron) makes a deal with the bikers, but they go back on it, forcing her to flee with her human cargo while the bikers blow part of the canyon and impede the attack of Furiosa’s enemy (and recent boss), Immortan Joe.
So here are some choices that have to be made in this scene: how many bikers will Furiosa negotiate with, where are the other bikers arrayed in the canyon, what possesses them to dress like furballs in the desert, what does the road through the canyon look like before and after the rockslide, and where are the other characters while the negotiation is going on. Every shot involves a hundred decisions. At least. Proof? Let’s try another director. Here’s Judd Apatow, about as unlike George Miller as anyone I can imagine, on NPR’s Fresh Air, telling Terry Gross about directing Trainwreck (2015) and working with Amy Schumer, who wrote and stars in the film: “[I]n editing, you have to make a million choices. I mean, every second you could be on a different person’s face, you could use a different joke, you could use different music, so there’s so many things to debate, and overall it really could not have gone better.” It doesn’t matter if the movie is The Seventh Seal or King Kong (either one) or, well, Trainwreck; the principle remains the same: every shot demands a series of decisions and choices from the faces on-screen to the lighting to the filters on the lens.
Among the other choices to be made in a scene: people (location, number, proximity to the camera), framing, camera angles and distances, lighting, props, duration of shot, sound clarity, background music, and which shots come before and after. In other words, how many persons are present, what are they wearing (or not); do you shoot them collectively or singly, up close or from a distance at any given moment; what, if anything, is the music playing behind the action; how brightly is the scene lit; do they speak clearly or mumble; in short, how much and what sort of visual and auditory data can this scene convey before it breaks down from the load, and how little does it need to be viable? Second, should we care? We don’t have to, as Dave’s enjoyment tells us; he’s just fine with what he saw and doesn’t need to see more. After all, the multiplex isn’t a film school, and we aren’t being graded. Lexi, on the other hand, seems to care. She’s noticing something about the movie that is independent of its quality: someone made this movie look and sound and feel the way it does. They may have made it well or badly, but they made it through a huge succession of issues to be decided and exigencies to be dealt with. More important, Lexi seems to want to care, and that is the thing that separates the two friends and from which we can draw a lesson.
Taking an interest in how movies are put together is a choice. You don’t have to. Some movies may be improved by declining that option. Film, moreover, inclines us toward passivity: the experience of sitting in a theater with a larger-than-life presentational surface, the screen, on which heads can be ten feet tall, overwhelms us. It’s easy to watch a giant screen without analyzing it. Not only that, but when movies these days are so action-packed and idea-thin, so escapist (and, to be fair, often so much fun), it’s easier and fairly natural not to interrogate a summer blockbuster. What are you going to ask, “Why are they wearing spandex”?
Contrast that with reading novels or poems, where we can hold the information in our hands—literally. The very nature of the experience of turning pages and moving our eyes down lines of type involves an active participation on our part, which leads almost inevitably toward other levels of engagement with the text that are consciously active. Think of it this way: in a movie house, in order to stop participating in the experience, we have to consciously stand up and walk out, whereas in reading a printed text we are already actively engaged, so that to stop we need only close the book. Sometimes, not even that, as anyone who has ever been jarred awake by their book slamming to the floor can tell you. The point is, with print, we move from activity toward passivity when we stop. With film, the basic experience is passive, so any deeper engagement, including the ultimate act of film criticism—walking out of the theater—is necessarily more active and therefore a conscious decision. Nor is the choice to be a more active student of film an all-or-nothing selection. We can choose to notice aspects of a movie without becoming a film theorist. One of my sons, in fact, operates on a shifting scale: some films are worth the effort and some simply are not. He sometimes reports back that a movie was “pretty terrible but still funny.” Which is fine by him in some cases. These are movies, you know, starring Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider. Or both. He’s a really good film viewer, by the way, when he thinks the energy invested will pay dividends.
I have spent my career trying to interest students not merely in reading literature but in noticing how literature is assembled. Mostly, I have succeeded—or at least they have humored me while in my classes. Literary criticism, a fraught term if ever there was one, is not about who’s better than whom, what novel or poem or play is the best. At least, that’s not what it is in my classes. Don’t get me wrong: I try to assign good works and skip the lousy stuff. But the real purpose of criticism, per Foster, is to take books and poems and plays apart so we can better understand how they’re put together. What are the elements of this sonnet, that story, and how do they operate in the poem or story? You know, all that other stuff. Big stuff like symbols and images. Little stuff like the sounds of words and their placement in lines. Whatever the particulars, the real issue is the same: how do we become better readers—more attentive to detail, more involved, more attuned to nuance, more aware of the many levels of significance possible in a given work? Same thing with movies. Oh, sure, there are differences. No line lengths or meter or rhyme schemes, no narrator to figure out whether he’s trustworthy or not. But not always all that different, either. There are still characters, still something like point of view, still images and even symbols. Plus lots of stuff that is specific to movies. It is not only possible but for some of us inevitable that we treat film as we treat other literary enterprises, that we study it to see how it works. We’ll get into all that in a moment.
But before that, the big question. So why should we care?
Pleasure. Pure and simple: pleasure. Oh, sure, you can take this knowledge and use it to excel in classes or become a famous critic on your very own blog. You can even use it to become a pretentious burden to your friends. Not recommended, but that’s your call. Of course, employing analytic strategies is fabulous brain exercise, and we can all use more of that, but it’s really not the point. The best argument for learning to see more up on the silver screen is that it will bring you more pleasure. Don’t you think knowing how Star Wars or The Hobbit is put together is pretty cool? Or that we can enjoy talking about something beyond the plot? That pleasure can take many forms, of course. Here are some that might appeal.
• Pleasure (1): if Lexi continues on the path she has laid out, she will learn to take more delight from her future movie watching than will Dave, for whom movies will always equal surface action—who said what and which events happened and what was funny and what sad, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there is more fun to be had. Learning to see more, moreover, takes nothing away from enjoying that surface action. There is a misconception in the culture that if we analyze the works we read or watch or listen to, we will kill our “simple” or “pure” enjoyment. Seriously? Then why do all those music geeks tear into the meaning of songs by Pink Floyd or Tupac or the Beatles or Pearl Jam or whomever to uncover every last shred of possible meaning? If so, then why would they do it? For that matter, do you really think they find the music less gratifying after that work than before? I’ve said this elsewhere, but it bears frequent repeating: no one, and I mean no one, takes more pleasure from reading than do professors of literature. True, they may seem to have smoke coming off their overheated brains as they consider five or six or a dozen different meanings, implications, and levels of signification simultaneously, but what may seem from the outside like the gnashing of gears sounds on the inside like a very contented hum. Far from spoiling your fun, you’ll likely double or triple it.
• Pleasure (2): you can even take pleasure in lousy movies. Bad ones, you understand, use many of the same techniques as good ones. We’ll look at some films of dubious quality as we go along just to make that point. Not only that, but as you become more accomplished as a critic, you can examine the lesser films to see just where they go awry (or perhaps work in spite of or even because of their flaws); occasionally, that’s the only enjoyment to be had. The flip side of that coin is that you can also begin to see what great films have to offer that maybe escaped you when you were a less experienced filmgoer.
• Pleasure (3): knowing more is a great way to astonish your friends and confound your rivals, and who doesn’t enjoy that?
Let’s take a small detour to the pizza parlor, where Dave is wondering if he missed something about the movie. He’s not convinced, of course—Lexi’s observations weren’t that persuasive, even if she is on the right track—but there was something about how much she seemed to enjoy the movie that caused him to reconsider the matter. Not that he’s telling her. But he’s thinking he might think about his next movie a little differently. See if any of that art business is going on. Nothing definite, you know, just maybe something that shows up if you pay a little more attention, watch for what’s going on behind the action. Watch like she does.
You want to know what totally getting movies sounds like? Here’s Anthony Lane on Mad Max: Fury Road:
That wonderful image [of Max simply melting away into the crowd at the end of the movie] allows Miller to draw back and survey the scene from on high. Such is the root of his near-mystical prestige as a creator of action films: a bright, instinctive sense of when and where to cut from the telling detail to the wider view, and back again. Those instincts were there in the first “Mad Max,” which, for all its cheapness, picked up rhythm whenever it hit the highway, and they are resurgent here. They connect Miller not so much to the panicky despots of the modern blockbuster, like Michael Bay, as to directors of Hollywood musicals, and to the early choreographers of the chase, in the wordless days when pictures lived by motion alone. In “Mad Max: Fury Road,” the Polecats—aggressors who arc from one vehicle to another, in mid-race, on the end of long stakes—are the descendants of Buster Keaton, who, in “Three Ages,” fell from a roof through three awnings and clutched at a drainpipe, which swung him out into the void and back through an open window.
That’s pretty terrific. It has observation, understanding, attention to detail, grasp of film history all rolled up into one package. Lane, as his readers will attest, is a man who knows what he likes and what he doesn’t (as with the Michael Bay dig) as well as why he thinks that way. I can’t turn you into Anthony Lane. Heck, I can’t turn me into him. Nor is that really desirable; even he would agree that one of him is quite sufficient. But what we can do is make you—make us all—a better reader of movies. More informed. More aware. More analytical. Which in turn will make your movie experience richer and more complete as you begin to see all the possibilities this marvelous medium has to offer.
So the question for you is, are you a Dave or a Lexi? Are you happiest not thinking about your movies, treating them as disposable commodities to be seen and then discarded? Or are you hoping to get a little something more out of your moviegoing, maybe find interesting things to say over your latte with friends? Would you simply like to be able to understand those aspects of films that you know are there but you can’t quite identify? Most important, are you looking to really take ownership of your movie experience, to make those films truly your own? Then why don’t we take a little trip together? Besides, you don’t want to be left on your own; I’m thinking even Dave may want to come along for the ride.
A Note on the Text
In the history of the cinema, there have been thousands of films made worldwide. We won’t mention all of them, but it may feel that way sometimes. This book will mention around a hundred movies, some of them only in passing. Even so, your head may sometimes spin. I’ll try to explain enough so that you can get the point of the example even if you haven’t seen it. If you’re like most people, the older, classic films will be the ones you are least likely to have seen (unless you were a young person when they were around). By cutting almost as many films as I have included, I have tried to limit major discussion to just a handful of classic films representing several genres: Citizen Kane (experimental/art), Shane and Stagecoach and The Magnificent Seven (classic Western), Once upon a Time in the West and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (revisionist Western), Annie Hall (screwball comedy), The Maltese Falcon (crime/noir), Body Heat (crime/neo-noir), Lawrence of Arabia (epic), The Lion in Winter (historical/play adaptation), Psycho (horror/thriller), The Gold Rush and Modern Times (silent comedy), Star Wars (sci-fi), Raiders of the Lost Ark (action-adventure), The Wizard of Oz (fantasy), and The Godfather (gangster). Most of these are shown repeatedly on various movie channels, especially those specializing in classic movies (who knew, right?), and all are available via subscription services like Netflix. In a perfect world, they would all be available for streaming, but that’s not where we live. The newer films are more varied in the hope that readers will have seen some of them so at least one or two examples will stick, and you can always rent a movie to get up to speed. In any case, I won’t be giving any tests, so you’re free to see them or not, as the spirit moves you. But I hope you will.
And now, for that last question (asked first): what is all that other stuff? Ah, well, if you really want to know, step inside.