The Happiness Boys

AMONG movie-goers there is a sect whose members prefix all discussions of films with the statement: “I only go to the movies to be entertained.” The statement implies that the rest of us, who are serious about the films, go to them as we would to castor oil. Any appreciation of art is a satisfaction of an emotional need and therefore a pleasure; the people who go to the movies just to be entertained are not referring to this pleasure but are implying that the movies aren’t art and if taken at all ought to be taken frivolously, and that those who do think the movies are an art go to them in a vain pursuit of nonexistent esthetic values. All the implications of their statement seem to me snobbish and silly.

The main trouble with their proposition is that it actually supposes that a person can consciously leave all of his experience of life and his desire for new experiences behind him when he goes to the movies, and can present to the movie a kind of third-rate part of himself that is interested only in being diverted by what he believes are third-rate representations of life. Short of blind self-deception or a peculiarly affected attitude toward esthetics, I don’t know how this can be done. It might be comfortable if one could leave at home when he goes to the movies his convictions of actuality, his instinctive sense of harmony, rhythm, balance and unity, his dislike of the spurious, the academic and the unimportant; that is what Hollywood’s press agents might desire most. It’s a nice idea, but it won’t work, because there is hardly a movie in which at least one person wasn’t passionately and earnestly involved in his performance—as soon as you can detect the area of this person’s activity neither the press agent nor anyone else can be frivolous with a clear conscience. In spite of which the people who go to the movies just to be entertained defend their kind of movie-going with the statement that the movies today are made with no serious intent. And yet last year movies like “Watch on the Rhine,” “The Oxbow Incident,” “The Hard Way,” “The Moon Is Down,” were meant in their entirety to be taken completely seriously no matter how well their aim was achieved—to look at them just to be entertained was to be foolish.

The argument for movies only as entertainment (a less offensive way of saying the movies are a place for slumming) implies that the more seriously one takes the movies, the less pleasurable they become. The serious-minded, though, go to be shown the movie-maker’s idea, the best the movie-maker can do with his idea. To be shown anything less than the best is to be given that much less pleasure—unless one is more entertained by artifice and bad performance than by its opposite. To differentiate in movies, as in any art, really enlarges the pleasure to be got from them, whether the movie turns out to be good, bad or indifferent. The bad, in this way, takes on more meaning and definition, and therefore serves a wider purpose. To seek merely entertainment in movies seems to me to be an aim toward misinformation and ignorance rather than toward the avowed aim of pleasure—merely an aim toward not understanding the full context of a movie fact. There are people who don’t confuse the qualities of pleasure in Irving Berlin and Bach; yet meanwhile they are degrading the concept of pleasure in art by lumping all movies, good, bad and indifferent, into a category labeled “something by which to be entertained.” The reason for this standardlessness is often that the entertainment-seekers think a good picture is the pretentious idiocy of the so-called serious film which is a slugging match of trick camera angles, heavy shadows, stagnancy, pompous dialogue and deep thinking (for this kind of “art film” see “The Voice in the Wind”): the people who have this kind of movie concept have actually little idea of what a good movie is. A really great movie like “Greed,” with the rich exactness of the material it shows in pursuit of its theme, has no relation at all to the “art film” and makes the “entertainment film” seem flimsy and eminently unsatisfying solely on the grounds of pleasure.

I believe that in some quarters the question is still being battled as to whether the movies are art. Battle or no battle, that the movies are an art is a fact: the movies are a medium for human expression and differ from poetry only as poetry differs from painting or from music, in having a different set of technical instruments.

I am not making out a case for every movie as a work of art. I too have heard the Hollywood slogan—“The movies are your best entertainment,” and I have seen my share of junk. My case is, however, that if you go to the movies for the diversion offered by an exhibition of junk, Hollywood, in more ways than one, has put something over on you.

February 28, 1944