FROM TIME TO TIME I FIND MYSELF AVOIDING MOVIES altogether, in the frank hope of not becoming depressed. It is in the nature of industries, of course, to assume that they offer the public a good thing, and it is clearly the sole function of the public relations wing of the movie industry to keep assuring the public that in movies they (almost invariably) get a good thing—but for myself, I wonder. In my view no art except fiction has the depression-inducing potential of film; certainly no other arts are so likely, through inadvertence or even through incompetence, to expose the more melancholy realities of human existence.
An art form or a genre needn’t necessarily have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but all of those that I know anything about do have a high, a middle, and a low. I seldom have any trouble with the highest level of film art—i.e., the great film—because I seldom encounter it. Nor do I have much trouble with the lowest level, that represented, say, by Kung Fu movies, sword-and-sandal epics, and Disneyesque comedy. This level is pure commerce, and pure commerce has an innocence of a sort, however tacky its product may be.
My trouble with movies comes with the ninety percent or so that are middle-grade—for unsuccessful or semisuccessful middle-grade realistic movies are woebegone and woebegetting things. What they lack, invariably, is the redemptive dimension. To see them is to be reminded either of the difficulties of life, or of the unsatisfactoriness of art, or of both at once—and for this one is expected to shell out money. Such movies, honest but weak, expose the sadness and cruelty of human experience, but bring to exposure neither radiance of spirit nor greatness of heart. They remind us over and over again of the failures of feeling, but do nothing to restore our confidence either in its survivals or its joys.
Tragedy contains a kernel of relief; what Dorothy Parker called “the messes” do not. And it is with the messes that second- and third-rate realistic movies deal. To immerse oneself in them week after week is to add a mass of vicarious and quite superfluous emotional aches and pains to whatever homecooked troubles one might be carrying around. I find increasingly that I’d rather not.
When this reluctance first appeared, it surprised me, for I have been a habitual, if not a compulsive, moviegoer most of my life, and long after I actually started avoiding movies I retained the surface habits of the confirmed movie freak. I read ads and scanned reviews, much as I always had, hoping to find something to tempt me. But even when something obviously tempting came along, I seldom succumbed. It was downright troubling, at first. I had always assumed that the movies had a firm grip on me, and yet the grip was broken easily—almost idly—and for a time I was at a loss as to what might be afoot.
Oddly, the most interesting thing I discovered, during the several months I was on what might be called a movie fast, was that in America it is hardly necessary to see movies in order to know them, particularly if one has a long, sustained reputation as a movie freak. People talked to me about movies constantly, assuming that I was still seeing them, and all I had to do was nod now and then and absorb the movie by osmosis, as it were. If I was in doubt about a film after hearing five or six reports on it, I could cross-check these non- or semiprofessional reports by quick reference to the reviews of, say, John Simon, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris. In this way I could acquire a more interesting fix on a given film than I would have had if I had actually seen it.
After a time, this method of trying to size up films without actually seeing them became a kind of game in itself. As I continued to refine it, I noticed it had begun to provide me with the very thing that I had once cheerfully expected movies to provide: i.e., escape. To increase the interest of the game I would from time to time actually see a film, but only after I had exhausted all my sources of reportage and drawn my own conclusions about how it would be. The interesting element of the game was that it required one to evaluate not films but people; that is, to sift through the prejudices of one’s movie-freak friends and the peccadilloes and quirks of the major reviewers, and by graphing, as it were, what each could be expected to overpraise, underpraise, revile, not notice, or deliberately ignore, one could acquire a very nice sense of the film.
I found this method both subtle and refreshing, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it to film lovers who may find themselves temporarily jaded. Personally I came to prefer a grade school value system based on As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs (no one, to my knowledge, has ever gotten an E), with, of course, minuses and pluses when appropriate. I have also found it well to wait about six weeks after the release date of a movie before actually seeing it. Not only will this give stragglers time to get in their two cents’ worth, but it will often ensure that one doesn’t have to stand in line. Indeed, in many cases, after a lapse of six weeks, one will have the added stimulus of tracking a picture to some picturesque out-of-the-way theater, where it is still OK to take popcorn into the show.
For a time, when I was first learning the movies-by-osmosis game, I tended to blame my slackening interest on the fact that I was doing so much screenwriting. Many a couple have discovered how deflating it can be to domesticate a passion; professionalizing an escape can have the same effect. One doesn’t want to write movies half the day and see them the other half—not, at least, if one is me. Shoemaking, I assume, makes one more critical of shoes, and screenwriting can often make one more critical of films. In the first place, once one starts screenwriting extensively, one seldom needs to go to see a film in the ordinary way, as a paying customer. Employment, whether actual or potential, immediately gives one “screening” status—as privileges go this might correspond to receiving a gift certificate entitling one to two hours of dentistry.
Seeing a movie at a screening is far from an ideal method. Generally, there will be a tense producer at one elbow, a hypertense director at the other, and six or seven grim PR people scattered around, all of them expecting one to come forth with both incisive analysis and wild praise, some eight or ten seconds after “The End” has appeared on the screen. One can stall a moment by yawning, or stretching, but ultimately comment will have to be made. I quickly settled on a tactic which I had previously used only when viewing best friends’ babies, which is to look jolly and say, “Well, that’s some baby,” with a touch of emphasis on the some. “Well, that’s some film,” is the perfect deflecting remark, because the producer and the director will not much care what the writer thinks anyway; once assured that he is not going to spit on them in disgust, they usually forget the writer and go right back to talking about advertising, openings, etc.
At first I suppose I thought going to screenings was glamorous, or professional, or something, but it was not long before I realized that the screenings were destroying what little romance movies still had, for me. Seeing a movie in a theater, with a normal, noisy, half-attentive audience, in effect clothes a film; seeing a movie at a screening strips it, leaves it standing there naked, with its sad discolorations and drooping parts exposed. The crude stitchery, used to sew up whatever gaping wounds were left by production, will seem even more crude at a screening. There will be no audience to distract one, no way to avoid seeing the writer’s desperate stratagems as he attempts to keep one foot in probability while shoring up the star’s part, but removing the odd avalanche or tidal wave in order to come in under budget. One will often leave a screening feeling that one has inadvertently been witness to something unhappy: i.e., the sight of a lot of honest work whose product is nothing.
Still, screenings were not the real cause of my sudden reluctance to see movies. This reluctance stems from a discouragement with middle-grade realism, and is not confined to movies: I am just as reluctant to read second- and third-rate realistic fiction, though I used to consume it by the crate. It is not, I think, that with age I have merely become more critical, but that I have come to want more from art than either documentary authenticity or casual honesty. I have, I suspect, come to want of it more or less what Matthew Arnold wanted: that is, that it perform a function once the trust of religion, that of reconciling us to our experience, whether social, domestic, or tragic. I want an art that—through style, through wit, through vision, or through heart—redeems the experience it presents; the last thing I want is an art that idly documents discontents and as idly adds them to my own. It was a sense at once of oppressiveness and not-enoughness that began to keep me out of movies, and for lengthy stretches it keeps me out still.
Since it seemed ready-made for not-enoughness, I made no plans to see All the President’s Men. Then, all around me, people began to see it and talk about it, and the most frequent comment I heard was, “Well, it was better than I expected it to be.” Some people said it was a lot better, others just that it was better. In my case, as I read the grosses in Variety, I soon began to wonder why the picture had such draw. Were millions of people really rushing off to the theater with low expectations, or was it merely in blase Washington that people, though really burning with curiosity, merely pretended to be above titillation?
I think titillation is the right word, too, for it is clear that Hollywood is the Capital’s current turn-on. Who wants to go to another political fundraiser when he could be going to a movie premiere? In any case, since the film was set in Washington, Washingtonians could be expected to have a high curiosity about it: It is always of some interest to see one’s day-to-day reality transported to the screen. It adds a sense of duality, and gives the moviegoer a chance to glimpse a kind of reflection of himself.
On the other hand, it is no wonder that the vast reaches of middle America are flocking to the film, inspired by curiosity about Washington, a place about which they have read much and seen little. The part of the picture’s draw that is most difficult to assess is the national attitude toward the national events with which the picture ostensibly deals. It has been suggested that a festering national guilt over Vietnam vented itself through Watergate and the resulting destruction of Richard Nixon; it might then follow that a need to keep gnawing at this guilt brings people to see the movie, and also—through timely publishing—into the bookstores to snatch up copies of The Final Days. Indeed, assessing the impact at the box office of the near simultaneous release of the book and the film, or, for that matter, assessing the film’s impact on sales of the book, is a job for demographers in the film and publishing industries.
My own guess is that far more people went to see the movie because Robert Redford was in it than because of any festering guilt or any deep curiosity about Watergate. If I had to bet, box office-wise, on either the star system or the national conscience, I’d bet on the star system every time. In this case Redford’s role was hardly riveting—it wasn’t even intense—but he does have going for him a high inscrutability. He allows us everything except the sense that we really know him, and in that residue of mystery lies his appeal. Even Brando is more accessible; Nicholson is much more so.
By the single stroke of casting Redford as Bob Woodward the picture automatically effected a romanticization of journalism which it was then able to play against by the use of a great many realistic details. In my view the attention—repetitive in the extreme—to realistic details made it a movie that at best one would call visually unexciting. I used to gripe at Peter Bogdanovich because of his (it seemed to me) obsession with hotel corridors and the opening and closing of doors in hotel corridors, but in All the President’s Men I soon felt that I would probably leave if I saw either Woodward-Redford or Bernstein-Hoffman knocking on one more door or staring at one more typewriter or talking into one more phone. Eventually, toward the end of the picture, they did knock on one too many doors and I did leave—long after I had exhausted my moral, visual, dramatic, and topical curiosity about the film.
The view of things I came away with was that, historically, the republic was saved, or more accurately, Richard Nixon destroyed, because the Post wanted to beat out the Times. And that seemed accurate enough: The competitive motive is still the most American of motives. I did think that, despite a touch of crude language here and there, the Post was made to seem rather more Jeffersonian than it is, but then I didn’t go to the movie in hopes of uncovering any truth about the Washington Post.
What seemed to me to weaken the film dramatically was that it was a “good guys versus the bad guys,” film in which we never see the bad guys. Goodness is usually duller than badness, and so it seemed to be here. Since the film never showed the bad guys, no sense of villainy was established; the suspenseful issue was not whether Nixon would fall (since we knew he must fall) but whether the Post would get the story. In this connection it seemed to me that in a sane world the publication of The Final Days would have worked against the movie, because that book makes clear that the really compelling drama of Watergate was going on in the White House, not in the newsroom of the Washington Post. The fall of princes makes a better story than the rise of reporters. And surely Nixon’s descent offers far greater possibilities for direction, drama, and acting than does the ascent of Woodward and Bernstein.
Or, to put it another way, the fall of Nixon, both as a personal and as a historical event, is resonant, ambiguous, and dramatically rich. It could inspire a bit of pity, a bit of terror. All the President’s Men has the resonance of a doorbell—at best it manages five or six tones—and it is indifferent to ambiguity. Far from enriching our sense of a crucial national event, the film reduces our sense of that event, narrows it by several dimensions, and offers no cathartic possibility whatsoever. It has its own modest niceties, but it is not enough, and ultimately its failure is the result of point of view.
The reporters knock on a lot of doors, but the doors only lead to their story, not the story. It is a picture full of doors, none of which lead to any substantive insights about either our national or our human destiny. Though it deals with a national cataclysm, of a kind, its rendering of our society is extremely thin. Social relations as such scarcely exist; if the film makes any statement about us, it is that we are a nation of professionals.
It is irresistible, if perhaps unfair, to contrast All the President’s Men with Seven Beauties, another film that deals with history, innocence, and guilt. Even to point out the contrast makes All the President’s Men seem rather like a burlesque epic. It is to Seven Beauties as “The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice” is to the Iliad.
If All the President’s Men is a doorbell, Seven Beauties is an organ, on which great chords are struck, great resonances created. In the latter film, virtually all experience is seen as social, even some that is very lonely and terrible. The cataclysm in this case transcends the national; Western civilization is involved, and we know it, yet this Tolstoyan dimension doesn’t prevent the director, Lina Wertmüller, from lingering over the most local and most personal scenes—witness her wonderfully vivid, complex rendering of bas Italia, in the Naples scenes.
One of the marks of a great artist is the ease with which he moves back and forth between scenes of vastly different scale; from the cosmic to the local, as it were; or from gods to swineherds, the death camp to the mattress factory. The confident artist makes these movies so casually that they seem like acts of grace. Seven Beauties is as full of such moves as it is devoid of doors. In the prison, in the mental institution, even in the death camp, Pasqualino is still the social man; he moves about more freely than people move in All the President’s Men. Indeed, one of the incidental achievements of Seven Beauties is to make a concentration camp seem more appealing than the Post newsroom. The human contacts are certainly richer.
Were Henry James alive, it would be interesting to have him respond to these two movies. While he would initially have approved of the limitation of point of view in All the President’s Men, he would probably have had to admit that in this case it led to impoverishment. Seven Beauties, one imagines, would have left him aghast at first, and he might have jerked back from its excesses, as he initially jerked back from the vast novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. “Great fluid puddings,” he called them, but their abundance could not be denied, and in the end he yielded them his respect if never exactly his admiration.
Seven Beauties may indeed be a fluid pudding, but what plums of vision it contains! It reminds one not so much of the European film as of the European novel: of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Stendhal. It has their ability to summon up a world and to furnish it with an extraordinary richness of human and social detail. Also, more important, it has their human reach, and a sense of a height, as it were, within a depth; and a sense of the sweep of time and the intricacy of life, the irrevocability of action. It has their size, their clarity, and their elusiveness, offering an almost limitless sequence of perspectives on human experience. Its political metaphors, its verbal statements are its parts, not its sum; its lasting and most luminous statements are all visual, and infinitely ambiguous.
I like particularly the way the picture gathers itself around the moment when Pasqualino, having survived, comes back to Naples to find his bride-to-be decked out like a whore. He asks her if she has become a whore and she says yes. He asks her if she made a lot of money and she says yes. Then he tells her to quit and get ready to be married. One of the limitations of All the President’s Men is that it contains no past and suggests no future. Part of the greatness of Seven Beauties is its awareness of the pressure the past exerts on the day-to-day present.
In telling his wife-to-be to quit whoring and get ready, Pasqualino, whom the Ilse figure had accurately and succinctly described as a “shit macaroni,” redeems himself and, to an extent, his experience, if only for that moment. He may yet—indeed, he may soon—be haunted by his wife’s whoring and the fact that he shot his friend, but for a moment at least he touches wholeness in his recognition that the final key to survival is in the handling, not of the historic, but of the personal past.
To have provided such a moment, after a long trip through confusion, silliness, cruelty, and horror is not to deny the horror, or the hopelessness that accompanied it, but it is balancing, reconciling, redemptive, the moment of harmony within the tragic. Wertmüller is far from perfect, but she is enough. One thinks of the baseball metaphor Hemingway used to describe Faulkner: not much control, but fantastic speed. A director with that can bring one back to movies.