Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan … and Beyond

I am a critic. As such, I see my work as in many respects set apart from that of theorists and scholars (though it is of course frequently dependent upon them). The theorist and the scholar are unburdened of any necessity to engage intimately and on a personal basis with any specific work; they can hide behind their screens of theory and scholarship, they are not compelled to expose the personal nature of their work because they deal in facts, abstract ideas, and data. Any critic who is honest, however, is committed to self-exposure, a kind of public striptease: s/he must make clear that any authentic response to a work of art or entertainment is grounded not only in the work itself but in the critic’s psychological makeup, personal history, values, prejudices, obsessions. Criticism arises out of an intense and intimate personal relationship between work and critic. If it is the critic’s duty to strive for “objectivity” (in the negative sense of avoiding distortions), s/he knows that it is an objectivity that can never be fully achieved, because even when one is convinced that one “sees the work as it is,” the relationship to it has still to be established. I have not the right to say, for example, “David Lynch makes bad movies”: many people for whom I have great respect admire them, and they can certainly be defended on grounds of imagination, accomplishment, originality, strong personal commitment. I do, however, have the right to say, “I find Lynch’s films extremely distasteful; my sense of value repudiates them.”

The critic, it follows, must never set him- or herself up as some kind of infallible oracle. The relationship between critic and reader must always be one of debate. One might invoke here F. R. Leavis’s famous definition of the ideal critical exchange: “This is so, isn’t it?” / “Yes, but … ” All interesting criticism is founded in the critic’s beliefs and values, political position, background, influences, and these should be made explicit or so clearly implied as to leave no room for ambiguity. The theorist and the scholar can (up to a point) conceal any personal commitment behind a cloak of objectivity. The personal element will always be there (in such matters as choice of material to be pursued and analyzed, choice of premise from which to work), but it can only be exposed with precisely that “reading between the lines” that the apparent perfect objectivity is there to deflect.

This will sound to many presumptuous in the extreme, but I feel the need to assert that, in the hierarchy, criticism occupies (or should occupy) the highest position, simply because the critic is the only one centrally and explicitly concerned with the question of value, which is the most important—the ultimate—question. For the theorist and the scholar, almost by definition, the question of value does not exist or is brought in as an afterthought: their tasks are, respectively, to develop and produce ideas about what cinema is, and to examine and catalogue data. But my claim requires two important qualifications:

1. In our present age, with criticism virtually expelled from the higher reaches of intellectual/academic activity, it has become thoroughly debased, the preserve of “popular” journalism; there is almost no “criticism” any more, as F. R. Leavis envisioned it.

2. In a sense critics are parasites, very much dependent on the work of theorists and scholars, which they ignore at their peril. Theory and scholarship supply materials upon which critics can build, applying the theories relevant to their work, using the data for accuracy and factual support.

In the preface to the recent revised edition of Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (2002), I attempted to expose the relationship between the various stages of my work and the events in my personal and professional life. Here, to avoid repetition, I shall make reference only to what seems essential. I want also to provide a double context within which this book might be read today—that within which it was written, and that within which we find ourselves now. The latter will include some commentary on developments in the Hollywood cinema since the 80s, discussing its relationship to the wider sociopolitical arena within which it operates and to which—in devious ways, never explicitly—it refers: the cinema, one might say, that the current cultural situation deserves and gets.

Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan was first published in 1986, but it had gestated gradually over the previous decade, when some of its material was written (the earliest was the chapter on Altman, the most recent that on Heaven’s Gate). It belongs, then, to a particular period of my life and the particular historical decade in which it was lived: the period of my growing politicization, under the influence of radical feminism, gay liberation, black power, the logical swing to the political left that accompanied such developments. It was also the period in which my marriage finally broke down, I left my wife and children, and “came out” as gay—the period, then, for me, of the greatest upheaval, the greatest pain, the greatest exhilaration, the most radical change, the construction (in my usual messy and blundering way) of a new life. The most potent individual influence on me was Andrew Britton, officially my student but swiftly my mentor, who still (a decade after his death) seems to me the finest film critic in the English language, and who helped me discover that it was possible to become political without having to enroll in the semiotics movement.

Feminism initially terrified me (I had to rethink all my previous relationships with women—my mother, my sisters, my wife, numerous friends) and then sustained me during my “coming out” period. In my blinkered state I didn’t catch up with the women’s movement until then: I’d absorbed no more than distant rumors of its existence and, in my role of “happily married bourgeois family man,” I felt no impulse to take an interest. But, when I stepped outside that role, the connection seemed (and still seems) so obvious: women and gays had been oppressed, throughout the centuries, by the heterosexual male hegemony, so it followed that they were natural allies in the war for liberation. And during that period they were. In the background of my book (too far in the background, I now feel—I wish it had been more radical, and more challenging, and more defiant, than it was) was the pervasive sense of excitement, of wonderful new possibilities, a new, reformed world to be created, a transformed civilization built—after all the existing one’s power/domination structures had been demolished—upon cooperation and a true democracy that would have little in common with the false one in which we still live: a democracy based upon values other than money.

Today all that has evaporated. The radical movements of the 60s and 70s have been effectively co-opted and emasculated in an archetypal movement of assimilation/rejection, that vast and insatiable octopus the Dominant Ideology drawing into its ugly belly what it can comfortably digest without fundamental change and spewing out what it can’t. Women can now (within limits) attain the kind of power that was previously the prerogative of men; gays are now widely (provisionally?) accepted (at least within our major cities); blacks and other persons of color have become partially, reluctantly integrated, to the extent that Toronto (where I live), for example, now feels able to pride itself on its multiculturalism. One cannot of course regret that these improvements have occurred (though “concessions” might be the more accurate term): many women, gays, and nonwhites now feel themselves accepted and, to a certain degree, empowered. But at what cost?

All real power (wealth) remains overwhelmingly in the hands of white heterosexual males; a few women can attain senior positions in the big companies and corporations, provided they play the male game and are untainted by feminism; in our multicultural Toronto there are very few wealthy and powerful blacks and Asians (persons of color can be seen riding the subway in large numbers, but very few have limousines); there are many smug and prosperous gay men visible in the gay neighborhoods of our major cities, mostly running their own businesses and without a single political thought in their well-groomed heads. As I write this, Gay Pride Week is once again upon us, with the Pride Day march a few days away. When I moved here twenty-five years ago it was a great event, essentially a political protest; now it gives the overall impression of a vast advertising campaign, with many of the floats supplied by companies cashing in on its newfound trendiness to promote their products. They ignored us when we were an oppressed and vilified minority: there was no money in it. Now that the march is “popular,” and thousands line the streets to cheer, the companies are “gay-friendly,” and go out of their way to show it. “Fair-weather friends” indeed: the moment a backlash started (and it could at any time), the floats would vanish overnight. The “empowerment” of women and minorities is in reality their conscription and assimilation into the still dominant masculinist order, within which “the business woman” and “the affluent gay male” are easily recognizable types.

Today I feel more politically motivated than ever; as a result, I also feel somewhat stranded. Contemporary reactions to my work (though they are generally polite and intended to be encouraging) depress me. People praise my book on Hitchcock, but it usually turns out that the sections they admire are those written for the original little book in the very early 60s, when I had no political awareness whatever; a close friend told me recently that he values my work solely for its analyses of films, finding the sociopolitical views superfluous; one of the very few reviews (it appeared on the Internet) of Sexual Politics and Narrative Film (which I consider my best work) insisted upon a sharp division between the (apparently) insightful analyses and my beliefs, the writer rejecting the latter contemptuously. This seemingly common reaction bewilders me: everything I have written from Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan onwards seems to me characterized and structured by my political position, so that it should be impossible to separate the aesthetics from the politics (in which I include of course sexual politics), the analyses from the radical attitude that animates and pervades them: if you accept one, you accept the other. Perhaps I should be humble and attribute this to my shortcomings as a political thinker (I lay no claim to profundity or originality); I prefer to attribute it to the present climate of political apathy and disenchantment, perhaps underpinned by an unadmitted despair and (understandable) sense of helplessness. Today we need political struggle, protest, and feminism more than ever before, but the enemy now seems dauntingly pervasive and omnipotent. My aim in this prologue is to do everything in my extremely limited power to reactivate the revolutionary ideas and ideals of the 60s and 70s and to develop them further, within the context of a world that, at its increasing peril, appears to regard them as redundant.

If I have achieved no more of value than a few allegedly illuminating interpretations of films, then my life, professionally at least, has been wasted.

1. Are you aware that men are responsible for at least 90 percent of the evils and suffering in the world that are not caused by natural disasters?

2. How many wars, throughout human history, can you name that were started and conducted by women? (No, the Trojan War is not even a partial answer. It was not even provoked by Helen but by the arrogant possessiveness of males.)

3. Did women invent and develop the atomic bomb, and were women responsible, directly or indirectly, for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a time when those cities were known to be populated predominantly by women, children, and the aged?

4. What proportion of acts of violence throughout the world would you guess are initiated and perpetrated by women?

5. What proportion of rapes?

6. What proportion of acts of domestic violence?

7. How many of the major corporations currently responsible for pollution, deforestation—hence, for global warming and the possible end of life on our planet—are effectively dominated by women?

8. How many of the world’s major governments are dominated and led by feminists (male or female)?

The questions are, of course, rhetorical, and I see no reason to supply statistics even if I could, the answers being obvious.

You will note that in the final question I have substituted “feminists” for “women.” There are or have been female leaders, of whom Margaret Thatcher is probably the most notorious instance in the West, but, politically, Mrs. Thatcher was simply a man in drag. I must add here also that the opposite of “feminism”—“masculinism”—is in politics taken for granted: it is very unlikely that many of our “democratic” male leaders consciously think of themselves as “masculinist.” If you position yourself outside the dominant ideology, you are forced to define and name yourself; if you’re within it, you aren’t. A feminist must declare him- or herself; a masculinist simply is. And one must further note a not-too-subtle distinction between the meanings of the two terms: “feminism” is a demand for women’s equality; “masculinism” is an assumption of the rightness—the naturalness—of male dominance.

I would like to forestall at this point a possible objection: “He’s got his nerve—a man telling women what they should be doing.” But I am addressing this equally to my fellow men, straight or gay—to those who care about life, both its quality and its continuation. When what is at stake is no less than the survival of life on this planet, we are in a no-holds-barred situation. This should be the concern of every human individual, irrespective of gender, color, race, nationality, sexual orientation, class position, who is able to think clearly about our predicament above the constant and ubiquitous “noise” of the capitalist media, and to see beyond the willful and irresponsible blindness of our appointed leaders. Many today appear to assume that the emancipation of women has happened and is now complete. In my opinion it has barely begun, and it won’t be completed until men are ready to accept and embrace their own femininity, granting women their share of the “masculine.”

I have occasionally been told by women that, as I am (as Marlene Dietrich so memorably described Hank Quinlan) “some kind of a man,” I cannot call myself a feminist, because only a woman can understand what being a woman feels like; but I have never accepted this. Because I am white, can I not declare myself anti-racist? Or can I not proclaim my commitment to animal rights because I am not a cat? Obviously, yes, I cannot experience quite “what it feels like to be a woman.” Yet one can surely align oneself with a movement on principle? And surely there are important connections between the woman’s experience and the gay experience under patriarchy? They are not, of course, the same, but there are sufficient overlaps, both being oppressed, belittled, and marginalized groups. The difference might be summed up thus: it is still not difficult (though perhaps within some limited cultural groups not quite as easy as it used to be) for a man to declare himself “anti-gay”; it would be far more difficult for him to declare himself “anti-women.”

“Masculinism” is still frequently confused by many with “masculinity.” The two are of course related but they are certainly not synonymous. The term “masculinism” might be defined as “the cult of masculinity,” the claim that men have a natural right to power and domination, the belief that the “masculine” is intrinsically superior to the “feminine.” Many men (and, apparently, and even more unfortunately, many women) still appear to believe this masculinist myth.

There is no reason to believe that what have traditionally been regarded as the “masculine” virtues (strength, courage, activeness, energy, … ) are the exclusive property of men, or that what have been regarded (especially, and conveniently, by men) as the “feminine” virtues (gentleness, tenderness, nurturing qualities, supportiveness, passivity, … ) are exclusive to women. The ideal human being would combine the two sets of virtues in balance. My own perfect embodiment of this is the music of Mozart, the supreme musical genius of Western culture, in which the “masculine” and “feminine” coexist in harmony and fusion; in his five greatest operas the identification we can deduce from the music is fairly equally and impartially distributed among the male and female characters. I want here, however, for reasons that will become clear, to celebrate a composer of more immediate and direct relevance to our current predicament.

I am coming increasingly to the belief that Janáček’s music deserves to stand, in relation to the twentieth century and beyond, in an equivalent position to that generally accorded Beethoven’s in the nineteenth. The obstacle to such recognition is clear and has nothing to do with the music’s quality or meaning: the core of his achievement is the eight operas;¹ they are composed to Czech texts, and the composer was quite explicit about the organic relationship of his music to the rhythms and accents of the Czech language; hence, they defy translation. Given the problems involved (one might assume them to be insuperable)—the training of soloists and choruses in a fluent and idiomatic grasp of a language far removed from English, French, Italian, or German—it is surprising what advances have been made. Today, most major opera houses have more than one Janáček opera in their repertoire; all the last seven ought to be.

Beethoven and Janáček have certain features in common. Both were revolutionaries, in the aesthetic sense (developing radically new and original idioms, extending the boundaries of musical thought), but also in the political. Both, in their later years, became visionaries (one might compare the Choral Symphony to the Glagolitic Mass, though the latter seems to me the more completely successful of the two works). Finally, both were essentially “masculine” composers, far removed from the Mozartian ideal, their music exhibiting to an extreme degree the allegedly “masculine” virtues outlined above. The degree is even more extreme in Janáček: his music is characterized by tremendous energy, forcefulness, passion, dynamism. Yet with Janáček this untrammeled masculinity is placed unhesitatingly in the service of liberation and the overthrow of power/domination in all its forms, accompanied by an overwhelming compassion for its victims. The energy and force, far from serving domination, are diverted into furious protest against it. One of the marks of great genius is the courage to “go all the way,” never to rein in the creative imagination or hold back in the interest of “rules” and conventions (one might relevantly evoke here William Blake, whose poetry has much in common with Janáček’s music). Many of Janáček’s most startling audacities of harmony, rhythm, scoring were long regarded even in his own country as errors to be corrected (the great conductor Vaclav Talich repeatedly “touched up” the scores when performing them, ironing out the idiosyncrasies, making them “safe”). But there is nothing naive or clumsy about the apparent uncouthness; it is quite simply the expression of a mind driven on by its own irresistible and irrepressible energy, an aspect of the “masculinity.” (We are fortunate today to have seven of the operas—all restored to their original form—available in recordings, under Charles Mackerras, that may well prove unsurpassable.)

The peak of Janáček’s achievement is represented by seven late works: his last four operas (Katya Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, The Makropoulos Case, From the House of the Dead), two orchestral masterpieces—Taras Bulba and the Sinfonietta—and the Glagolitic Mass, arguably his supreme statement. They divide neatly into two pairs and a trio. The Cunning Little Vixen (a misleading title—the heroine’s name, Liška Bystrouška, means literally “the vixen Sharpears,” and his animal heroine has none of the negative overtones of “cunning”) and The Makropoulos Case are both concerned with the celebration of earthly life and the natural cycle of life/death/rebirth, the Vixen positively, the Case its negative complement (the heroine has discovered the elixir of life and is several hundred years old, clinging on to a life that has become barren, emotionless, and empty; in the ironically “happy” ending she chooses death). Katya and From the House of the Dead are both “protest” operas, denunciations of oppression: women’s oppression in the former, where the women have internalized the monstrous demands of patriarchy and the sense of inevitable punishment for transgression; the horrors of the prison camp in the latter. The two orchestral works and the Glagolitic Mass are visionary embodiments of revolution, liberation, and transcendence. Considered altogether, the seven works amount to a coherent and immensely powerful, fully committed statement about the potentiality of human life, the horrors of the forces of oppression (internal and external), and faith in the possibility of realizing the former and triumphing over the latter: precisely the vision we need today. In Janáček’s music, the political and the spiritual fuse and become inseparable.

The sense of a coherent vision is intensified by certain thematic overlaps. Witness, for example, the hilarious scene in Liška Bystrouška where the vixen attempts to rouse the hens to revolution, preaching Marxist feminism and the overthrow of the Cock (whom she proceeds to slaughter); or the moments in From the House of the Dead of a tender and tentative homosexual love between the political prisoner Goryanchikov and the boy Aljeja (“Did you ever have a sister? … I’m sure she was a beauty if she was like you”), their intimacy suddenly transcending the pervasive atmosphere of misery, oppression, breakdown, the collapse of identity and hope. In presenting Janáček here, in this way, my intention is to hold him up as a model of what masculinity today should be animated and driven by—the masculine energies of both men and women, straights and gays, whites and persons of color: the urgent necessity to work for the dismantling of all forms of domination and oppression, and the realization of the vision of the Transfigured City that was Janáček’s inspiration for his Sinfonietta.

I am no Luddite; I am not “against” technology and its development. To be so would be both useless and stupid. It is true that I resisted owning a computer for many years after everyone else seemed to have one, and that, when I at last capitulated, I continued to express my (partly unconscious) resistance by making ridiculous errors, erasing whole articles “by accident.” But today I have not the slightest desire to return to that laborious process of writing everything by hand, then typing it up, then revising and changing, then having to retype the whole thing from scratch. (I still, however, work out every article I write by hand in rough, with headings and more or less elaborate notes, frequently sitting in a pub or a cafe with a bottle of wine or a pint of beer within reach … my liquid inspiration, increasingly necessary given the current world situation.)

With the astonishing—and astonishingly swift—scientific and technological advances made in our own lifetimes, it is at least conceivable that famine, pestilence, and disease could now be banished from the earth, that the millions of people all over the globe who are at this minute dying of disease or starvation could be saved—could already have been saved. This, of course, has not happened, and despite numerous pious statements of intent it seems unlikely to happen in the near future (as I write, we have just had the G-8 summit, where President George W. Bush has made clear his lack of interest in “saving” Africa from AIDS). The primary function of technology today is not to feed starving peoples and combat disease; it’s to make very rich people richer. The world is in the process—it seems inexorable, a veritable juggernaut—of being taken over by the big corporations and conglomerates, especially those centered in the United States, which throw their money behind right-wing governments (whether they call themselves “Democrat” or “Republican” still matters a little, but not much). Under capitalism, wealth equals power; power is already largely in the hands of the corporations, supported by the right-wing governments which they in turn support; this includes power over technology and all scientific development, which in turn includes, today, the power over life and death. The first aim of the revolution I now see as our only remaining hope (preferably peaceful—see below: I am not bloodthirsty, I have no desire to see heads rolling down the steps from guillotines; I think our millionaires should be treated decently and humanely, allowed a reasonable monthly income and given life-sustaining jobs on the assembly line) must be to dismantle all privatization and hand over technology to the people (if they have not already been so corrupted by the capitalist hegemony that they won’t know what to do with it; one must hope—a desperate hope—that they will at least know to elect governments that will).

What has become of the many (and devastating) scientific “doomsday” predictions, not least that, if global warming, pollution, depletion of the ozone layer, and so on continue at the present rate, the planet may not be able to sustain life (any life, not only human) within a hundred or two hundred years? One still reads of them occasionally, a couple of short paragraphs buried away in the inner pages of our newspapers. They are not, apparently, considered important enough (or, perhaps, imminent enough) to make the front pages, where one might reasonably expect to find such items. There also seem to be fewer of them, which may explain why there is no sense of urgency in the general population. But one has only to consider the alarming changes in our weather to feel that perhaps these prognostications are being fulfilled rather rapidly. Can it be that our scientists (or all but a very few honest and conscientious ones) have been bought up, are actually afraid to speak out for fear of losing their jobs? None, as far as I know, has come forward to tell us that predictions of global warming or catastrophic climate change were incorrect. Or are such warnings simply not being reported, our media also being under the control of corporate capitalism? In any case, their success in preserving the mystification of the public they are supposed to serve seems considerable, to judge from the number of times, when I meet my neighbors, I am greeted with “Isn’t this weather marvelous?” Even as I write this there are floods all over much of Europe and the Middle East, and we have been enduring a prolonged period of suffocating heat, with record-breaking temperatures, extreme humidity, daily smog warnings, but no official account seems ready to point out that this may be the beginning of the end of life on this planet and that no government is doing anything effective about it. When some troublesome account does make it to the inner pages, our bolder scientists are continuing to tell us that, “If something is not done at once …,” and even that “It may already be too late.” But nothing is being done. President Bush even refuses to sign the Kyoto agreement, itself long regarded as insufficient and inadequate.

As I write this, my son and daughter-in-law are expecting daily the birth of their first child, my fifth grandchild. He (science has told us his gender) does not have a name yet, but he will have one before I finish writing and I am dedicating this preface to him. I wonder what world he will grow up in? One must assume that our millionaires and billionaires don’t care in the least about their grandchildren, so long as, when they die, they have amassed the wealth that they have not lived to spend. Today, money, and not even what it can buy, is clearly in itself the Grand Phallus, completely useless beyond a certain point of accumulation, but Power is Power … The image our millionaires, billionaires, tycoons, heads of corporations belching pollution over our environment evoke is that of the Gadarene swine, possessed, rushing headlong toward their destruction … and unfortunately everyone else’s. In a certain sense, of course, “they know not what they do”: people believe what it is necessary for them to believe, or “don’t know” what it is necessary not to know, in order to continue along their chosen path—like colonialists believing that the subjugated races were somehow inferior, not fully human, or masculinists who believe that it is women’s true destiny to be docile and serve them. It isn’t necessarily stupidity, just willful and convenient blindness, indispensable to their sense of security: culpable ignorance.

Meanwhile, so few people appear to care, and one must ask: Why not? The necessary information is, after all, available (if not given much prominence), and one has only to look for it. For many, of course, with the steadily rising gulf between rich and poor, the worries of daily life are distraction enough: how to earn enough for the basic necessities and a few pleasures, how to pay one’s credit card debts … But distraction, when one looks around, seems the operative principle that makes the continuance of corporate capitalism possible (combined with the almost complete suppression, within North American culture, of any strong left-wing voice). Contemporary mainstream Hollywood cinema plays an important role in the “distraction principle,” and I discuss this below in a separate section; it is not by any means the only factor.

“New Is Good” An advertisement, currently prominent on our Toronto subway system (it runs half the length of a carriage) for a local rock station actually culminates in this pronouncement (with its understood corollary, “Old Is Bad”). Does anyone, today, care about the death of the Past? When discussing recently Michael Haneke’s first masterpiece The Seventh Continent with an allegedly advanced film class, I attempted to elucidate his use of Bach and Berg in a scene crucial to the film’s meaning, and I watched the eyes glaze over (they had presumably, at least, heard of Bach, but the name was clearly synonymous with Boring): one could almost see attention dispersing in the theater air. But it is not just Bach in particular or classical music in general. On another recent occasion with another advanced film class, I discovered that almost no one in an audience of around fifty students had even heard of Brecht (he was, after all, a Marxist, and we all know that Marxism has been discredited and is no longer relevant), and instead of the scheduled discussion of Lang’s M I had to devote the time to an explication of Brechtian theory. It has happened more than once, at the end of a screening on the first night of a new class, that a student has come to me and said, “Will you be showing a lot of black-and-white movies in the course? I never watch them.” Many registered film students appear never to have seen a film made before (at latest) the seventies. The current DVD market is of great significance here. Every week the stores are flooded with new releases, of which the overwhelming majority are recent movies mostly of minimal value (including numerous films that were considered unreleasable and so went “direct to video”). Presumably these sell, though it is difficult to imagine anyone looking at most of them twice, or even lasting through a first screening. But they are “new,” “the latest,” what we must have now, this minute, to keep us happy and “with it.” Meanwhile, a vast number of masterpieces from the Classical Hollywood period (not to mention thousands of foreign movies, new and old) languish in limbo, many unavailable in any form: one thinks of Man of the West, Bigger Than Life, Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys!, The Tarnished Angels, Make Way for Tomorrow, The Big Sky, The Reckless Moment … In the words of the distinguished Canadian director William Macgillivray, “If we lose the past, we lose the future,” and today we have been essentially disinherited by corporate capitalism. It teaches us that all that is important is making money: enough money if you’re poor, more money if you’re rich. The enormously rich (in senses beyond the financial) legacy of the past can teach us so many different ways, not merely of thinking, but of feeling. It can reveal attitudes, complexities, emotions that today have been rendered either inconvenient or irrelevant. We no longer need Mozart’s music to give us an emblem of the fully human because we can go off to the nearest supermarket and buy whatever has just come in, whether food, clothing, rock music, candy bars, “improved” popcorn, and this will make us feel really good … for a few minutes. “Comfort food,” or its equivalent in other commodities, has become a principle of life.

The real point of keeping our minds on today and “the latest” is to prevent us from giving so much as a single thought to our children and grandchildren—not to mention the world’s animal and wild life. We are supposed not to care, so long as we are happy (a word that has become totally degraded, beyond serious use any more), “with it,” and/or have pots of money in the bank (which somehow makes us better than the homeless person lifting up his cap on the street—if we have it, we must deserve it). And the rapidly increasing numbers of homeless people in Toronto, including whole families (an enormous leap over the last few years, under our Conservative government, for which people must have voted quite knowing what they doing) don’t count: they have no addresses, so they won’t even get ballot papers. “Democracy”?

Noise Silence used to be considered golden; today it’s forbidden, at least in our cities. The almost continuous noise that surrounds us is a marvelous deterrent to thought. Street noise at least has a certain validity in the shape of transportation, though it could be lessened and minimized without causing undue suffering, as can be seen from those rare enlightened cities—Denver comes to mind—that have turned their centers into pleasant malls, with gardens, benches, and play areas. When we escape from street noise we are assailed by music, in every store, every shopping mall, and almost every restaurant, the type of music and its volume apparently selected according to the class status, age, and supposed tastes of the expected clientele. We are no longer permitted to eat or converse with our friends without a background. Most such backgrounds I have learned to ignore, unless they are very loud indeed and I am sitting near a loudspeaker: it has become just “noise.” I am far more angered by the use (in the more “up-scale” restaurants) of classical music. If I want to listen to (say) the Mozart clarinet quintet, I want to be allowed to listen, at the proper volume, from beginning to end, surrounded by silence, not fragmented, reduced to semi-audibility, while I am trying to engage in discussion with a friend. To treat the quintet (or, I would have thought, any piece of music of any merit, in whatever genre, jazz, rock, folk … ) in this way shows a total lack of respect for its composer. But the great amount of music being churned out today seems to have been intended as background; once again, people appear to have become complicit with the powers that be in wanting the partial distraction, the filling in of silences, the distraction from thinking that is a necessity for the system’s continuance. Something of the kind I mean is, while I write this, droning out from a loudspeaker in a tree on the patio of the pub in which I am sitting with my “pint.” Which makes me wonder if “distract” is after all quite the word, as I am not especially distracted (I would be if it was Mozart). Perhaps “soothe” or “lull” is the more appropriate term: I can see that it might operate as a kind of mild drug, with its group of singers, its indistinguishable (at this volume level) words, its endlessly repetitive rhythmic accompaniment, its ritualistically recurring refrain.

“Dumbing Down” This appears to have become a recognized social phenomenon in which our cinema has played—is playing—a major role (from which the high school comedies, discussed in the new chapter 16 for this expanded edition, are not by any means exempt): one reads about it in one’s daily newspaper, where it is treated with an ambiguous, unstable half-seriousness, as if one should perhaps see it just as a joke. But “dumbing down” is a reality, and absolutely necessary to the current processes of what some people still refer to quite seriously as “democracy.” As such, it is especially terrifying as it is happening within the country that seems set on dominating, and spreading its “values” over, the entire globe. I do not of course wish to be taken as suggesting that this process is part of some articulated, coordinated, deliberate, diabolical plot. The direct control our governments have over the film, television, and entertainment industries is relatively slight, expressed mainly in official censorship. Rather, the process must be seen in terms of evolving, interacting, mutually supportive structures. And “dumbing down” is only possible within a civilization whose inhabitants want to be dumbed down, are willing and complicit victims.

“Permissiveness” President Bush may continue to drone on about “families” (by which he means only one of many possible models of family—the patriarchal, biological, nuclear one, of all available models the most oppressive, neurosis-breeding, and insular, the enemy of true community). Given his intransigence on this subject, and the recent threat to deprive women of their right to abortion, it is a little surprising that he hasn’t yet said or done more to combat “permissiveness,” which today threatens the traditional family on all sides. Perhaps the attempt to recriminalize abortion is merely a first step and will be followed by others even more drastic. (Parenthetically, I should say here that my own belief is that we should be thinking in terms, not of families, but of communities, and that children should be raised communally, choosing whenever practicable the adults to whom they wish to relate. I would like to start a “Children’s Rights” movement—why should kids have to remain tied to parents whom they dislike and who abuse them in various ways both legal and illegal, frequently “for their own good”?).

One of the most positive signs of recent years has been the widespread (and apparently quite sudden) acceptance of homosexuals,² at least within the middle-and upper-class circles of large cities (let’s not get carried away!). But it seems clear that that acceptance (which we should still consider provisional rather than permanent) has only become possible with the growth of sexual permissiveness generally. Since what we used to (and many still do) call “cheating” has become taken for granted among heterosexuals (not always openly, old bad habits lingering on), it became harder to deny homosexuals their right to the same—indeed, their (relative) freedom and refusal of guilt in such matters was probably envied, becoming a kind of surreptitious guideline. If our right-wing politicians decide to do something about permissiveness (in defense of “family values”), homosexuality will be the first target, because the most obvious.

There are reasons to believe, however, that this may not happen. In the present phase of cultural evolution, sexual freedom still carries a definite charge of danger, excitement, daring. It is important to stress here that the current obsession with “getting laid” (the immediate result of our “sexual liberation,” which seems to me anything but—rather, a move from one kind of imprisonment to another) is by no means restricted to the gay population. One has only to consider the 90s cycle of American high school comedies (see chapter 16), which are strictly heterosexualized. The ideal of “sexual liberation” has degenerated into the pursuit of sex for the sake of sex, the thrill of the chase and conquest becoming a major preoccupation, or in other words, yet another distraction—hence, invaluable to the continuance and development of the current progression toward extinction: if we can have sex with, say, six people a week on average, why worry about global warming? (It is of course doubtful that our politicians, so upright and moralistic except when it comes to financial matters, think such devious thoughts consciously, but that doesn’t mean they are not present somewhere just below that “moral majority” surface). Isn’t this why we now have the “permissive” society? You can be homosexual, you can screw around all you want, you can do drugs if you’re discreet about it (so many do that it seems improbable that police surveyance is even intended to be effective). You can do anything that will distract you from asking serious questions.

Co-option Which brings us back to a topic I have touched on above but which is again relevant here. The Great White Heterosexual Male is still (within the corporate capitalist Establishment) the rightful Lord of the Universe, and women and minorities are distrusted. They are, however, today, granted some rights, though grudgingly and provisionally. Since Hitler, concentration camps have lost something of their popular appeal (most people have at some time seen the films); therefore, camps for feminists might be a problem, and besides, there’s all that messy cleaning up. So the safest method is incorporation. But no more than necessary—that would be overdoing it. No, just enough so that governments and the media they control (and are to some extent controlled by, in an obscene performance of mutual masturbation) can say, Look, we’re liberal now, we accept these people, we even like these people. And besides, we need them: we need all the votes we can get. Of course, such sentiments can be trusted about as far as a goat can trust a python that is crawling toward it to devour it for its dinner—on the apparent assumption that, when the python has devoured you, digested you, and passed you out through its anus you will in sheer gratitude vote conservative for the rest of your life.

Despair is perhaps today our most dangerous enemy, and the most difficult to combat. The odds seem so hopeless, the chips stacked so heavily against us. Money is power, and it is overwhelmingly in the hands of our potential destroyers, who are supported by the governments so many of us have helped to elect. I have a voice somewhere inside me that says, all too frequently, “Give up, shut up; really retire; do all the things you want to do, read your books, listen to your music, watch your movies, it’s already a lost war, leave it all alone.” But then those books, that music, those films, tell me the exact opposite: “You must fight, you must speak. If you stop, what happens to your self-respect?”

I put it in this personal way because that’s how I experience it, but I think the tendency to despair today may be widespread, may in fact underlie people’s apparent willingness to be distracted, to be lulled, to be duped: If thought is inevitably depressing, who wants to think?—especially with children to raise, money to earn, fatigue to combat, the sense of overwhelming odds and personal helplessness. Better to succumb, enjoy what you can, let it all happen—it’s not, after all, your fault: “I am not responsible” (as the concentration camp guards said at the trials after World War II) … But we are all responsible: to say nothing, to sink into weary passivity, to allow despair to numb the intelligence, is to share in the responsibility.

Even as I write this (and who knows, given the speed at which things happen nowadays, what developments there may have been by the time it is published?), the U.S. administration appears to be reaching its nadir of respectability, and what masqueraded as moral probity looks increasingly like total moral bankruptcy. From the viewpoint of this prologue, the current daily exposures of corporate financial shenanigans offer grounds, not for increased despair, but for fresh hope: how long will the American people, however duped and doped out, however encircled by distractions, tolerate such a government? It is surely time for change, for drastic change. But whether a majority of the American people will begin to see through the fog of fear and secrecy that is the Bush administration’s modus operandi remains to be seen.

Still, the current and increasing surges of protest—directed so far primarily (and rightly) at the Free Trade Agreement and “globalization” (which, realistically, means world domination by the United States), but seeming constantly on the verge of widening to a virtually all-encompassing disillusionment and rage—are at once an acknowledgment that all is not yet lost and an encouragement to stronger and more widespread hope. Protest is crucial, but it is not in itself enough. The Establishment can get away with not taking it seriously, seeing it as “hooliganism” and criminalizing it. Above all, we need the creation and development of a strong (and eventually international) party—a party of the humane radical left that could at some stage (early or subsequently) incorporate the existing Green Party and its relevant concerns. The next stage would be gaining its election (against all the currently existing odds) by passionate yet thoroughly rational and thereby effective campaigning.

The practical problem is obvious: to form such a party and develop it to the point where it can conduct effective campaigns and get members elected to our parliaments requires money, and (despite idealistic—or are they just increasingly cynical?—notions about “democracy” and everyone having the right to vote) the overwhelming economic advantage today is solidly in the corrupt hands of what I can only call, albeit melodramatically, the forces of evil. Yet it is becoming a matter of the greatest urgency that the attempt be made. The world desperately needs leaders—not mere demogogues, but enlightened, educated, committed leaders, idealistic yet schooled in the actualities of political theory, thought, and action.

In the United States today no such party, and no such leaders, exist as effective public presences. The Green Party’s agenda remains too restricted and insufficiently radical to become politically effective (though it might, perhaps, provide the necessary organizational nucleus). In Canada we have a nominally leftist party (the NDP, or New Democrats), but, at time of writing, it appears to have lost whatever energy, passion, or conviction it once had, and its policies place it only marginally to the left of the currently reigning liberals (roughly the equivalent of the Democrats in the United States).

1. To take over all the major corporations, demolish their present antidemocratic structures, and rebuild them so that profits go to the benefits of humanity at large (depending upon needs), irrespective of race, nationality, creed. This would be accompanied by

2. The drastic curtailment of all methods of production that threaten the future of life and welfare on our planet.

I am quite aware that this proposal will be rejected by many (most?) readers as hopelessly naive and idealistic, and they will be swift to point out that I offer no practical account of how such an agenda (which may, in the present cultural context, appear as realizable as flying over the rainbow) is to be realized. But I never laid claim to being a political theorist. My knowledge of what is happening to us goes little beyond reading the headlines in our daily papers (we are privileged, where I live in Toronto, to have one which is at least marginally to the left of center). What I am presenting appears to me the only viable alternative to outright and universal disaster. If anyone has a better, more practical solution, let’s hear it. Prayer (if you’re religious) is all that comes to mind, and that seems to me infinitely more naive and impotent than my admittedly simplistic blueprint. The first aim is to persuade people of the desperateness of our situation, without which no solution is even thinkable. It is also obvious that this must happen, first and foremost, within the United States, its clear primary agenda, already on the way toward fulfillment, being no less than world domination. While its various administrations (Republican or Democrat) remain firmly behind (not to mention dependent upon) corporate capitalism, there is no hope.

The cultural situation outlined above finds its reflection, almost point by point, in the Hollywood cinema of the past decade; it can be analyzed under many of the same headings. It is above all a cinema of distraction, of unreality, designed not to encourage thinking but to dull it into extinction. It is the era above all of the “teen pic,” the wooing of the “youth market,” it being especially important that those just growing into full man- or womanhood be indoctrinated with the generalized sense that “life is fun and nothing else matters.”

Notoriously, Hollywood is now largely run by corporations—Coca-Cola, Sony, etc. It used to be common among intellectuals to deplore the fact that Hollywood films were produced, ultimately, by the moguls—men like Louis B. Mayer or Samuel Goldwyn or Harry Cohn, with minimal intellectual interests and unrefined tastes. But at least they were men who loved making movies, delighted in and were proud of their own products, the stars and directors in their own “stables.” One has the sense today that the majority of Hollywood products materialize because a group of businessmen sit around a table asking each other, “Well, what made the most money last year?”—then planning an imitation or a sequel, trying to “go a little further” in thrills, yucks, or special effects, putting together a “package.” And, unfortunately, in most cases the “youth market” laps it up: they know that “New Is Good.” How many Hollywood films in the past ten years can you name that seem addressed to an adult intelligence, or to any but a thoroughly coarsened and petrified sensibility? What films disturb us—rather than titillate or dull our senses?

The great technological advances have affected our cinema in obvious ways, many of them clearly positive: better sound, stronger definition, new potentials to add to the possible range of expression. We must welcome, in principle, any developments that add to the artist’s means of realizing his/her vision. Most strikingly and pervasively, however, they have been used quite irresponsibly to create what I see as a kind of magical unreality that seeks to impose itself as a new and better “realism.” This is most obvious in science fiction movies, but it also, today, pervades the action film, which, typically (after perhaps an initial half hour establishing the characters), degenerates into a series of car chases, smash-ups, explosions, fights, “suspense” (both literal and metaphorical) with the hero improbably dangling from, falling from, escaping from ledges, rooftops, drainpipes …, all largely created by computerization. Enjoyment of this is perhaps quite complex, on various interacting levels. We know it’s all impossible, yet it looks so real, so we can thrill to it and at the same time laugh knowingly; the fundamental level is the enjoyment of spectacle as the creation of technology, the knowing “Wow! That’s brilliant, man,” the sense that technology has now developed to the point where it can create the world, saving us the trouble of having to do it ourselves. Classical Hollywood, though far removed from, say, the ideals of Italian neorealism, never entirely lost touch with human problems, human emotions, and human actions, its genres rooted firmly in the culture’s ideological contradictions, its works frequently arousing passionate discussion. Today, what audiences seem to want is this “real” unreality, voluntarily losing themselves in what they know to be absurd. The Bourne Identity can stand as example. As much “thriller” as “action movie,” it is not especially spectacular, but two sequences make my point eloquently. As preface, I should mention that, when I screen Classical Hollywood action movies for my classes, there is often laughter during the fight scenes: the actors appear to be landing and receiving punches that would knock anyone cold instantly, yet the fight continues. The students have a point of course: one could not expect John Wayne and Randolph Scott (not to mention the producers) to accept a lengthy spell in hospital in the interests of “realism.” However, at least here one can see the actors “acting” a fight. Cut to the fight scene in The Bourne Identity, when one of the bad guys invades Matt Damon’s apartment. No shot lasts more than a second or two; we never see even the semblance of a punch actually landing, though most of them look violent enough to appear lethal. It is, in fact, almost impossible to make out what the two men are physically doing to each other—we are just allowed a very generalized sense of extremely violent movement. At the end, if I recall correctly, Damon has somehow managed to emerge without so much as a nosebleed. Yet, here, no one laughs: the fight appears to be taken by the audience as authentic, “realistic,” whereas all the actors seem to have been called on to do is strike gestures, then “Cut!” to the next shot. The fakery is so transparent that the readiness of spectators to accept it as “real” shows a quite extraordinary eagerness to “believe.” (It is possible that the scene was shot that way because Matt Damon can’t do “action.” The film’s solitary and perfunctory love scene suggests that he can’t do that either.)

The film’s climactic action sequence is even more remarkable. Damon is trapped at the top of an immense spiral stairway, about ten floors up in a large ornate building; the stairs are blocked by bad guys; how can he escape (escape he must, not because of anything intrinsic in the plot but because he is “the Hero” and this is a contemporary action movie)? Well, there is a convenient corpse (a bad guy already disposed of by Our Hero), with its convenient head poking conveniently between the banister railings. Damon gives it a good shove, the railings part, and the body falls—not head first, as an unimaginative person like myself might expect, but horizontally. Then Matt: 1. Hurls himself upon it, using it as a kind of magic carpet to fall ten floors or so to safety (I thought of Sabu on his magic carpet in The Thief of Baghdad, but that is signaled as “fantasy”); 2. Finds time on the way down to turn his head and shoot one of the worst of the bad guys halfway up the stairs, and 3. Lands without even being winded. Is this what the term “magic realism” means? No one in the audience seemed to find it as hilarious as I did; a few applauded. Today, it seems, anyone will believe anything; the whole distinction between “reality” and “fantasy” (always somewhat precarious in Hollywood movies) has become completely eroded, the impossible has become “real”: perfect training for life in today’s culture. Compared to what we have now, the practices of Classical Hollywood seem actually to merge with Italian neorealism. (The only thing positive I took away from this stupid, empty movie was some moments of Franka Potente, who at least preserves a certain dignity and sense of distinction; but it is sad to see the vibrant star of Run, Lola, Run wasting her time in such drivel.)

One recent film stands out in this context (though my claims for it are fairly minimal): John Frankenheimer’s Ronin. Frankenheimer insisted (and the film’s promoters made a point of this, as an audience attraction) that the many car chases and crashes be for real: no faking, no technological “assistance.” The car chases are indeed, as a result, quite thrilling, but the film failed at the box office. Today the “real” is old-fashioned; only the computerized unreal is really “real.” It’s possible though, that the film failed commercially because it didn’t have Matt Damon, only Robert De Niro …

My choice of The Bourne Identity, in most respects arbitrary, was made partly because it was directed (if one can be said to “direct” such a film, and in what direction?—the material and the technology end up directing you) by Doug Liman, a director in whom I had become very interested. His first film, Swingers, showed intelligence, a gift for sly satire, a critical stance toward his characters; his second, Go, is a tour de force of considerable brilliance—I have seen it several times without in the least tiring of it, a rare experience with today’s Hollywood cinema. But intelligence and brilliance no longer draw in the “youth market” (a typically brutal blanket catchphrase to describe a group of human beings), and that despite the fact that Go is a “youth” movie which deserved a far greater commercial success than it received (a number of intelligent students I know admired it). The message: that you can succeed in Hollywood today only if you are willing to prostitute yourself by churning out assembly-line “action” films, “dumbed down” teen flicks, or “grossout” horror/comedies. (The ideal Hollywood filmmakers today are apparently those too stupid even to realize that they are prostituting themselves.) I understand that two sequels to The Bourne Identity (a big commercial hit) are planned and that Liman has committed himself to them.

A close parallel: in recent years Sam Raimi has made two intelligent and distinguished films (A Simple Plan, The Gift). The latter, despite its astonishing central performance by Cate Blanchett, was a box office disaster. Raimi’s latest movie is Spiderman. This is better, at least, than The Bourne Identity (thanks as much to Tobey Maguire as to Raimi): it has a few (technology-free) strong scenes. Again, a series of sequels is planned, though it is not clear as yet whether Raimi will be directing. There is even a rumor that David Fincher is going to direct Mission Impossible 3. None of this is certain at time of writing, yet the very fact of likelihood suggests an inescapable pattern. I would like to believe that the only reason these directors accept such assignments is to enable them to make other, more personal films on smaller budgets. “Watch the skies.” It appears to be almost impossible for a relatively new director to sustain a career in Hollywood today if he is unwilling to prostitute himself.

An interesting and daring alternative direction (so far moderately successful) has been taken by Paul Thomas Anderson. I still think his first film, Hard Eight, made independently, is by far his finest, with the kind of distinction (economy, precision, and “personal” in the best sense, the sense in which Anthony Mann’s early films noir are personal) found in certain now-legendary Classical Hollywood “B” movies. But he has had the audacity to present himself, within the contemporary Hollywood system, as a kind of European “arthouse” auteur, and has even managed to impose himself as such. Still … I wanted so much to admire Boogie Nights and Magnolia, but the former seemed to me self-indulgent and fundamentally uninteresting, the latter pretentious and ultimately empty. Magnolia did, however, impose itself (rather like the early films of Ingmar Bergman) as the work of someone who might be worth watching. It seems doubtful whether such a description corresponds at all closely to how Anderson sees his work, Magnolia continuously giving the impression of declaring itself a masterpiece. But how can anyone hope to develop within a milieu and a system that understand nothing except “making money”—not merely “getting back your investment” but making millions in profits? Punch-Drunk Love is interesting but seems desperately in need of a further rewrite; the Emily Watson character in particular makes no sense.

The number of clearly talented new directors who (since the 80s) have made one (or two) intelligent and distinguished films and then either vanished from sight or moved into other work is remarkable: think of Michael Tolkin (The Rapture, The New Age) or David Koepp (The Trigger Effect), both of whom seem to have turned to scriptwriting; or Greg Mottola, who, since The Daytrippers (which would be on my list of the ten best American films of the 90s), has had nothing released, although there have been vague rumors of a second film in various stages of development or completion. One would have thought that the (richly deserved) success of My Best Friend’s Wedding would have been sufficient to establish the credentials of P. J. Hogan, yet even he appears to have been unable to set up a film since, despite various attempts. The Hollywood directors of the past could work securely within genres but continue to “be themselves”; today this seems to be becoming increasingly difficult. Any of these films would have secured for their directors a five-film contract in the “classical” period.

What has become of David O. Russell, one of the very few contemporary American filmmakers who has shown any ambition to create an oppositional cinema? Spanking the Monkey remains perhaps unique among “teen” movies in concerning itself, not with the satisfactions of “getting laid,” but with the pleasures and frustrations of masturbation (which may well be more relevant to the lives of most teenagers today). Flirting with Disaster dared hilariously to question our culture’s strange obsession with biological parentage. Three Kings (definitely an “un-American activity”) gave us a view of the Gulf War and the U.S. involvement that was, to say the least, jaundiced. The first got made because it was “independent” and “low budget,” the second because it was “just a comedy.” the third (presumably) because it was an “action movie.” Three years have passed, and I have found no information that Russell has made or is making another movie.

(Parenthetically, I should make explicit here the dangers in writing a prologue like this that, in examining the present, must also to a certain degree foresee the future. No one will be more delighted than I if, by the time this book is published, Tolkin, Koepp, Mottola, and Russell have all had new and distinguished films released.)

It will be clear already that I think the most useful and relevant touchstone against which contemporary Hollywood should be judged is not the European (or, today, the Asian or Iranian) cinema, but the Classical Hollywood of the period approximately from 1930 to 1960, which represents one of the richest “movements” in twentieth-century art. A full account of the conditions that made it possible (at the same time defining its limitations) is beyond the capacity of the present volume, but certain specific comparisons are illuminating.

Consider, first, the issue of genre itself. Classical Hollywood was (notoriously?) a genre cinema and, as such, looked down upon by intellectuals (who might, one would have thought, have spared a moment to reflect that all the plays of Shakespeare belong to genres). In the new chapter on 90s high school comedies I develop the notion of the importance of genre within a communal art (in which the artist, instead of living and working in isolation, feels a part of a community, with common concerns and a shared creativity). The major genres—western, musical, gangster film, film noir, screwball comedy, romantic comedy, domestic melodrama, horror film, etc.—offered a potential range of material, expression, and interaction for which there is no comparable equivalent today, where the only genres with any kind of spurious vitality are the action movie, sci-fi, and grossout comedy (one might add, today, the war movie, as an offshoot of the action film, and, I suppose, that emptiest of genres the “spoof” movie). One of the few recent Hollywood films of any distinction, The Deep End, provides an illuminating instance of the decline of genre, partly because no one seemed to recognize it as belonging to one: it was simply a drama about people. It is, in fact, a close remake of one of the great Classical Hollywood genre movies, Max Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment (1949). The far greater richness of the earlier film is attributable not only to the intelligence of one of the world’s greatest film directors (though Ophuls’ presence is palpable throughout) but to the collision of two immediately identifiable, clearly defined, and usually quite distinct genres, the domestic melodrama and film noir, both bringing with them the resonances of a developed tradition.

I don’t think anyone who sees The Deep End registers anything of this, even unconsciously, because these genres no longer operate as recognized phenomena. (Occasional attempts at contemporary film noir—broadly becoming known as “neo-noir”—come across as self-conscious pastiche.) A whole dimension of expression and meaning has been lost.

Genre has traditionally been seen as essentially conservative (since it merely reproduces the same patterns, the same trajectories, the same “happy endings”). Yet far more challenging and radical work was produced during the Classical Hollywood period than appears to be possible today. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a period in the Hollywood cinema of the past in which so little can be read as oppositional to the dominant forces. The Reckless Moment offers, in effect, a remarkably caustic yet compassionate analysis of the values (and oppressiveness) of American bourgeois family life, centered upon the entrapment of the wife/mother. Today we have only an American Beauty to gesticulate messily, crudely, and impotently about the sufferings of men burdened with stupid, racalcitrant wives. We have no Bigger Than Life to articulate (despite its copout ending) a sense of the impossible constraints of bourgeois existence, no Man of the West to reveal the impossible contradictions at the very basis of American ideology, no Rally ’Round the Flag, Boys! to offer us a wish-fulfillment fantasy that America had never existed. To be “daring” or “audacious” today means merely to “go a little further,” to titillate without disturbance, playing straight into the hands of the dominant culture and the distractions its continuance demands.

During the classsical period directors were mostly under contract, expected to make a certain number of films during a certain period of time. The great directors became associated with particular genres with which they felt an affinity (or, in the case of Hawks, a particular style of filmmaking) and were able to develop distinguished careers within or around the generic limits; lesser directors were more likely to be treated as employees and handed assignments. The system was obviously not ideal but it allowed a balance of freedom and discipline, and the richness of the period is in part due to it. Much the same was true of stars: they were typically under contract, they were “groomed” for certain types of roles, they were guaranteed a certain number of films over a certain number of years. The concept of the “star vehicle” developed naturally out of this. When the studio/genre/star system collapsed during the 60s and 70s, many actors rejoiced in their newfound “freedom”: they could now choose their roles freely, move about from studio to studio, negotiate (through their agents) increasingly lucrative contracts for individual films. It has worked for some (Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Al Pacino, Eddie Murphy, Tom Cruise, Mike Myers, Julia Roberts), either because they are widely recognized as great actors, or because they have committed themselves to one or other of the contemporary genres. It is not exactly an accident that most of the names on that list are male.

The women’s movement produced in Hollywood a backlash of hysterical masculinity of which the only surprise is that it did not erupt sooner: the “key” year is 1982, the year of the release of Conan the Barbarian and First Blood, which, respectively, made Schwarzenegger a major (i.e., “bankable”) star almost overnight and pumped new blood into Stallone’s career after one or two too many punch-drunk Rocky sequels. With the collapse of radical feminism and the co-option of what was left of it into mainstream male-dominated culture, the hysteria died out but the overemphasis on ultra-macho masculinity did not: the 90s has merely substituted a kinder, less blatant, less parodic, and less downright silly form of it. The credibility of the Stallone/Schwarzenegger model may collapse, but Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson (and, more recently, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) are on hand to offer a more emotional, more vulnerable, more human image of maleness. The cost of this (for them) is that they (and even, sadly, Tobey Maguire) are forced into the “action,” fantasy, or sci-fi genres. (I remember that, when I saw Harrison Ford in Witness, I compared him to the young Cary Grant. I don’t any more—nor even to the older Cary Grant.)

During the classical period, furthermore, the great female stars were able to develop and sustain careers well into middle age and sometimes beyond. This is so obvious that it seems unnecessary to mention names. But that was when there existed genres that were centered on women’s problems within the constraints of the culture. The contemporary myth has it that women are no longer trapped in domesticity, marriage, and family, so films like Blonde Venus, Beyond the Forest, The Reckless Moment are no longer relevant, and films about women’s rebellion and its consequences like (to follow the same trajectory of directors) The Devil Is a Woman, Ruby Gentry, Letter from an Unknown Woman are now totally redundant. Today (in the official version) women have everything they’ve fought for: they are happy, and if they’re not, they ought to be. So why bother making films about them any more? All those old problems of inequality have been solved long ago, so now we can concentrate on the male audience (most specifically, the male teen audience). They’re the ones who pay for the tickets.

Over the past decade I have developed a great attachment to a number of female stars, whether as actors or as “presences,” and I have watched their careers steadily dwindle. The most spectacular case is that of Mimi Rogers, who, in The Rapture, gave one of the greatest performances in the history of the Hollywood cinema. The film was not sufficiently respectable for either it or its star to be nominated for an Academy Award, and Rogers’ career went roughly the same way as its director’s. It is amazing that it got made at all—a film in which a woman refuses, at its climactic moment, to be taken up into Heaven because she has grasped the monstrousness and cruelty of the God of the so-called “Christian” religion. Rogers might have become the Barbara Stanwyck of modern Hollywood cinema; she is now reduced to playing grotesque mothers in Cruel Intentions 2 and the Canadian horror movie Ginger Snaps. She is the most extreme instance of the predicament of the female star in a cinema that has no place for strong, passionate women, but one has only to consider the careers, in the 90s, of Sigourney Weaver, Sharon Stone, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange … to grasp the humiliating situation of mature women in contemporary Hollywood, where only “bimbos” or “chicks” need apply. (It is possible that Pfeiffer’s decline may be her own fault, that the dreadful movies in which she has appeared recently were her own bad choices; they might have looked promising on paper.) In this context, Julia Roberts is (in my opinion deservedly) something of a phenomenon, though one wonders how long her success can continue. Our culture’s resentment of strong older women (i.e., any who can no longer be classified as “chicks”) comes out repeatedly in the obsessively sneering and ungenerous comments of reviewers even when they cannot withhold praise of her performances, and this phenomenon (trivial in itself) speaks volumes about the dominant masculinist attitude to women who dare become powerful.⁴

This, then, is roughly how I view the culture in which I live and the mainstream cinema that is at once its product and support. As in the culture, so in the cinema: there are hostile and dissonant rumblings, but they are seldom allowed to enter the mainstream. In the new last chapters of this expanded edition, I do examine one instance of (marginal) progress (the acceptance of gays and gay-related subject matter into mainstream comedy), one instance of a generic cycle that is at least lively and intermittently engaging (the high school movies), and two filmmakers who have attempted to introduce a note of dissonance (Jim Jarmusch and David Fincher—though Jarmusch, for all the availability of his films, can scarcely be called “mainstream” and would I’m sure regard it as an insult, and Fincher compromised himself disastrously with The Game).

Finally, a few words about this book today. Looking through it somewhat cursorily (I hate reading my own work), I find that I stand by most of its judgments. The weakest chapter seems to me, ironically, the one that has been most frequently reprinted (one gets the impression that one can’t open a critical anthology without coming upon at least an excerpt): the chapter on the horror film. Its thesis applies to only one branch of the genre (though it still seems to me the most important), and it fails to discriminate sufficiently in terms of value, lumping together major works and the relatively trivial simply because they reveal the same generic patterns—a common failing of “theoretical” criticism. I hope the addition of a chapter on Day of the Dead, the extraordinary culmination of Romero’s trilogy which, in its completion, represents one of the great achievements of the period, will do something toward correcting this. And I stand by my celebration of Heaven’s Gate: if there has been a greater Hollywood film since its disastrous first appearance, I haven’t seen it, and it is if anything more important and relevant today, in the contemporary political context, than when it was made.

I have become aware of one striking omission: there is no chapter on Kubrick, and I still don’t feel ready to add one. My relationship with his films has been one of startling ups and downs. With the partial exception of Paths of Glory I found it difficult to make contact with the early films, intellectually or emotionally. Then, when I saw A Clockwork Orange, I made a solemn vow never to see another. I managed to hold to this for several years, despite the urgings of my friends to see Barry Lyndon. Finally, one of them trapped me in his New York apartment, sat me down in front of his television set, and told me I couldn’t leave until I watched it. My attitude to Kubrick changed instantly, and I became a great admirer of The Shining also. Subsequently, I was so overwhelmed by Full Metal Jacket that I couldn’t speak for half an hour after emerging from it—an experience shared with my colleagues Richard Lippe and Andrew Britton (I remember us walking together in silence around the streets of Toronto, not liking to meet each other’s eyes). I have not yet plucked up the courage to watch it again. Eyes Wide Shut I have also seen only once, for the different reason that it left me feeling somewhat blank. But one of my many projects now is to watch all Kubrick’s films again (yes, even A Clockwork Orange!) in chronological order. I have no doubt of his major status, but I have no firm grasp of his career as a whole.

Just as I am aware of Kubrick as a major absence in the original book, so am I aware of the absence of Steven Soderbergh from the new additions. He is another director of obvious significance, though of exactly what kind I remain uncertain. I cannot seem to get a firm grasp on his films. My experience of them has been curious: I admire the surface, the polish, the sheer crafsmanship and virtuosity, the feeling for elaborate structures: everything relates to everything and everything seems to work, just as it should in the work of a major artist. But, invariably, I come away with a sense of emptiness, realizing that, while I have admired, I have never become emotionally involved. And it is a sensation of emptiness, not of distancing. One can talk of distancing in the work of many great directors over a very wide range of achievement: Ozu, Ophuls, Preminger at his intermittent best (from Laura to Advise and Consent), Kiarostami, Hou, Tsai, Denis, Haneke … But “distancing” there (taking many different forms) has the function of allowing a certain critical detachment that never precludes a simultaneous emotional involvement: if we are made to feel very strongly for Joan Bennett’s predicament in The Reckless Moment, we remain extremely critical of her, aware of her limitations, the entrapment in domesticity she is incapable of recognizing for herself. For me, at least, the pleasure of watching a Soderbergh movie is rather like a child’s pleasure in a perfect clockwork toy. Perhaps that is why the Soderbergh movie I have most enjoyed is Ocean’s Eleven, a perfectly empty work in which form and content are almost perfectly integrated: the perfect heist, the perfect movie, everything going like clockwork, the only divergence being that there are moments when the heist, but not the movie, doesn’t. Perhaps it is this sense of emptiness that makes Soderbergh the ideal “serious” director for the early 2000s, the artist who can fascinate, even dazzle, us while giving us, actually, so little. I don’t see him (as I now see Kubrick) as a major artist. More a brilliant conjuror, or even, in less charitable moments, a superior con artist. To put it another way: I feel (perhaps quite mistakenly) that I “know” Ozu, Ophuls, Kiarostami, Hou, Tsai, even the elusive Preminger, as human beings. But I don’t know Soderbergh at all: I don’t know what’s there, he gives nothing away. I maintain the right to change my mind. I am intrigued by the fact that his most elaborately “distanced,” “intellectual,” “clockwork toy” movie, The Limey, is also the one where some kind of powerful emotional disturbance seems dangerously close to the surface. One day, perhaps, we shall bear witness to an explosion, though with Full Frontal, supposedly the “small,” “personal” film he “really wanted to make,” I don’t detect even a distant rumble.

The Shining: Patriarch (Jack Nicholson) on the rampage, wife (Shelley Duvall) on the defense

But there is a far more important absence than that of Soderbergh, and I realize it demands explanation, though it leads me into somewhat personal territory. My failure to write about Spike Lee is a matter partly of respect, partly of cowardice, partly of a past hurt. Do the Right Thing is a great movie (among the most important in the American cinema since Heaven’s Gate), a fully achieved work of great intelligence and integrity, and everything Lee does must be seen by anyone with a serious interest in film and/or American culture. But I suffer from a prototypical white person’s inhibition: the black experience is so integral to Lee’s work, and, although his films are by no means inaccessible to whites, I am not sure that a white person can write about them with the necessary inwardness, or without embarrassing blunders.

As I earlier claimed the right to call myself a feminist without being a woman, this reluctance to deal with black issues may see inconsistent and perhaps irrational, but underlying it is a somewhat painful personal experience. Almost ten years ago I contributed an article to an issue of CineAction (no. 32) devoted to race, and it brought down the wrath of the righteous upon my head, this being at the peak of “political correctness” at its strictest. I committed two major crimes. At this time a production of Show Boat (the musical) was about to be mounted in a Toronto auditorium, and there had been a great public outcry, a number of professed leftists going so far as to demand that it be banned by the local authorities. This strikes me as a frightening microcosmic expression of how easily Marxism can degenerate into Stalinism, with freedom of expression flung out the window (would not organized protests outside the theater be sufficient to draw the public’s attention to possible objections?). I defended Show Boat, both Edna Ferber’s novel and James Whale’s film (and George Sidney’s remake seems harmless enough, simply—the indestructible Ava Gardner aside—a bad and boring movie), claiming both as, for all their shortcomings and insufficiencies, powerfully antiracist. My other crime was much worse: I suggested that black persons be called brown and white persons pink, on grounds not merely of greater accuracy. One of the strongest underpinnings of racism, it seems to me, has always been the close association of “black” with evil and “white” with good. To quote myself: “I’m sure white supremacists have a commitment to exactly such an association of ideas, and play upon it surreptitiously: they would hate to have to think of themselves as ‘pinkish-beige.’” (I was, and remain, fully aware of the importance of “black” as a political weapon.) This still seems to me harmless at worst, but it provoked an outpouring of abuse. One leading North American leftist film critic actually demanded, when he sent in his subscription renewal, that all articles by “the racist Robin Wood” be removed from his subsequent copies (a request with which we failed to comply, not wishing to deprive the gentleman of the satisfaction of tearing them out himself). I shall be interested to discover whether the repetition of these ideas here provokes similar outrage today. I suspect it won’t. But something of the pain lingers. If it did not prevent me from writing at length on Mandingo (in my Sexual Politics and Narrative Film), that is perhaps because the film is set in the past, the issue of slavery distancing it from contemporary concerns. I hope to write about Spike Lee’s films at some time in the future; for now, I shall simply express my admiration.

I might well have saved the last two essays (on Before Sunrise and The Doom Generation) in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film for inclusion here if I had known there would be a new edition. Araki’s film especially belongs to this prologue and this period, and its remarkable force remains undimmed by the subsequent collapse (temporary one hopes) of his career. Few American films since 1990 have greater claims to “classical” status. Its rage and desperation—the inevitable corollary, today, of its life-affirmative passion—is, as with Heaven’s Gate, more relevant than ever. Yet the film now appears to have become totally marginalized, an obvious necessary sacrifice on the altar of corporate capitalism and the “patriotism” that celebrates it.

Which brings me to my major gripe about contemporary criticism, a gripe both personal and more-than-personal. I bitterly resent the collapse, today, of critical debate. It is of course consistent with (indeed, the product of) the general movement of critical discourse in cinema: theory and scholarship dominate, the value of the individual work is no longer an issue, it “doesn’t matter.” But it matters to me.

In recent years, in this book and its successor, I have built what I believe to be irrefutable cases for several generally despised films, notably Heaven’s Gate, Mandingo, and The Doom Generation, claiming them as major works and important statements (on a lower level of achievement I could add Cruising). As far as any kind of response in print is concerned, it’s as if these defenses—celebrations—never existed. In the wide general view, the first film remains a “fiasco,” the second “disgusting exploitation,” the third … well, has anyone but myself even bothered to examine it seriously?. And gay critics still find it necessary to vilify Cruising without any acknowledgment that another gay critic has at least attempted a defense of it. If I am wrong about these films, why have my analyses not been refuted? Where is the stimulating engagement one might—or should—expect from other serious movie critics? Are these films really so silly that reasoned refutation would be superfluous? I thought I was issuing a challenge, but I have to assume that the challenge was either unanswerable or totally insignificant. Leavis’s “This is so, isn’t it?” is no longer answered by “Yes, but … ” but by “Why bother?” (I should add that, on the individual level, a number of professors in film studies have at various times congratulated me on my treatment of these films and assured me that they now use them in their classes, together with my writings on them. I am of course delighted that this is so, but it doesn’t appear, so far, to have affected in the least the films’ “official” status within film culture.)

A week ago, for the first time, I held in my arms my tiny grandson, Nicholas Gee-Ming (the names acknowledging his British father and Chinese-Canadian mother). My head was full of Schubert’s late string quartets, which I had been listening to somewhat obsessively, especially the A minor. The two experiences merged, the music expressing so eloquently the beauty, the joy, the pain, the despair, of human existence, the new life in my arms so innocent (but is any of us born innocent?), so fragile, so impossibly tiny, so trusting … I cannot help wondering how he will fare in a world now controlled by the forces of domination and greed.

I must here acknowledge an important influence: Varda Burstyn’s magnificent book The Rites of Men: Manhood, Politics, and the Culture of Sport (University of Toronto Press, 1999). Although her move to another city has put us out of touch, Varda, whom I have known for many years both professionally and as a personal friend (we taught film classes together), gave me a copy of the book some years ago and it rested, unread, on my shelves, my reluctance due to my own total lack of interest in professional sport. (I think games should be played for fun and exercise, and no one should care especially who wins.) I don’t know what mysterious instinct induced me to take it down and read it just as I started work on this prologue, but I certainly would not have written as I have without it. It acted as a necessary release of my beliefs and commitments, and gave me the courage I so often lack. It seems to me one of the indispensable books for anyone interested in the issues I have tried, in my clumsy, blundering way, to raise. Meticulously researched, it is a shining example of the amalgamation of theory, scholarship, and criticism so that they become indistinguishable.

Finally, I thank my intelligent editor, Roy Thomas, for his creative suggestions and occasional contributions.

1. Strictly speaking, there are nine: the second opera, Romance, has apparently never been performed, although the score survives. One continues to hope that some Janáček scholar will resurrect it and there will be a recording. Even if it is a failure, any work of Janáček’s demands to be made available.

2. I use the term here to cover both genders. Many still seem not to have grasped that “homo-” derives, not from the Latin for “man,” but from the Greek for “same.”

4. Since this was written, The Hours, with its three superb leading performances, has proven that a great “woman’s picture” can still be made, though it may turn out to be an isolated phenomenon. One also watches, with great interest, the developing career of Julianne Moore.