I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Perhaps they want much more from entertainment than the civilized, but limited rational pleasures of genre pieces. More likely, and the box-office returns support this, they want something different. Audiences that enjoy the shocks and falsifications, the brutal series of titillations of a Mondo Cane, one thrill after another, don’t care any longer about the conventions of the past, and are too restless and apathetic to pay attention to motivations and complications, cause and effect. They want less effort, more sensations, more knobs to turn.

  A decade ago, The Haunting, an efficient, professional and to all appearances “commercial” genre piece, might have made money. By the end of 1963, its grosses in the United States and Canada, according to Variety, were $700,000. This may be compared with $9,250,000 for Irma La Douce, $4,600,000 for The Birds, $3,900,000 for 55 Days at Peking — all three, I think, much less enjoyable movies, or to be more exact, terrible movies, and in varying degrees pointless and incomprehensible. A detective genre piece, The List of Adrian Messenger, also incomparably better than the three films cited, and with a tricky “star” selling campaign, grossed only $1,500,000. It’s easy to imagine that Robert Wise, after the energetic excesses of West Side Story, turned to The Haunting for a safe, sane respite, and that John Huston, after wrestling with Freud, turned to an intriguing detective story like Adrian Messenger for a lucrative, old-fashioned holiday. But what used to be safe seems now to be folly. How can audiences preoccupied with identity problems of their own worry about a case of whodunit and why and how? Following clues may be too much of an effort for those who, in the current teen-age phrase, “couldn’t care less.” They want shock treatment, not diversion, and it takes more than ghosts to frighten them.

  The Haunting is set in that pleasantly familiar “old dark house” that is itself an evil presence, and is usually inhabited by ghosts or evil people. In our childhood imaginings, the unknowable things that have happened in old houses, and the whispers that someone may have died in them, make them mysterious, “dirty”; only the new house that has known no life or death is safe and clean. But so many stories have used the sinister dark house from-which-no-one-can-escape and its murky gardens for our ritual entertainment that we learn to experience the terrors as pleasurable excitations and reassuring reminders of how frightened we used to be before we learned our way around. In film, as in story, the ambiance is fear; the film specialty is gathering a group who are trapped and helpless. (Although the women are more easily frightened, the men are also powerless. Their superior strength doesn’t count for much against unseen menaces: this may explain why the genre was often used for a male comedian — like Bob Hope in The Ghost Breakers. Russ Tamblyn serves a similar but feeble cowardly-comic function in The Haunting.) The action is confined to the house and grounds (the maze); the town is usually far away, just far enough away so that “nobody will hear you if you scream.”

  In recent years film festivals and art houses have featured a peculiar variant of the trapped-in-the-old-dark-house genre (Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel is the classic new example), but the characters, or rather figures, are the undead or zombies of the vampire movies. “We live as in coffins frozen side by side in a garden” — Last Year at Marienbad. “I’m dead” — the heroine of Il Mare. “They’re all dead in there” — the hostess describing the party of La Notte. Their vital juices have been sucked away, but they don’t have the revealing marks on the throat. We get the message: alienation drains the soul without leaving any marks. Or, as Bergman says of his trilogy, “Most of the people in these three films are dead, completely dead. They don’t know how to love or to feel any emotions. They are lost because they can’t reach anyone outside of themselves.” This “art” variant is a message movie about failure of communication and lack of love and spiritual emptiness and all the rest of that. It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a new genre but it has some peculiarities. The old dark house was simply there, but these symbolic decadent or sterile surroundings are supposed to reflect the walking death of those within the maze. The characters in the old dark house tried to solve the riddle of their imprisonment and tried to escape; even in No Exit the drama was in why the characters were there, but in the new hotel-in-hell movies the characters don’t even want to get out of the maze — nor one surmises do the directors, despite their moralizing. And audiences apparently respond to these films as modern and relevant just because of this paralysis and inaction and minimal story line. If in the group at the older dark house, someone was not who we thought he was, in the new dull party gatherings, it doesn’t matter who anybody is (which is a new horror).

  Although The Haunting is moderately elegant and literate and expensive, and the director gussies things up with a Marienbadish piece of statuary that may or may not be the key to something or other, it’s basically a traditional ghost story. There is the dedicated scientist who wants to contribute to science in some socially unacceptable or scientifically reproachable area — in this case to prove the supernatural powers of the house. (The scientist is, somewhat inexplicably, an anthropologist; perhaps Margaret Mead has set the precedent for anthropologists to dabble in and babble on anything — so that the modern concept of the anthropologist is like the old concept of the philosopher or, for that matter, the scientist.) And, in the expository style traditional for the genre, he explains the lore and jargon of psychic research, meticulously separating out ghost from poltergeist and so on. And of course the scientist, in the great tradition of Frankenstein, must have the abnormal or mad assistant: the role that would once have belonged to Dwight Frye is here modernized and becomes the Greenwich Village lesbian, Claire Bloom. And there is the scientist’s distraught wife who fears that her husband’s brilliant career will be ruined, and so on. The chaste heroine, Julie Harris (like an updated Helen Chandler, Dracula’s anemic victim), is the movies’ post-Freudian concept of the virgin: repressed, hysterical, insane — the source of evil.

  It wasn’t a great movie but I certainly wouldn’t have thought that it could offend anyone. Yet part of the audience at The Haunting wasn’t merely bored, it was hostile — as if the movie, by assuming interests they didn’t have, made them feel resentful or inferior. I’ve never felt this kind of audience hostility toward crude, bad movies. People are relaxed and tolerant about ghoulish quickies, grotesque shockers dubbed from Japan, and chopped-up Italian spectacles that scramble mythologies and pile on actions, one stupidity after another. Perhaps they prefer incoherent, meaningless movies because they are not required to remember or connect. They can feel superior, contemptuous — as they do toward television advertising. Even when it’s a virtuoso triumph, the audience is contemptuous toward advertising, because, after all, they see through it — they know somebody is trying to sell something. And because, like a cheap movie obviously made to pry money out of them, that is all advertising means, it’s OK. But the few, scattered people at The Haunting were restless and talkative, the couple sitting near me arguing — the man threatening to leave, the woman assuring him that something would happen. In their terms, they were cheated: nothing happened. And, of course, they missed what was happening all along, perhaps because of nervous impatience or a primitive notion that the real things are physical, perhaps because people take from art and from popular entertainment only what they want; and if they are indifferent to story and motive and blank out on the connections, then a movie without physical action or crass jokes or built-in sentimental responses has nothing for them. I am afraid that the young instructor in English spoke for his times, that there is no terror for modern audiences if a story is carefully worked out and follows a tradition, even though the tradition was developed and perfected precisely to frighten entertainingly.

  No wonder that studios and producers are unsure what to do next, scan best-seller lists for trends, consult audience-testing polls, anxiously chop out what a preview audience doesn’t like. The New York Times chides the representatives of some seven companies who didn’t want to invest in What Eve
r Happened to Baby Jane? but how could businessmen, brought up to respect logic and a good commercial script, possibly guess that this confused mixture of low camp and Grand Guignol would delight the public?

  And if I may return for a moment to that producer whom I left sunning himself at the side of the pool — “Did you know that Irma La Douce is already the highest-grossing comedy in film history?” he asked me at one point, not in the droning voice of the civic-minded man discussing the cultural development of the community, but in the voice of someone who’s really involved in what he’s saying. “Yes,” I said, “but is it even a comedy? It’s a monstrous mutation.” The producer shrugged his dark round shoulders helplessly: “Who knows what’s a comedy any more?”

  It is not just general audiences out for an evening’s entertainment who seem to have lost the narrative sense, or become indifferent to narrative. What I think are processes of structural disintegration are at work in all types of movies, and though it’s obvious that many of the old forms were dead and had to be broken through, it’s rather scary to see what’s happening — and not just at the big picture-palaces. Art-house films are even more confusing. Why, at the end of Godard’s My Life to Live, is the heroine shot, rather than the pimp that the rival gang is presumably gunning for? Is she just a victim of bad marksmanship? If we express perplexity, we are likely to be told that we are missing the existentialist point: it’s simply fate, she had to die. But a cross-eyed fate? And why is there so little questioning of the organization of My Name Is Ivan with its lyric interludes and patriotic sections so ill assembled that one might think the projectionist had scrambled the reels? (They often do at art houses, and it would seem that the more sophisticated the audience, the less likely that the error will be discovered. When I pointed out to a theater manager that the women in Brink of Life were waiting for their babies after they had miscarried, he told me that he had been playing the film for two weeks and I was his first patron who wasn’t familiar with Bergman’s methods.)

  The art-house audience accepts lack of clarity as complexity, accepts clumsiness and confusion as “ambiguity” and as style. Perhaps even without the support of critics, they would accept incoherence just as the larger audience does: they may feel that movies as incomprehensible as Viridiana are more relevant to their experience, more true to their own feelings about life, and more satisfying and complex than works they can understand.

  I trust I won’t be mistaken for the sort of boob who attacks ambiguity or complexity. I am interested in the change from the period when the meaning of art and form in art was in making complex experience simple and lucid, as is still the case in Knife in the Water or Bandits of Orgosolo, to the current acceptance of art as technique, the technique which in a movie like This Sporting Life makes a simple, though psychologically confused, story look complex, and modern because inexplicable.

  It has become easy — especially for those who consider “time” a problem and a great theme — to believe that fast editing, out of normal sequence, which makes it difficult, or impossible, for the audience to know if any action is taking place, is somehow more “cinematic” than a consecutively told story. For a half century movies have, when necessary, shifted action in time and place and the directors generally didn’t think it necessary to slap us in the face with each cut or to call out, “Look what I can do!” Yet people who should know better will tell you how “cinematic” The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner or This Sporting Life is — as if fiddling with the time sequence was good in itself, proof that the “medium” is really being used. Perhaps, after a few decades of indoctrination in high art, they are convinced that a movie is cinematic when they don’t understand what’s going on. This Sporting Life, which Derek Hill, among others, has called the best feature ever made in England, isn’t gracefully fragmented, it’s smashed. The chunks are so heavy and humorless and, in an odd way, disturbing, that we can tell the film is meant to be bold, powerful, tragic.

  There’s a woman writer I’d be tempted to call a three-time loser: she’s Catholic, Communist, and lesbian; but she comes on more like a triple threat. She’s in with so many groups that her books are rarely panned. I thought of her when I read the reviews of This Sporting Life: this film has it made in so many ways, it carries an identity card with all the outsiders. The hero is “bewildered,” the heroine “bruised” and “afraid of life,” the brutal rugby games are possibly a “microcosm of a corrupt society,” and the film murkily suggests all sorts of passion and protest, like a group of demonstrators singing “We Shall Overcome” and leaving it to you to fill in your own set of injustices. For Show magazine, “The football scenes bear the aspect of a savage rite, with the spectators as participants hungry for sacrifice. The love story . . . is simply another kind of scrimmage, a battle between two people who cannot communicate . . .” For the New York Times, the film “translates the confusions and unrequited longings of the angry young men and women of our time into memorable universal truths.” (I wish the reviewer would spell out one or two of them for us.) The Times has an unusual interpretation of the love story: “The woman . . . only succumbs to him physically and the real roots he seeks are unattainable.” This reminds me of my confusion as a schoolgirl when a jazz musician who had been introduced to me during the break called out “Dig you later” as he went back to the stand.

  In the Observer, Penelope Gilliatt offers extraordinary praise: “This Sporting Life is a stupendous film. It has a blow like a fist. I’ve never seen an English picture that gave such expression to the violence and the capacity for pain that there is in the English character. It is there in Shakespeare, in Marlowe, in Lawrence and Orwell and Hogarth, but not in our cinema like this before. This Sporting Life is hard to write about because everything important about it is really subverbal.” But then so are trees and animals and cities. Isn’t it precisely the artist’s task to give form to his experience and the critic’s task to verbalize on how this has been accomplished? She goes on to write of the hero, “The events almost seem to be happening to him in the dark. Half of them are told while he is under dentist’s gas, in flashback, which is a clumsy device if one is telling a story but the natural method if one is searching around a character.” English dental hygiene is notorious; still, isn’t telling a story, with or without gas and flashbacks, a pretty good “natural” method of searching around a character? But something more seems to be involved: “The black subjective spirit of the film is overpowering. It floods the sound track, which often has a peculiar resonance as though it were happening inside one’s own head.” Sort of a sunken cathedral effect? The bells are clanging in the reviewers’ heads, but what’s happening on the screen?

  In one way or another, almost all the enthusiasts for a film like this one will tell you that it doesn’t matter, that however you interpret the film, you will be right (though this does not prevent some of them from working out elaborate interpretations of Marienbad or The Eclipse or Viridiana). Walter Lassally says that “Antonioni’s oblique atmospheric statements and Buñuel’s symbolism, for example, cannot be analyzed in terms of good or bad . . . for they contain, in addition to any obvious meanings, everything that the viewer may read into them.” Surely he can read the most onto a blank screen?

  There’s not much to be said for this theory except that it’s mighty democratic. Rather pathetically, those who accept this Rorschach-blot approach to movies are hesitant and uneasy about offering reactions. They should be reassured by the belief that whatever they say is right, but as it refers not to the film but to them (turning criticism into autobiography) they are afraid of self-exposure. I don’t think they really believe the theory — it’s a sort of temporary public convenience station. More and more people come out of a movie and can’t tell you what they’ve seen, or even whether they liked it.

  An author like David Storey may stun them with information like “[This Sporting Life] works purely in terms of feeling. Only frivolous judgments can be made about it in convent
ional terms of style.” Has he discovered a new method of conveying feeling without style? Or has he simply found the arrogance to frustrate normal responses? No one wants to have his capacity for feeling questioned, and if a viewer tries to play it cool, and discuss This Sporting Life in terms of corrupt professional football, he still won’t score on that muddy field: there are no goal-posts. Lindsay Anderson, who directed, says, “This Sporting Life is not a film about sport. In fact, I wouldn’t really call it a story picture at all. . . . We have tried to make a tragedy . . . we were making a film about something unique.” A tragedy without a story is unique all right: a disaster.

  In movies, as in other art forms, if you are interested only in technique or if you reject technique, the result is just about the same: if you have nothing to express it is very much like thinking you have so much to express that you don’t know how to say it. Something related to absorption in technique is involved in the enthusiasm of young people for what is called “the New American Cinema,” though these films are often made by those who reject craftsmanship as well as meaning. They tend to equate technique with science and those who produced the Bomb. This approach, which is a little like the attack on scientific method in Eyes Without a Face, is used to explain why they must make movies without taking time to learn how. They’re in a hurry, and anyway, technique might corrupt them.