It is an orthodoxy of movie history that the new medium effortlessly took over from the stage. Cineastes are expected to despise and avoid the theater. So it’s arresting for someone to say, wait a minute, the eloquence and passion of live enactment did not simply lie down under the onslaught of the movies. It has carried on and, at this point, it seems likely to outlive the movie house as a public entertainment and as commentary on the complexities of our experience. The liveness of theater is returning, and paradoxically it is something that Syberberg saw as a newfound destination for film itself. The first thing to be said about his Hitler film, no matter that it is a projected performance, is that it reminds us of the participation of theater and strives to shatter the illusionism, the fetishized reality, of movie house movies.
The shattering exists in its collage: this is a movie where actors, puppets, real speeches, film clips, back projections, dramatization, lecture, and reverie conspire to present the facts about Adolf Hitler and the myriad ways in which he has been understood or digested. Yes, the film is immense and time-consuming, and it requires knowledge of what Hitler did and said and of the German history he looms over—but if Hitler is important, is that too much to ask? The film played outside Germany—in America it was distributed by Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope operation, and it had British funding through the BBC—but it is principally a work from and for Germany. Susan Sontag, one of Syberberg’s admirers, said he was addressing the cultural melancholy (or self-pity) in which a country or person cannot digest or properly mourn the grief for what it has done. So, Germany, Syberberg says, has moved on after the Holocaust and Hitler without coming to terms with it. You may not agree with that, but the pressing point is to wonder whether America, say, has been through the same necessary mourning over Hiroshima, Iran, Chile, Vietnam…the list goes all the way through Latin America to the Middle East, and it numbers the “trouble spots” where the self-declared source and arbiter of modern liberty has offered comfort for tyrants, neglect of freedom fighters, corruption, and exploitation. In other words, the strangled ongoing documentary that television news has given us over more than fifty years and that has left the United States at the end of its moral tether.
Susan Sontag recognized the intellectual energy and risk in Syberberg’s Hitler film—it may be related to this outpouring that he did not do too much afterward. “The film tries to be everything,” she wrote, and it is implicitly a defiance of ordinary documentary, especially its passive mock-aesthetic notion that documentary should deprive itself of words, commentary, and argument—as if it were a flawless testament instead of a mere imprint of appearance. She added: “Syberberg belongs to the race of creators like Wagner, Artaud, Céline, the late Joyce, whose work annihilates other work. All are artists of endless speaking, endless melody—a voice that goes on and on.” Godard is the only political filmmaker to rival Syberberg, but Godard was too tight-lipped. He lacked intellectual generosity or the willingness to seem unsure. You can call Syberberg crazed, arrogant, or crypto-fascist, but you should see his movie, too. Hitler: A Film from Germany is the work that most captures the natural helpless montage television has made of history in our age. It is a film, or a version of epic theater, that allows us the feeling that we might examine and admit our own history, instead of being its eternal victims.
Don’t we need such a movie about Ronald Reagan? It would have nearly as much to contain as any work on Hitler, and most of the material is so much jollier. Think of all the times Reagan passed in front of our cameras with a wave and a grin and a quick one-liner, and realize how far that flourish had become a gloss for public behavior in fifty years of silly movies. I don’t pass judgment on his presidency: he maybe violated the Constitution; he undermined economic morality; but he also presided over the fall of that “evil empire,” the Soviet Union, he survived an assassination attempt, he revived American spirits and gave much of the nation an odd sense of ease or relaxation. He cheered us up, just as he had often lifted a scene in a picture with brisk good nature. Even the people who know the damage of his administrations conclude that he was a good guy, a nice fellow, because that was all he had ever set out to play—no wonder he gave up movie acting after he had to slap Angie Dickinson’s face in Don Siegel’s television version of The Killers (1964). That wasn’t nice, or true to Ronnie, and he was determined at all times to resemble himself, to be like Ronald Reagan.
It didn’t matter finally whether he was a good or a bad president. For he was the embodiment of that moment in Network when Ned Beatty’s boss lectures Peter Finch on his responsibilities to corporate America and what he must do and say. “Why me?” asks the amazed Finch—his character’s name is Howard Beale. (He wasn’t going to take it anymore, but he takes it now.) “Why me?” And Beatty answers, “Because you’re on television, dummie!” Reagan had been on television long before anyone thought of the White House, in days when his presidency referred only to the Screen Actors Guild (1947–52).
It was unthinkable then that the American electorate would ever vote for an actor, let alone a minor one. That was a time when Gore Vidal’s warning not to vote for anyone who has been told what to say and where to move and when, all his life, still seemed potent and decisive. Since then we’ve had another actor, the far-fetched Arnold Schwarzenegger, as governor of Californa, no matter that he seemed to spell the state with a capital K. There may be other actors who win big jobs. More important, no one can now get office, or run for it, without possessing a viable or actorly television personality. He or she must be presented as a self we can admire. This is not just being “photogenic,” it’s being persuasively natural on moving film without seeming stupid. (It’s Crosby and not Hope; it’s Dean Martin, not Jerry Lewis.) John Kennedy had it. Nixon lacked it. Reagan had it. Obama seemed to have it until he needed it. Will there be an election where no candidate has it?
But Reagan excelled at it because he had served so long as a supporting actor. So he had a modesty, a deference, a supporting-actor openness, that Kennedy or Obama would not permit in themselves. They believed they were well cast in the job. Reagan suspected he was lucky because he had few assets beyond the collected scenarios of Warner Bros. in the 1940s. And the secret to it all is that in these media-ridden times, when there is so little presidential authority left, perhaps we might as well have someone like Reagan, someone who can be on TV. He passed our time pleasantly and left a vague impression of well-being, even when he put his foot in it. The office of the presidency has been blurred and inhibited by television coverage and spin, and by that Reagan ease. How can a president be so relaxed? He doesn’t remember everything.
It was Jack Germond on The McLaughlin Report who, when asked if Reagan had known about Iran-Contra, said, “They told him, but he forgot.” Reagan was a career forgetter, long before any suspicion of Alzheimer’s. From reading radio commentaries during the war, he believed he had been present at events he never witnessed. As the journalist Tom Shales would point out, “When are they going to realize that with Ronald Reagan ‘seemed’ and ‘was’ are one and the same?” In Murder in the Air (1940), a fifty-five-minute B picture, where he plays “Brass” Bancroft, there is a cockamamie plot McGuffin about a destructive ray (the Inertia Projector), and it stuck with him as the Strategic Defense Initiative, not just difficult to achieve but maybe ridiculous, and later called Star Wars, referring to the fantasy of the George Lucas movies.
Some memory losses were over matters of fact. When asked by a Los Angeles grand jury in 1962 whether he had participated in the 1952 Screen Actors Guild waiver that allowed MCA and Revue Productions (and only them) to be both producer and agent (bringing them great profits over seven unrivaled years), he reckoned he had been out of town filming Cattle Queen of Montana at the time. In fact, the dates for that were wrong, but no one on the jury was enough of a movie buff to know. (Very soon thereafter, Reagan was paid $75,000 for a cheap Western, Law and Order, as negotiated by Lew Wasserman, or MCA, his own agency.)
The m
ontage would have to include the observations, sometimes from family members, that his winning public amiability sometimes dried up if you were with him alone—because in those predicaments, he didn’t always know or possess the script. At a school event, he introduced himself to his own son, Michael, as if they were strangers. Some believed there was not just boredom but emptiness behind the grin. Many actors know that troubling hole. Even those of us who feel increasingly that we are playing ourselves sense the abyss.
Is there a Syberberg available to make that film? I don’t think so—it’s hardly suited to the patriotic euphoria of a Ken Burns or the patient witness kept by Frederick Wiseman. Werner Herzog might do it, but the maker needs to be an American. Our current documentary perspective does not really permit Syberberg’s “endless voice.” It is afraid to think out loud; it still believes the camera is reliable enough.
The closest we have come to that Reagan movie is the unexpected book Dutch, by Edmund Morris, published in 1999. Morris was an esteemed academic biographer at work on a multivolume life of Theodore Roosevelt (it had won him a Pulitzer Prize already) when he was diverted by an invitation to do an authorized biography on Reagan. So he watched the man and talked to him, and did all that professional biographers are meant to do. But the book didn’t quite come to life, because Morris believed there wasn’t an entire person there. So he was brave enough to get into scenario, or “Ronald Reagan’s own way of looking at his life.” There are sections of Dutch written as fiction, or in an imagined attempt to match the manner with which Reagan perceived, and liked, himself. There is this passage, where Morris talks to Reagan about good and evil:
“So you do believe in the power of human goodness.”
“Of course!” he said, contact lenses twinkling. “That’s what it’s all about.”
The twinkle slid off as he turned to speak to Kathy [his secretary], and with it slid my reflection from his eyes, and all consciousness of me from his brain.
Morris couldn’t know that, but he felt he had to say it in an authorized biography. Dutch was mocked and deplored, and it’s hard to claim it works “properly.” But its inside approach, the resort to scenario, was intuitively stimulating. For Reagan was always hoping to be a cut-and-print acted character, and that meant we had to slip aside, too, from citizenry to audience. We may never get back.
Part IV
Dread and Desire
Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter, Sofia, on the set of The Godfather: Part II
Dread and Desire
In 1947 a prescient poetic imagination had seen a streetcar passing by in an American city. It was named Desire, after one of the routes in New Orleans, and Tennessee Williams came to it after he had tried other titles. “Desire” was a mark of voodoo, perhaps, or of subterranean and surreal needs ready to battle the external grid system of a New Orleans unaware how nature and a spirited female force, Katrina, would soon carry it back in time, and not alert to the way sixty years was only a blink or a flicker in the film strip.
But in A Streetcar Named Desire, the Tennessee Williams play, the vehicle of desire, Blanche DuBois, is seen to be crazed so that finally she is taken off to an asylum. Stanley Kowalski knows she is dangerous, disorderly, and a bad example. He is a new man, a Polack American home from the war, his mean head filled with barrack-room law, his rights, and a crass materialism that likes to smash minor property to show his authority. So he picks up the chinaware in his own home and clears the table. And in his iconic and tight jeans and what was perceived as his audacious physicality you could feel his manhood. So he gets the disturbing sister-in-law out of his house, and he rapes desire—that is his way of killing it.
The film of Streetcar that followed in 1951 hoped to be the stage production transferred. The only cast change had Jessica Tandy replaced by Vivien Leigh. But the movie had many censorship problems over its suggestion of sexual violence. At one time a “happy ending” was proposed, and Lillian Hellman delivered a script for it. By the early 1950s, the Hollywood Production Code was still in force, so that words, actions, and hints allowed onstage could not be filmed.
But the pressure was mounting. The careers of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Jeanne Moreau, and many others cannot be followed without some realization of clothes, restraint, and shyness falling away. In Some Like It Hot (1959), Marilyn seems to be falling out of her dress when she sings “I’m Through with Love.” In To Catch a Thief (1955), on their picnic, when Kelly asks Cary Grant whether he’ll have a leg or a breast, she isn’t just talking cold chicken. He responds, “You decide” (a very Grantian hesitation), but is that a tribute to feminist decision making or the male’s sultanate view of the movie harem?
Sometimes, in a spirit of optimism, the new woman was hailed as a step toward “feminist” advance. Soon enough, Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie would be helping the diffident Clyde to his orgasm, Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly would be interpreted as a free spirit instead of a shopping escapist, and in Klute, the aggressive loneliness of Jane Fonda and her taut body were read as unstable independence instead of a concession to the Godardian idea that prostitution and being an actress were a dark sisterhood.
The breakdown of censorship in the 1960s could be interpreted as liberation. But as with many radical shifts in that era, the real impact was complicated. Female nudity and female sexual readiness were much more evident on our screens, and some said this was good for women. Yet all knew it was what men would pay for, and at the executive and creative levels, men still determined what got made and shown. So in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), Cybill Shepherd showed us her breasts (and prompted the director to abandon his wife, Polly Platt, for her), but the actors’ penises stayed out of sight.
As female bodies became more visible, their glamour declined. But the private parts of men became more illustrious and fetishized. In turn, this began to bring to public attention the possibility that men were erotic icons, too, and that movies might be bisexual, or multisexual, or gay.
The industry said there were some movies aimed at men (Westerns, gangster flicks, war) and some more suited to women (romances, tearjerkers, mother movies). But they were as reluctant to give up any portion of the audience as they were to acknowledge the quantity of homosexuals working in film—and watching them. With Astaire and Rogers, their films could not be enjoyed without a male viewer saying to himself, “It sure would be swell to have Ginger in my arms, but it would be great to be able to move her—they call it dancing—the way Fred does. And he is so elegant, so cool, so nice, so gentle, so silly, so…gay?” Equally, the woman in the audience can say to herself that it would be terrific to have a partner as athletic and considerate as Fred—but “Don’t I wish I looked like Ginger, or had her dress?” The old adage was that she gave him sex appeal, and he lent her class. But we got both.
The normal history of film is of an art, a business, and the famous people who contributed to it and who made modern celebrity. But if commercials are small movies, and if pornography has a place in the list of films made, then there must be larger issues of understanding in play. So film introduced us to a mass medium, leading us away from inner truth to appearance, confusing us over reality and fantasy, and helping us go from a state of sexual innocence or ignorance to claiming sexuality as a right. Suppose the vital history of the medium has been in making novices and strangers accustomed to sex and to seeing the chance of pleasure or desire’s fulfillment. Suppose that meant being drawn to both sexes.
In Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier (published in 1915, the year of The Birth of a Nation, and far beyond Griffith’s film in its human understanding), there are several characters of whom the narrator can say quite reasonably that they did not know how babies were made. These are not uneducated figures. They are wealthy pillars of society. Most of them seek sexual gratification and seem to know where to get it. But they do not apprehend the role of sex in either their own experience or the d
evelopment of the culture. At that social level, few innocents like that exist any longer. In a hundred years sex has developed as an experience and a theory. It is where we grow up? And in positing the curious gap between the inner and outer aspects of sex, what it feels like and what it looks like, movie may have had a value beyond that of individual films. Thus, stardom is less about the people on-screen than those watching them. It involves the discovery of desire.
In Montgomery Clift’s breakthrough film, Howard Hawks’s Western Red River (1948), he played the adopted son who opposed John Wayne’s tyrannical rancher, and took his herd of cattle from him, incurring lethal vengeance. Clift was handsome; he was beautiful. Not everyone thought he could be convincing as a robust Western hero—including Wayne. Did the insiders know he was bisexual? That’s less clear than Hawks’s belief that Clift was exciting box office and a worthy opponent for Wayne—even in the concluding fistfight. Still, Clift had to be taught how to work with guns on his hips, a hat on his head, and a horse between his thighs. How well he managed can be seen on the screen. He was a good enough actor to impress Wayne and Hawks, and to hold the camera.
And yet…Clift’s character wears fringed buckskin (a costume you might purchase in a gay store now). He has private movie talk with Cherry Valance (John Ireland) about their guns, the innuendo of which was noticeable at the time. Then, at the close of the picture—where the script had originally called for a death—the girl (Joanne Dru), who has been propositioned by both men along the trail, tells them to stop fighting and grow up, because anyone can see they love each other.
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