David Foster Wallace would sum up the impact of Blue Velvet on a new movie audience:
[It] helped us realize that first-rate experimentalism was a way not to “transcend” or “rebel against” the truth but actually to honor it. It brought home to us—via images, the medium we were suckled on and most credulous of—that the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn’t intellectual but wasn’t even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium wasn’t verbal but imagistic.
Blue Velvet opened in Ronald Reagan’s America as the movies were becoming a business again that did not appreciate wild trespassers. It was more controversial than any other picture of its time, and its sexuality and obscurity may have kept the largest audiences away. People can guess what may terrify them. But it was talked about, like a foul ghost in the house. The curious folksiness of Lynch himself, who could be an extra from a provincial coffee shop (and happy to be so identified), had grabbed the subconscious as if to shout out, “It’s alive!,” the famous cry from the 1931 Frankenstein, when life is not simply vitality but a dangerous extension of humanity.
Despite the talk, Blue Velvet barely covered its outlay in the domestic market. The sane and amiable critic Roger Ebert attacked the film for what he saw as exploitation of eroticism and its lead actress:
Rossellini is asked to do things in this film that require real nerve. In one scene, she’s publicly embarrassed by being dumped naked on the lawn of the police detective. In others, she is asked to portray emotions that I imagine most actresses would rather not touch. She is degraded, slapped around, humiliated and undressed in front of the camera. And when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film.
Isabella Rossellini did not share Ebert’s distaste, but Lynch admitted that several actresses had declined the role, as if they “could smell a rat.” Some talked to Lynch and gave him useful notes, one of them Helen Mirren. (Go that way, and the film shifts in our mind: Mirren would have to dominate Jeffrey; but Rossellini lets him feel his new power and its cruelty.) It was then that the director met Rossellini for the first time and realized she wasn’t just a model. Today, Ebert might reappraise his response, for the film has passed beyond outrage to a point where it’s easier to recognize Lynch’s serenity in making it. He is not disturbed or aroused by his own vision. There is a matter-of-fact point of view. I don’t know if Blue Velvet was ever meant to be an “important” film, and I’m not sure I trust that genre. But it’s one of the most piercing and involving films in this book. Set in the cosy small town of Lumberton, North Carolina, and playing off archetypal images of the heartland, it is doggedly American. Its companion in recent years in the uncovering of a surreal inscape is Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. That is his Los Angeles story and an autopsy on how Hollywood uses actresses, a film where blond glamour and a corpse-like grayness sit side by side in a challenging double role for Naomi Watts.
These films are “difficult” if you strain to understand everything immediately—and once our films had assured us, and themselves, that everything could be grasped immediately. It was a way of saying we wouldn’t condone difficulty. Lynch works best if you relax, and come back for more. But most people reckon to see a film just once. Pauline Kael always claimed that was her policy. It’s another way of adoring now. But gradually—since Kane, at least—pictures had been made for that sophisticated pleasure in all the arts: coming back later to see how the experience resembles itself. So film becomes less a process that requires an opening night (in which we are opened up to the novelty) than a museum to which we may return. But will people still be excited enough to make movies if that now is withdrawn? Don’t you sometimes feel that few people any longer take still photographs with the urgency or excitement that gripped Muybridge or Lartigue or Capa? Aren’t they pictures of pictures, or of the catalogue of photography? Hasn’t television, on and on, always on, and now streaming, made it clear that we can’t quite watch anymore? Six hours a day of American television, done over two or three decades, can leave you with the numb discovery that all the irony and superiority you were feeling has turned to waterlogged depression.
Blue Velvet still feels like a dangerous now, and a great film, though “great” becomes as silly and redundant as “important.” It speaks to our yearning better than it explains a movie. But in this chapter there have been at least three films of a high order: Blue Velvet, Pulp Fiction, and Casino. It’s good to remind ourselves of that in a climate where it’s easy to think that the movies might be withering. They might be. But we have seen amazing things near death; and if the movies are dying, the long-running funeral has been a show to behold. The ghost has a half-life, even if he lives in a museum.
He may talk to himself in the night, going over the lines from movies: “Nobody’s perfect” and “Rosebud”—isn’t there a disconnect there, a subtle difference of philosophy? Or “Tomorrow is another day” and “I could have been a contender”—American mottos, yearning for the future and the past, delusion and self-pity. Does the ghost ever hear other lines in his overlook? “You saw nothing in Hiroshima” or Ozu’s “Isn’t life disappointing?”
The Numbers and the Numbness
More than many film books that talk about the quality of movies, this book has quoted numbers—what films cost and what they made. I can’t be confident in all these numbers. Lynda Obst, a movie producer (she did Sleepless in Seattle), once wrote a memoir on Hollywood called Hello, He Lied, and nowhere is the habit of wishful thinking more common than with the numbers. But the urge to be serious and important in picture-making, to be good or better, can hardly hold its head up unless it promises numbers. It’s like the dilemma from a film I’ve referred to several times, Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941), where the director of popular comedies (such as Hey Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Pants of 1939) yearns to do a picture about hard times and sad lives. He intends to call it O Brother, Where Art Thou? He means well; he says he wants to suffer and put that on the screen. But this man has been raised in the large rooms and sunny self-esteem of Beverly Hills, so he probably nurses a secret hope that his bold departure might yet prove a sleeper smash: not just a Best Picture possibility, but a hit! Think of the numbers.
The matter of “the numbers” is contingent on the frequent hope in filmmakers that film and screens can put us in touch with the larger world, an interaction that reaches from Chaplin’s sincere wish to have us all feel like one community to Mark Zuckerberg’s estimate that the function of Facebook is “to make the world more open and connected.”
As it reaches nearly a billion subscribers, Facebook claims that it is used by five hundred million people every day. This is a prodigy of our time (and Facebook was founded only in 2004), as wondrous as the movies seemed in the 1920s. Such a force, family or collectivization, carries a burden of responsibility. The huddled masses have so much dread and desire: they need direction, a commanding story, or a sweet dream—and openness can be a lack of direction that yields eventually to more emphatic, brutal answers. Zuckerberg is as vague as Chaplin on what he means by “open and connected.” In David Fincher’s acidic The Social Network (2010), you may gauge how close Zuckerberg is to being out of his depth. He says his toy will give us more choice with things such as music, movies, and restaurants. (I haven’t heard him mention job opportunities or freedom from terrorism.) But so many of us are uncertain about surviving, and suspicious of anything that makes that much money. Zuckerberg is said to have a net worth of $17.5 billion.
Facebook is an evolved movie system: it involves us looking at screens and converting our desire into a fee payment or a surrender to ads. Its aura of youthful generosity and utility belies how easily it could be turned into a system of surveillance and control. That slippery process was outlined already in the 1920s and early ’30s in Germany by Fritz Lang, in his Mabuse films. Facebook already takes our earnest admissions about
ourselves and trades them for advertising. Twitter has not yet made a profit, but it has little trouble finding investors—because they are gambling on a future when the money turns around.
It is very hard to make a movie without hiring equipment and the people who can operate it, without purchasing place, time, rights, and opportunities. Nor is it any easier to make a film without feeling the great desire to show it to others. And then to make more films. Moreover, once you ascend that staircase of economic progress and cultural reach, it is hard to step off. As he made sex, lies, and videotape (a breakthrough “independent” movie, in 1989), Steven Soderbergh wrote a journal that admitted the poverty he was in and the miracle of having a chance at a movie. Twenty-two years later, Soderbergh is a kind of tycoon: he makes films steadily; he lives in Los Angeles; he produces and enables movies by others—and, to his credit, he involves himself in experiments as well as mainstream pictures. He knows and lives by the rhetoric of balancing the two, and so he has directed the two-part Che (2008, a sympathetic portrait of Guevara) as well as the “real-life” people’s lawyer movie Erin Brockovich (2000), and Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen (2001, 2004, and 2007, respectively). He also produced Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002, George Clooney’s directorial debut, and a neglected film). Soderbergh is still not fifty. He has clout and credentials and he has made some enjoyable pictures, though nothing yet is better than sex, lies and videotape.
I don’t know him, but he is said to have a net worth of $40 million, which can be as awkward as any other net worth because it means he must keep striving, working, and balancing if his standard of living is not to drop.
So Soderbergh, who began full of a rather sour, or cool, idealism, has to negotiate with stars, franchising, international rights, DVD deals, and raising large sums of money for which he admits a sense of responsibility and good fortune. And he’s candid:
I think it’s a real privilege to make a living doing this job…You walk into a room and say, “I’m imagining this,” and they give you millions of dollars to go out and make it real…. They should be betting on the career of somebody. By definition the really smart people in this business are the ones making the stuff. That has to be the case. Making it is harder than sitting in an office and deciding what should be made. It doesn’t mean I should walk around feeling like a smart guy…There’s a lot of fear in the room. So when you talk about things that are difficult to describe in writing but are crucial to the creative success of a movie, that’s tricky. You’re saying, “You’re just going to have to trust me…” I don’t like to say those words, and they don’t like to hear them, and there’s no question that in the last two years there are certain words in meetings that you can’t say. Words like “elevated,” “smart,” “better.” You literally can’t indicate at any point that you’re going to do anything that won’t be understood by a below-the-average audience member.
The Ocean’s films have been central to Soderbergh’s position, and they demonstrate the easy wisdom of franchising: if you make something that works, make it again. When they came out, in the years 2001–2007, few audiences recalled the Frank Sinatra version from 1960. The new franchise took ironic pleasure in criminality, wealth, and wisecracks; it had a package of likeable stars; and it played to the endless fantasy of a big killing and a bigger payday. It’s not hard to see Soderbergh identifying with Clooney and the guys in the gang; they are much closer to him than he is to Che Guevara. Che wanted one kind of opportunity in the world, Soderbergh sought another. Danny Ocean’s good guys (or the good bad guys) triumphed with several male fantasies (albeit in suicide city). There was an air of Robin Hood about it because the money had been stolen from a shark or a sheriff, Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia). Thus it was possible to forget how Benedict had picked up the money from us, the people. Think instead that Benedict had also taken Danny’s wife (Julia Roberts). Her role in the picture is so spineless and convenient it could take the edge off the fun.
Everyone knows now that the Ocean’s films were big successes. Yet the three films saw a moderate revenue decline: $450 million; $362 million; $311 million. Not enough slippage to break many hearts, perhaps, but reason to think some spectators had worked out the con and that three times down this road might be enough.
But when is enough enough? Franchising was always the solution for bosses who couldn’t think of a new story, or a whole story, one that reached a narrative and moral conclusion. The James Bond pictures (begun in 1962 with Dr. No) are the pioneering modern franchise—if “modern” still fits—and more recent examples have been Adam Sandler being himself and the Die Hard, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, Twilight, the Harry Potter pictures, where a rascal studio (Warner Bros.) actually broke one book into two films to stretch out the bounty.
In serious books about movies, Adam Sandler is rarely examined. On principle, a lot of people (cable subscribers, perhaps) tend to think as badly of him as they do of franchising—though if The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire aren’t as much franchises as serials then we’re kidding ourselves. Sandler is too interesting to ignore. It is said that every dollar paid to him in salary has produced $9 in gross revenue. Many of his films are tedious and painful, or not “better.” Since he has gained self-confidence, he has happily played himself, to such an extent that his good nature and his casual sense of fun have tended to make scripts redundant—so maybe they are no longer written. And yet Sandler was unusually controlled and surprising in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love (2002), and he did enough in Judd Apatow’s Funny People (2009) to suggest that it might have been a worthwhile exploration of being a professional comedian, and rather more daring than a lot of Woody Allen pictures. That it didn’t reach that far is a sign of his audience being lazily content with Sandler’s happy-go-lucky attitude to his own work.
On November 11, 2011, a new Sandler film, Jack and Jill, opened along with Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Could two films be more different, or illustrative of the idea that filmgoing is still full of variety?
That weekend in November was not a good time in the world at large. Unemployment in America was officially at 9 percent, though that figure was deemed as unreliable (or corrupt) as the fiscal status of Greece or Italy, which were coming to pieces with threats of “contagion.” Another American debt crisis committee was drifting toward stalemate. It had been the week of Joe Paterno, the scandal at Pennsylvania State University, and the reports of a ten-year-old boy being raped in a shower by the team’s defensive coordinator. Joe Frazier had died. Kim Kardashian’s marriage had ended after seventy-two days. Eddie Murphy had stepped away from being the host at the next Oscars. The Dead Sea was dying. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry had been unable to remember every government department he meant to shut down. There was word of higher radiation in Japan than had been anticipated, and every reason to think that the state of global warming and the permafrost in Siberia were making their gradual way toward catastrophe. You can arrange these items in whatever order you think fit. But on that Friday night, you had those new films to choose from.
Jack and Jill is excruciating. It’s about a Los Angeles advertising executive who seems to be happy: he has Katie Holmes as a wife and two adorable children. (The film is an extended advertisement, as if unaware that we are accustomed to keeping ads short.) But he has a twin sister who comes to visit at Thanksgiving. He hates her, and you will, too (yet Sandler plays both parts). The idea of twins locked in revulsion and resemblance is very promising: it inspired the David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers (1988), which was frequently funnier and always nastier and more intelligent than Jack and Jill, and it is embedded in the Jekyll-and-Hyde myth just as it picks up the pattern of doubling in so many of our most impressive pictures, from M through Vertigo and Persona to That Obscure Object of Desire. There is this piquant extra in the Sandler film: that Jack wants to get Al Pacino to appear in a commercial. This comes to pass in enjoyable ways. (A. O. Scott in the New York Times said it was Pacino’s
best acting in years.) Sandler coproduced and helped write the script, all for $20 million up front and a slice of the gross. One clue to Sandler’s following comes in this review, by Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle:
So Jack and Jill is a strange one, with successful bits and big moments of satisfying comedy, interspersed with long sections that are just annoying. You may still be on the fence about it, so here’s a last morsel of information that should tip you one way or the other: Jack and Jill was made with a children’s audience in mind, so it abounds with flatulence and excretion jokes. Jill eats Mexican food.
Case closed.
In the November 11 issue of the Chronicle, LaSalle gave the same visual rating to Jack and Jill and to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia: a little man sitting upright in his theater seat, not applauding, not leaping out of his chair, but not slumped back in a coma.
Melancholia is a festival film, and von Trier is a festival director. Once upon a time, film festivals were special events that often assisted the commercial release of a picture in foreign countries. By today, however, festivals have become a self-sufficient circuit of distribution in a world less sympathetic to foreign films. In the larger Bay Area of San Francisco there are now more than seventy film festivals in a year. These represent sectional interests, different languages, and the simple urge in outlying suburbs or towns to promote local business. The creative directors of most festivals report fewer worthy films, though more and more get a screening. The funding of festivals becomes more strained, and if filmmakers are to appear in person, the budget has to take care of their travel, their hotel, and perhaps their companion. There are a few large festivals with a history—Venice, Cannes, Toronto, New York, London—and there are smaller events for connoisseurs, such as Telluride, Sundance, and Pordenone. Many of those are marketplaces for other festivals and for the few foreign-language films that can afford subtitling and an opening.
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