The Talkies / Aristides Goes to the Movies
Podhoretz, John
ARISTIDES GOES TO THE MOVIES Is there still any point in going to the movies? That is the question Joseph Epstein (writing as Aristides) asks in the current issue of the American Scholar. His...
...For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and '70s, things have always been different...
...It didn't seem a bad thing to do then, though now, for some reason it does...
...I don't mean to sound poetk or fatalistic here...
...When life is a bit uncomfortable, we can enter the movie theater...
...In the 1950s, the Supreme Court ruled that the movie studios were violating anti-trust laws by booking their films only in movie theaters they owned (thus ensuring that no amount of profit would go to anyone else...
...There still is something magical about the movies, something ineffable which draws to them people who might just as easily stay away and watch television...
...One might enter a movie somewhere in its middle, sit through the rest of it, then stay up to the point at which one had entered...
...And this is the point: There is a difference between movie-going, as an experience, and movie-watching...
...Things have in fact changed so much that going to the movies today is something akin to what going to the theater was like in the forties and fifties (and still is today)-an excursion, a deliberate effort to seek out entertainment...
...Movies are meant for the young...
...The question is, how important is it to escape...
...Each one is terrible, I think, in most ways, yet I have to say with one or two exceptions that I rather liked them all...
...But television has not been enough...
...The hold movies have on people- on me-is not negligible...
...Epstein, however, speaks from the vantage point of someone who grew up during the heyday of Hollywood, when seven hundred movies were released each year, when choice was so plentiful, admission so cheap, and movie theaters (at least in cities) so numerous that going to the movies was something almost as easy as walking...
...Still, the question remains: Why go to the movies anymore...
...Movie-watching is a serious business, something rather like reading...
...The audience for most movies, he points out, is generally a young one-one has to remember that the biggest hits of the last four years have been Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and National Lampoon's Animal House...
...Epstein mentions that the leading film critics in the country- he names Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffman, John Simon, Andrew Sarris, Vincent Canby, and Judith Crist-are all fifty or older, and he regards this with some amusement...
...Star Wars becomes a fixation of every child in the country, while "Star Trek" is made into a movie which flops miserably...
...So, the newest generation of moviegoers has gone to the movies always conscious that they are a luxury (it generally costs me seven or eight dollars, what with the price of a ticket and traveling expenses), not a given as they were in the 1930s and '40s (when, according to estimates, some 46 million people went to the movies every week...
...There is still a sharp line dividing television and the movies-when Robert Blake or Telly Savalas or Carroll O'Connor or any other television star appears as the star of a movie, that movie is guaranteed to flop...
...I am not speaking here of that phenomenon of our times-Sally Field, the star of three disastrous television series whose name was synonymous with everything wrong about television and who then became a great film actress...
...In Play It Again, Sam, a brilliant comedy about a movie critic and his fixation on Casablanca, Woody Allen makes a curtain speech that sounds familiar: "You're getting on that plane to Cleveland," he tells his girl, the wife of his best friend, "because the problems of three people don't mean a hill of beans in this crazy world...
...Epstein answers this question himself...
...One is, in short, whiling away one's time, away from Henry James and everyday life...
...In the ten years following the decision, more than a quarter of the nation's movie theaters shut their doors forever, independent distributors began charging exorbitant rates, the studio contract system with actors fell apart (for once the studios lost control of their movies, it stood to reason they would lose control over everything else), stars began taking their time between movies, deals for producing movies got more and more complicated, and costs rose to such a ruinous height that movie production slowed to almost nothing...
...and now one of them, the movies, is being dried up," writes Epstein, and though one is surprised that he does not say the same about sweet but unserious music, his point is almost unarguable...
...Carroll Connor may be seen by fifty million people a week, but it is Woody Allen, maker of only several modestly successful movies, who is mobbed every time he has the misfortune to be spotted walking down the street...
...Considering the recent work of Pauline Kael (who is past sixty, as a matter of fact) one could even say that she has entered her second childhood, or rather has never left her first...
...I myself have seen, in the last two months, an almost unbroken series of lousy movies-from Back Roads to Breaker Morant, from Excalibur to Heaven's Gate, from Thief to The Final Conflict, from Tess to Nighthawks...
...Movie-going, however, is much more prosaic-it has to do with the effort expended to get to the movie theater, with the taste and the smell of popcorn, with the dilapidated condition of the movie theater, with the gang of stoned hoods sitting in the next row screaming, as well as with the movie itself...
...The movies are a place, not an art form-a place to hide, really, if only for a few hours...
...Is there, I wonder, an age beyond which too regular attendance at the movies is a bit unseemly...
...When one goes to a movie that everyone has decided is a profound work of art, and one wishes either to discover it for oneself or to understand why everyone has praised it so effusively, one is movie-watching...
...That's beautiful," she says...
...Movie-going now is actually not all that much different from the movie-going of Mr...
...If one is lucky, one is entertained, but even that is not at all a necessary component for today's serious moviegoer...
...What movies were to our parents, television has been to us-an easy, mindless way to pass the time...
...Today, perhaps one hundred movies a year are made in this country (excepting pornography and those extremely cheap productions made in someone's garage and usually released only to drive-ins in New Mexico and sold at very low cost to television for showings at 3 a.m...
...Sweet but unserious music, elegant food, lovely movies-these are among the shaded water holes in the desert of life...
...And when movies get a bit uncomfortable, as Epstein demonstrates, life is always waiting...
...I think it is fair to assume that movie-going, waste of time that it is, comes to mean less and less as one gets older, when time means more...
...The court decided that the studios had to give up all ownership of movie theaters and much of their distribution rights...
...Most of us cannot go through life without putting something of the movies into it...
...His superb essay, "An End to Moviegoing," is the lament of a movie-lover who does not have the strength to bear with the dozens of bad, and often morally reprehensible, movies turned out nowadays merely for the sake of movie-going...
...I remember," he writes, "going to the movies during those years without even bothering to ask what was showing...
...It's from Casablanca," he replies, his voice rising, "and I've been waiting my whole life to say it...
...Epstein's youth, except that one now goes to the movies less frequently and with more effort...
Vol. 14 • July 1981 • No. 7
