The Talkies/Communists and Kitsch
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES COMMUNISTS AND KITSCH by Bruce Bawer T f I've taken this long to get around ures crucially in the novel The Unbear- writes, describing the gulag as "a sep- action games when making...
...For full details and a free, personalized proposal, please call our toll-free number...
...Your annuity is completely confidential and is not reportable on your tax return...
...Average annual gain: 32...
...Interestingly, the film's most successful sequences are frankly sentimental, and would almost certainly be classified by Kundera as kitsch...
...But one is reminded especially of his 1966 film Seconds, in which a frustrated middle-aged businessmancontracts with a secret medical conglomerate that fakes his death and transforms him surgically into a handsome, virile, and young-looking Rock Hudson...
...The Unbearable Lightness of Being is worth seeing if only to watch this splendid actor at work...
...to his rich, domineering mother (Angela Lansbury) and his despised stepfather, Senator John Iselin (James Gregory)—a Joe McCarthy-type demagogue—who are eager to make political hay out of his success...
...Indeed, even a reader of the novel has the feeling, while viewing the movie, that the significance of one story development after another is constantly hovering just beyond his grasp...
...Like Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate offers a stark, black-and-white, tiltedcamera's-eye vision of a Kafkaesque world in which things are not as they seem...
...But to what evil purpose...
...he defines broadly: "Kitsch is the trans- (Though the novel's story is meant to lation of received ideas into the lan- make a statement about kitsch, without guage of beauty and feeling...
...The film is temperate, steadily paced, strikingly photographed (by Sven Nykvist), moderately disjunctive, and (in spite of the inevitable T. & A.) surprisingly tame...
...promising that the novel, written by the cries, "My enemy is kitsch, not Corn- in American kitsch...
...Though Kundera mentions the old man and his pig, and dwells at some length upon Tomas and Tereza's rural life and upon their love for Karenin, the film's treatment of these matters is considerably more expansive than the novel's...
...Jean-Claude Carriere (Belle du Jour, The Discreet Charm of the BourgeoiBruce Bawer is The American Spec- sie), have done is to isolate the narrative tator 's movie reviewer...
...And consider two more benefits: • Your accumulation annuity is liquid...
...The story's principal complications include (a) the aforementioned Sabina (Lena Olin), a sexy avant-garde artist who is Tomas's frequent bedmate and who, we are told, understands him best...
...yet the conglomerate has more surgery planned—shall we say?—than the man bargained for...
...Gradually we—and Marco—discover that the Soviets have rendered Shaw vulnerable to post-hypnotic suggestion, and that they seek, through him, to gain control of the biggest prize of all: the Presidency of the United States...
...Although Kundera To make an American movie out of distinguished Czech emigre author Mi- munism...
...In Kundera's lexicon, kitsch em- a filmmaker do with a text whose chief braces all social and cultural phenome- structural principle is not plot but na—sentimental pop songs, cliched TV argumentation, and whose characters news reports, and, yes, Hollywood are less flesh-and-blood humans than movies—which are designed to please emblematic ciphers...
...To be sure, The Manchurian Candidate is not quite the classic that some reviewers have claimed it to be...
...If, in spite of all this, the film is highly engaging, one major reason is its wealth of strong performances...
...SWISS FRANC ANNUITIES The Swiss franc is the world's safest currency...
...In the novel one understands this peculia?' motivation, more or less, for Kundera helpfully expatiates upon the concepts of "heaviness" and "lightness," which, along with kitsch, form the book's thematic foundation...
...But in the film, the return to Czechoslovakia seems quite incomprehensible...
...The concept of kitsch fig- What the director Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff) and his co-scenarist, 'Grove Press, $16.95...
...He comes to realize that the encounter with the enemy company is a fiction, and that during those four days he, Shaw, and their entire patrol were abducted, flown to Manchuria, and brainwashed by a team of Soviet scientists, who erased the memory of their abduction and imprinted on their minds a "memory" of Shaw's imaginary heroic action...
...11X Florida: 1-800-282-5705, Ex...
...and to Captain Ben Marco (Frank Sinatra), who, believing himself to have witnessed Shaw's heroic action during a four-day period when they and their Army patrol were incommunicado in the Korean countryside, recommended him for the medal...
...segments of Kundera's novel, to put 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 them in chronological order (with a couple of significant exceptions), and to throw in an occasional line or two of dialogue that makes an awkwardly obtrusive reference to one or another of Kundera's central themes...
...and (b) the 1968 Soviet invasion, in the wake of which Tomas and Tereza move to Geneva (where they live very well), then back to Prague (where he must work as a window washer, she as a barmaid), and finally to a collective farm (where they find bucolic bliss...
...and which feature a good-natured elderly villager and the beloved pet pig who accompanies him everywhere...
...Then there's find something—even if it's only the and has been playing two blocks from might consider Kundera's novels to be "American kitsch," a sensibility which tackiness of New York buildings, the my home for weeks, it's because every powerful indictments of Communism, Kundera sees reflected in catch phrases banality of the American media, or time I passed the theater the notion of to Kundera this sort of interpretation like "powerful indictment of Commu- the schlockiness of Hollywood films—sitting through a 172-minute movie is itself only a sign of the ubiquity of nism...
...But the film is nonetheless very gripping, more compelling by far than most thrillers of the present day...
...You contract with a Swiss insurance company to convert your dollar investment into francs...
...Take Tomas and Tereza's departure from Switzerland...
...Once everyone's back in the States, however, Marco begins to have nightmares which present a shockingly different version of that four-day period...
...It's a bizarre, audacious story, which at times seems to be making fun of Americans who attribute too great a capacity for elaborate and evil ingenuity to the Communists and at other times seems to share their fears, and Frankenheimer's characteristic tone and style—dark and intense, hard-edged and high-contrast—suits the material perfectly...
...It moves Kundera's intercalated glosses the typius to tears of compassion for ourselves, cal reader could hardly be counted on for the banality of what we think and to understand it...
...which show them suffering over their dying dog, Karenin...
...the crowd...
...Your money accumulates interest tax-free until your contract matures and is converted back to dollars...
...It works like this...
...The result is an unconventional but medium-voltage story about a randy young Prague brain surgeon named Tomas (Daniel Day-Lewis) and a sweet and charming country girl named Tereza (Juliette Binoche) who, against all odds, makes him her husband...
...My guess is that, while such a viewer will probably recognize the filmmakers' intention to convey a host of complex and recondite ideas, and might well find this intention vaguely impressive and even intellectually challenging, he would not, in the end, quite be able to make out what those ideas are...
...Example: $10,000 invested in 1973 would be worth $58,623 today...
...If you ever need your money before your contract expires, it is yours for the asking...
...We are Switzerland's largest broker for accumulation annuities...
...tic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to parisons between West and East, to of Being, which came out last winter Indeed, though the ordinary reader dispose of its refuse...
...What's more, the film's very effective ending doesn't come from Kundera's book at all, and the point which that ending makes, wonderfully touching and appropriate though it is, doesn't have much of anything to do with the themes that animate the novel...
...No salesman will bother you...
...Switzerland is the world's foremost financial haven...
...For above all, Kundera despises tively convey ideas which in the original kitsch, a term which (in his recent col- book are communicated largely by way lection of essays, The Art of the Novell) of leisurely discursive passages...
...What, moreover, can feel...
...All one has to go on is Tereza's enigmatic remark to the effect that life in Switzerland is too "light," and that she pines for the "heaviness" of life in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia...
...It seemed to this viewer, for one thing, that there would be much easier ways for the Soviets to get someone to do their bidding than to devise such an elaborate and improbable scheme...
...Similarly, such matters as Sabina's hat fetish and Tereza's attraction to photography, which in the novel are pregnant with meaning, seem arbitrary details when they occur in the film, divorced from Kundera's thorough explanations...
...At various points one recalls such other Frankenheimer films as Seven Days in May and The Train (which, like The Manchurian Candidate, is a story of totalitarianism and Ilarge-scale deception—the only difference being that in The Train the good guys are the ones doing the deceiving...
...Thus you profit two ways: • You accumulate tax-free interest — at the highest rates paid in Switzerland...
...11X THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1988 37...
...How, among other things, a contempt for the ceremony called May Day," he for some reason, to play affirmative- after all, can a film adaptation effecmovies...
...Kundera interprets the en- (who has lived in Paris since 1975) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Ian Kundera and published in 1984, was tire global situation in terms of kitsch...
...THE TALKIES COMMUNISTS AND KITSCH by Bruce Bawer T f I've taken this long to get around ures crucially in the novel The Unbear- writes, describing the gulag as "a sep- action games when making moral corn- 1 to seeing The Unbearable Lightness able Lightness of Being...
...Juliette Binoche is perfect as the sweet Tereza, and Lena Olin manages to capture both the vivacity and the vulnerability necessary for the role of Sabina...
...only toward the end, when he becomes a devoted husband, does he begin to earn one's sympathy...
...Nor did it seem fies with his character Sabina when she work testifies powerfully—is to indulge (Pardon my American kitsch...
...But mostly, alas, the Tomas of the film comes off as a jerk...
...Example: $10,000 invested in 1983 would be worth $18,647 today...
...Both films present an agreeable illusion—in Seconds, an illusion of the possibility of starting a new life, and in Candidate, an illusion of wartime heroics—beneath which lies a horrific reality...
...Adapted by George Axelrod from the novel by Richard Condon, this weirdly forceful film introduces us to Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who wins the Medal of Honor in the Korean War for taking out a company of enemy infantry...
...Why, a viewer innocent of Kundera may wonder, do they abandon the comforts of Geneva for certain misery back home in Prague...
...You are the complete opposite of kitsch," Sabina tells him in bed, and presumably we're meant to see that he deserves this compliment in some way, that he embodies some fundamental Kunderesque ideal...
...He plainly identi- evils of Communism—to which his legacy of crimes against humanity...
...Then there's our supposed hero, Tomas...
...Average annual gain: 17...
...I'm speaking of sequences which show Tomas and Tereza content together at last in the countryside...
...SWISS INVESTMENT COUNSELLORS 1-800-874-4143, Ex...
...Iso worth seeing is The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 John Frankenheimer political thriller which is currently in re-release...
...in his eyes, even to speak of the to stack up alongside Communism's based on a European novel of ideas the kitsch mentality...
...For clients outside Switzerland, the investment preferred for safety and steady growth is the single premium Swiss franc annuity...
...All our business is done by mail, in complete privacy...
...But what, for a viewer who hasn't read the book, does it all add up to...
...If nothing else, this has been a good year for endearing performances by pigs—see my review last month of The Milagro Beanfield War...
...in both films the horror consists in the use of ultra-sophisticated (indeed, well-nigh fantastic) scientific processes in the service of a clandestine, subversive, and profoundly evil power...
...Perhaps the best thing about its re-release is that it draws deserved attention to a director, John Frankenheimer, who is responsible for some of the most striking films of his time...
...The astonishingly versatile Daniel Day-Lewis, who played a Cockney street tough in My Beautiful Laundrette andan effete Edwardian snob in A Room with a View, proves equally convincing here as the libidinous young Czech doctor...
...clearly appreciates the value of living then, seems a paradoxical proposition...
...filled me with despair...
...born of a philosophy that implies, "The model of Communist kitsch is in the Free World, he seems compelled, Not to mention a difficult one...
...Your money — safe in rock-solid Swiss francs — is all but certain to gain against the dollar in the years to come...
Vol. 21 • July 1988 • No. 7
