The Talkies/Wild Metropolitan Fools
Bowman, James
on the council, representing a no-longer-existing voting district. Thanks to "Protocol No. 3 of the February 27, 1924 emergency session of the Moscow City Council," it was explained, "1) V. I. Lenin...
...Where juvenile delinquents do violent and self-destructive things, however, these boys and girls talk...
...The Communists won this particular battle, but their triumph was short-lived: during the lunch break, Lenin vanished...
...It is quickly apparent that, in the world of the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, there are few dirt-loving children...
...The Economist 272 pp...
...She has as much potential star quality as Whit Stillman himself, whose longtime status as New York editor of this magazine he has managed to keep mostly out of sight of the predominantly leftish film critics who have hailed Metropolitan as the greatest thing since talking pictures...
...It is a visual reminiscence of Bufiuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but somehow it is almost as reassuring as Glinda and her magic wand: any class of people which manages to get itself hated as much as the UHB must have more staying power than appears on the surface...
...Time 455 pp...
...Reindeer, who is eating his breakfast and watching a nude dancer while sitting on the toilet, says to Santos: "That was great s--- you sent in last month...
...Even the currently iconoclastic council has renewed Lenin's mandate, apparently not worried that he will do much to block its free-market plans...
...The New York Times Book Review 480 pp...
...After a long search, he was discovered in the basement, where—in the interests of harmony—he remains...
...These are the people who have nowhere to go butdown and whose cultured discontent expresses itself in the thoughtful observation that "our parents' generation is the worst since the Protestant Reformation...
...The girl wandering dazedly at the scene is already mortally injured but is muttering about how her mother will kill her for losing her purse, her wallet, her hairbrush—and what's this sticky stuff doing in her hair...
...because their core of innocence and vulnerability is still so apparent—and because their elders are weak or sinister and almost invariably hypocritical...
...It is, in fact, a fairy tale...
...Having lost a motion to have the bust removed, several radical deputies took matters into their own hands and removed it before the start of the morn-ing session on June 27...
...I especially liked the visual pun of the luridly overdrawn villain, Mr...
...Here, too, we like the bad kids, the juvenile delinquents (remember them...
...in love in a world that is portrayed as unremittingly violent and corrupt...
...Don't tell anybody he's one of us until after he's produced a second hit, OK...
...filled with things that most general readers won't know at all, and that many specialist readers won't have thought of...
...Eichendorff's lyrics are here excluded from the song—which is strange, because the voice that we never quite get to hear would have provided a great epigraph for a David Lynch road movie: How tired we are of traveling—Is this, perhaps, death...
...Isn't that reason enough for making their story into a fairy tale...
...W hit Stillman's delightful Metropolitan is enjoying an unexpected success nationwide...
...Stillman's playing off against expectation like this emphasizes the isolation of his characters in a city filled with successful strivers and upwardly mobile professionals...
...Simon Schama, The New Republic "If you want to know the who, what, and when of the Revolution, here is where to find it...
...Here sits the connoisseur of great s...
...7 togo be sure, the picture doesn't hold 1 ether very well...
...All the same, I feel the need to say a few words in defense of this weird road movie about the weirdly named Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern...
...color illus., b&w photos, maps, genealogies paper $16.95 The Oxford History of the French Revolution WILLIAM DOYLE "An outstanding model of clarity and informed scholarship...
...Yet if their crust is made up of self-conscious literary-historical argument and witty repartee rather than violence, their underlying innocence and vulnerability is as apparent as that of the charming juvenile delinquent...
...Tom doesn't mention it, but in the ideal fourieriste community, a phalange of about 1,500 souls, children are given the task of garbage collectors—because they like to play in the dirt...
...T he best film of the year so far is 1 Louis Malle's May Fools, which offers a more European perspective on the subject of youth's disaffection from its seniors...
...A fairy tale is an externalization of the inward darkness that innocence fears without knowing...
...That is the film's justification for an almost Shavian talkiness...
...What confuses criticism is that Lynch's innocents are a killer and a borderline nymphomaniac who have somehow managed to retain their belief James Bowman is TAS's movie critic...
...When Sailor finally finds some heavy metal music they both leap out of the car and do a wild and orgiastic dance by the side of the road as the sun goes down...
...This is partly because they are educated and articulate and therefore have a lot to talk about and partly because their whole social class is in the same situation—which is to say ignored or despised by the rest of society...
...That's the whole point about them: if they weren't those things they wouldn't be religion or politics or seawater but something else entirely...
...At the same time, it is charitable about the characters whose foibles are so mercilessly exposed to us...
...I didn't think it was possible...
...They were caught in the act by several "conservative," i.e...
...2) the Mandate No...
...Communist, early risers, and a tug-of-war ensued...
...it is merely the response to it which differs...
...did for Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme in The Face of Battle...
...Adolescent pain from parental rejection (Tom's father moves away without leaving a forwarding address) and unhappy love is as acute in both cases...
...Like Woody Allen's, too, some of the jokes are good...
...IIII.IMENIOS•0111iMNIIII.17.011MMOMMEI•Magla &&&&& • .•^• •••••• • The Best in Western History Now in Paperback The Western Way of War Infantry Battle in Classical Greece VICTOR DAVIS HANSON with an introduction by John Keegan "Takes us, brilliantly, through the various stages of an ideal infantry battle...
...Unlike Woody Allen's, however, some of the jokes also plumb the depths of pathos...
...You don't have to be a Freudian to know that there's more to the Big Bad Wolf than an unconvincing portrayal of animal psychology and a contrived ending...
...1 no longer graces the hall of the Moscow City Council...
...Here the innocence is not that of adolescents, who are too busy trying to be grown up and to change the world, but that of the gentle Milou, a feckless middle-aged widower brilliantly played by Michel Piccoli...
...The running references to The Wizard of Oz are overdone, like nearly everything else in the film, but at least they should leave us in no doubt about the kind of film it is...
...Like the early films of Woody Allen it is rather a by James Bowman series of jokes loosely strung together than an artistic whole...
...His centrality is indicated by the film's French title, Milouen Mai, and he offers us another way out of the dilemma limned by both Lynch and Stillman as he instructs his wide-eyed, pre-adolescent granddaughter in the ways of the world without losing any of his own childlike quality...
...It's like criticizing religion for being mystical or politics for being mendacious or seawater for being salty...
...The accumulating ironies of the scene in which Sailor and Lula come upon a fatal road accident are unforgettable in spite of their obviousness...
...THE TALKIES WILD METROPOLITAN FOOLS T et me say at the outset that I, too, Li got sick of the new David Lynch self-parody, Wild at Heart: it's nasty, brutish, and long, as one English reviewer put it...
...5 maps paper $12.95 The Decline of the West Abridged Edition OSWALD SPENGLER edited by I lelmut Werner with a new introduction by H. Stuart I lughes "Often damned but still cited (the very title can turn a whole evening into a disputation), it is still a provocative and often dazzling book...
...As the good witch tells Sailor at the end, "If you're truly wild at heart, you'll fight for your dreams...
...It's almost enough to make me forgive the fade from heavy metal to heavy muddle with the lush orchestral introduction to Im Abendrot, the last of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs...
...Maybe we in the New World find this even harder to believe than a good witch magically putting things to rights, but David Lynch should be interested to learn that innocent hope can be more than just a fairy tale...
...Moreover, the sense of futility emanates from the center of both situations—though Stillman offers us, instead of a fairy-tale witch, a more sober cinematic allusion as his closing shot...
...Yet it is also somehow appropriate that the voice we do hear is that of Nicolas Cage as Sailor doing a very passable imitation of Elvis Presley, complete with screaming girls in the background (another fairy tale touch...
...This music deserves better than to beused as a mere leitmotif of passion...
...For too many of those who have commented on it have done so under the mistaken impression that it is a realistic drama...
...And it has been that way ever since, for sixty-six years...
...1, assigned to Lenin, is not to be issued in the future to any other elected deputy of the Council...
...What is the point of criticizing a fairy tale for not paying enough attention to plot continuities or psychological verisimilitude or for being grotesque and morally simplistic...
...The London Review of Books 440 pp...
...Here, instead of juvenile delinquents, we are dealing with the privileged youth of the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, as they call themselves in order to avoid the hated term "preppie...
...When, with the bumptious wisdom of youth, his revolutionary nephew, fresh from the Parisian barricades, tells the rest of the family that life is unjust, brutal, and vile, it is the beneficentpresence of Milou and his ghostly mother which belies him...
...As with Shakespeare or Chaucer, all dissolves in comedy and we are left with the sense of our own complicity—not in any particular social and political milieu but in a common humanity...
...Their breeding has left them with no vocabulary to express their discontent except that of wit and irony and a kind of world-weary self-mockery...
...Watch out, by the way, for Carolyn Farina, the doe-eyed Audrey who develops a crush on Tom...
...Hanson does for the ancients what John Keegan...
...Yet the problems are not dissimilar from the perennial ones of mixed-up youth flicks, both of the James Dean/Natalie Wood and of the Nicolas Cage/Laura Dern schools...
...Sunday Telegraph "A small masterpiece of style and scholarship...
...New York, NY 10016 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 39...
...paper $8.95 The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe Edited by GEORGE I IOLMES "A splendid volume, presenting contemporary scholarship to the general reader with care, grace, much thought, and many illustrations...
...paper $10.95 At better bookstores or directly from OXFORD PAPERBACKS Oxford University Press • 200 Madison Ave...
...Together with The Wizard of Oz, his memory stands in this film for all the underlying niceness that these overgrown children still believe in, in spite of their appalling experiences...
...Thus they go around moaning, like Charlie, about how they're doomed, or theorizing, like Tom, about the unusually dotty socialism of Fourier, who designed a perfect, small-scale society where every human type would have a place...
...Elvis is still the ultimate Hollywood juvenile delinquent and symbol of America's own rough innocence in the 1950s...
...There is not enough residual American innocence, even in places like Big Tuna, Texas, to be able to stand it...
...The blood/lipstick comparison underlines once again the connection between sex and violence which the ingenue's quest for niceness tries to skirt...
...And it's not as if David Lynch does not clearly signal his intentions in Wild at Heart...
...The film opens with two young men fighting over a cab in New York—only each is insisting that the other take it...
...Reindeer, as he speaks to his wicked henchman, Santos, on the telephone about a couple of contract killings the two are arranging...
...The significant incident in Wild at Heart is Lula's attempting to get some music on the radio and finding only an increasingly bizarre series of news reports about rapes, murders, assaults, necrophilia, and turtles eating cadavers in the Ganges...
...Here is the 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 image of all that Sailor and Lula's doomed wholesomeness stands against, and only the ludicrously contrived fairy-tale ending can save them...
...The other and unacknowledged genre to which Wild at Heart belongs is that of Rebel Without a Cause...
...The New York Times said only that he'd contributed a few pieces in the 1970s, as if it were some sort of youthful indiscretion for which he could now be forgiven...
...Of such stuff are friendships forged among the UHB...
...Nonetheless, the bust of Deputy No...
...Yet somehow Metropolitan manages to sustain a full-length feature on little more than words...
...The host concluded: "It seems to me that this is just the kind of case where no comment is needed...
...Set during les evenements of 1968, it captures perfectly both the idiot naivete of the student revolutionaries and the enormous attractiveness of their ideas to an older generation grown weary of its own selfishness...
...Who but a camped-up celluloid witch could even say such a thing anymore...
...The plot is even more exiguous than that of Wild at Heart and there is no succession of strikingly visual dramatic episodes to make up for it...
...3 of the February 27, 1924 emergency session of the Moscow City Council," it was explained, "1) V. I. Lenin will remain forever on the list of Moscow City Council members as a deputy of the working class of Moscow...
...According to a June 30 news brief of the independent news agency DS-Inform, it was taken out in a dizzying sequence of events...
...It makes another appearance when Lula's mother, the comically caricatured wicked witch, covers her face in lipstick after arranging for the murder of her boyfriend...
...He is killed not by a hit-man but by a hit-cripple and her boyfriend, who time their sexual climax to coincide with the murder in some kind of weird voodoo rite...
...As Sailor and Lula walk away, the smashed car's directional indicator continues to tick, directionlessly, in the background...
...Her last words are of a lost lipstick—and then the blood gushes out of her mouth to cover her chin and neck...
...The film's own context of injustice and brutality is transfigured by the gentle humor with which it is presented...
...An exciting excursion through history...
Vol. 23 • November 1990 • No. 11
