The Talkies/Empty Dreams

...They wouldn't bother with it otherwise...

...Here I imagine a big movie-going audience of middle-aged divorced women, most of them less slatternly if also less attractive than Susan Saran-don's character, munching their popcorn and thrilling to the promise of happiness and a new life in the arms of frightfully attractive and rich younger men...

...What's original about this version of the standard story is that the paranoid dream-world is recognized as, in fact, a dream-world...

...From us...

...The difference between documentary and fiction is that the latter requires some real insight into character, and for that we would have to know if, and how, Claus is guilty...

...Poor old Richard Nixon, who was always the big bad wolf to the oppressed artistic red riding hoods of California, has a lot to answer for...

...We are flattered to learn that dead people, like gangsters, cowboys, policemen—fill in the blank—are just like us...

...For the dream-merchants of Hollywood, however, I can well believe that it is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know...

...Happens all the time...

...Their closeness to reality also damages Reversal of Fortune and Memphis Belle...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991 35 Imyself tend to fall asleep in dream movies, which is what I did in the legendary Akira Kurosawa's Dreams...

...The hippie chemist does, of course...

...But then that is just business as usual in Hollywood...

...Oh dear, oh dear...

...They give the men the drug and the men go berserk and kill each other...

...And it is mildly surprising to me that what it always seems to prove is a kind of Sunday-school morality—this from the angry young men of Babylon on the Pacific...

...Eating pate de foie gras to the sound of trumpets, perhaps...

...There may be other dreams that I slept through...

...What they get up to here is what might happen to any American family...

...There are other kinds of cinematic dreams that disappoint by their mundanity, too...

...And it is nice to know that it can also look at that kind of dream in a detached and ironic way, as it does in Rine in Tomorrow, a delightful romp through fifties nostalgia (again...

...We are made to feel mildly glad and sad about their ups and downs over the years, but we leave wondering why the time wouldn't have been better spent looking into our own family histories...

...This, at any rate, was how I felt in Barry Levinson's Avalon...

...But this film has no point to it: it is all chronicle and no theme—unless you consider the idea that America is a great place for East European immigrants a theme...

...This plays on the heartstrings in exactly the same way as the WWII weepies and goes to show that you shouldn't tamper with a successful formula...

...Would that the ghosts of our Western dream-mongers and metaphysicians were so sensible and obedient...

...What is most depressing about all this is that its sentimentality is all there is to it...

...The foxes' wedding procession, the dance of the dolls in the peach orchard, the coming to life of van Gogh's Langlois Bridge and Wheatfield With Crows, and the Dantesque Weeping Demons are especially memorable...

...Belief is a much more difficult business, and sentimentalizing may be all that most of us have to tide us over the lack of it...

...but also through the great, "dream-factory" days of popular culture...

...It really belongs together with movies like Three Days of the Condor or Capricorn One, those left-wing paranoid fantasies that seemed to gush forth from some subterranean Hollywood pool, buried deep beneath the McCarthyite substrata, after Watergate...

...Because they are stupid as well as evil, the highJames Bowman is The American Spectator's movie critic...

...Someone always does...

...Dreams seem to be reserved for the nightmarish visions of Jacob's Ladder except where they are mere wish-fulfillment, as in Ghost or, in a very different way, White Palace...

...Once the sins are placated, however, the karmic tension dispersed and the lessonlearned that "everything we do matters," the boys and girls are ready to behave themselves and go on living some unimaginably holy life—except that they've presumably got to do it in the landscape of nightmare grotesques (cf...

...Last year there was what may still be, in spite of this year's stiff competition, the all-time schmalz champion, Field of Dreams, appropriately set in a cornfield, and a near competitor in Steven Spielberg's remake of A Guy Named Joe called Always, in which Audrey Hepburn played Richard Dreyfuss's heavenly guide...

...THE TALKIES EMPTY DREAMS by James Bowman W hen I taught English to small boys and compelled them to offer up creative prose compositions for my approval, I used to tell them that all essays ending with the words . . . and then I woke up" or any formula approximating thereunto would be rewarded with instant failure...

...So what...

...With them, on the contrary, spectral existence always proves something...

...In the end the field medics pronounce him dead, and we discover that his whole post-Vietnam life was a dream, as in Ambrose Bierces story, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge...

...This raises the issue of the relationship between art and reality which is cogently addressed when Reeves accuses Falk of stealing his words to Miss Hershey as material for the radio drama...

...I tried to warn them," he says, through his anguished grimace...

...and they're pissed...

...Given the cinematic possibilities of such fantasies, it is a bit disappointing to learn that the mystery of death and transfiguration amounts to no more than ordinary people rendered invisible to the living...

...Falk's valedictory to the two lovers is the aphorism that "Life is a s--tstorm, and, when it's raining s--t, there's no better umbrella than art...

...The borderline between reality and even a fairy-tale art is never so clearly fixed as we imagine it...

...This insight could have been made more of, however, and I think that the film strikes a slightly false note at the end...

...The movies as family snapshot album are tolerable only to the extent that we are given some cornpelling reason to care about the family...

...up military/CIA types do not foresee what will happen when the stuff is tried out on a particular battalion in Vietnam in 1971...

...As in traditional folklore, the ghosts generally had some unfinished business to take care of here below before they were beamed up to heaven and . . . whatever...

...Taking their cue from Topper of 1937, films like Here Comes Mr...

...The special character of the immigrant hope in Avalon, for example, is lost...

...Oops...

...This picture has been a long time in the making ("Not long enough," I hear you add), and its origins in the 1970s show through the slick, nineties look of the finished product...

...Never mind...

...Falk replies: "And where did you get your words...

...Here the younger man/older woman theme is more romantic than it is in White Palace even though it is being simultaneously parodied in the soap opera, which is played as a film within the film...

...That view of art as mere prophylactic is what we might expect from a shamanistic writer of soap-operas, but it detracts from—to some extent even contradicts—the more profound and universal statement about art that the film edges close to earlier on...

...The trouble is that the rest of the world is also a dream...

...And why not...

...We thought it was kind of weird...

...Batman, Dick Racy) that the movie makes of Chicago...

...Returning to the world like this proves nothing...

...I've just given away the ending...

...Well, it's a start...

...In Jacob's Ladder, the wicked military/CIA plot is to develop a hallucinogenic drug, with the help of a plea-bargaining hippie chemist, which renders men more aggressive...

...You're really dead," he tells them, even though they don't seem so sure...

...Alongside Jacob's Ladder, Bruce Joel Rubin gives us a more traditional version of the spook flick in what has turned out to be the biggest grossing movie of the year so far, Ghost...

...FT here is a certain consistency to 1 Hollywood eschatology, which was developed during the Second World War years when popular demand for a comforting version of the afterlife was at its strongest...

...I don't claim to possess the pedagogical skill that would have been necessary to make them more literate, but at least I might have planted a doubt, a hesitation in their minds which, many years later, would have produced a full-blown sense of artistic prudence and restraint and spared the world their co-creation, Jacob's Ladder...

...from writers...

...The trouble is that cutting mere sentimentality with simple moralism doesn't help very much...

...Now, however, the ghost-world shows signs of becoming a bit more problematical—not only in Jacob's Ladder but also in Flatliners, where a bunch of medical students playing around with near-death experiences find that "we've brought our sins back...

...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1991...

...Its slogan, "You will believe," is precisely wrong...

...Jordan (its remake by Warren Beatty, Heaven Can Wait, stole its title from a much better Lubitsch film of 1943 on the same theme), Down to Earth, A Guy Named Joe, Stairway to Heaven, Between Tivo Worlds, and Angel on My Shoulder took us through a breezy tour of that "undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns' and returned us happy and comforted...

...This is absolutely right and fits together beautifully with the romance, which can only flower when the hard-bitten older woman abandons her attempt to be tough and "realistic" about it...

...It should be: "You will feel good about the death thing for a couple of hours...

...Even Kurosawa seems to jump on the ghost bandwagon at one point, where he includes a segment in which a platoon of dead soldiers marches out of a tunnel to confront the commander who sent them to their deaths...

...Instead of "and then I woke up" at the end, it's "and then I didn't wake up," since it turns out that all that has happened in the film is the vision of hell and (only a little bit at the end) heaven of the hero in articulo mortis...

...The fact that these people are immigrants is accidental...

...If you've read this far you won't be going to the film unless you're a masochist—in which case you will presumably be glad to have your pleasure in it spoiled anyway...

...Barbet Schroeder's natural coyness on this subject renders his film a "Saturday Night With Connie Chung"-style dramatization...

...You don't want people so real that they bore you to tears...

...In the last couple of years we have had another spate of ghost pictures, most of them even more sappy than the originals...

...The invocation of Marilyn Monroe, the caricature of Jewish family life, and the uplift provided by Miss Sarandon's fortune-telling sister I could have done without, but I can live with all that for the sake of watching Hollywood do what Hollywood does best...

...The basic outlines of the traditional ghost movie remain intact even in Flatliners, which teaches that bad people are in for a rough time in the hereafter...

...The visual imagination inthis series of cinematic haiku is almost enough to keep you awake in spite of its lack of narrative or dramatic content and its facile, greenish political message...

...Peter Falk as Pedro Carmichael, the radio soap-opera scriptwriter with an irrational hatred of Albanians, is a joy to watch, and Keanu Reeves and Barbara Hershey do a fine job as the couple whose lives he manipulates for the sake of his art...

...If I could remember my own dreams on that occasion, I might be tempted to tell them to you, but I have always been blessed with instant forgetfulness when it comes to dreams...

...So they do...

...The only good thing to be said about Kurosawa's is that they are visually stunning...

...Then the stupid and evil military/CIA types engage in a cover-up...

...But they never listen, do they...

...Likewise, Memphis Belle is a remake of a World War II documentary about a B-17 crew—but its value as documentary is seriously diminished by the admixture of schlock drama...

...Rubin even supplies some cute little demons to drag the souls of the baddies down to hell and render poetic justice ex machina (demon effects by Industrial Light and Magic...

...How I wish that Bruce Joel Rubin and Adrian Lyne had had the benefit of my tuition at a tender age...

...Please go back and rest in peace...

...Routine pictures like these raise a doubt as to what has happened to Hollywood as dream-factory...

...If you know the Claus von Billow story you won't learn anything new about it from the filmic version, though it is amusing to watch Jeremy Irons impersonate him...

...So if you think the Righteous Brothers singing "Unchained Melody" is beautiful music and tend to fall asleep during Macbeth, you'll love Ghost...

...You feed on us, we feed on you...