The Talkies/Swinging No More

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...Like all successful entertainers, Morrison knew his audience, who were the same people as those who saw in Andy Warhol's work a way to make self-indulgence look like art...

...It is interesting, however, that the one aspect of the sixties that is not celebrated in this film is sexual freedom...

...Who watches this rubbish...

...On the film's own showing, California people are at least as concerned as the rest of the human race with looking good and winning the approval of others...

...But the material richness of their surroundings serves as a soothing and healing influence to lead them back into the money-padded comfort of an unexciting but essentially happy bourgeois conjugality...

...it is just that, there, a certain amount of superficial eccentricity—like that of the girl (marvelously portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker) who spells her name SanDeEt—seems to be the way to do it...

...His brother, Paul Warhola, even James Bowman is The American Spectator's movie critic...

...The intervening time will be comfortably spent, but after a brief moment of crisis they seem to conclude, like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, that there is nothing else for them but to go on as they are...

...Above all, he knew that "they don't want me, they want my death...

...A t the opposite extreme is the ludicrously pretentious Jim Morrison, poet and shaman, who drank himself to death in 1971 at the age of 27 and who is the hero of Oliver Stone's paean The Doors...

...Of the re-creations currently on offer, the best is Chuck Workman's documentary, Superstar, on the life of Andy Warhol...

...Insofar as there is any merit to Stone's portrait, it comes at the odd moment when he rises above that stupidity with a touch of almost whimsical irony...

...and Henry Jaglom's Eating ("A very serious comedy about women and food...

...This in itself would be unremarkable but for the fact that that culture is seen as beneficent rather than sinister...

...This is not a subtle film: papa has a framed photograph of George McGovern on his wall, daughter has framed blow-ups of Boardwalk and Park Place "Monopoly" cards...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 43...

...What they wanted from Jim, and what he gave them, were bad-boy gyrations, naughty words, portentously obscure poetry, drug mysticism, a few Indian dances, and a dash of Satanism...

...For the most part, however, it is not the real sixties that are being revived but a horribly tidied-up and earnest version that may be worse than the original...

...But here they are not meant to be funny so much as faddish, reminders of the tyranny of fashion under which a group of some forty supposedly liberated women live...

...But food here is really only the most prominent symbol of all the pleasures available to them, the indulgence of which only increases their sense of insecurity...

...She's supposed to be a good lawyer, by the way...

...D efferent perspectives on the sub- ject of Californian manners are to be found in three other recent releases: John Badham's The Hard Way, with Michael J. Fox and James Woods...

...Papa is bringing a class-action suit against a car manufacturer on behalf of a bunch of accident victims who claim that a design fault led to their cars' blowing up after rear-end collisions...

...Some say I'm the Lizard King," he intones—and then adds, "whatever that means...

...instead they undermine the very happiness they are supposed to produce...

...It is a voice of moderation and modesty, of self-restraint and common sense, and it is, in the terms of this film, quite isolated and impotent...

...Here, perhaps, is the Andy Warhol generation finally liberated from the need to pretend that its fascination with consumerism has anything transcendent about it...

...The Hard Way begins by taking the New York streets as the reality from which Hollywood is insulated in order to produce a culture-clash comedy...

...And his exercises in mystification (he gets advice from an electronic freeway sign and makes the weather subordinate to love's imperatives) have more than a little of seriousness about them...

...and you are left with a substantial body of cinema-goers who, like Stone, really believe that Morrison was a cool guy who did acid with God...

...The old man has to repent of his libidinous excesses before his little girl can come back to him, but otherwise the spirit of the sixties lives on...

...Paul Mazursky's Scenes from a Mall, with Woody Allen and Bette Midler...

...As the doctor said of the woman who gave birth after a 12-month pregnancy, we always knew she had it in her...

...I just wish it were as much fun the second time around...

...I guess there's no error so gross that it doesn't have to be scotched more than once...

...As the novelist Fran Lebowitz says in one of many fascinating interviews in this picture, he made fame more famous...

...but the picture vindicates him...

...Yet it would be wrong to suggest that Morrison was just a cynical manipulator of his audience...

...Like Steve Martin, he makes use of a number of stock features of the cinematic portrayal of Californialife: tarot cards and crystals, foam cones for primally screaming into and foam baseball bats for working off aggression with...

...here, says his British visitor, "no one is looking to the outside for confirmation that what they're doing is all right...

...Too bad that only experience can teach us that Morrisonian narcissism ("Look at yourself...

...Whatever you may think of Warhol as an artist, there can be no doubt that he was a cultural entrepreneur of genius, the prototype as well as the inventor of the modern celebrity who is famous for being famous...

...The satire on sexual and restaurant manners, cosmetic surgery, health nuts and gadget nuts, freeway maniacs, performance art and performance life (even TV weathermen have agents), is of the gentlest...

...Maybe, as Jim Morrison says, "our pure reason hides the infinite from us"—a thought no more original to him than most of his oeuvre was—but these are people who have more than they can handle from the finite and have need of a little reason...

...The Warhol fascination with commercial kitsch now seems to stand, as Tom Wolfe observes, for the desire of sixties children to have it both ways: "to take advantage of the indulgences of modern life but to show you are superior to it because you are mocking it...

...since Andy, there are a lot more celebrities around...

...The daughter's estrangement from the father stems from his history of extramarital affairs and the effect that they have had on her and her mother...

...tells the camera that Campbell's soup was the children's favorite when they were growing up...

...When he told one of his teachers he wanted to be a great artist, the teacher replied: "What do you love most in the world...

...To Martin, the sixties live on in contemporary California spaciness, and who are we to gainsay him...

...Now it is the papa who is the flower child and the daughter who is the hard-nosed, success-oriented eighties type...

...Allen and Midler portray a married couple trapped in a mall just as they find their marriage on the point of breaking up...

...Steve Martin's L.A...

...When papa is depressed, he says that he thinks he should have died when Nixon resigned (maybe even before, we mutter...

...Can it be that all that is left of the big sixties party is a pack of prigs and moralists...

...they just hadn't progressed quite as far as St...

...A pampered movie star (Fox) attempts to pick up a little local color for a movie role by becoming the buddy of a hard-asnails cop (Woods...

...Heave it to you to decide if it is funny to discover, in theend, that New York reality looks exactly like a Steven Spielberg extravaganza...

...Another film that attempts to answer this question is Michael Apted's Class Action, in which Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio attempt to bring the Generation Gap (remember that...

...today it's food...

...Story is at least able to find cultural rather than political relics of the sixties to do reverence (and irreverence) to...

...How is it that they, like the rest of us to some extent and in ways we cannot help, are still in thrall to the Morrisonian mysticism of liberation...

...Artistic pretentiousness, in the person of a pesky mime (Bill Irwin) who could have stepped straight out of sixties street theatre, is slugged in the jaw—and then, weirdly, given $100 to keep his mouth shut...

...As his two lovers walk through a garden (including stone lions) which comes to animate life and magically revert to childhood to the strains of New Age music, we realize that Steve Martin is a man who will never get over the sixties...

...Martin, like most non-Californians, finds this silly...

...There was a wild integrity in his refusal to be pretentious about his art, and Workman's film begins with his insistence that we "just look at the surface . . . There's nothing behind it...

...Scenes from a Mall I enjoyed very much...

...Liberation from what...

...Aging hippies on a nostalgia trip, sure, but there can't be enough of them to make the film the hit it has been...

...Although he is "interested in chaos and disorder," there is a moment when he can say, "I by James Bowman feel the universe functioning perfectly but I'm still locked inside myself...

...But its mystique was enough to persuade those who were themselves content with a little recreational marijuana and sex that they were embarked on something holy...

...You know it has to happen this way when, in the opening scene, father-lawyer and daughter-lawyer are summing up in adjoining courtrooms: father elicits cheers from the gallery for his emotional defense of a worker who sabotaged some environmental "hellhole of a factory" as daughter is saying to the approval of a few smug yuppies that appeals to emotion have no place in a court of law...

...As a satire on California life it is too predictable, if intermittently funny, but what is striking about it is the kind of sixties wackiness that it lovingly re-creates...

...This seems to me to be all wrong...

...One of his splendidly down-to-earth cousins, interviewed by Workman, says that "when we read some of his philosophy we laughed out loud—we didn't know he was so much like us...

...What I think, finally, makes the film a success is the presence of the central character's mother, played by Frances Bergen, whose puzzlement in the midst of all these unhappy children of the sixties serves as the voice of the pre-sixties past...

...The answer was "Money...

...Life as a consumer is good and it is wholesome, but, as Woody Allen says at the beginning, having reproduced and brought up the (now materially demanding) kids, he and his wife have nothing further to look forward to but death...

...Her subsequent rebellion is what lands her in the beginning on the side of what the old man calls "fascist Reagan judges" and "the vilest kind of corporate vermin...

...Twenty-five years ago," says one of his characters, "the secret subject of women was sex...

...What will certainly be remembered as one of history's more spectacular dead ends is briefly looking to the jaded children of the Reagan era like a Golden Age...

...Here is a man who loves it all...

...From the relative sanity, it turns out, of the bad old days before the sixties—to which no filmmaker, to my knowledge, thinks we can ever go back...

...But it makes me feel dirty to assist in this voyeuristic exercise I don't mind Jim's having fun, but I do mind Stone's attempt to convince us that he was a hero for doing it...

...Yup, the greening of greed and the consternation of conservatism...

...Daddy's girl realizes she is working for sharks and breaks on through to the other side (J...

...Well, that's the price you pay for being a "God of Rock...

...I suppose that's enough of a reason to go on scrutinizing the decade when everything changed...

...When one of his women says that sometimes she feels "there is a big black hole inside of me that nothing could ever fill," she is talking about an emptiness that is spiritual as well as alimentary and sexual...

...Here, too, California is a metaphor for the way we live now, but instead of Martin's emphasis on dippiness, Mazursky concentrates on the blandness of the culture of the suburban shopping mall...

...It isn't...

...If not a shaman, he was at least a circus performer, one whose trick was to "kiss the snake on the tongue" But people come to watch that kind of thing because they hope that this time they will get to watch the snake kill him, as eventually it did...

...Of course the wicked corporation is guilty (having rather implausibly concluded that settling 150 lawsuits would be cheaper than fixing several thousand tail-light circuits) and indulges in a cover-up of evidence and—but you know the rest...

...Some of us who had to get through the decade the first time around feel particularly aggrieved that there is now once again money—if not art—to be made out of peace and love and flower children...

...All of this seemed to add up to Deep Meaning—so deep, in fact, as to be quite unfathomable...

...At least Warhol himself made no bones about it...

...Guess what happens...

...It would be more accurate to say that what they really wanted was sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, but that middle-class guilt made them also want to believe that that was sacred...

...For the corollary of sexual freedom was the necessity to remain sexually attractive—i.e., thin and young-looking...

...And when the teacher said, "Paint it," Andy did...

...The question of more general interest that he is getting at is this: What survives of the sixties today...

...Morrison...

...Nathanael West would recognize this version of California, although to me Jaglom's serious points are a little too heavy for the material he has to hang them on...

...As that quintessential California boy Jim Morrison used to say: "Will to be Weird...

...It is true that there is a brief attempt to portray him as greedy for fame as the people's champion, but it doesn't come off: we know that, even though he can be at times the "superior, self-righteous bastard" that his wife calls him at one point, he is on the right side—just as the saintly wife is when she stops her daughter from eating grape jelly, in solidarity with the farm workers...

...He was the hippest of the hip, but his own values were fundamentally those of his immigrant peasant family back in Pittsburgh...

...Its message is that the world still needs its sixties liberals...

...To him that decade's permanent legacy is the kind of crazy individualism of which California is the paradise...

...no guts, no glory...

...Those 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 who are a little slower to pick up the direction in which things are headed can tell it by the fact that daughter-lawyer drives an Alfa Romeo Spider instead of a BMW...

...Add in those who have a morbid fascination for ostentatious self-destruction (on one level the film is an invitation to us to cry, "Jump, Jim, jump...

...the sexual liberation they brought has mutated into a new kind of oppressiveness...

...T he state of constant anxiety in I which these women live their lives produces a dark and pessimistic vision of the late twentieth-century world...

...It wasn't...

...but Martin, unlike most non-Californians, likes silly things...

...fall in love with yourself') is a pretty poor stab at the "something sacred" that he imagined his fans wanted...

...For Jaglom the sixties have not survived in individualism but in a kind of desperate conformity...

...Here British screwball comedy seems born again with the girlfriend (Victoria Tennant), who plays that great anthem of sixties mindlessness, Manfred Mann's "Doo Wah Diddy," on the tuba...

...W hat a horrible thought...

...Above all, Warhol personified the essential ambiguity of the period...

...To be as successful as he was he had to be stupid enough to believe in it himself...

...Nor are material comforts the source of emotional solace as they are for Mazursky...

...In Eating, Henry Jaglom is both more and less inclined to yield to this comfortable despair...

...There are even Richard Lester-style camera tricks—time lapseand slow-motion photography—and appearances by such classic sixties types as George Plimpton and Peter Cook to help establish the film's antecedents in that era...

...Paradoxically, it is his disavowal of any more permanent significance to his artifacts that has made him the one sixties figure who still looks interesting in the nineties...