The Talkies/Pardon Me, Myth

...Now, as then, it is taken for granted that the human beings will be tough yet sensitive, will suffer and be misunderstood, and will have to fight against those who abuse or oppress or patronize them...

...It hath been otherwise, twenty times better, for us guys...

...I'll get you two...

...That is why Keshishian's documentary fails...

...it is merely trivialized by such a pantomime accompaniment...

...Typically in these latest retellings of The Myth, women deal with male sexual abuse by killing the men, so it is unremarkable that another disposable man 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 is blown away in order to set up what purports to be a comic situation in Blake Edwards's Switch...

...It is a serious meditation on the complex relations between art and love and money which is also a moving story of trust and betrayal and a human beauty which puts that of art in its proper place...

...Some punishment...

...Maybe the artists of the nineteenth century really behaved like this, but that is just another reason to avoid the real people and concentrate on their art instead...

...Of course one expects poor old C and R to be caricatured, as they are here in Geena Davis's brutish and idiotic husband, Daryl (Christopher MacDonald), yet Thelma is actually quite a good movie...

...Instead of de-emphasizing it, Madonna glories in her femininity, buckling it into pretty, shell-like armor that at once shows off her sexual attributes and renders her sexually impermeable except on her own terms...

...That film is tothe Tough Woman myth what The Graduate was to the sixties youth myth...

...It's beautiful and all that crap," he says, but "I'll get you another one...

...He just misses the point...

...Here is our contemporary Tough Woman transplanted to the nineteenth century in a way that might make the period come alive again—if it weren't for all that phoniness about Art...

...I f it is not possible to convey the greatness of one art in terms of another, my Film of the Month comes pretty close...

...Madonna bringing her personal life before the cameras is tediously manipulative if sublimely unconscious of the fact...

...It already is from mine...

...In Object of Beauty, as in the real real world, far removed from Hollywood myth-making, it has a price which few if any are willing to pay—except in superfluous dollars and cents...

...Scott's male characters retain their moral opacity for long enough to make us share in the women's feelings of tentativeness...

...Madonna on stage is truly exciting...

...Female buddies teaming up against swinish males is also the theme of Mortal Thoughts by Alan Rudolph...

...At least they do in The Myth—by which I mean Hollywood's continual retelling of what it assumes is a paradigmatic tale for our times...

...In the late sixties, you had to be James Bowman, TAS 's movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Chopin's music alone and unaided convinces us of the greatness of Chopin...

...Miss Barkin pretending to trip over her high heels is barely worth a smile the first time, and is worth something more than a grimace by the fourteenth...

...As, indeed, Easy Rider was—although in both cases, if your political consciousness is more highly developed than your artistic, you will find them difficult to watch without feelings of annoyance...

...Hugh Grant as Chopin has some manners, but the artistic license by which the others eschew them has to be granted by us on trust merely because this pack of boors and fops happen to bear famous names...

...Exhibit A for the other side in this argument is Madonna...

...Unfortunately, Michael LindsayHogg's Object of Beauty will probably be gone from your neighborhood cinema by the time you read this...

...young and male to be taken seriously, even to be fully human, in the myth-makers lens...

...Sometimes this is funny, as when she declares that money, rather than earrings, makes people beautiful, or when she tells her father to wait outside while she is dressing and then not only allows the camera into the dressing room but bares her breasts in front of it...

...In fact, the real people are unfailingly boring and predictable by contrast with the glitz...

...He attempts to cordon off The Madonna Show from "real life" by switching back and forth between color and grainy black and white, but it swiftly becomes apparent that real life is part of The Madonna Show too—and an inferior part...

...To me her scribbled explanation of the theft`Because it spoke and I heard it"—is too pat, but otherwise the counterpoint between her and her brother and the American couple is nicely done: the poor are not romanticized and the rich are not simply corrupt...

...But Thoughts is marred by its uneasy combination of character study and whodunit...

...Today the principal runs away from instead of into marriage, but both films are moralistic versions of their respective myths, just as High Noon was the moralistic version of the fifties myth of the man-who-stands-alone...

...It is really the audience which is made to suffer...

...Such moments are worth waiting for, but they are not enough to make this a good movie, except for the parts of it that are filmed onstage...

...Like the artistically pretentious country bumpkins who get taught a lesson by their awfulness, we are ready to say by the end that we "should not grieve if we never saw an artist again...

...Ultimately he falls victim to the Chorus Line fallacy: that behind the glitz of the show there are real people with aclaim on our interest and attention...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 33...

...Above all, the film doesn't pretend, as both Ruth or Dare and Impromptu do, that Art is playing around and having fun and being outrageous...

...Not that Beatty is wrong when he says that she doesn't want to live off camera...

...in the nineties, you have to be of youngish middle age and female...

...That is why people have to pay to watch them perform and why they have to pay people to listen to them maunder on about their personal problems...

...Scott gives us more subtlety than we are used to in this kind of movie, as well as some beauty and quite a lot of humor...

...There are too many ways in which costume dramas such as this one are, like Keshishian's Madonna, continually tugging at the clothesline from which our disbelief is suspended...

...That this film also purports to be about "real people' only accentuates the phoniness to my ear...

...What would Dick Tracy have said...

...But moralism gives way to romanticism and the starkness of individual moral choice diffuses into companionship in adventure in films like The Magnificent Seven or Fog Rider...

...Here there is some excellent acting from Demi Moore, Glenne Headly, and Bruce Willis, and Harvey Keitel plays a New Jersey version of the rough-hewn Arkansas cop with a sympathy for murderous women that he portrays in Thelma and Louise...

...Take away the public and she is just a woman, as vulnerable as Geena Davis in the truck-stop parking lot of Thelma and Louise...

...This time the male sex-tyrant gets his comeuppance not by getting killed, which anywhere but in the movies might seem like punishment enough, but by coming back to life as Ellen Barkin...

...Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise is the Easy Rider of the nineties...

...She doesn't want to sell it, he does...

...Only the poor chambermaid sees the statuette as art, and she must give it up to protect her brother...

...But see it if you can...

...Each is a combination of buddy movie and road movie and each ends with the moment at which the friendship and the road come to an end together in a violent apotheosis...

...I'm an artist," she says, "and this is how I choose to express myself...

...She can't live off camera, not as Madonna anyway, because it is the camera and the watching crowds which have made her what she is: the premiere exponent of public sexuality...

...A caricature like Sleeping with the Enemy gives us our clearest look at The Myth in its present form...

...Here is a film that has nothing going for it except its fidelity to The Myth, for it says the right thing, in its terms, about sexual identity—i.e., that it is merely accidental and irrelevant to anything except childbearing (and maybe not even that...

...Because the whole story is narrated in flashback, the true nature of the bond between the women is withheld to the end, along with the identity of the murderer...

...And it is appropriate that the most personable of them turn out to be the most treacherous and the roughest-looking the most reliable...

...She'll eat you alive—not in spite of but because of the fact that she is all woman...

...Only Madonna is a worthy sexual partner for Madonna...

...Try to get through this chick's defenses, baby...

...She tells us more than we want to know about her sexual experiences and then shuts the door on the cameraman when she is discussing business...

...The sentimental religiosity of Madonna's regular pre-show prayer session (she takes the gum out of her mouth for the paying customers but not for God) is nothing next to her sanctimoniousness about Art...

...The documentary made by Alek Keshishian on her "Blond Ambition" tour, Truth or Dare, is another look at the Tough Woman—one who challenges the male tendencies to aggression and domination that the other redactors of The Myth are so afraid of...

...Each of the Americans thinks that the other has faked the theft for the insurance and suspicion and mistrust grow between them...

...Something of the same attitude is to be found in James Lapine's Impromptu, which is not as good as the smashing performance of Judy Davis as George Sand should have made it...

...The movie evokes for us the attractive yet threatening nighttime world of bars and truck stops and motels and gas stations, as well as the uncertainty and fear of the woman alone in it who has to decide whom she can trust...

...Poor Warren Beatty sits disgruntled in a corner making sour comments about her exhibitionism and looking scarcely less emasculated than the homosexual dancers who delight in her domination of them on stage and off...

...By that time it is too late for us to make sense of it, and we are left in the dark as to how much retrospective credence is to be given to the version of events we have seen only through the eyes of a tainted source...

...Even the woman's point of view is well done...

...What keeps the girls (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, who is becoming so closely identified with it that she may one day be the Doris Day of this superseded myth) on the road is not drugs but male sex-violence...

...Now it is time for the romantic version of the Tough Woman myth...

...Even the exquisite Judy Davis's ecstatic writhings to Chopin's music look almost as fakeas Madonna's visiting her mother's grave: not because Chopin's music isn't wonderful or Madonna didn't really love her mother, but because the truth of real feelings about real events is to some extent compromised when they are used as means to a dramatic end...

...For her, masturbation is not so much coy synecdoche as it is a natural expression of her narcissistic and self-regarding sexuality...

...Before they can decide what to do, the figure is stolen by a deaf and dumb chambermaid (Rudi Davies) who lives in a squalid flat with her punk brother...

...For her this status as Artist is a kind of diploma conferring special privileges upon the bearer...

...but their object is still the kind of self-realization that comes from breaking ties to conformity and respectability—those constant enemies of the heroes of so many different kinds of myths over the years...

...An American couple (John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell) staying in a posh London hotel run out of money and contemplate selling their one asset,a small bronze figure by Henry Moore...