The Talkies / The World of Carpi James
Bowman, James
M y favorite politically correct critic and commentator on film, Caryn James of The New York Times, had a bad moment recently. In writing about a film she otherwise loved, Sally Potter's Orlando—the...
...the masculinist...
...This, I take it, is the sign of first-class artistic achievement—this and the fact that no political faction has bought a stake in it...
...Truth to historical fact becomes just another way to be unoriginal...
...This bit sent dear little Caryn James into an ecstasy of admiration: Eastwood turns "convincingly into a sensitive guy" and thus becomes "a shrewd combination of the familiar, invincible Clint and a new, vulnerable man for the 90s...
...and that the respectable appearances that they set so much store by can hide some pretty nasty behavior...
...Such a character is not a stereotype, which is boringly predictable, but an archetype, which is interestingly predictable...
...Just as Orlando defies the most basic of historical realities, time, by not growing old or dying, so he/she mocks the most basic of biological realities by changing sex...
...In writing about a film she otherwise loved, Sally Potter's Orlando—the story of an epicene English nobleman of the sixteenth century surviving without aging into the twentieth and changing sex along the way, sometime in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth—Ms...
...In the meantime they have been flocking to movies like Sleepless in Seattle and The Firm, which reaffirm the standard tropes of the Hollywood culture...
...you want to be in love in a movie...
...They have to learn that she is not so very much worse than they are after all...
...I for one am far from convinced that Frank is in any important respect different from Dirty Harry or the Man with No Name or William Munny of Unforgiven or any other of the clones of the character Eastwood has played throughout his career...
...The Clint Eastwood character in In the Line of Fire still has that archetypal quality, but it shows signs of wearing thin...
...Both the drop-dead beautiful killer and the hard-bitten, tight-lipped melancholy Man Alone played here by Clint are common figures in the movies these days, but nobody bothers to identify them as stereotypes...
...Hollywood, of course, would be unthinkable without such stock characters, which are usually identified with particular actors...
...She might as well object that in the sumptuously photographed Elizabethan settings the men wear doublets and hose and the women wear dresses...
...Sleepless is particularly interesting because, unlike The Last Action Hero, its self-consciousness about being cinematic is entirely un-ironic...
...just a different sex...
...Potter, like the graffiti artist who pencils in a moustache on the Mona Lisa, seems to be pleased with her own wit in suggesting the possibility of sexual ambiguity behind the icons of the past...
...But by any standard of what constitutes "the best" other than the presence of sensitive guys and careerist gals this is unlikely to be true...
...As yet this is not quite so true in Europe, which is one reason why I turn so often, as I do again this month,, to a European film as Movie of the Month...
...All the right archetypal figures are in place, so it doesn't seem to matter to audiences that the premise of the plot—that a firm of high-powered lawyers would be stupid enough (1) to involve themselves in criminal activity in cahoots with their Mafia clients, (2) to murder members of the firm who discover the truth and try to bail out, (3) to get caught on account of atransparent scheme of overbilling virtually all their clients, and (4) finally to be outsmarted, en masse, by little Tom Cruise—is ridiculous...
...Another lady critic, Rita Kempley of the Washington Post, takes a similar line when she compares the recent re-release of Snow White with a new kids' film, an unspeakably rubbishy (even by latter-day Disney standards) piece of witch-mongering called Hocus Pocus, and finds the latter worthy of commendation because "at least the female characters are riding their brooms instead of sweeping up after dwarves...
...and women not liking it could be enough completely to vitiate even Orlando, which is so assiduous an attempt to efface the true image and deny the real function of sex through the ages as to constitute an act of historical vandalism...
...Yet, in the end, the film invites us to reply: well, why not...
...The unspoken assumption of such critics is that the purpose of the cinematic as of the other arts is to promote the progressivist fantasy of a world in which men do not make war but women may—though they may not sweep up...
...And he doesn't mind spouting it precisely because he knows that the underlying character remains substantially undisturbed...
...He's just been given a bit of feminist-inspired dialogue to spout...
...The fake itself proves to be fake...
...This is too confusing, and audiences have understandably shunned the thing...
...Also, she thinks he's a hunk...
...Neither does The Firm break any new ground...
...A beautiful young woman who has been living in Berlin returns to a little Swedish village to claim an inheritance and scandalizes the villagers with her city ways...
...If it didn't matter that the Clint-clone should be recognizable to a popular audience, they might as well have cast Jerry Lewis as, Dirty Harry...
...James avers that "the idea behind Orlando's gender change—that men are the warmongers and women the peacemakers—seems dangerously close to traditional stereotypes...
...At least not when such dialogue takes place between them as this: Asking her about her love life, Eastwood guesses that she has ended a relationship because "you swore you'd never again let a man come between you and your career...
...Maybe this is what Caryn James meant by the "dangerous" stereotypes: the ones that look too much like the truth...
...Thus are films judged according to their effectiveness as propaganda for the feminist utopia, while the judges pretend that their concern is really with the freshness of the image...
...When the celluloid hero supposedly enters the real world and finds that real bombs and bullets are less selective in their effects, it is meant to be a revelation both to him and to the action-sated audience...
...Youdon't want to be in love," says one character to another...
...Most of the best Hollywood films derive their power over their audiences by making the familiar seem archetypal and the archetypal seem familiar...
...I'm not quite sure what the import of "dangerously" is, but the suggestion seems to be that even the merest hint of a representation of men making war (who ever heard of such a thing...
...And, indeed, someone in a movie who wants to be in love in a movie would seem to be in the right place to realize her ambition...
...nterestingly, something similar happened to The Last Action Hero.The archetypal action hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, having become a little too familiar, is here exposed as a fake, a merely celluloid creation in a celluloid world where bombs and bullets create a visual phantasmagoria but are always ultimately powerless when directed at the hero...
...CI...
...She is a tough Secret Service agent, cover-girl beautiful but every bit as deadly as her male colleagues, whose purpose in the film is to remind Clint that things have changed since the sexist days of John F. Kennedy, whose memory he reveres, and then to serve as his love-interest in reward for learning that lesson...
...Nothing is quite as it appears at first—or even at second—yet everything is as familiar as a stereotype...
...In the end, the demands of the genre are stronger than the urge to debunk it, and Arnold, though he takes a bullet in a non-vital place, is essentially the hero of old...
...Hal Holbrook has played the corrupt grandee as often as Clint Eastwood has played Dirty Harry, and Paul Sorvino's arrival late in the film as a Mafia capo was greeted by the audience on the night I saw it with a delighted sigh of recognition...
...is just too unbelievable a character, and Frank Horrigan, the "sensitive" Secret Service man played by Eastwood, is a little too boringly familiar...
...ut the feminist vision is certainly Bas freighted with stereotypes as the one it opposes (what should we call it...
...Clearly, Caryn James got so far into the spirit of the thing that even such a vestige of historical fact as a depiction of men making war seemed to her "dangerously" close to stereotype...
...It is not...
...Look how common are such characters as the one played by Rene Russo in Clint Eastwood's In the Line of Fire...
...It is a world that has never existed but they believe it can be brought into existence if only artists are conscientious enough about avoiding sexist "stereotypes...
...House of Angels is a Swedish film by a British director, Colin Nutley, who creates stereotypes in order to subvert them...
...Meanwhile, Tom Cruise is busy playing Tom Cruise: the wise-ass who has to be taught a lesson but who takes the lesson to his heart of gold and defeats the forces of corruption, injustice, and reaction...
...Thus she has that old queen and author of The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp, playing another old Queen, Elizabeth I, while Orlando, the young boy that he/she takes a fancy to, is played by Tilda Swinton, a woman...
...it's all enough to make this, in her view, "the best commercial movie of the summer so far...
...Then he suggests his own suitability as a mate for her by telling her that he "swore I'd never again let my career come between me and a woman...
...John Malkovich as a deranged ex-CIA agent who is very cross because his country has taught him to kill (who else would you expect to try to murder the president...
...The point is that these real world difficulties are swallowed by the enthusiastic audiences—along with yet another depiction of our federal government's law enforcement agencies as sly and brutal and duplicitous—because they are ultimately irrelevant to the play of archetypes that the audience has come to see...
...Interestingly, Bill Clinton liked it too...
...When, at length (at great length), Orlando is transformed into a woman, she turns to the camera and pronouncesthe progressivist credo in as succinct a form as we are ever likely to have it: "Same person, no difference at all...
...The Cary Grant/Deborah Kerr film, An Affair to Remember, which is the acknowledged prototype for Sleepless in Seattle, is thus reprised by it—with the nasty accident cut out and a cute kid thrown in—and the audience's will to believe in the celluloid world is simply reinforced without first being called into question, as in The Last Action Hero...
...Then there is the bumbling but likable ex-con private eye and his ditzy secretary...
...The politically less convenient of the movies' repertory of archetypal images are reduced to stereotypes...
...T hus does film criticism in America tend to spill over into cultural criticism, a la Caryn James: you end up criticizing—or praising—the archetypes rather than the film itself, and it becomes a matter of political rectitude to defend your side's archetypes against the other side's...
...It is not a very original theme or story, and the twist in the plot at the end you can see coming a mile off, but it is told with so much narrative and cinematic originality and inventiveness that the treatment echoes the theme: that characters and situations that may on the surface suggest stereotypes have to be looked at again when you look closely, or from a different angle...
...The nearer your characters get to looking like real people, the less suitable you are likely to find them as propaganda weapons...
...And that makes him a tempting target for those who want to replace the old archetypes with the new stereotypes...
...The result is funny and tender, humorous and heart-warming...
...We've seen and loved them all before...
Vol. 26 • September 1993 • No. 9
