The Talkies: Self-Ignorance

...Please, God," she had prayed silently to herself, "don't ever let that happen to me...

...But self-deception is also deception, and often the means by which deceptions are perpetrated on others...

...The only must-see movie is the re-release, re-cut and restored, of Orson Welles's Touch ofEvil of 1957, which may just be the best B-picture ever made...

...Brenda Monte, in her forties, affects a studied indifference to sex and men, who are always "coming on to" her or, oddly, simply wanting to expose themselves to her, while declaring her determination to44 The only must-see movie is the re-release, re-cut and restored, of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil...

...As in his hilariously outdated seventies bachelor pad, decorated with pornographic art, he thinks he cuts quite a glamorous figure...

...Her continuing insistence that she has a perfect right not only to marry for money but that she can easily do so and then not engage in sexual relations with her putative husband is part of an aggressive assertion of entitlement which includes her right to shoplift small but expensive things she needs...

...Such defiance of all experience would be rather splendid if it were not so boring...

...The cinematic result is movies like Permanent Midnight or Rounders in which what might once have been treated as sociopathic behavior—drug addiction and obsessive gambling, respectively—take on the kind of glamour that the movies always impart to suffering, even suffering in the cause of self-indulgence...

...You're supposed to do that on your own...

...It is reassuring to him, as it was to Aimee, that the reason for his romantic failures is so entirely outside his control...

...She has just broken up with an obviously unsuitable guy—older,unemployed, who got her involved in sado-masochism and bondage...

...Barker's technique of allowing these people a chance to work up their best self-presentations, to get their stories straight, as it were, is the ideal format for a show which is not really the documentary about sex and the single person in New York that it pretends to be but an essay on self-deception...

...That, at any rate, is what...

...Their job is to strike glamorous poses, like those of the "heroin chic" models of a couple of years ago, and not to present us with anything recognizable as a real human character...

...Ai James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JVBowman@compuserve.com...

...Lori, her oldest girlfriend, suggests as tactfully as possible that, if she really wants to get married in the next year, she might want to think about losing a few of her 220 pounds...

...Michael De Stefano is five feet four...

...As "a real last gasp" he's decided to try going to a "dating coach" — someone who will advise him on the things he can do to attract women, though he is defensively skeptical about it "You have a coach for tennis or golf—something where you have to master the technical details...

...Heston, his face darkened and mustachioed to make him look Mexican, wades into a trash-filled stream with a squealing and staticky radio-tape-recorder in pursuit of the crooked Quinlan's inadvertent confession...

...Admittedly, there are Nowadays self-deception passes for self-knowledge...

...I don't go out with mutts," he says with the same kind of insistence Brenda gives to her declaration that she's not a prostitute...

...Both films deal with the events of September ii, 1973, when Salvador Allende, Chile's elected Communist president, was overthrown and killed (or committed suicide) in a coup staged by General Augusto Pinochet and other leaders of the Chilean armed forces...

...What would be the point...

...Aimee Copp frankly confesses that she is desperate...

...Instantly, Aimee becomes emotional and defensive...

...She's always had a weight problem...

...Our culture expects the man to be taller than the woman, and he finds that most of the women he is interested in are taller than he is and, thus, not interested in him...

...These days the vogue word, derived from the jargon of therapy, for a refusal to face reality is "denial...

...Though at 28 she is the youngest of the four, she believes that she is almost out of time to marry and have children...

...Now, in her forties, the reality of aging and decay and loss, the human condition itself, comes as a complete and horrifying surprise...

...Such are the ironies with which, since Welles's time, we have become all too familiar...

...Maybe it's his extremely high standards in women...

...Though the claim was meant to be self-discrediting, it is hard not to reflect on the millions slaughtered by Allende's heroes, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro, and think that Chile has had a comparatively lucky escape...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site—http://www.spectator.org...

...These are people whom years of "dating" have turned into emotional and moral cripples...

...N icholas Barker takes neither a therapeutic nor a moral attitude towards the subjects of his marvelous quasi-documentary, Unmade Beds, but allows them to speak for themselves...

...For this insight we can cite no less an authority than our naughty-Boy President, Bill Clinton, who recently offered as one of the chaff-cloud of excuses for his own egregious deceptions the idea, made by oblique suggestion, that he should not be blamed so long as he believed them himself...

...Her insistence that she is not a prostitute suggests a painful underlying consciousness that she is becoming one...

...It is almost the only remark made by any of the four that smacks of self-knowledge or even self-detachment...

...Like the others, she just can't understand why it is so difficult for her to find romance...

...Best of all is the hilarious climax of the picture in which Mr...

...For while Allende's Communist dream lies in ruins everywhere else in the world, Guzman and a few other cadres of the revolution among the idle, subsidized intellectual classes supported by universities and foundations in the wealthy West continue to believe in it...

...You have to wonder if Welles knew what he was doing—which was anticipating postmodern movies by twenty years—or if he thought he was making another Citizen Kane...

...The film resembles the magnificent, ruined shambling figure of Welles himself as Hank Quinlan, a corrupt police detective in a U.S...

...Here is the film's sexlessfemale narrator still spouting her Marxist gibberish about how "the class nature of the state repressive apparatus becomes apparent [as] the officers side with fascism" because "three years of economic warfare have enabled imperialism and the bourgeoisie to win over important segments of the middle class...

...Mikey Russo is fifty-ish by the calendar but mentally remains the 25-year-old swinger he was in the early 1970's when it was thought very cool and sophisticated to enjoy sexual relations with three women in a 24-hour period...

...To use "privacy" as a defense against the charge of perjury is quintessential Hollywood narcissism...

...Fate has dealt him a cruel blow...

...Somehow she always thought that it didn't apply to her, that God would exempt her from the laws of nature...

...Those with a more sociological interest in the movies and a high boredom threshold might want to try the documentary Chile, Obstinate Memory by Patricio Guzman...

...are screen jobs not for actors but for models...

...And there you have another therapeutic principle: There is no reality apart from what we believe...

...He claims to be a screenwriter, though he has never sold a screenplay...

...Both Ben Stiller's junkie and Matt Damon's gambler (who insists he's not really gambling since he's sure to win—and does win...

...Mikey's idea of honesty is confessing that he "was never a Robert Redford or Paul Newman type" —but more like Jack Nicholson or Harvey Keitel...

...It comes paired with the central episode of Guzman's twenty-year-old Battle of Chile Part Two, a 90-minute black-and-white Marxist epic called The Coup d'Etat...

...11 marry for money...

...The American Spectator • November 1998 77...

...The cult of romantic love and the multi-billion dollar culture we have built on it ends here, with Brenda looking at her body in the mirror and remembering once long ago seeing a middle-aged woman whose upper arm flapped from side to side when she lifted it...

...As with most therapeutic language, it is an attempt to extract the moral element from the older terms, in this case self-deception...

...That is what he did once, anyway, back in 1974, so he tells us...

...Now she feels embarrassed that she was "dumped by a submissive" — and wonders if they can get back together...

...Like so many other moments in this wonderful film, such spiritual poverty strikes us as being depressingly typical of life in Bill Clinton's America...

...So far as he is concerned that's all you have to know about him...

...Among these flashes are his making the good and incorruptible cop the foreigner, while the Americans are all more or less complicit in wrongdoing...

...Each is pathetic in his own way, and each has a very carefully developed stratagem for disguising the fact from him- or herself...

...Almost the only moment lightening the gloom of self-deception comes with the announcement by a proud and patriotic young man that the number of victims (about 2,10o) of the anti-Communist repression in Chile, including "the disappeared," was the smallest of any country in Latin America...

...border town who tries to frame an honest Mexican cop called Vargas (Charlton Heston) after the latter catches on to his crooked ways...

...understood him to mean when he said he thought that in the confrontation between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas seven years ago, both of them sincerely believed they were telling the truth...

...The hourlong Chile, Obstinate Memory records Guzman's return to Chile last year—after Pinochet had at last stepped down from the presidency, having given his country peace, the most prosperous economy in Latin America, and, finally, a restoration of democracy—to talk about the coup with survivors whose memories, like his own, are very obstinate indeed...

...The therapeutic etiquette which dictates that we not challenge other people's realities with arguments from morality is essentially the basis for the Boy President's so-far successful appeal, backed by a galaxy of Hollywood and other stars, to his rights of "privacy...

...But having a life...

...Now he can't understand why he's still not doing it...

...There's no way you can make that work...

...Never was a picture more appropriately named...

...76 November 1998 - The American Spectator realities that we may deny, but the state of denial then becomes a kind of private, alternative reality which is impenetrable to any outside—read moral — influences and can only change from its own, internal contradictions and dissatisfactions...

...My income is $2,000," she says, "and my expenses are $3,000...

...Thus does the therapeutic ethos end up glorifying what it first set out to cure...

...Its corny dialogue and cheesy production values may have been dictated by budgetary considerations or fatigue or drunkenness, but Welles makes the most of them and, like his character Quinlan, retains the power to surprise us with flashes of brilliance...

...Welles stands on the bridge above him, talking into a microphone the size of a cigarette pack which JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement has been planted on his partner, and big Chuck Heston — representing honesty, decency, rationality, good government, and high technology—stands beneath him like poor Kenneth Starr, in garbage up to the crotch and reduced to the level of a common Peeping Tom...