The Talkies: Cliché Corners
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES by James Bowman Cliché Corners M ovies, like politics, journalism, and epic poetry, are made from clichés. In poetry, of course, they don't call them cliches but formulae. Just as...
...And the gangster movies, in turn, were compendia of clichés derived from popular melodrama, journalism, and cheap fiction...
...In many ways it could be said to be pro-war, since the most memorable thing about it is the gentlemanliness and unemotional devotion to duty of the perfectly matched French and German aristocrats, played by Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim, men who agree that "for a commoner, death in war is a tragedy...
...You might almost call them cool...
...In the movies the clichés are more often dramatic than verbal, but they serve the same purpose...
...In the context of its time, only two years before the beginning of the Second World War, there is a bitter irony to such words and, to my ears, a note of regret for the sense of duty and honor that were in danger of disappearing along with the aristocrats...
...Cast adrift in Montana with his guilt, he forms a bond with a scientist at the local Army research institute, played by David Paymer, with whom he shares not only a passion for fly-fishing but also a Secret Sorrow...
...So why should Skeet not have one...
...at being remade as comic in Some Like It Hot, re-issued this summer...
...Like Bill Clinton, our heroes have to be given a history of hidden (though obviously not too hidden) suffering to establish the charming vulnerability that the cool pose always masks...
...As one of the working-class and ethnic pair of soldiers (played by Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio) who are to succeed the aristos in the postwar world puts it as they approach safety in Switzerland: "You can't see borders...
...Why were they to be denied just because they were immigrants...
...They're manmade...
...Everybody has wealth, but who has power...
...Today imitation is the sincerest form of laziness...
...Now, they would be more accurately called not-coming-of-age movies...
...and since, as the poet Michael McClure says in The Source, being antiwar (along with being pro-environment) is one of the hallmarks of Beatdom, we might suppose that it was a prototype of Beat attitudes and Beat clichés...
...Nature couldn't care less...
...Childe Harold had one...
...77 en Caulfield, that great hater of phonies) and make drug-taking and casual sex into virtues...
...Other films of this sort include Detroit Rock City, The Adventures ofSebastian Cole, and Outside Providence...
...cries the child (as G.K...
...Here, Secret Sorrows are a kind of fashion accessory, a guarantee of cool and a mark of who is worthy of our sympathies—since merely risking your life for your country is not sympathetic enough...
...Despite portentous hints of a Big Brother in the making, the vast conspiracy in Enemy of the State confines almost all its attentions to three or four would-be whistle-blowers...
...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online — www.spectator.org...
...Yet even such celebrations of juvenile self-importance and self-indulgence are examples of cliché, as we are reminded by Chuck Workman's documentary, The Source, a loving tribute to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the other "Beat" pioneers of the Peter Pandering youth cult...
...The embarrassment shtick that he first perfected in Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994 is still funny enough to attract an audience, but the repetition is here varied by being joined to another set of cinematic cliches associated with mafia movies...
...Now he "will never throw a ball in the NFL...
...Chesterton says somewhere), and the grown-up person does it again and again until he is ready to drop...
...The American Spectator • October 199 9 65...
...64 October 1999 • The American Spectator His Secret Sorrow involves an accident, caused by him, in which a college football teammate was injured...
...Nowadays, such lust for wealth and power, for "making it" in a dog-eat-dog world, looks quaint, almost camp...
...But the old-fashioned gangster flicks took on a new relevance in the 70's because their implicit moralism had to be re-adjusted to suit a time in which, as one of the teenage heroes of the unspeakably awful Teaching Mrs...
...Like Teaching Mrs...
...Tingle—which was called Killing Mrs...
...The Godfather movies themselves stood on the foundation of the gangster movies of the 1930's and 1940's, which had had their own turn JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Their phoniness is deliberate and designed, like the "self-esteem" movement, precisely to bolster children's attachment to what is transparently unhealthy and untrue...
...To present them as admirable was, of course, the old cliche—one that would have been recognizable to Homer and the other epic poets who invented it and refined it over the intervening centuries between the Trojan and the First World Wars...
...0 ne of the most venerable clichés in American movies over the past 5o years at least has been the troubled teen —the moody, sensitive kid with a secret sorrow who may or may not cover up his vulnerabilities with tough-guy bluster but who has a way of popping up in the oddest places and in the company of seemingly unrelated clichés...
...Governments, it's true, may initiate or hide sinister conspiracies, as in The X-Files, but these most often have the mysterious property of being invisible to the world not only in their workings (which, after all, is the point of conspiracies) but also in their effects...
...But it still retained some of its old power when Renoir took it up with the inspired idea of combining it with the newer attitude, already well on its way to becoming the cliché we have since come to know so well, of a benevolent and pacifistic spirit of humanity that transcends national frontiers...
...Even if Kerouac might conceivably not have been saying that, the perception that he was is at least an important part of the reason Workman is celebrating his achievement 30 years after his death...
...Just as Homeric audiences apparently never got tired of being told that the dawn was "rosy-fingered," so the readers of newspapers must be comforted and reassured by endless repetitions of the fact that Our President, having been "scandal-plagued," is now (again) "the Comeback Kid...
...Again...
...The sneaking sympathy for the bad guys that had always leaked out of the gangster flicks (and that was also to become the foundation for film noir) now became the point of the movie, perfectly expressed by Al Pacino's reproof to Diane Keaton in The Godfather when she says that governments and legitimate businesses don't kill people: "Now who's being naive, Kay...
...Grant presumably knows that the way to succeed in Hollywood is to imitate previous successes, as early and as often as possible...
...Werther had one...
...These are not just bad movies in the sense that they are ill-made and phony (how odd, by the way, that the prototype for the cliché of the sensitive teen is so often said to be HoldComing-of-age movies are now more accurately called not-coming-ofage movies...
...Tingle until someone, in the wake of the Littleton massacre, thought the title might be impolitic just now—they resolutely take the point of view of the kids before rather than after the coming of age experience...
...I'm going to make my own meaning, and if you don't like it you can kiss my ass...
...Except that it seems no longer to be grown-up persons who are retailing this cliché in what used to be called "coming-of-age" movies...
...James Bowman welcomes e-mail at JamesBowman@home.com...
...The scientist's Secret Sorrow is that an experimental explosive he developed when tested incinerated eighteen soldiers...
...We go to see Hugh Grant being embarrassed in Mickey Blue Eyes not because we haven't seen him embarrassed before but because we have—only three months ago in Notting Hill...
...But for some reason, one of the two heroes, played by the perennially sensitive youth Skeet Ulrich, is also given a Secret Sorrow...
...Governments, armies, corporations, and, since Goodfellas, even the mafia are all seen as more or less bunglers and buffoons...
...But kids (it is the nicest thing about them from a marketer's point of view) never seem to get tired of it...
...First shown in 1937, this classic of the silver screen has long been known as an "antiwar" film...
...It takes a particular kind of moral obtuseness in anyone over zi to see such childishness as admirable, yet that obtuseness has become almost characteristic of our culture, hardened into place by the power of clichés at least as old as Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the notoriously and stubbornly "Lost Generation" of World War I. If we are ever to escape it, we might do well to return to the time when such clichés were still relatively new and take another look at them—something which the re-release of our Movie of the Month, La Grande Illusion by Jean Renoir in a sparkling new print, fortunately provides an opportunity to do...
...The mafia were just doing what everybody did that held or wanted to hold power...
...As a result, there is no corning of age but only a confirmation of their juvenile perceptions and values...
...There is nothing tendentious or political about its antiwar feeling, as there is in McClure's...
...Tingle puts it when his girlfriend says that kidnapping, tying up, and blackmailing their teacher is "not right": "What's 'right' anymore...
...Mickey Blue Eyes, like Analyze This earlier in the year, rests firmly on the foundation of The Godfather movies of the Iwo's, which have haunted our national imagination ever since they came out, though they are now being mined for their comic potential...
...So gangsters evolve from street toughs to little men in the grip of malign fate to businessmen with guns and now are in the process of a further transformation—into the Keystone Kops of the crime world—all the while remaining recognizably the same wise guys...
...It's not much of a mask, you might think, when the face beneath it is always the same...
...for us it is a good way out" —since they know that they and their whole class are on the way out anyway...
...It is not...
...But those gentlemen, at least, were one cliche who knew when it was time for them to leave the stage...
...In Chill Factor, for example, Speed meets The Rock, as a devastating explosive must be kept cooler than 5o degrees Fahrenheit by our odd-couple heroes, who are driving an ice-cream truck while being pursued with deadly efficiency by a formerly decent soldier now in league with terrorists because he has been betrayed, imprisoned, and driven mad by corrupt and murderous superiors...
...Its most revealing moment comes as a young man of today shows his appreciation for the Beats' enduring legacy by noting that, "Instead of looking for some universal meaning, Kerouac is saying: `F--k you...
...When a body turns up in The X-Files, nobody but the dogged Mulder and Scully and some shadowy figures in the background seem to notice, or to care very much...
...The clichés, in other words, are constantly in the process of being revised even as they are repeated (in epic poetry it is called "incremental repetition"), kaleidoscopically shifting, breaking up, and recombining to make new patterns...
...I never close my eyes without seeing those 18 guys," he tells the bad guy, who was made to carry the can for the accident (and so, in a way, has a Secret Sorrow of his own...
...Manfred had one...
...Again...
Vol. 32 • October 1999 • No. 10
