THE TALKIES
Bowman, James
Sneak Attack: Hollywood vs. History BY JAMES BOWMAN hen I was a boy, my parents wouldn't let me read comic books. Of course I sneaked them into the house and read them at every...
...The story of a party of tourists stranded in an African desert who pass the time by having rehearsals for a performance of King Lear sounds unpromising, but Levring is able to do impressive things with it, and even add a dimension of meaning to Shakespeare himself when we see people who otherwise would have had no time for him finding in his words the perfect expression for states of mind and feeling that they also would not otherwise have had time for...
...1980s...
...The times tried our souls," says the pretty nurse in voiceover, "and through the trials, we overcame...
...even just among the girls would have been thought unladylike...
...But it unquestionably contributes to the sense of excess that seems to me inseparable from the experience of this picture...
...These movies vandalize the past as a way of paying tribute to the "I trust you'll find it suitable...
...I sometimes think that even the idolatry of the Second World Warriors inspired by Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (which Pearl Harbor imitates in part) and Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation-and now about to issue in a hideous memorial on the National Mall in Washington-is similarly tainted.Who could be against honoring the men and women who won the war...
...Luhrmann nor Mr...
...is pure 1990s slang, as is: "But that's just me," while urging a bereaved person to "move on" or "get on with your life" after only a few weeks or months smacks of contemporary psychobabble...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR N Summer Reading Issue 2001 117 The comic book mentality positively cultivates the illusion that the people of previous generations were just like us, right down to a fondness for Queen or Elton John...
...The comic book mentality does not bother-or, in the case of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge or Brian present, since it flatters the stupid to be told that their ancestors were only trying with very imperfect success to be like them...
...Offenbach was not techno-music, "It's not on the resume, but I do all my own stunts...
...Paris in 1900 did not have New York's celebrity culture of the 1980s...
...If every visual image is scrupulously accurate, but no one at the time could actually have seen what we moviegoers see in this film, does that amount to falsification...
...Obviously, too, the Moulin Rouge was not Studio 54, whatever may have been their superficial similarities...
...Helgeland really believes this, but nevertheless they enjoy the sense of liberation it gives them to say, as Peter Travers of Rolling Stone did in commending A Knight's Tale, "purists be damned...
...By "purists," of course, they mean those of us who believe it matters what the people who inhabited the earth before us were like-and that they were not like us...
...Long-time readers will know of my dislike of fantasy and belief that it is debilitating to the imagination, but in a way comic-book reality is even more harmful than comic-book fantasy...
...But the natural tendency of the times and their yuppie, therapeutic culture to honor the heroes as victims and "survivors" rather than "the glorious dead" suggests that we want a little of their glory for ourselves...
...But with the supersession of academic history by theory and the pop cultural efforts of people like Messrs...
...In theory there should be nothing wrong with this-at least I feel almost as much at a loss as my mother in trying to explain what is wrong with it...
...What Levring realizes that none of the other filmmakers do is that the points of connection between us and those who have lived before us come not out of the pretense that they were like us but out of those rather scary moments of recognition and selfknowledge (and they rarely are more than moments) when we realize that we are like them...
...There is too much of everything (beginning with too much money), and the views of the actual attack on Pearl Harbor are too perfect-perfect as they can only be when drawn, as in a comic...
...Combination: Theatre, dance-club, brothel...
...Offenbach was not techno-music, "It's not on the resume, but I do all my own stunts...
...After all, we're survivors too...
...a sense of shame...
...History BY JAMES BOWMAN hen I was a boy, my parents wouldn't let me read comic books...
...Now, that's a fairly serious theme, but we want to deal with it in a disarming, fun way...
...But the movie was made just so as to make such facile comparisons, as if its purpose was simply to glory in the intellectual shoddiness of its conception...
...One has the sense that the filmmakers are at least trying to make their film look authentic-like the Merchant-Ivory team in the woefully inadequate Golden Bowl and unlike Luhrmann or Helgeland...
...And, as in Bangkok, people at the Moulin Rouge could pay money and have sex with them afterwards...
...Now in middle age, I have come to the conclusion that there are reasons why reading comic books is bad for you...
...For the coloring and heightening of reality that you get in comic books, especially when consumed as a steady diet, becomes just another form of fantasy...
...I suspect that, to her, it would have been like having bad table manners or an unpressed shirt--that is, it was a sign of inferior social origins-and that she was afraid to admit to such snobbery...
...The "we" in context seems to mean "my boyfriend and I" and so is a reminder of the extent to which the movie's-and the movies'-treatment of history tends to be only a means to treating ourselves...
...Of course neither Mr...
...It just goes to show you that when you have a serious problem to get your mind around it can be a recreation and a pastime for life-as, generally, comic books are not...
...But when I asked why I wasn't allowed to read them, I remember my mother replying that I would learn bad spelling habits from them...
...Sex has been for sale in most places on earth through most of human history, but what makes Bangkok Bangkok today is not the same thing that made Montmartre Montmartre a hundred years ago...
...It is an interesting question...
...Could you be any more boring...
...1980s...
...He clicks his fingers and pauses for the most fleeting of nanoseconds: "(2) Moulin Rouge was Studio 54.You know, a place where an entrepreneur invented something based on a dance-craze where the rich and powerful-Bianca Jagger, and Mick, and Elizabeth Taylor-could go down and mix with the young, the beautiful, and the penniless...
...The story, too, is a comic-book tale of two handsome young fighter pilots (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett), best friends since THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 0 Summer Reading Issue 2001 116 childhood, who fall for the same pretty Navy nurse (Kate Beckinsale)-and it is already tending to crowd out the worldhistorical events that make up its backdrop when the director, Michael Bay, and his screenwriter, Randall Wallace, give the game away by abandoning the story of the Second World War at the point, sometime in 1942, when the right guy gets the girl...
...Of course I sneaked them into the house and read them at every opportunity, at least through a two- or three-year period of my youth when I might not have been so interested in them if they had not been forbidden...
...Twice, at least, the celebration of a kill takes a man away from his weapon, which could have continued firing at the enemy...
...Some effort was always made at least to pay lip-service to the otherness of the past...
...118 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR E Summer Reading Issue 2001 Obviously the Moulin Rouge was not Studio 54, whatever their superficial similarities...
...Luhrmann and Helgeland, this belief may itself soon be a historical relic.Who notices, for example, the way in which, on the few occasions in Pearl Harbor when our boys shoot down one of the attacking Japanese planes, they all cheer and dance about and pump their fists and do little end-zone celebrations of a kind that have become common in the last 20 or 30 years but that would have been seen as unseemly and undisciplined then...
...I think she must have given it to buy time: because she didn't really know why reading comic books was bad for me...
...Paris in 1900 did not have New York's celebrity culture of the 1980s...
...Without the celebrity culture of 1980s New York, Studio 54 would not have existed, and Paris in 1900 did not have New York's celebrity culture of the nor could anybody in 1900 have been Bob Dylan...
...How do we show that this young kid, this poet, is like Bob Dylan...
...Unfortunately, the enemy are twice referred to as what sounds like "Jap suckers" (though it may have been another word)-which was not used in this sense then, and I suspect that a woman's saying: "He did have a very cute butt...
...But Ii Helgeland's Knight's Tale, it positively cultivates the illusion that the people of previous generations were just like us, right down to a fondness for Queen or Elton John...
...I haven't liked everything I've seen of the Dogme films, but the most recent to open in this country, The King is Alive by Kristian Levring, makes a good Movie of the Month because it shows how a historical text-in this case Shakespeare's King Lear-can be brought into the present without doing violence to the past...
...Her answer puzzled me then and it puzzles me now...
...118 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR E Summer Reading Issue 2001 Obviously the Moulin Rouge was not Studio 54, whatever their superficial similarities...
...These thoughts occurred to me as I watched the first of this summer's blockbusters, Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, which uses computer animation seamlessly blended with live action to produce the same kind of heightened reality you find in a comic book...
...Among the other interviews I saw with Luhrmann, one suggested that the comic-book excesses of Moulin Rouge may have owed something to a reaction against the self-imposed austerities of the Danish Dogme 95 group...
...Whatever you may think of Bob Dylan, and some people whose opinion I respect think him a serious poet, he is fundamentally and ineluctably different from the people who were serious poets in 1900...
...So we're musicalising it...
...ut of course Montmartre was not Bangkok, no matter how much sex was for sale there...
...History has always been to the movies more or less a quarry out of which pretty stones, agreeable to our own taste and the fashions of our time, can be removed at will, but there used to be about this process (as about so much else...
...And the musical contract is: How do we understand that da-da da-dada-da da-da [he sings the famous Offenbach can-can tune] was the most hard-core techno of the time...
...As it happens, I am quite a good speller, and most of the comics then were probably better proofread than books from university presses are nowadays...
...At any rate, the experience of watching it too often produced in me a feeling of oppression at the cumulative unrealities rather than exhilaration at the sheer visual splendor of the thing...
...Anyway, it got me to thinking, and in a way I have been thinking about this subject ever since...
...Here is how Baz Luhrmann, fresh from the triumph of Moulin Rouge at Cannes-Cannes, spoke to an interviewer about what he had been trying to accomplish: "Now, through research, we know it's a fact: (1) Montmartre was Bangkok-a slum/sex industry...
...c ; presumably the example of Luhrmann and Helgeland means that they don't have to try very hard...
...Full marks to the producers for avoiding the use of the f-word, which would be common today but was not at all then...
...It was a Disneyland of sexuality, a carnival of flesh for sale...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
