THE TALKIES: What's the Story?
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES James O NCE I HAD A FRIEND who was such an extreme antihistoricist that he affected to believe-I still can't quite imagine that he really did believe it--that there was no reason...
...To me it was not 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 JAMES BOWMAN surprising that none of these three prestige projects, Hollywoodland by Allen Coulter (director) and Paul Bernbaum (writer), The Black Dahlia by Brian DePalma (director) and Josh Friedman (writer), and All the King's Men by Steven Zaillian (writer and director) were box office disappointments (at best), as all three tried so hard to convey that atmosphere of hard-won knowledge and world-weary cynicism that they forgot the first rule of classic Hollywood story-telling, which is that something should happen, and that the movie should explain why and how it happened...
...In fact, a 1940s or 1950s setting for a film today is almost certainly a tip-off that it is going to be sheer fakery, since the things that interest today's audiences about the period-the costumes, the cars, the constant smoking and drinking, the striking poses of the tough guys and brassy dames, and, above all, the "repression" and selfconscious disillusionment-are so much easier to copy than the historical circumstances that produced these things...
...Well, we knew that...
...Thus: no story...
...Zaillian never actually gets around to presenting on screen any particular act of corruption by his hero, Willie Stark (Scan Penn), but just takes it for granted that there must have been some...
...But Hollywood is clearly of my friend's mind...
...What would be shocking today would be the survival of an illusion or two...
...In deference, presumably, to Mr...
...Messrs...
...By now, over half a century later, we have been so long without those inhibitions whose presence creates "repression;' and so long without those illusions whose absence creates disillusionment, that we have forgotten what they were...
...In short, they forgot to tell a comprehensible story...
...The poor person's crime, therefore, is not just a drop in the ocean, one more act of viciousness in a world that is full of it, but an isolated act of defiance, and of honor, a protest against goodness itself and the divine ordering of the universe that has put him at the bottom of the heap...
...DePalma and Friedman get away with this--to the extent they do get away with it-because we interpose an automatic corrective lens between ourselves and the period that fascinates us...
...THE TALKIES James O NCE I HAD A FRIEND who was such an extreme antihistoricist that he affected to believe-I still can't quite imagine that he really did believe it--that there was no reason on earth why Beethoven should not have been born in our own time and have written the same music he wrote 200 years ago, or why some Stravinsky or Stockhausen avant la lettre should not have written music of the kind that those gentlemen did and do had he happened to have been born in Beethoven's time...
...You only have to look at the three recent examples of neo-noir that opened the bidding in the Oscar-auction of September...
...Just to recap for those who were born too late to remember them, the most common of the illusions perdues of the period were of the possibility, even the expectation, of unselfish love, sacrifice, virtue, honor, and human nobility...
...We've been disillusioned for three quarters of a century, remember...
...For it is when we fail to recognize and understand all the historical reasons why we think, talk, write, and act the way we do, that we are the slaves and the prisoners of that history instead of its masters and molders...
...The paradigm of respectable society as a mere facade to cover the most appalling sorts of corruption is by now so familiar that, some of us seem to imagine, no further explanation is needed for any particular vicious act...
...Was it suicide, as the coroner gave out, or murder...
...The grown-up audiences of the 1940s and 1950s would have had memories of these beliefs and expectations from their childhoods and-especially if they were among the many who had been through depression and war-some gratifyingly disillusioning experiences of their own to make them empathetic participants in their cinematic heroes' disillusionment...
...Like the pulp fiction that they are mostly based on, the characteristic mode of these entertainments is one of seeing through the hypocrisies and deceiving appearances that are presumed to mask it to the sordid reality beneath...
...And if it was a murder, who had killed him...
...Moreover, by going for that noirish "edge" or"attitude" rather than trying to tell a story, today's movies miss the fact that story and not atmosphere was the essence offilm noir...
...It sees no reason at all why it shouldn't continue making what it has taken to calling by its pretentious French name, films noirs, even though film noir was the product of very particular historical circumstances and looks ridiculous when we try to copy it today-even when the films that do the copying are set in the era of thefilm noir, which is the 1940s and early 1950s...
...His new book, Honor: A History, has just been published by Encounter Books...
...It is precisely the genuine virtue, goodness, and morality of the rich-those things that they rely on for their justification as a class a p a r t - t h a t was seen by the suppressed left-wingery of the genuinely noir era as the insult to the poor, the divinely ordained reason why they must be excluded from the elect...
...But what the neonoir directors generally don't recognize is that the genre is at its best when the criminal is poor, not rich...
...Yet now, nearly half a century after disillusionment became a clich~ and repression a painted devil demanding to be ritually slain, the movies are still reenacting these foundational myths of the postmodern era as if we needed them, as perhaps we do, to reassure ourselves that our culture's departure from the beliefs-call them illusions if you like--that sustained our ancestors over so many centuries was right and necessary...
...Though another of Hollywood's great true-life mysteries is here accounted for, it is done so in such a way-by the invention of an entirely fictional family of rich and utterly unscrupulous people who are capable of anything-as to obscure rather than elucidate the narrative arc...
...My suspicion was that this person thought it an insult to human freedom, in which he and I both believed, to recognize that there was any such thing as historical contingency at all...
...NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...
...Now there's no trick at all to being knowing about the evil in the world...
...In both Hollywoodland and All the King's Men there is no development...
...All that we take away with us is Mr...
...But now we are so accustomed to seeing through these things, so ready to take for granted the deceptiveness of appearance, that the disillusionment of the 1940s has become nothing more than a form of cheap cynicism...
...But then we have to realize that the purpose of the neo-noir, the 21st-century noir, is neither to advance a political cause nor to entertain but rather to congratulate its audience on its own perspicacity in keeping those now almost forgotten illusions firmly in their place upon the ash heap of history...
...Especially on the part of the rich...
...They would, moreover, still have known at first hand and have been possessors themselves of the full set of repressive inhibitions and prejudices whose discrediting in the 1960s was what finally killed off the genuine film noir...
...Likewise, Robert Penn Warren's carefully contrived disillusionment at the corruption of Louisiana politics and, by implication, all politics in All the King's Men is very old news...
...All the action is just a kind of buzzing around the central, inert f a c t - that George Reeves was, in some indeterminate sense, both participant in and victim of Hollywood's sordidness just as Willie Stark was of Louisiana's...
...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and The American Spectator's movie critic...
...This view of the world was what was so powerful about the old noir films, and it loses all its meaning if you simply make the rich people secretly even more vicious and immoral than the poor people...
...Brody's character's painful realization of how awful and corrupt everything in Hollywood is...
...But neither he nor we ever find out the answer to these questions...
...I N HOLLYWOODLAND, Adrien Brody wanders hither and yon, looking for information that might solve the mystery of the death of TV Superman George Reeves (Ben Affleck...
...We can tell because Mr...
...If so, he seems tO me to have got things exactlythe wrong way around...
...Instead, there is just an infinite regress of possibilities...
...But I defy anyone to combine them all into one master-narrative on the basis of what we are told in the film itself...
...At least there was a story to TheBlackDahlia...
...In fact there were about a dozen that I could make out...
...Penn's well-known political beliefs, there are hints of a story, somewhere off-stage, about the rise of a fascist demagogue, but when Willie's own career is cut short this is reduced to mere portentousness...
...It's like solving the mystery of Jack the Ripper by imagining him as a contemporary of the Borgias...
...There is just a hint, too, of Penn Warren's story of a good man corrupted by power, but Willie's transition from goodness to corruption is so abrupt and unexplained that whatever that story might have been remains untold...
Vol. 39 • November 2006 • No. 9
