CONSERVATIVE TASTES: The Hero Vanishes

...Each between the tortured musings of a Bergman or an of these heroes, in however attenuated a fashion, was Antonioni and the comic-book derring-do of Indiana seen in addition as fighting on behalf of a community, a Jones, but both are the product of the last century’s civil order, or civilization which it was part of the film’s farewell—regretful in the case of the artistes and gleepurpose to represent to us as in some sense our own...

...Once that fatal step was taken, however great individual works of art might still be, a whole language of artistic expression was corrupted by self-consciousness...

...1998) and Federico Fellini (d...

...In Sergeant York, this community is most richly There may be another link as well...

...Nor is it just self-conscious cinematic artists and their blockbusting heirs who have killed off the hero...

...Even if they didn’t know what it was, these great revolutionary directors believed passionately in that reality—perhaps the more passionately because they didn’t know what it was...

...They made the artist the hero of his own creation...

...During the summer of the death of Bergman and Antonioni, I presented at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington an eight-film series titled “The JAMES BOWMAN American Movie Hero,” the point of which was to kidnapped by Comanches...

...The result was the nihilism of a Spielberg or a Lucas, filmmakers who abandoned the artistic pretensions of their models and reverted to being entertainers but who were as devoted as the masters to style and technique over anything inherently interesting about their subjects...

...But the would-be artists and “poets” of the cinema who came after them and who were inspired by their example had a very different view...

...But the great post-war directors, including Bergman and Antonioni, did to the movies what Picasso and Matisse had done a generation earlier to painting...

...to heroic stature but the extraordinary powers of intellect, instinct, or fighting prowess he has B UT ALL FOUR HEROES were virtuous in the etymo-been blessed with by nature...

...Up until their time, film—as we have since learned to call it—was still a medium of popular entertainment...

...His recent book is Honor: A he serves is taken still further...

...But the most lasting legacy of these four men is less likely to reside in their films, which range in quality from the dire Marxist agit-prop of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) to Bergman’s sublime Fanny and Alexander (1982), than it is for another and accidental accomplishment...

...Children who know only superheroes will find real heroes boring or incomprehensible, and when they come to maturity, if they ever do, it will be without the formerly natural habit of wishing to emulate their heroes...

...A vital link between the movies and reality outside themselves had been broken...

...Fistful of Dollars (1964) with Clint Eastwood, and Other examples were John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Peter Yates’s Bullitt (1968) with Steve McQueen were Jima (1949), Cooper again in High Noon (1952), and meant to illustrate what I called the cool hero...

...though he undertakes them anyway...

...In High Noon, the community belong to the nation on whom the duty of defending shows itself to be unworthy of the risks and the sacrifice Christianity and enlightened secular civilization has undertaken by Gary Cooper’s Marshal Will Kane, devolved...

...How do you emulate Harry Potter...

...Most movies were trash but many were highly enjoyable trash...

...His commentaries on the Edwards, like Marshal Kane, seems motivated only by individual films shown in “The American Movie Hero” his own sense of honor—in his case to find the niece can be read on his website, James Bowman.net...

...And the worst of the plague of superheroes is that they are both cause and consequence of the absence from our screens of real heroes...

...Though still a real hero, the knew as their audiences knew and without being told cool hero prepares the way for the cartoon hero of that leading men into battle, standing up bravely before Lucas and Spielberg, whose Raiders of the Lost Ark the enemy, not backing down from a fight, seeking jus-(1981) ended the series by pointing to the bleak heroic tice even when it is indistinguishable from revenge, landscape to come...

...and hanging in there when anyone who was not a hero You might not think that there was any connection would have quit are inherently admirable things...

...In The Searchers, this Public Policy Center and The American Spectator’s theme of the isolation of the hero from the community movie and culture critic...

...True, we still have the victim hero or anti-hero, modernism’s darling, but he’s not much use either if it’s the real hero who is in demand, as he always is...

...He was the The next three films in the series, Hawks’s The Big first of what I called the “virtuous heroes” who were Sleep (1946) with Humphrey Bogart, Sergio Leone’s still the norm in American movies up until the 1960s...

...Generations from now these will be remembered as the men who ruined the movies...

...That is they were men to emulate these qualities in the way that we (Latin viri), and men who were prepared to sac-can the courage, grit, and determination of the rifice their ease, their desires, their happiness, and even virtuous hero, and this means that the cool their lives in order that they might fulfill the impera-hero takes us out of the film as vicarious partives of manhood as they saw them, which was also how ticipants in what we see and stresses our status HighNoon many generations before them had seen them...

...They as mere observers...

...In The Sands of Iwo gret for Swedes or Italians in allowing their children to Jima, the home front has a much more shadowy pres-remain children all their lives, there are much more ence, while the main communal entity is the United serious consequences for all of us when the children States Marine Corps...

...For 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2007 them, detachment from reality seemed like a liberation and they embraced it rather than lamenting it...

...In one of the obitupresent in the two-thirds of the film devoted to Alvin aries of Bergman, he was quoted thus: “I usually say I York’s young manhood in the small Tennessee town of left puberty at 58...

...CONSERVATIVE TASTES The Hero Vanishes by James Bowman T WO GIANTS OF THE ART HOUSE CINEMA, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, died on the same day this summer, and the tributes to both men stressed—as I suppose was natural—all that set them apart from their fellow toilers in the celluloid vineyards of the mid-20th century and raised them to a stature rivaled only by their near-contemporaries, Akira Kurosawa (d...

...Yet Ford subtly fills in attempt to trace this gradual progression, during the 40 behind him the picture of the community he is esyears from 1941 to 1981, from an American popular cin-tranged from whose standards of civilization and sexuema of heroes and heroism to one of mere fantasy...

...Some of the best, such as the sophisticated comedies of Ernst Lubitsch or Jean Renoir, or the westerns of John Ford, rose to the level of serious art...

...The al continence he nevertheless represents in his private series opened with Sergeant York (1941), starring Gary battle against the savagery of the Indians...

...Thereafter, every second- and third-rate artist or director felt he had a license to become a little imitation Picasso or Bergman...

...We cannot hope logical sense of the term...

...SEPTEMBER 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...

...Only Sergeant his cue from Marshal Kane and Ethan Edwards in York among these was “virtuous” in the usual sense of being isolated from his community, but he difmorally well-behaved, and even he had to go through a fered from them in representing not primariprolonged period of sowing his wild oats first before his ly the act of will and nerve that it takes to rise religious conversion...

...ful in the case of the entertainers—to cinematic reality...

...He took Wayne again in The Searchers (1956...

...Egalitarian and utopian tendencies in the wider culture have made it embarrassed by heroism and have conspired with self-obsessed filmmakers to make unreality of one kind or another—most often in the form of super-powers or a mastery of fantastical and omnicompetent technology—almost the condition of the hero’s continued existence...

...Only Katy Jurado’s Helen, the woman he has scorned, sees that if he James Bowmanis a resident scholar at the Ethics and dies, the town dies with him...

...Cooper and directed by Howard Hawks...

...John Wayne’s Ethan History (Encounter Books...

...That’s better, I guess, than the devoPall Mall, but it also appears as the country whose tees of the cartoon hero, who seem never to want to claims on him he must learn to treat as separate from leave puberty at all...

...But whatever there may be to reGod’s and equally compelling...

...1993...

...Without this contempt for reality, they could not have become the creators of that seemingly endless procession of superheroes and other fantasy figures—what, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?—of which Harry Potter is only the latest to dominate the imaginative lives of our children...

...It haunts them all like the absent God in Bergman or the elusive image of a murder-victim in the corner of a photograph in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966...

...Like the postwar giants, such directors were the heroes of their own pictures, but they were comic rather than tragic heroes—“comic” not only in being light-hearted and flippant towards their material but also in the sense of the comic books from which they took so much of their style and worldview...