Media
McConnell, Frank
MEDIA CATHEDRAL TO OCTOPLEX REMEMBERING THE MOVIES Two interesting and related things happened-my stars, for a change, must have been in synch-as March gave way to April and spring began (in...
...sublimity of glitz-who said the Tacky can't be Great Art?-it's simultaneously a hymn to the rise and fall of the undisputed Rolls-Royce of the Hollywood studios, and a surprisingly honest and gritty history of the hype and human cost of an extraordinary moment...
...films and a salad bar of interviews with old M.G...
...MEDIA CATHEDRAL TO OCTOPLEX REMEMBERING THE MOVIES Two interesting and related things happened-my stars, for a change, must have been in synch-as March gave way to April and spring began (in California you can tell the seasonal change by the appearance of Easter candy in the grocery...
...Because Kawin is mad (I told you he was my friend): as mad as Gerry Mast was about the grandeur and glory of film as film, but also the sort of madman who cannot tolerate seeing a date off by as much as a year, a title-English or Rumanian, makes no difference-misspelled by as much as a letter or an accent mark, or a major or minor director's work discussed without full and intimate knowledge of all his/her films...
...Look: I'm not trying to sell you the book...
...Mast died early, in 1988, and his family and Macmillan Press asked Kawin to revise and update the next-the fifth-edition of the book...
...The series itself, of course, is also-in the spirit of its subject-partly self-serving hype...
...One needs a beer...
...So what we have here, after two years of painstaking agony, research, and rewriting-and I've got the phone bills to prove it-is a great book on film turned into an indispensable great book on film...
...The first was that I received a copy of the fifth edition of A Short History of the Movies (Macmillan, $38,667 pp...
...In its scope, wit, and breathtaking range of association, it was the ideal introduction to the one truly international art form of our century...
...as foundling, he is excused from appropriating the phallus at his father's expense...
...Or one needs A Short History of the Movies, by Gerald Mast as revised by Bruce F Kawin...
...If it's that good, we'll rent it on video...
...We go to the shoppingmall octoplex to catch Lethal Weapon VIII or Dances With Wolves II: The Revenge and have our eyes and ears blistered by a nonstop assault whose main point-sorry-is to conceal from us the fact that we really don't enjoy, anymore, sitting with strangers in a theater watching the screen...
...So yeah: Bruce Kawin is one of my oldest friends and maybe my best, but that doesn't stop him being part of one grand book...
...Ted Turner owns, as of 1990, 2,200 M.G.M...
...The moment, which lasted from, say, 1918 to 1980, was when the most advanced industrial nation in the world channeled Homeric effort, ingenuity, and Commonweal 22 May 1992: 13 wealth into a technology whose sole and sacred purpose was entertainment-for-a-price...
...Because the moment is over...
...Plus more...
...Flashy as all hell, with sets and costumes that not only summon up the great M.G.M...
...Gerald Mast, that good and generous man, first published his Short History in 1971, and it almost immediately became the textbook for any beginning class in film...
...I open, almost at random, a recent book on film theory and read this: "To the extent that Elliot identifies with E.T...
...If you care about film, you'll get it eventually anyway...
...The kind of madman who makes the encyclopedias the rest of us depend upon for our expertise...
...The second was that I watched the Turner Network's six-hour history of M.G.M., "When the Lion Roars...
...M. hands, is as satisfying a long Sunday afternoon as you could want-unless, of course, you live near Kaplan's Delicatessen in Los Angeles...
...It's a sure sign an art has lost its vitality when the ghouls move in and start trying to dissect the corpse...
...When the Lion Roars," hosted by Patrick Stewart, directed and written by Frank Martin and Michael Henry Wilson, and featuring a smorgasbord of clips from old M.G.M...
...films, and he's not only showing them on his channel, he's marketing them in video: gotta keep lane Fonda in Spandex, I guess...
...With Children...
...Now this, it turns out, is like asking Stephen Hawking to help you with your geometry homework...
...What I'm saying is that, just as "the movies" seem to be disappearing as a really living part of our culture, and just as the deconstructionist freemasons of the inarticulate appear to be carving that heritage up for their own smelly little ends, there appears this wonderful thing-a work of real scholarship-that, like all real scholarship, keeps alive the wonder and holiness of its subject, even for those who won't ever know the magic of the lights going down in the Loews and the curtain parting before the screen...
...Just as theater was subsumed and transcended by the movies, the movies have been subsumed and transcended by the Tube: and at each stage, our viewing-our communion-has become less communal and more privatized, more likely to separate us one from the other even as it claims to bring us together...
...Because it's in our homes that we really watch movies these days, isn't it...
...Now it's bad academic form to review a book by a friend...
...by Gerald Mast and revised by Bruce F. Kawin: more about that in a while...
...All I'm saying is that for the TV generation, in Mast/Kawin as in the Turner series, somewhere the lion still roars...
...and in doing so created a mythology as complex, rich, and infinitely variable as anything the Babylonians or the Middle Ages ever managed...
...All of Mast's original genius and lovely, loving consideration is still there, and now with what has to be the most absolutely reliable filmographic data to be found in any book on film, with Kawin's lovely and loving prose to boot, discussing recent directors Mast either didn't consider or only considered glancingly...
...The Loews and Rialtos, those great cathedrals of the American religion in the fifties and sixties, have been replaced by the Quaker meeting-houses of the den or the living room and VHS...
...Look at the state of film teaching in American universities...
...But that's okay...
...FRANK McCONNELL 14: 22 May 1992 Commonweal...
...but a hell of a lot to do with the academic narcissism of its practitioners...
...Kids today are taught-the real word is "bullied"-to think and write about movies in terms of a jumble of half-digested semiotic, Marxist, and feminist theory that has as little to do with real semiotics, Marxism, or feminism as it does with the films it pretends to discuss...
...This is, I think, what the physicists call "entropy...
...These two events taught me something I should have, but hadn't, realized about movies: I mean "the movies," as an American institution and secular religion: i.e., that in their way they're as dead as the Elizabethan stage or as Jacob Marley...
...monster productions, but catch, in their own way, the M.G.M...
...And last night I sat in my den and listened to the canned laughter on the sound track of "Married...
...We don't go to "the movies" anymore: not to that cool dark place where we all came together in silence to see what was "on" this week...
...I remember a whole audience horking together with laughter at the first showing, in South Bend, Indiana, of The Pink Panther...
...But I think I just told you that I think most of the academy is terminally silly...
...Sure, it's not quite as egregious as the teaching of literature these days, but then again, it hasn't had as much time to go rancid...
...It even enhances, makes more plangent, what is for me, finally, the all-but-inexpressible sadness of "When the Lion Roars...
Vol. 119 • May 1992 • No. 10
