Trash, Art, and Critics

...The last view says, I have become acquainted with trash while spending most of my time with better things—that is the way I intend to keep it, MOVIES thank you, and I think the separation will take care of itself...

...or the way a group of scientists approaching the monolith were made to look just like the apes who began the story...

...Right now, Five Easy Pieces is being swamped by God knows how many Statements of Our National Mood, and you may be sure plenty of them are worse than Rabbit, Run...

...Criticism in this vein was bound to seem a little airless, and before long it had exhausted its value as an instrument of cultural hegemony —i.e., a stick to beat the philistines with— giving way to a more cheerful acceptance of homogenized culture, well represented, I think, by Leslie Fiedler's ideological defense of comic books and by Susan Sontag's brilliant (but oddly deadpan) study of camp...

...where he tries to explain himself to a paralytic father who reminds us of Hemingway, will last for as long as we remember Brando's famous speech in On the Waterfront: "Oh Charlie, Charlie...

...Now one interesting point about the newer, ostensibly more tolerant view is the special logic by which it must refuse to break down standards if it once recognizes their existence...

...The second lapse happens when Bobby tells polite society to go to hell...

...In one of his two serious lapses, Rafelson has Bobby wrestle an anonymous panting girl down to bed, perform an unspecified act (intercourse...

...MOVIES 2001 may be a disappointing film, depending on what you expected...

...And even allowing for the extraordinary rapport generated by Jack Nicholson, which makes it hard to take anything else in focus, the film still deserves to stand on its own...

...Drop up...

...Trilling had spent much of her space recounting the plot of Easy Rider, discovering in it the anti-intellectual sentiment mixed in with anti-Americanism and nostalgia for the old America (the two are by no means incompatible) which is so characteristic of the hippie subculture and, even more, of the rich hippies who made this particular film...

...without condescension," her self-conscious choice not to be condescending is what gives the game away...

...And who does not remember the small-town girl dreamily telling Marlon Brando, "I've never ridden on a motorcycle before...

...A director like Godard takes half of his inspiration from Brecht and the other half (following the Brecht of Jungle of Cities) from American comic books, crime thrillers, science fiction, not to mention Sartre...

...certainly the banal transformation sequence must suffer by comparison with Cocteau's journey to Hell in Orpheus...

...Those who worship at the shrine of capital Culture, or Art, have a way of being insensitive to the specific products on which their religion ultimately rests...

...Superficially, Five Easy Pieces bears a certain resemblance to the novel Rabbit, Run, which could have been a good movie but has just now been made into a bad one...

...and the earlier hero was also caught between two lives, both rather more constricting then the alternatives given Bobby Dupea...

...the second says, I was nurtured by art and know just how to appreciate it, but I think trash also has a certain appeal and isn't that very daring...

...The moralistic line on mass culture was a bore since, as Rosenberg noted, the "taste" thereby established had to be negatively inferred, while the Art holding on at the opposite end of the balance could turn out to be a portentious sham...

...If he doesn't like Miller, why not write about Ibsen...

...The "picturesque" quality makes it a film of sharply limited interest...

...Here, I think, Rafelson and his screenwriter Adrien Joyce were seduced by the obverse side of a familiar dishonesty: where in other films the hero is a primitive with a strangely refined consciousness, MOVIES Five Easy Pieces allows him his refinement and education only to present his antisocial impulse in primitive terms, misleading the cheering audience...

...Here the bright moments have to be separated out, leaving the husk of "message" to rot...

...There's an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab...

...Here, then," she roundly submitted, "are some of the lessons taught in this popular film, and an enticing brew of the fashionable, the false, and the pernicious they are...

...In times gone by, before she was domiciled as weekly critic for the New Yorker, Miss Kael would take in several movies at once to point out why the objects under discussion were (a) meretricious, and (b) important, where (a) faded neatly into the background...

...Right off, Miss Kael signals that she won't be put on the defensive by lousy pictures, since "there are worse things aesthetically than the crude goodnatured crumminess, the undisguised reach for a fast buck, of movies without art," recalling that wonderful little poem by Frank O'Hara with its Liberty Bell ringing out "Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies...

...NEVERTHELESS, Easy Rider did convey something of the rootlessness of American life, its shortcoming being the device of blurred allegory, tacked on, in this case, by people too insensitive to create living characters...

...Unfortunately he was wrong about both films...

...It's a bad, bad sign when a movie director begins to think of himself as a myth-maker, and this limp myth of a grand plan that justifies slaughter and ends with resurrection has been around before...

...Norman Mailer found fault with the Updike story because there, too, "his character bolts over a literal hill and runs away...

...For one thing, her trash-art formulation has nothing to say about this entire middle, range of films...

...that makes her pant some more, after which he stands up grinning stupidly...

...And hasn't art itself been trivialized by its merely symbolic use to ward off intruding spirits...

...imbecile could go on debating whether or not the cinema is art after seeing the best work of Renoir, Lang, Bergman, or for that matter Godard and Truffaut—movies have their special function of informing the Zeitgeist, in ways that operate quite independently of what is called intrinsic worth...

...of 90...

...Of all the phenomena surrounding motion pictures, this one has to be the most interesting to observe, and of course there isn't anyone who can't think of movies like this: movies that are striking before they are good or bad, in the manner of Rebel Without a Cause, On the Waterfront, The Wild One...

...You read Sherlock Holmes alongside of The Trial, shiver at the cleverness of it all, and presumably learn something about the generic nature of mystery stories...

...Peter Fonda's good looks have the James Dean audience shouting "Come off it"—hardly the thing to set alight the fires of terrorism...

...Who remembers that The Wild One, produced by Stanley Kramer, was a moral tale about Responsibility asking us to stop this from ever happening...

...It connects with our lives in a way that is neither gross nor frivolous...

...During the fifties there were hundreds of wayward-adolescent pictures floating around Hollywood, and one of them, embodied in the person of James Dean, survives...

...and while there are also "pure" artists to be considered, yet no one is going to wish Robert Bresson had made twenty films instead of nine...

...Joseph Morgenstern recently made a comparison of Five Easy Pieces, which is doing well in this country, and Truffaut's The Wild Child, which is doing badly...

...thus, Mr...

...And one thing is plain: they are never going to enjoy movies...

...This kind of redundantly stupid narcissism may not be exciting to watch—I confess I don't ever want to see Easy Rider again—but does it really have the force of wicked propaganda...

...The moralist declaiming against trash can be useful, up to a point, but it is his besetting fault to attract an audience that will not disagree with him—he flogs dead horses in the public trust...

...In Five Easy Pieces Rafelson found the right screenplay, a splendid group of actors, and a new star: once around, the hitchhikers are good...

...Starting from what might have become a reprise of Easy Rider, the makers of Five Easy Pieces (including Laszlo Kovacs, cinematographer for both films) no doubt understood that they were on to something different and more truly resonant...

...Having said all this, it has to be added that the movie is unsubtle in at least one aspect, for it very predictably comes at other tensions by way of sex and its attitude toward sex is— immature...

...Bobby can be tender, now and then, but the violent side of him is apparently what attracts women...

...False the movie cer tainly is, from beginning to end: the farmer who is seen fixing his horse while Hopper and Fonda fix their motorcycles (Yes, We Too Are America) might as well have been the farmer down South who kills off the heroes—only the second one happens to be physically ugly...

...Is a film like Five Easy Pieces trash...

...But these similarities are less interesting than the differences...

...We go to the movies hoping not to see trash, not to like anything about a gigantically conceived failure like 2001—but then, the movies have made nonsense of our categories...

...As a diagnostician of such trends Miss Kael was at one time preeminent, but with the obligation of filling out an (excellent) column each week she has seemed to lapse inattentive...

...Looking through Pauline Kael's recent collection of reviews,* and in particular her essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies," one finds the beginning of an answer...

...Taking it frame by frame, I don't think Rafelson has much to offer the Museum of Modern Art publications in which stills from Antonioni and Fritz Lang look so good...

...Updike made his character an ex-basketball player, riding the ennui of lower-middle-class Protestant America in the fifties, yet he gave him too many good lines for the part, tried out too many of his own private worries...

...And her conclusion is simple enough—"Trash has given us an appetite for art...

...But the myth is more complicated than Miss Kael makes out, and the one thing most people seem to enjoy in this picture is the spectacle of machines becoming more human than their masters...

...Bobby is a drifter self-made, having renounced the concert hall for the society of bowling alleys, first off, because Culture had all begun to look like his uncoordinated and priggish brother...

...And when I came across Diana Trilling's weighty piece on Easy Rider—a commercial success wrung out of a slightly doped-up hippie travelogue— I wondered what all the fuss could be about...

...When his girlfriend sings for him he can say, "I love it...

...Good movies are sometimes popular and popular movies make money: apparently there are people to whom this is offensive...

...Moments of crisis have been met throughout the film by a bluntness not exactly in character, which is derived from those earlier movie actors on whom Bobby was patterned...

...Rejecting the sorry inhibitions of the nouveau riche highbrow, Miss Kael can pull sapphires out of the mud and find things to like even in the most rudely exploitative pieces of commercial muck...

...Yet this is a better film than Rebel Without a Cause, the screenplay is strong enough where it had to be strong, avoiding mushiness by playing its heavy speeches off against the unserious reactions of other characters...

...For example: "If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead...

...then, too, an actor may come to dominate his material so far as to bend it in the direction just opposite from what was intended...

...They should find another religion, since their love for art is after all secondary...

...We know this sort of thing well enough from all the recent movies about campus life, and so we can watch with a certain detachment as the confrontation builds...

...And when a pretentious and—of course— frigid academic woman addresses the gathered company in the Dupea living room on the subject of innate human aggression, Catherine is the first to leave, calling the theory loveless, while Bobby, whose anger we have seen growing inside him, finally yells out "You're full of shit, you're totally full of shit...

...Bob Rafelson may not be through as a director of interesting films, but past experience should teach us to expect otherwise...

...Those with the slighter intellectual pretension (Nicholas Ray, as compared with Kazan–Schulberg) often have the more direct impact...

...Five Easy Pieces is another film made somewhat along these lines, but with a deeper interest: it has much of that strength which was once the special province of the novel, indeed it is alone among recent American films in showing decent unspectacular lives (which means also: not conspicuously drab ones) as they must be experienced at the present time...

...This happy ending, so oddly utilitarian in its need to justify the ways of trash to art, in fact does violence to the spirit of Miss Kael's argument...

...Besides, Francois Truffaut, who has written admiringly of Hitchcock, would be the last one to applaud his movie being used in this stuffy manner...

...That this is at odds with his sensitivity did not bother the director, Bob Rafelson, or perhaps it didn't occur to him...

...And so, not surprisingly, a course has been instituted at Yale centering around this same knowing indulgence in cultural transgression...

...The reviewer who spoke of "juicy photography" as the mainly attractive feature of Easy Rider was nearer to the truth, in her vulgar phrasing no less than in the observation itself...

...Running off at the end of the movie, he looks dumb, not mysterious, and with an incredible burst of imaginative poverty the director thought to blare out his plastic theme song while solemnly printing the last line of the novel on screen...

...So that the movie, too, must have it both ways...

...There is one exception, and Nicholson's monologue near the end of the film—"I move around a lot...

...I could have been somebody, I could have been a contender—instead of a bum, which is what I am...

...Returning home, he can do an easy Chopin for his brother's mistress (throughout the film we are aware of what separates terms like "girlfriend" and "mistress") , and wave off the obligatory compliment with "I faked a little Chopin—you faked a big response...

...At some point his ambivalence changes mind, and he drives back home to see his dying father, trying to get rid of his other-life girlfriend (a waitress with a highly developed attachment to country music...

...The forces that brought this film to the surface work by chance, and although Rafelson shows a good deal of skill at finding out what works, like his full-circle pan of the family portraits while Bobby plays Chopin, yet he too often settles for what merely "works," like the funny hitchhiker Bobby picks up on his way home...

...Expounding his views on Culture for Newsweek, Mr...

...Miss Kael always writes in this spirit, and when she comes through with a kind of epic catalogue of her favorite bits from old pictures, it naturally includes "the inflection Gene Kelly gave to the line, `I'm a rising young man' in DuBarry was a Lady, Tony Curtis saying `avidly' in Sweet Smell of Success...

...very sensibly, she holds out her sympathy for the kids who violate their parents' advice by seeing Wild in the Streets instead of Closely Watched Trains: It connects with their lives in an immediate if grossly frivolous way, and if we don't go tothe movies for excitement, if, even as children, we accept the cultural standards of refinedadults, if we have so little drive that we accept"good taste," then we will probably never reallybegin to care about movies at all...

...You don't understand...

...Morgenstern found in himself a defender of the faith against the philistinism of the moment...

...He has it both ways, but of course it won't ever seem right: inevitably, he walks out of the film, hitching a ride up North where "it's gonna be cold...

...Whatever was intended (and I suspect we are viewing the remnant of a discarded longer scene), this segment, lasting a minute or so, seems utterly gratuitous, and better editing would have done away with it altogether...

...Hal, the super-computer, with its voyeuristic whim leading on to petty jealousy and murder, finally losing its mind to sing "Daisy, Daisy" like some cosmic Ophelia doing her mad scene...

...This view has the advantage of being infinitely less pretentious than its competitors, for the first position says, Art is precious, kitsch is awful, and I am going to tell you all about kitsch...

...and in speaking of one of its recent instances, Kubrick's 2001 she misses all the fun: It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stair way to paradise, something better is coming, and it's all out of your hands anyway...

...the set pieces delivered up by Laszlo Kovacs often verge on the arty...

...On the one hand, somebody must do the dirty work: if Arthur Miller is bad, then he must be weaned away from the hubris born of too many honorary degrees in Literature...

...The five easy pieces—the reference is to music—bring together two environments in which Bobby Dupea chooses to exist, and it was shrewd as well as honest to make him an MOVIES artist on the slum rather than a "romantic" lower-class drifter...

...We should try to be honest about our reasons for going to the movies, and those reasons are not in the least pure: that is what I take Miss Kael to be arguing at her sanest...

...Yet the man who dwells on this type of criticism is suspect...

...Such, at any rate, is the commonsense solution, ignoring kitsch in the hope that it will go away...

...WHEN HE SPEAKS against kitsch he seems to be speaking from the point of view of art," wrote Harold Rosenberg, describing the stance of a certain well-practiced critic of mass culture...

...A truly one-cultural sensibility would have no way of comprehending the sympathetic gesture as such: only a very intellectual sort of person could be excited by this particular bag of tricks—indeed, only a decadent academic...

...There is nothing sadder to contemplate than kitsch that tries too hard, looking to become art, and we should be mildly grateful to those indefatigable souls who have made of this sadness a permanent occupation...

...At any rate, the chances for Jack Nicholson are slightly better, if only he can distinguish the essential from the "relevant...

...And leaving aside the films of the great directors—only an * Going Steady, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1970...

...but "when he speaks about art it is plain his ideas are kitsch...

...and the ambiguous last moment of The Wild Child comprehends not only the monuments but the chains of bourgeois civilization...

...logically enough, the movie of Rabbit, Run cuts them to portray Rabbit, method-style, as a poor big boy with an I.Q...

...Films are an immediate experience, as Miss Kael made clear in those earlier essays now collected under the heading "Broadsides" in I Lost It at the Movies...

...Indeed, the whole tendency of her criticism has been to show that movies affect us for reasons having nothing to do with art, so that the teleological up-to-art exit must look a bit willed...

...The remark about Chopin which he quotes as typical of the outlook encouraged by Five Easy Pieces was important mostly for what it said about Bobby...

...It's not charming, it's direct...

...When Bobby starts quarreling with Catherine, his brother's mistress (excellently played by Susan Anspach), it comes out this way: —I don't find your language very charming...

...There is, too, an unusual directness in the exterior realism, giving you the American landscape with its bright new gas stations, parking lots, cafeterias, motels, barren highways, decaying oil works—all strange and a little ugly and real, without editorial nudging...

...It is worth noting the dead silence that prevails over audiences during this scene, since nobody really knows what is going on: is the girl on drugs, or what...

...The good things about Rabbit—like his theological arguments—had either to be cut or justified...

...Such an attitude is not uncritical— it is, simply enough, an attitude that starts from the immediate response...

...It is the first kind of success that makes a real director, the second that makes a usable and amusing hack...

...In the end we lose interest in this contorted exercise of wit, and we realize that it is just as well to leave kitsch alone, allowing some of it to be fun (like Sherlock Holmes) and some of it worthless (like Love Story, also required for the Yale course...

...HAVE THE MOVIES ALTERED our perception of these problems...

...Five Easy Pieces was not left open to that kind of vulgarity: its hero comes from a family of gifted musicians, and his anxiety makes sense...

...Does he care about Art (always capitalized), except as a wonderful dusky region from which to condescend...

...When Miss Sontag, for example, notifies us that "the singing style of Dionne Warwick can be appreciated...

...So that the first mistake of an intelligent movie audience comes out of taking a film more seriously than the occasion wants...

...Midcult...

...The Wild Child, he said, was arguing faith in culture and so couldn't help being a minority movie, while Five Easy Pieces went along with all our slick preconceptions...

...That line doesn't belong to a moron, but we have no idea where it came from—not, surely, from the man who reached his peak as a high school basketball star...