KILLERS OF THE DREAM
Bromwich, David
In Hemingway's story "The Killers," two anonymous gray men walked into a lunchroom and said they were going to murder a prize fighter named Ole Andreson. Just what Andreson had done to deserve...
...The girl will succeed to high office in the corporation, so that now the conversation is like an optical illusion...
...Later, the corporation president who ordered the tape is indeed murdered, while the lovers who could be heard to feel threatened are still alive...
...After this first blow we are given a trial by lighting...
...To make a suitable impression evil must go under a whispered alias: inevitability...
...What seemed an innocuous talk between lovers can be heard in undertones to express fear of murder...
...Those two killers in Henry's lunchroom murdered one man but made another ready for life...
...the corporate assistant, with his seriousness, speed, deadly assurance about deadly matters...
...People from a generation closer to Fitzgerald's than my own have, so far as I could tell, despised the role without exception...
...Some of the confusion derives from an unhappy cross-breeding of two modes of detective writing from the California school...
...Admirers of The Conversation, not, I trust, immune to their own irony, have dubbed the movie "Kafkaesque," but to me it seems a fair original...
...The second is well-taken, but the film, respectably tedious and yet not without individual virtues, in any case sustains its alternative style throughout...
...Bleak insouciance lies behind many of these films, a lazy hopelessness that has never been pondered, and we will go on suffering as we depart from the theater unless the reigning mood changes...
...My conclusion is that Malick, having decided to make a film, opted for the murder story, which is based on a real occurrence, as a scenario with possibilities but then drew an imaginative blank...
...Maybe they hold a reason for senseless deeds...
...In us...
...It has an ideological tone that can be alluded to but never revealed...
...At a gathering in the apartment Tom has set aside for Myrtle Wilson, one gets a delicate use of soliloquy on camera: the only such experiment attempted in movies so far, apart from an awkward cadenza at the close of Sunday Bloody Sunday...
...The first of these objections I find largely bogus, since those romps were in the publicity but absent from the final product, for those who cared to see it...
...Coppola is the most versatile American director as well as the finest in his touch...
...Because it will be absolute and arbitrary, it is absolutely arbitrary...
...When Nicholson is set upon by a couple of low-level thugs, it is as if they came from nowhere...
...The entire film is narrated by the girl, who is scarcely in her teens, and she is naturally full of wide-eyed romance, which the picture contradicts in every frame...
...At first: "He'd kill us if he knew...
...He could not see how to manage the thing...
...Harry was thoroughly bugged, all along, by a corporate assistant who collaborated with the young couple...
...But the conspiracy of wealth, power, and violence that finally stops the detective in his tracks is something untoward, a riddle which, in the detective story format, strikes one as a broadly unassimilable cheat...
...There is no significant difference between that remark and the old "I guess this wraps it up," except the time and place in which they could have been uttered...
...In Polansky's defense it ought to be said that detective movies, as a rule, are 568 not more or less cynical than the general film culture they abide in from year to year, and in this case they are following a well-defined lead...
...Someone on the set told someone else that Fitzgerald was a great reader of Keats who liked birds...
...Chinatown is loaded down with halfhearted mythy clues like that: the city suffering from drought, one man setting out to find the cause, and, as it turns out, an answer not unrelated to incest...
...All of which on the face of it makes him a desirable character, but he has brought the public a conceited and rotten film...
...We are caught and do not know why, exactly...
...It will not stand for nonsense...
...He is a dull earnest nice young man who contrived to impress viewers in movies where he only had to shut up...
...In those fields yonder...
...near the beginning of the film, willy-nilly, courage fills him because his life is in danger...
...Not since The Big Sleep has a movie known with this authority the tense and weirdly tentative look and feel of things there...
...Something to do with a racket, and the racket was getting even, and there was nothing to do but watch...
...Wilson is an unlikely instrument of destiny, and in the novel his act of shooting the hero was chancy, like Gatsby's reunion with Daisy...
...His name, for those who will enjoy it, is Noah Cross...
...For the time being, the security of that mood is driven home by its unquestioned predominance in a widely marketable feature like Chinatown...
...I mean Daniel Ellsberg...
...But sarcasm, whether it is coming from the boy, the girl, the director, or all or none of the above—a mystery in this kind of wit is how it can be appealing when the dramatic stance it implies is by definition nonexistent— surely tends in the main to remove the gravity from any situation...
...Despite the facile literariness, I am glad to report that Southern California composes the scene in Chinatown whole-heartedly...
...No one has given a more convincing explanation for the dead seagull that washes ashore once, to be examined by a mystified Nick, or for a host of lesser twittering specimens...
...Something bad in the air...
...We are stranded with Macdonald's focus on the bizarre and ineluctable force of a villain who is probably a psychopath...
...Robert Redford plays Gatsby and as usual cannot act...
...One has the usual Chandler-cum-Bogart interest in getting a problem solved, with a finish that will be tidily satisfactory and perhaps grim but at all events not depressing, and beyond all that an interest in displaying the rude necessary wit of the detective...
...No questions asked...
...Certain assumptions within a genre are moral as well as generational...
...It remains only to document the film's various "outs" and to speculate as to why they should have pleased anyone...
...Malick is responding to a mood in the popular culture at large and he is quite as innocent, absurd, and essentially hysterical as his characters...
...Its acumen strikes considerably deeper than such a compliment might imply...
...Yet at last the pretense of solving anything is given over...
...He looks as if he might have an infinite capacity for absorbing liquor and still not fail to notice any first scent of opportunity for a merger...
...But who will guard the guardians...
...Yet Harry's furtiveness, his pride, his neurotic ability to concentrate, his peculiarly Catholic obsession with conscience, which he manages to keep entirely separate from a case of professional jitters...
...Terrence Malick, who made the film, is an anomaly in the industry, for he is the first American director to come over to movies from an academic discipline, and his involvement in the craft apparently does not partake of idolatry...
...MOVIES 571...
...Even a bugging expert has much to learn...
...It was a matter of accepted landscape, like knowing the inside track, and, accordingly, Nick Adams's experience in the lunchroom is treated merely as one item on the agenda of his rite de passage...
...Where the character used to be loud, openly a creature of dominance, she has become frightened and neurasthenic...
...Especially if one admires Godard, as I do, the spirit of Malick's film will appear pure in spite of the film itself...
...Though in some measure reminiscent of Graham Greene's heroes, his doom remains that of an American trapped by unexamined customs who must suddenly guide himself he knows not whither...
...Crickets with their nervous beat are heard throughout the movie as the sun burns without motive over Los Angeles...
...But in these films the evil is altogether more specific, being for the most part a dry social phenomenon, and yet the spell it casts is somehow more complete...
...actually, his character is more straightforwardly a snoop than the old movies let us believe...
...The offense is not pessimism but rather a certain facility with which it is indulged...
...Since it takes place 30 years ago the film must pay homage to Raymond Chandler...
...Then thee is justification by realism: every murder happens in a middle-range shot, to emphasize how little such a film could ever flinch from its own horrors, let alone dwell MOVIES on them...
...This last is admittedly problematic...
...The film does not pause to ask whether this may not be an extreme view of things, but continues, blithely, with Nicholson's hopeless effort at pursuit and prosecution...
...The direction of this enormous project was supervised by Jack Clayton, who in the past has been an elegant craftsman, but one rule for the making of large-scale adaptations is that even vestigial signs of personality must disappear...
...Those badlands of the Northwest look pretty forbidding, or at least pretty dull...
...No irony there...
...All is changed, and nothing...
...It disturbs perhaps chiefly because it shows nothing of what the matter at hand is about: the corporation is a large building—a business is a business—and the president is a well-off aging man...
...We are waiting for an end...
...SET THE PACING of a detective movie against a quickly recognized opportunity for social criticism and the result will be the single most surprising film of its year...
...Genteel, silver, and echt-Pasadena, he wants to control the water supply of Los Angeles and grow rich forever...
...In the last analysis they are just buggers too...
...But he had betrayed someone, most likely someone worth betraying...
...He is, I think, fearfully influenced by Godard, particularly Band of Outsiders, with its queer high spirits about a ramble that liberates no one, and Pierrot le fou, which spoke of an isolation from the world that gained its whole character from random, discovered fragments of popular culture...
...The parties are Gatsby parties, lights are on forever, and one lady dances an indefatigable Charleston...
...Yet the fact is that his trademark, an alertness to vague menace in an atmosphere of subliminal and all-extensive violence, has become very nearly standard in the short time since his last piece of work...
...But somewhere in all that there is going to be one less of us walking the streets...
...The counterpoint, which I found tedious and often offensive, possibly represents the point of view of her boyfriend, who is slightly older...
...The original sin of being a square, the incredible specialization, the constant worry over strategy, the new and flashing recognition that wreaks havoc on an established way of life, and the righteous swerve out of control in which the old personality is very much visible, are all there in full strength with Harry Caul...
...I suppose my only reservation has to do with the kind as such and the manner in which it has become enticingly available...
...Unlike Badlands and Chinatown this film is playing legitimately with its given set of rules...
...Evil that was everywhere and nowhere at once would obviously make for a cipher...
...Gatsby and Daisy had been sentimentalized, with lots of gamboling in the sun, and the marvelously jagged style of the book had been polished over...
...I offer a surmise...
...The film is a detective genre story and also a period piece, set in Los Angeles in the 1940s...
...For me, such a power is difficult even to imagine, and I am sure that it has not been unveiled in any work of art...
...Bleakness has become a convention...
...Unfortunately, the film runs slow, grows altogether leaden in its middle hour, and is filled with birds...
...I can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it," says Nick Adams...
...Incorporation...
...It would appear that sometime in the past few decades, our received idea of the neurotically destructive woman, whom Daisy represents, imperceptibly took on a dim coloring...
...My own immediate reaction to his latest venture was simply that it did not feel much like a Polansky film...
...But he happens to be showing a mass murderer and his victims...
...This is the grand finale, the cleanup that deflates everything...
...Lovers are irrelevant...
...With full knowledge: "He'd kill us if he knew...
...Like "The Killers," they draw on the odd tic of a feeling for conspiracy...
...Recent American movies have been helpless in explaining the doom of their heroes...
...Such pleasure as may be taken from Badlands resides in the fidelity of its imitation...
...and what he discovers thereafter is a city power structure that has been corrupted in widening circles of decay...
...He can be, visually and imaginatively, the most generous of directors, even as he holds to the decorum of portraying men who are bugs...
...The film works quietly with a version of ideological determinism as it indicates that everyone is ignorant, everyone is trapped: the metaphor, which sounds like a pun, is to be tapped...
...All of the circumstances were flat and nondescript like those men...
...The true subject of Coppola's story, however, is the corporate mentality in all its ramifications, which subsume those who bug and those who commission bugging...
...It is the imagination of a small but wholly irrevocable disaster...
...That it looks manageable, plain, and narrowly limited helps only for a moment, for afterward, in the very air, will lurk the sense of an evil that is pervasive and casual...
...Where Hemingway left one subdued, however—where the effect of his story was humbling and truly frightful —the audience of these films leaves the theater weary, bitter, ill at ease, and no wiser than when it came...
...ANY AGE REVEALS ITSELF most unambiguously in what it does to the classics of a previous age...
...Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean...
...But what we see is mostly the killer, with his pretensions being recognized as accomplishments...
...There is, first of all, the reflex sarcasm that goes on being inherited from Salinger...
...This film is urgently contemporary about the social malaise of which Gatsby is a symptom, and depressing, much in the fashion of the others discussed...
...In the last scenes and most importantly, the hero becomes a cult item with the officers who capture him, and why not, since he is a Nietzschean who strikingly resembles James Dean...
...Yet Mr...
...We'll be watching you," he is told, and, as the film comes to an end, his life disintegrates before our eyes...
...The plotting young assistant is a ringer for John Dean in every way, and that he has become a daily figure in our lives, almost a type, says something about our state...
...The smartest thing you can do," a compromised policeman tells Nicholson's buddy, when the hunt has disclosed a quarry who cannot be stopped, "is just to take your friend home...
...All the same it is a tasteful film, MOVIES well worth seeing, and the laws by which it is judged bereft of merit have nowhere been made explicit...
...The film of The Great Gatsby reflects this change quite faithfully...
...Appearances, appearances...
...What has been saliently preserved through adaptation is the picture of a dying god...
...However, since it was made in the 1970s and with later conventions jostling to be employed, it adopts a good deal of the current stock in trade from Ross Macdonald...
...It should not be obliged to give political or financial or even personal details, and within its kind it is entirely consistent...
...Our sophisticated recent killers, among whom the film-makers may count themselves, educate no one and leave only a blank annihilation in their wake...
...It was directed by Roman Polansky, who did Rosemary's Baby and Knife in the Water, and who, given the cold hauteur of his genius for trash, has seemed for a long while to be the proper heir to Hitchcock...
...the president, ostensibly guilty, and the young couple, ostensibly his victims— all of them caught in a cycle of watching and waiting and calculating for gain: these the film makes vivid and unforgettable...
...Harry one must pry further into for an analogue, but he will surely remind many people of a dense and paradoxical character, also from our recent past, who shared with the plotter-type an irremediable wish to look the part of the hero...
...It is directed in a style that would be called "spare" if it were prose: by portraying acts of extraordinary violence in a very low key, it subtly compels an admission that they are the norm...
...Just what Andreson had done to deserve his fate was not clear...
...The film is rather clever and totally unscrupulous, and it has earned high marks among all those critics who wish, at any cost, to give encouragement to a promising youthful director...
...death is fated...
...The source for this sequence is Blow-Up, and ultimately Hitchcock's Rear Window...
...The gang is the government...
...Evil for Hemingway, though inscrutable, did not paralyze...
...Well," says his friend, "you better not think about it...
...Jack Nicholson plays the Bogart role here...
...That is a fairly impartial summary of the plot...
...John Huston takes the part of the villain in a performance which is not easily forgotten...
...Much excitement in The Conversation attaches to the gradual metamorphosis of the tape...
...A chain of pointless murders is the subject of Badlands, and the killer and his girlfriend are the heroes...
...But there are remarkable performances here by Karen Black as Myrtle Wilson, Sam Waterston as Nick, and Mia Farrow as Daisy...
...Chinatown has to switch abruptly in mid-course since it hovers between mutually exclusive sets of assumptions...
...What license there is for this brings back Fitzgerald's ease in the midst of unhealthy lives, a trait that stands in sharp contrast to Hemingway...
...It was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, stars Gene Hackman MOVIES in the role of a bugging expert, and is called The Conversation...
...CHINATOWN WILL DO for a start...
...Those who grew up in the 1950s or 1960s have found it astonishingly right...
...Tapes have been an issue of some concern lately, and The Conversation, shot in the spring of 1973, has been called prophetic...
...In the killer...
...Hysteria should by no means be thought incompatible with a lowkeyed voice or a spare technique: it entails nothing more than a systematically unreasoning attitude toward life and the complexity of life...
...So he emptied it of affect and put in style...
...he beams, utterly enthralled...
...The result is certainly curious...
...Dryden's songs for The Tempest and Shaw's refinishing of Cymbeline are familiar examples: the revision and not the thing revised always looks the more mannered, and 570 the whole process, which is comforting, really spoils nothing...
...As an illustration of the have-it-both-ways method of directorial trickery, it ranks together with the most spectacular feats of Hollywood...
...Incorporation...
...What Badlands and -other films have done on the sly is to introduce the notion of an intangibly potent evil without having tried to digest it...
...This year, literate Americans were appalled by what Hollywood had done to their Great Gatsby, and their reasons were twofold...
...Harry Caul, who is the hero, finds himself with a taped conversation that has tt ken a wicked turn...
...He brings off a lengthy scene in a garage that is Harry's studio, the ad hoc party struck up by a few bug-men after their convention, and puts it in a class with the marriage sequence he photographed for The Godfather...
...Only nowhere is everywhere...
...BADLANDS DEPICTS a social malaise that prevails everywhere and without end...
...Thebes, anyone...
Vol. 21 • September 1974 • No. 4
