The natural, the real, and the significant
Larner, Jeremy
One balmy spring evening I am honored to give the Diana Vreeland Lecture at the Institute of Cultural Significance in San Francisco. Here is a chance, I think, to discuss a new kind of...
...Don't forget Mailer quoting Bugsy's speech in the movie about how a man who wants to steal from him wants to rape him...
...Since World War II, movies have been increasingly given over to supercool robot heroes and stylized tales of violence...
...SPRING • 1992 • 269 Every time the camera cuts to "real" people walking up and down the street, they seem less like exemplars the voguers are trying to imitate and more like inadequate, narrowed, scaled-down, and buttonedup role players...
...The scene is a contemporary version of Dante's inferno —surreal, but believable—and speaks louder than a hundred aphorisms of hip correctness...
...That was when, they say, you should have laughed...
...The film cuts from her vision of life as a beautiful and happy woman, to the discovery of her strangled body in a shabby hotel room...
...Was I aware the Korean grocer persona was a traditional African signifier...
...Just what standard should I use," I say, "if I'm trying to assess a film about the people around me, and find I don't believe a moment of it...
...It has a look...
...but oh, what a going-over they give me for my outmoded concepts of all things American and cinematic...
...Since every transvestite role demands counterfeit or parody of people who believe themselves to be only what they seem, one expects at first to learn that underneath their costumes these actors are shallow, pathetic souls...
...I wonder...
...Without doubt," says Puffie, "the most significant moment of last year was Norman Mailer's interview of Warren Beatty in Vanity Fair...
...Just think of those suits...
...exclaims Ringo...
...It's the story of a black teenager living in the Brooklyn projects, who sees his proud father trapped in a degrading job...
...It seems there are fifty trophies for different competitions, ranging from sexy T&A torches to Big Mamas to bikers to tough punks to gleaming military men...
...Is that true...
...Let Robert Bly and his humorless drum-beaters match these guys for male bonding...
...In the most haunting scene of the movie, he takes us through clusters and layers of jiving, nodding crack addicts in the smoky atmosphere of an abandoned building that has become the Taj Mahal crack house...
...They give the effect —unfakable, I think—of people who have seen much and live now with few judgments, grown rich in years and mellow in humor...
...It was the Newtonian fallacy to imagine I could describe even one scene in a movie, when another person might not agree a scene was occurring...
...You got me there...
...And you cling to the plantation cliché that African America is impoverished, isolated, and culturally disadvantaged...
...It goes back to Why Are We in Vietnam...
...What touching literalism...
...And if movie content is pure sensation, then Oliver Stone is the equivalent of Leni Riefenstahl...
...Quite some time ago, too...
...And what did I really know about rap...
...Yet the most affecting parts of his work are, unsurprisingly, those that seem most authentic...
...Film-makers don't show the people around you, they make images to signify their own visions...
...When the father drinks and beats the mother, she tries to hide her bruises from the children...
...My language was ignorant of the fundamental nature of film, which is a mixture of images, angles, light, sound, shape, and so on, pouring in upon the human cerebrum in a conglomerate of sensation...
...Do you have the slightest idea why they booed you...
...Being British, they are understated...
...And it gives us our first nineties rebel hero, in the Garrison figure...
...I make that comparison not merely for laughs...
...But for all its surprising romance, Paris Is Burning is the most indelibly relentless of all these pictures...
...Yet I'm surprised, on arrival, to find my talk billed as "The New Voodoo," and a vending booth in the lobby selling T-shirts with names and slogans, blown-up photos of bygone movie stars, fashion and rock magazines, Elvis souvenirs, Madonna-style religious lingerie, combat-boot sneakers, and a battery of weaponlike jewelry...
...By the time she got the funds to finish editing, the vogue houses had become the in places in Manhattan, with socialites paying a thousand a night to join the party...
...And all along, the conditions that justify black naturalist movies remain largely unchanged...
...Next you'll be questioning whether Ben Kingsley is Jewish...
...An acknowledgment of the supremacy of the visual image...
...And face it, people get off on Bugsy because it's sexy and stylish...
...I laughed, but the movie seemed to take his idea seriously...
...Beatty and Bening in the picture connect to Beatty and Bening off-screen, and the whole image of the ladies'-man figure of our time settling down to fatherhood...
...This is where the sexual significance comes in...
...Mailer's witchcraft mixture of the political and cultural—a whiff of the paranoid complexity of Harlot's Ghost—which in turn prefigures the diabolical intricacy of JFK...
...I wonder what George Bush would say...
...SPRING • 1992 • 271 "Glad we're not alone," I murmur to Ringo...
...The made-up people radiate a vitality beyond the imaginations of their real-life counterparts...
...But how does this relate to the greatness of Bugsy...
...Is that rebellion, or a merchandized rebel outfit...
...Then how about when Beatty is improbably beating up a tougher-looking rival, and stops to slick down his hair in the mirror...
...The boy develops a desperate plan to rip off the local drug distributor, and manages to buy a gun and coerce a few unsteady companions...
...You mean, the genius of Jerry Lewis...
...It was total colonialism for you to presume to analyze black culture...
...Their heightened capacities are not likely to prevent the world from having its way with them...
...Paris Is Burning is a documentary of the mostly black "houses" in New York where "families" of transvestites engage in "vogueing" contests, camping down a runway or through a crowded dance floor impersonating specific categories of "hot" stylish women and macho men...
...But you're supposed to see Beatty...
...You presented Paris Is Burning as a hot paradox of alienation and authenticity...
...Alongside such explosiveness, Lee's more sober characters behave like puppets who announce messages and enact staged emotions...
...My lecture analyzes four recent pictures as a revival of American naturalism, in the tradition of the novelist Theodore Dreiser, who saw the class struggle operating through overwhelming drives for sex, money, and power, with an individual who attempts to rise in status doomed to crush or be crushed...
...How could you not...
...Here is a chance, I think, to discuss a new kind of socially oriented African-American feature movie...
...Now deal with that as a phenomenon of social oppression...
...No, but I was amazed to hear a dozen gentiles do thirteen different New York accents...
...The vogueing is intercut with interviews that reveal their subjects to be people of emotional range and depth...
...To me, the MTV Ice Cube is a stance, a symbol, a flickering cutout...
...Content is a purely subjective matter, they inform me...
...In his loyalty to the fortress of his family and friends, he glows with dogged caring—but the only venue for its expression is retaliation to the last drop of blood...
...I keep seeing Warren Beatty trying so earnestly to be a deranged Jewish gangster who is funny and sensitive at heart and gets laid...
...Until I grasp that, I'll never see how politics, art and show business have merged in the postmodern era into one discontinuous whole, perpetually ripe for deconstruction...
...Once more, detail and accuracy count...
...Plus the Ghost of John Kennedy and the Goddess figure of Marilyn Monroe...
...They've seen more, can do more, but they've paid the price in vulnerability...
...Are you aware of Spike Lee's clothing factory, his line of retail stores, his TV commercials with Air Jordan bringing self-respect to homeboys who now see themselves worthy of two-hundred-dollar sneakers...
...It's that triangleBeatty/Mailer/Stone—that positioned our culture to enter a new zodiac in 1992...
...Still, that doesn't help me much reading a novel or watching a movie...
...The director of the Institute, Ringo Powdor (Ph.D in Mass Comm...
...In response to criticism, Lee rejected the idea that his texture should be true to life any more than that of "white" films...
...To watch a Lee joint is like seeing a wrenching, funny blues singer interrupted by the prancing choreography of costumed exhibitionists on MTV...
...And the romance—Mailer and Beatty fondly thumbing over the major women in their lives, referring to the anima shadow in anything but conventional macho expectations, hinting openly of female inspiration, almost collaboration...
...demands Puffie...
...But would Beatty make a good President...
...The love affair between the black architect and the white secretary is falsified by soapy dialogue and elaborate camera effects—yet Lee brilliantly catches the edgy bitterness of working-class white males hanging around a candy store and taunting one another...
...That's why Beatty would make a great president, by the way— But here we were overtaken by a throng of chuckling TV interviewers, who lifted us on their thumbs and carried us on high across the Golden Gate Bridge at sunrise...
...as part of the world he governs...
...More recently, Ice Cube plays Ice Cube in a video rapping out threats of violence to Korean grocers...
...You'd have to get in line to buy one...
...The greatness was established," says Puffie, "by unconscious media unanimity...
...I don't know whether to laugh or yawn...
...270 • DISSENT His sister takes up the assault...
...she is as feminine as anyone you'll meet...
...She knew all along the only way out was to become a girl, and she is saving now for a sex-change operation...
...The effect is heightened when we follow one of the sexiest young voguers into the straight world, where in pursuit of her dream to become a full-fledged fashion model, she attends a reception of New York's most beautiful mannequins...
...I point to the rendering of city life as a dense web engulfing individuals who are rich or poor only as 268 • DISSENT queens, drones, and workers in an insect hive—and therefore equal in their dreams, needs, schemes, and self-deceptions...
...I saw the director bouncing light off tiles, draperies, tabletops, skin, sand, and rain, but what was beautiful about gangsterism...
...What does that mean...
...What follows devastates the lives of all concerned, and would be melodramatic were it not for the gritty believability of the people and the world that closes in on them...
...What I dismissed as the myth of the self-made man turns out to be the essence of existentialism, in which existence comes before essence...
...JFK redefines it for a whole new generation...
...That's what we mean by the right act in the right space in historical time...
...Significance," Puffie informs me...
...One really must add Oliver Stone...
...Now I come to two films I regard as the real thing, movies worthy of Richard Wright's mental toughness...
...to use a term like "reality...
...You think ghetto life is a novel called Grapes of Wrath Takes the A Train...
...It is an art of detail and accuracy...
...It was almost eighteenth century (at best...
...She, like her surviving friends, moves us by the grace and daring of her efforts to transcend the world around her...
...That's why papers spend so much space now listing box receipts in every art area...
...We feel this all the more keenly in the show's final personality—a small, delicately pretty hooker, who tells how lonely she felt in her white, working-class family...
...I note that the people buying this equipment, despite their garish makeup, appear to be well-dressed members of the professional classes...
...Like Mailer, who obsesses on John Kennedy, challenging his ghost, Stone makes all the connections between sex, death, power, and control of the media...
...Nothing, obviously...
...But vogueing is nothing new...
...Can it be you're catching on...
...The Boyz N the Hood Ice Cube is the realler man...
...Though she is confidently, outrageously feminine in her own environment, she seems nervous, large and gawky in this sleek society...
...He usta take care of me?' " They congratulate me on catching a cultural referent...
...The viewer is shocked by the loss...
...And haven't I heard that line in several hundred gangster pictures...
...The naturalistic effect is well suited to movies, and until the 1950s, it is pursued in Western, country, and small-town as well as city movies, usually modified by fairytale romance and reassuring endings...
...Worse, I'd spoken of film in terms of content...
...And that's why we can't refer significant-style filmmaking like JFK to reality...
...It appeared, she reminds me, just before the release of Beatty's Bugsy and Mailer's Harlot's Ghost...
...As a radical," I say, "I'm used to that...
...Government is present here only in the terrifying whir of hovering helicopters, the blast from their blades, and the probing of their spotlights at night...
...But the point is the significance of Mailer's proposal as an act in itself...
...A radical...
...Perhaps it is the protean variety of the personalities around them, the knowledge that one both can and cannot make oneself, that lets them stand as towers of empathy and tolerance...
...Her housemates love and protect her, but she has a wild streak, an impatience with the hypocrisy of middle-class tricks, that leads her into dangerous places...
...Good thing none of our African friends were there...
...There are a few paper-thin characters —like the hero's classy mother—but mostly what we get here is the spooky calm of blocks and blocks of houses sitting on small neat lawns, inside which people dive for cover as screeching cars and blasting guns rip the monotony...
...No one knows the Oswald reality...
...When racism is touched on, it's condensed into scenes of stylized drama, as when Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis learn to love one another through escaping prison shackled in the same chains...
...Would he recognize South Central L.A...
...Another excursion centers on two preteen street boys who hang around the houses and identify with "the gay world...
...Bugsy, for instance, how to enjoy it...
...Black audiences, he said, are entitled to their own mythology...
...The macho challenge, Mailer's whole thing about no two men left alone without knowing which one could fuck the other...
...Every with-it film person knows that the film's director, Jennie Livingston, finished her shooting years ago...
...The film Straight Out of Brooklyn is pure naturalism, made on a shoestring by a black film student...
...Richard Wright brought this perspective to black experience, writing searing stories of men and women battling for breathing space in the welter of industrial cities...
...The family is pinched into an apartment as cramped as their choices...
...Critics of Dreiser and Wright (among them many refined black artists) saw these large souls as crude and mechanistic, overlooking the tenderness they felt for their characters, even as they meticulously chronicled their undoings...
...Ringo gives a hopeless sigh...
...Then Mailer symbolically going to his knees—proposing that Beatty run for president...
...Au contraire...
...Give me," I say, "an example of significance...
...Seeing her among her stuffed animals in her teen girl's bedroom, one feels nothing bizarre...
...272 • DISSENT...
...Arts) and his sister, Puffie Vapour-Powdor, flown in from New York where she edits the definitive fash-cult magazine, sneak me out the back door and down the alley to a small bistro...
...No, the genius of Sartre, de Sade, Foucault, Artaud, Godard...
...The defiant glee of their freedom has edges both higher pitched and sadder than that of more usual delinquents...
...The premise of such work is democratic to the core...
...Absolutely none of the AfricanAmerican film quarterlies would use a word like `naturalism.' They talk about appropriation and reversal...
...The second lead, the rapper Ice Cube, gives a chilling performance as a born leader with no resources beyond his wit and courage, dedicated to protecting his comrades, whether in Vietnam or in "the 'hood...
...Only lately have we seen black artists of box-office power wanting to speak to the anger and wild street humor of the urban ghettoes...
...Exactly, and that's a compliment...
...Have I never heard of Einstein's theory of relativity...
...Boyz N the Hood is not out to impress with artiness, but with nearly every shot and word it tells the appalling story of why young black men in the ghetto are killing one another...
...It was decisive in terms of status—Mailer flew to Beatty, was a guest at his house, wrote about him—while Beatty's was the face on the cover, with a spontaneous expression created by the camera assistant's lowering her halter...
...How am I supposed to feel about Bugsy Siegel...
...I saw the sky change color over the desert when Beatty/Bugsy stepped out to piss and had a vision of a gambling center in Vegas...
...It does not revel in gore like fashionable holiday thrillers or sci fi blockbusters...
...You don't have the slightest idea of what's happening in the African community...
...It related to the coordinated PR in all media, climaxed by the Mailer interview making the definitive connection between history, politics, image, and sexuality...
...The house "mothers" are especially impressive...
...Meaning," explains Ringo, "art as pure act, art as timing within cultural space, slashing new intersections between continuity and discontinuity that change forever the way we see things...
...That's where Mailer comes in...
...I read to the strangely quiet audience a few passages describing Roberta in An American Tragedy and Booker in Native Son...
...Stung by those who questioned the spray-painted, drug-free ghetto street in Right Thing, Lee triumphs in Jungle Fever with the supporting actors who play the hero's junkie brother and the brother's junkie woman, a couple who erupt from stupor into wild ranting fury, then collapse into zonked-out dependence...
...Still, compared to her, the regular models become shadowy, sallow, slight in feeling...
...The reader is invited to rise above a broad social landscape, to look down and weep in recognition of the world where he or she, too, must play a role...
...In the meantime, selected black musicians and comedians achieve celebrity status without making a dent in the segregated, demoralized condition of the urban majority...
...The spectators are also the competitors, and the showrooms are electric with savage wit, virtuoso grandstanding, sexual heat, and erotic good cheer...
...For brief moments, she succeeds...
...Even the young actor who plays Ice Cube as a boy conveys the dignity of the unintimidated doomed...
...They can define their own terms...
...The Ice Cube who returns from war has a thousand-mile stare of a man who will not provoke but will never back down...
...Still," I persisted, "if all events and impressions are relative, what quality do you look for in a movie or in a book or song or object of art...
...On a more sophisticated level, every film (or "joint") of Spike Lee's can be seen as a raucous inner dialogue with the idea of naturalism...
...And to this vision the movie is true...
...What is the difference, then," I ask, "between critical analysis and a puff piece...
...Could I tell hip-hop from new jack swing or gangsta rap, Niggaz With Attitude from Digital Underground...
...It's significant...
...He can see I've never read the French theorists and thus know nothing about American culture...
...Did Reagan...
...In the postwar period, I speculate, such grim views no longer satisfied the possibilities of boom times and gave way to the number-one American cultural fable, the saga of the self-made man, gloriously unbound by his environment, embodied by a male star who is a spoiled pet on or off the screen, and likely to be directed by an artiste more interested in his own technique than in the supposed subject of his story...
...And I did wonder what neighborhood it was, where Beatty as a kid took care of the older Kingsley...
...Its impact comes from thwarted passion, from desire, from all-too-human vanity and love...
...That's only if," I say stubbornly, "the cerebrum is not part of a mind capable of thought...
...The story unfolds in episodes of male proving in a social pressure cooker, wherein even little boys play on the edge of death...
...You see them as isolated, yet they're dominating the visual style of our time...
...The "only in America" orators should rejoice that a movie as homemade as this one found a national release...
...The night city is ruled by iron gods, who will not be mocked— Unlike this writer, who receives a full round of booing from the lecture audience...
...The Africans don't want that...
...They say it doesn't bother them to have no families, no one to stand by them except each other...
...In a magazine called Dissent [which the audience hears as "Descent"], I once noted the nutty mix of high-flown fantasy, dark street humor, and simplistic politics that alternately bring Do the Right Thing to life, then kill it...
...Narcissism is the medium of the existential rebel, as in Brando or James Dean...
Vol. 39 • April 1992 • No. 2
