Return of the Pseuds
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Television Return of the Pseuds By Andrew Ferguson Somewhere deep in the bowels of PBS (a horrifying image, I know) there must be a little spool of film marked "All-Purpose Fifties Montage."...
...HE: Yes, it has an order-a finality, finally...
...Others are character sketches of endearing sweetness-such as the first date of a high-school basketball star and a starry-eyed classmate...
...The intellectual pseuds of the 50s have their analogues these days, of course...
...To the producers' credit, they do allow a dissenting voice to penetrate their documentary, that of the comedian Steve Martin...
...It was genuinely the Eisenhower years," says Penn, as the montage slams the message home, "and it was a country reeling under the weight of what had happened in the McCarthy period...
...But they were never smug...
...If you watch this show-and you should-you'll want to reach through the screen and hug him...
...It's serene...
...SHE: Yes, yes...
...SHE: I just never knew such things existed...
...HE: It has a fantastic, uh, peace...
...That certainly is a grand view, but it's also, in the case of Nichols and May, pretty silly...
...SHE: Yes...
...It has a kind of mathematical certainty that's almost sensual, to me...
...With luck, the artists can even be made to seem activists...
...The splendid irony is that Nichols and May's favorite targets were the tweedy, Stevenson-supporting, Kierkegaard-quoting, Miles-loving pseuds of the era...
...You might question, though, whether their reputation deserves to be revived in the tendentious manner of PBS...
...I think they were just plain funny...
...Cut to the Tailgunner's follicles.] I think that we were held in thrall, and that this was the beginning of the bust-out...
...MOTHER: Honey, if I could believe that I'd be the happiest mother in the whole world...
...There shouldn't be any question that Mike Nichols and Elaine May deserve to be honored as masters: In their four years together, from 1958 to 1962, they were the country's most popular comedy team and created a handful of routines that rank among the funniest stuff ever produced by American humorists...
...You've seen it in a dozen public-television documentaries-maybe hundreds, depending on your viewing habits...
...Still others do indeed carry the weight of social satire, and it's as penetrating and pitiless as the best of Mencken or Twain...
...After a particularly ponderous ventilation from Jules Feiffer, Martin gets to say: "Well, I know they were very smart...
...In the documentary's opening minutes, unsuspecting viewers may think they've wandered into a wind tunnel...
...In many ways, when I read Thus Spake Zarathustra, a whole world opened in front of me...
...A couple listening to classical music: SHE: It's beautiful...
...Nichols and May's routines were conceived 35 years ago, but it's a short distance between their Zarathustra -loving cant and the "grand views" of Arthur Penn and Tom Brokaw...
...Johnny Ray or Patti Page drips from the soundtrack as the black-and-white images glide by, a hallucination of clich?s meant to convey all that is essential about the decade: Here's clueless Ike on the golf course, hordes of kids in hula hoops, fins on Cadillacs, the fantasy family of Father Knows Best...
...HE: Exactly...
...If you want your Nichols and May straight up, unfiltered by PBS, Mercury Records has just released a compilation of their best work, in retrospect...
...Another couple at a cocktail party: HE: What a shock it was to me when I discovered Nietzsche...
...You can enjoy this one-size-fits-all montage again in Nichols and May: Take Two, the latest offering in the network's "American Masters" series, airing this week nationwide...
...Didn't that man ever shave...
...They produce documentaries for PBS...
...Historically, one could take the grand view," continues Penn, "and say that it's from these kind of artists that genuine social change comes...
...The bust-out, of course, was the Arcadia of the 1960s and all its delicious consequences...
...And then the images fade into the crueler, truer reality: a segregated lunch counter, a bomb shelter, police dogs, a close-up of Joe McCarthy that launches you right up into his beard follicles...
...This is why the fifties montage is so useful...
...PBS producers seem incapable of elevating artists of long ago without casting them as rebels against their era, beams of light in the miasma of American culture...
...Without knowing it, the show's producers provide lots of evidence contradicting their thesis, in the form of the Nichols and May routines themselves...
...Some of the routines are pure comedy, like the famous skit of a phone call between a rocket scientist and his nagging mother...
...A team of experts-the film director Arthur Penn, the producer Jack Rollins, the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and, for some unknowable reason, Tom Brokaw-are brought on to think deeply, without much success...
...I know exactly what you mean...
...SON: Mom, I feel awful about not calling you...
Vol. 1 • May 1996 • No. 36
