I lost it at the art house
PODHORETZ, JOHN
I Lost It at the Art House A Moviegoer's Diary By John Podhoretz Thursday, April 17. I just moved a block away from the premier art house in Washington, so I strolled over this evening to take in...
...Those movies are obscure for very good reason, let me tell you...
...It has a climax as head-shakingly bizarre in its way as the ending of Clerks, the 1994 debut film of the same New Jersey auteur, Kevin Smith...
...He also becomes convinced that his best friend is unknowingly in love with him...
...Boosters of the new art-house movies—also called the "American independent filmmaking movement"—praise them because they do something Hollywood movies never do any more: They take chances...
...That would have seemed like a wonderful development during the heyday of the art house, except that, here at the end of history, we are all lowbrows now...
...It's a stunning, gasp-inducing climax, but it is entirely unbelievable—even if it did happen, as Smith's screenplay hints (there are all sorts of clues that Smith and the dreamy guy are the same person...
...A threesome will free him from his jealousy, and it will allow his best friend to come to grips with his homosexuality by having his first gay sex with the man he secretly loves...
...On the one hand, they no longer had to feel guilty about going to a movie rather than reading a book, wandering through a gallery, or spending an evening at the ballet, because cultivated people were supposed to go to the movies...
...The Daytrippers is very modest, like a one-act play or a New Yorker short story (the William Shawn New Yorker, not the Tina Brown New Yorker...
...The dreamy guy screams the F-word back...
...The voice of the people...
...alas, I attended the movie by myself at a small theater with a crowd so hip it was barely heterosexual...
...were highly experimental (like David Holzman's Diary) or unabashedly Communist (like Herbert Biberman's Salt of the Earth...
...In the world of the middlebrow, art is like medicine...
...The very term "art house" used to mean a movie theater run by proprietors committed to the proposition that the cinema was an art form equal to literature or painting...
...The dreamy guy's romance upsets his oldest friend, a curmudgeon with a violent temper who does nothing but crack dyke jokes and scream the F-word...
...So is Big Night, the moving comedy about an Italian restaurant...
...Meanwhile, in France, the nation Americans did not yet have enough sense to hate, Jean-Luc Godard was making movies full of editing and blather...
...So is Swingers, the delightful look at young Angelenos...
...The same is true of the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose movies about the terminal boredom of swanky Eurotrash were actually the dull imaginings of a terminally boring Eurotrash director...
...Sunday, April 20...
...Before the 1960s, art houses had a slightly disreputable, semi-pornographic reputation...
...It has no stars, its director is a nobody, and the reviews are bad, so there's really no reason for it to be doing well except that moviegoers actually like it and are recommending it to others...
...You end up disliking characters you found endearing at the beginning and admiring others who seemed like dull doormats at first...
...Now, it is certainly true that many wonderful movies were made outside the United States in the 1960s—the exuberant works of Federico Fellini still stand up, and so do the remarkably varied films by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa...
...Though Chasing Amy is being sold by the marketing geniuses at Miramax as an honest, plainspoken love story for the '90s, this is one deeply sick film...
...in the days of Hollywood sexual censorship, a part of the foreign-film audience went to catch the occasional glimpse of a female's bare back, maybe the merest hint of a breast...
...The same is true of people who go to the theater, or spend their weekends in museums...
...The middlebrows who had once defiantly scorned the movies as inferior to the other "lively arts" (theater, ballet, opera, the symphony) decided that the cinema—they always called it cinema—was worthy of their attention...
...It is not supposed to be fun...
...Doubtless, Kevin Smith has saved the F-word as a macro on his computer keyboard (F1, perhaps...
...I never would have seen it except that I was drawn to it for somewhat the same reason our middlebrow friends were drawn to the art houses 30 years ago...
...The dreamy guy becomes obsessed with the fact that his girlfriend had a sexual experience with two guys in high school...
...My fiancee was at her bridal shower, and I don't know what it says about our times that I took the occasion to see a movie about a lesbian who turns straight only to be mistreated by her new boyfriend, an experience that leads her to return to the homosexual life whence she came...
...Take Chasing Amy...
...Moviegoers are not searching for Art...
...Monday, April 21...
...its audience considered American movies far too bourgeois unless they John Podhoretz is deputy editor of The Weekly Standard...
...The scene would be nowhere near as shocking as it is were it not for the sexy, muscular, starmaking performance of Ben Affleck as the dreamy guy...
...Have you tried to watch an obscure movie from the 1940s on American Movie Classics or Turner Classic Movies...
...Art houses quickly became cultural institutions with real power...
...I just moved a block away from the premier art house in Washington, so I strolled over this evening to take in a late showing of a terrifically engaging little movie called The Daytrippers...
...Improvement is what church is for...
...In a populist age, the middlebrows have lost their power...
...In 1997, Godard's supposedly pathbreaking works resemble nothing so much as bad rock videos, only instead of featuring annoying grunge rock on the soundtrack, they feature incredibly annoying French conversations about Mao, capitalism, and the laughable Joan Crawford western called Johnny Guitar...
...I found Clerks a tiresome look at anomic twentysomethings until its conclusion, in which Smith takes revenge on one of the female characters by contriving it so that she has sex with a dead body and goes stark-raving mad...
...If they were, the experience of moviegoing would be torture, because it is rare actually to find yourself in proximity to Art...
...A form of reverse snobbery has brought me out to the suburban multiplex in the pouring rain on the afternoon before the beginning of Passover: Anaconda has just spent its second weekend in the #1 position on the box-office charts...
...The rise of the art house put moviegoers in a real bind...
...This was like a dream come true to inveterate moviegoers, who had long desired admittance into the ranks of the culturally acceptable...
...Anaconda is as far from the art house as you can possibly get—you need say no more than "Jaws meets Jurassic Park in the Amazon" to understand this movie about a really, really big snake that swallows people whole...
...When the dreamy guy and the lapsed lesbian fight, they scream the F-word at each other for about five minutes...
...This is certainly true, but a movie can take chances, even manage to take your breath away, without being any good...
...So is Waiting for Guffman, the hilarious pseudo-documentary about a community theater in Missouri...
...Actually, the impulse that compels my attendance at movies like Anaconda and the dreadful Volcano has a good deal in common with the forces that compelled the moviegoer of decades past to waste his time in art-house misery...
...But for the most part, the movies that supposedly raised cinema to the level of art were almost psychotically humorless...
...it is supposed to be good for you, and the more punishingly severe the experience, the better...
...They go because they enjoy the experience itself, not because they seek improvement...
...after all, even in the golden age of Hollywood, most movies were lousy...
...To be sure, the end-of-history art house is also full of noxious stuff like Kids, or the latest post-Tarantino gangster epic...
...Moviegoers spend their lives in the dark in search of pleasure—which is exactly what the middlebrows of the 1960s and the managers of the nation's art houses wished to deny them...
...The art house showed movies made outside the United States almost exclusively...
...it is almost physically painful that so pornographic an idea could emerge from his heartthrob lips...
...And so the movies you were supposed to see in the days when the cinema seemed like a high art form—the movies that made up the regular fare at the art houses—were joyless...
...When I was growing up in New York 30 years ago, this movie would never have been screened at an art house worthy of the name...
...Today's art-house audience has a real taste for the kind of fare that used to entertain Broadway audiences— amusing, well-observed stories about little people who don't count for a hill of beans in this crazy world...
...Bergman made films about the existential struggle of man, which is to say, they were portentous nonsense...
...Thus, there is something remarkable about the way it is settling in for a long run at Washington's Key Theatre and New York's Lincoln Plaza, among other leading art houses...
...Just as I felt obliged to see every Ingmar Bergman movie when it came out during my youth because the cultural commissars of the day told me I should, I feel obliged in 1997 to waste my time on the junk that receives the cultural imprimatur of the multiplex audience...
...Chasing Amy is very interesting, but it's no fun...
...And so he sits down his girlfriend and his best friend and proposes that they all go to bed together...
...Sling Blade is an art-house movie...
...It's the kind of movie that's best in retrospect, that you enjoy discussing on the way home with a companion...
...His idea of a movie was to place Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman in a dark house on a barren landscape and have them stare at each other as a grandfather clock ticked away noisily on the soundtrack...
...That has all changed now...
...The world's most formidable filmmaker, the Samuel Beckett of the silver screen, was the Swedish writer-director Ingmar Bergman...
...Perhaps there is something to be learned, some form of folk wisdom to be gleaned, from an exploration of the tastes of the multiplex viewer...
...But that doesn't matter...
...Now that we are at the end of history, you are actually more likely to see a nice, sweet, unpretentious movie at an art house than at the local multiplex...
...Worse still, they were bereft of the very quality that brings people to a movie theater in the first place...
...But by the 1960s, the movies suddenly had a new cachet...
...Then, just like Clerks, Chasing Amy comes to a shocking climax...
...It's about a Long Island family that drives into Manhattan for a day to track down the wayward husband of one of the family's two daughters, and writer-director Greg Mottola proves to have a real gift for finding unexpected drama in the most conventional situations...
...But there was a catch—the very same catch that always applies when middlebrow taste is involved...
...Chasing Amy at first is an awkward and badly written comedy about a dreamy comic-book artist who falls in love with a cute lesbian...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 34
