The Culture of Reincarnation

The star system began as the decision to bring certain pretty and appreciated faces back in more films--or in extensions of the same film. Most movies would be return vehicles for treasured stars, or reworkings of plots in which they had proved successful. By the time of the golden age of movie-making, the gold was an unfailing roster of stars and genres. A great deal of decision-making had been eliminated--and that is invariably a keynote of prosperity, and happiness.

But drama is not meant to function like that, for it is dramatic to the degree that a unique unwinding of action sets up momentous and irrevocable consequences. Soft hearts among us might say it would be nice if Lear and his daughter Cordelia could be reunited. In the eighteenth century, there was such an ending written to make Shakespeare more palatable. It has been discarded now because we know King Lear does not work--does not move us--if it is cheated of its tragedy.

Movies were seldom so resolute. Certain stars could not die in their films; others had to. Those imperatives outweighed any feelings the writers or the directors (or even the actors] might have had about dramatic logic or necessity. Box office urged regeneration: sons of Kong and Dracula; the instant reassemblage of Tom in Tom and Jerry, no matter how completely one set-piece had reduced him to dust, smithereens or the thinness of prosciutto; and nothing quite as odd as the Thin Man films, where William Powell and Myrna Loy were brought back in sequels as the wisecracking Nick and Nora Charles, even though in the original the Thin Man had not been the detective, but the man killed--the label was too potent, so Nick became the Thin Man and William Powell had to watch his diet.

Even Conan Doyle had to go back on his tracks once and tell us, aha, Sherlock Holmes didn't really, didn't quite or actually die at Reichenbach Falls. He lived to sell another book. But if the detective is immortal, then danger or dread can never quite touch or deter him. Audiences began to feel the range or limits of certain pictures simply because of the casting. Endings became ordained, and so there could not be the force of dramatic consequence we expect in theatre or the novel. Movies drifted away from moral narrative and closer to dream and ritual.

Thus, at the end of Halloween, when the sidewalk is magically wiped clean of the destroyed Michael Myers, we do not laugh at the absurdity. Rather, we sigh with a terrible understanding--that sequels are in the natural order of movies; that Michael can no more die or cease than Tom, or fear; that the nightmare will return. It is a willful holding on to superstition, a way of preferring the atmospheric dark to any chance of moral light or reason.

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Just in, and upcoming: a make-over of Bringing Up Baby--it's the old film, but with Madonna instead of Katharine Hepburn, and Madonna will be in color--Warren is directing her in the blue-screening; Elvis and Eddie Murphy are going to do The Defiant Ones; James Dean and Grace Kelly are together at last in a remake of Peter Ibbetson, the classic story of separated lovers; in an ingenious montage of recently recovered out-takes and ILM know-how, it's the Judy Garland of Meet Me in St. Louis-vintage in A Star is Born Again--this time Vicki Lester becomes an evangelist; Robert Towne is doing a last-minute polish on What Jake Did at School--with Mickey Rooney of 1936 set to go and today's Mick on the payroll as "technical adviser"; Sly Stallone will be Godfather III (this after the snafu'd computer came up with the script for Three Godfathers!); Shirley MacLaine, will play Louise Brooks in... bed? And--I don't quite read the tape here--someone called Billy Wilder is coming back to direct a satirical comedy from his own script. What is "satirical," please?

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Not everything you have read so far in this article is going to happen. But don't take it for granted that one bit of it couldn't come to pass--and pass again. Truth to tell, the ancient dignity or grace that persuaded Garbo and Grant to retire before they had to... well, that's one gesture not coming back.

More than that, Garbo and Grant have never gone away. A year has not elapsed since Two-Faced Woman (1941) without either the rumor of a Garbo comeback, a photograph of a long wisp of shaded shyness, seen somewhere between Sutton Place and Sightseer Point, or a new book that reveals parts of her letters or lists. The possibility of Garbo has always been there, and who can doubt that the power of her legend has been armored by her absence? In a medium so dedicated to showing and seeing, there is an ultimate charisma in being invisible--if the retiree has the nerve to stay away.

Of course, if the star does retire and live another 30, 40... 50 years, then he or she may become a monster of unused appearance. If you have made yourself by pretending to be others for money, what do you do with just your self? In his last years, while turning down such roles as the one James Mason took in Heaven Can Wait, Cary Grant did experiment with a live stage act. It did not appear to be an "act." For Mr. Grant was billed as "Cary Grant," and he simply came on stage and answered questions from the audience. This was what you might call a "documentary" appearance. Yet he could not help but talk, move, react and--seemingly--think like the Gary Grant of_ North by Northwest_ or People Will Talk. He was that old wonder, still, and he seemed to be having and giving such a good time that one looked around for the cameras recording the evening for future use. But I don't think cameras were ever there; and the shows he did were at out-of-the-way venues. They were remarkable at every moment, and most extraordinary and beautiful in that they now depend on the memories of their spectators.

Surely, Grant felt, why take the risk of going back to the screen? Ahead of most of us, he may have divined that his writers and directors were gone, and that no one took his kind of movie seriously any longer. How easy it would be to come back and look stupid. For here is a point worth brooding on: in the last 30 years, movies have lost true faith in their own fancy and make-believe; they have gone camp, knowing how far they are recirculated versions of former selves--for in the culture of reincarnation can one life ever be quite as precious or as meaningful as when death and the single opportunity are real?

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