Don Simpson: Hollywood Death

And so to the death of Louis B. Mayer himself in October 1957, six years after MGM had kicked him out. The little tyrant was taken away by cancer, the conclusion to those last years of bitterness against the studio he had made. Who can know, in all the stress on health in Hollywood, how far yearning affects the organism? If you believe in it enough, can you will others dead? But if your belief is so terrible, perhaps it strikes back at you.

Mayer was a has-been when he died, but some were surprised how many people came to the funeral. There were several explanations: that if you give the public what they want, they'll turn out; that plenty had come to be sure Mayer was gone; and that there were people who'd been staying alive just to be at this funeral. And so, Jeanette MacDonald sang "Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life." One of Mayer's daughters, Edie, sat there wondering whether she'd been cut out of the will--she had. Spencer Tracy, under contract to the studio, grimly read the eulogy several screen-writers had labored over.

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Boom, we cut out of the L.B. Mayer affair into the terrific open-air burial from The Godfather, the one where Don Vito himself is being put to rest--as if diligent killers and protectors of order could ever rest! We're at this posh cemetery, out on Long Island, and the screen is filled with these Italian guys in their dark suits. There is so much sinister intent and respect around it could be a scene from Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. There's the family and the enemies, and--get a load of this--after Michael has said, like a psychic, that the betrayer will be the one who carries the invitation, the sad-eyed Tessio comes over to Michael with the whispered how-about-a-get-together? How long has Tessio been in the Mafia that he doesn't know how Mafia movies work? Doesn't he grasp the rule that Michael and the script know? Is he volunteering, or is this his unconscious death wish?

But we are loving it, because we want death, and this funeral is the apt intro to the big finish--the scenes of baptism crosscut with the executions of the enemies of the Corleones. And we enjoy all the staged ways the enemies get hit, looking as innocent as actors hitting their marks, gazing up and taking the bullets in the face. There never was a medium until movies that could give you so much knockout, lifelike death.

You see, what I am building to is this point about how movies by their very nature resemble death, and how our desire at the movies is, so often, just to peep over that line and get a look and a feel of death. For decades we had movies that were slaughter yards, piles of drop-dead corpses, like Auschwitz with Max Factor. Not just the Godfathers but The Wild Bunch, that whole era of mowing 'em all down. By now we are beyond the mere thrill of killing as such. The frontier is no longer killing, but death itself. That's where the voyeur gaze is headed. What is death like? Couldn't we get a look, just a hint? I wanna go to Death Valley, Daddy.

Think of Ghost and Truly Madly Deeply-- aren't these new love stories where your lover has gone, but, just for a moment in time, you can have them back in what is bound to be safe sex? Consider Flatliners, where these wildly bright kids are just tripping up to the edge and one step over. And there's Glenn Close talking to us from out of her coma in Reversal of Fortune. Don't forget 12 Monkeys. Not that I could ever work out the story, but I'll swear that some of those people were dead, and some alive. Then there are those pictures, like Strange Days and Unforgettable, where, if you can get hold of the right cyberware or neurofluids, you can see a woman who's already dead come back and get killed all over again. Now, that could catch on as a CD-ROM!

These are big themes as the millennium draws close. Death now is the trip and the turn-on. Look at the kind of photography we're getting in pictures. You can say it's the influence of MTV or the result of special effects edging out classical photography. Whatever it is, we are into a style now where the imagery is increasingly non-naturalistic, more and more fantasy-driven, ghostly--no longer just a record of appearance. Once upon a time, movies were a sensation because they let us share the sight of real things--even if in fantastic or fictional circumstances. But now we are seeing the unreal, the impossible, the electronic. It can be dinosaurs, morphins or James Dean and Marilyn Monroe dancing together at Rick's Cafe-- which they never did or could have done. I can't stand most of what Oliver Stone does, but I will give him some credit: In films like JFK. he has found a way of showing the real and the merely possible on screen at the same time--so you're not sure which is which. It's the weird feeling you get in Pulp Fiction when you know John Travolta is dead already, but there he is still walking out of the diner. I tell you, movies are going to do this more and more. Why? Us, sweetheart. We are fascinated with the big D.

"This is Norman Mailer:

"Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long. An emotion produced from the chum of the flesh is delivered to a machine, and that machine and its connections manage to produce a flow of images which will arouse some related sentiment in those who watch. The living emotion has passed through a burial ground--and has been resurrected. The living emotion survives as a psychological reality: it continues to exist as a set of images in our memory which are not too different, as the years go by, from the images we keep of a relative who is dead."

In other words, whether we dream ourselves up there on the screen-- the way Buster Keaton once climbed up into the light in Sherlock, Jr.--or let those illusory lives mingle with ours, as in The Purple Rose of Cairo, we are experimenting with ghostliness. This may be the most profound lesson for identity and human nature that the age of movies has for us. It reminds me of Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane. You see, there's a way of regarding both those films as death wishes, or the dying dream of being at one's own funeral. In Kane, when the great man dies he whispers his last word to us as a seduction, a mystery for us to solve. Only at the close of the film do we find out what "Rosebud" could mean. In between, Kane has run through his entire life, with the delicious advantage of hearing those left behind tell us about him.

Sunset Boulevard has two characters, a young man and an old woman, both "dead" in Hollywood's eyes. The man is a struggling writer, the woman an ex-star. But they are lingering, moldering, slinking up the place; they can't get a decent burial. So the writer drives his car into the garage of the big house on Sunset. Norma Desmond thinks he's the undertaker, come to take her dead monkey away. She's nearly right. Joe Gillis has the taint of death on him, and it won't be long before the guys in the white coats come to fish him out of the pool and lake him to the morgue. Still, he has one ironic privilege: as a would-be writer he gets to tell the story. That part of him just doesn't shut off--Joe Gillis is going to a hell where he will have to pitch hopeless stories forever.

As for Norma, she gets her comeback. She will be on the front pages again--on her way to a home for the criminally insane. But her comeback is her funeral too--in DeMille close-up, she comes down the staircase like vapor, looking into the lens and trusting that those other ghosts, the public, are there. Like all great stars, she is dead, dead attractive, a ghost who needs our warming thoughts.

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David Thomson's new book, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, has just been published by Knopf.

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