A treatise on how 10 famous pictures have expressed and influenced the ideas and behavior of Hollywood people.
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The movies entertain us, but they shape us, too. So many of us "know" how to kiss, wear clothes or die because of all the pictures we've seen. It's too late now to wonder whether that process is educational or demented-- we're all walking along, half in life and half in the scenarios in our heads.
More than we would ever admit to, we are, after 100 years of movies, acting in their style and calling it behavior. But we are amateurs at this game. Just think about the way movies affect professionals, those for whom pretending is a career. Here's a suggestion as to how 10 famous pictures have expressed and influenced the ideas and behavior of Hollywood people.
Citizen Kane (1941)
The enterprise of Citizen Kane was for decades what Hollywood moguls held up to infant tycoons as the epitome of how the game should not be played: never give a director anything like carte blanche; never give him power over script or casting; never give him final cut; and, above all, don't permit him that extraordinary freedom to just show off.
But Orson Welles had a lifelong pose of being at war with the system, of being a loner and an "artist," even though he lived on magic and melodrama, was a favored guest at parties given by people like Zanuck and Selznick, built his artistry on the fluent mix of sincerity, showmanship, genius, chutzpah and bullshit that Hollywood called its own.
Orson Welles died in L.A. a magnificent, lonely failure--which is just what Hollywood wants artists to be. Beneath that, however, Citizen Kane spread the seductive subtext of how the rich should behave.
Kane is a spendthrift. He buys art and people with indiscriminate glee and then seldom has the patience to examine either. He boasts of the money he flushes away and of how, at the rate he's going, he'll be broke ... in 60 years! His house is a palace of shopping and narcissism (the true home for someone indifferent to family, friends, conscience or pension plans), a setting in which the endless process of telling one's own story will be aided by the echoes of huge rooms and the whispering gallery of empty corridors. Every Hollywood giant has the secret sense that he is alone--that he has to be alone to concentrate, to be himself, to exult in self (that is megalomania).
Kane's Xanadu (prison, madhouse, folly--if you will) is the supreme version of the monstrous aloneness called power. Like Norma Desmond's place on Sunset Boulevard, it honors a superb Hollywood destiny--the enormous mansion, bursting with the chaotic design dreams and the broken heart of its occupant.
No, Orson and Kane were very Hollywood. They pioneered laughter in the face of disaster, cigars as big as bombs, and eating anyone you wanted.
The Big Sleep (1946)
Howard Hawks's adaptation of Raymond Chandler's mystery novel had a profound, liberating/devastating effect on Hollywood's everyday sense of story, truth, order and consequence. Put it another way: it is the film that most fully introduces the notion that we are not simply alive, or living life, but are in a movie, where we have lines, actions and fates to fulfill. And so it is our duty to have fun and put on a great show.
As a book, The Big Sleep was an elaborate, complex story about who killed whom, how and why. In the process of making the film, the actors and crew had a tough time following the script--why was that fellow killed, and who did it? The several scriptwriters were interrogated. They had no satisfactory answer. A wire was sent to Chandler himself, and even he had to admit he was puzzled. Well, there was a long scene in the script--a conversation between Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) and the cops--that was intended to explain everything. But it went on and on, and the audience had to remember all the names, think back, and make diagrams in their heads. When the picture previewed, that scene was a killer--people went to the bathroom and never came back. And it took so much away from all the great scenes where Bogart and Bacall just chat and flirt and have fun. So director Hawks and Warner Bros, cut the boring clearing-up sequence, and filmed some more Bogart/Bacall stuff to replace it. Result: what is maybe the most entertaining Hollywood film ever made (top 10, anyway) is also beyond comprehension. But no one cares.
The lesson for life, especially show-business life? Whenever anyone asks you something like: "I want the $500,000 now," or "What were you doing with the hat-check girl at Ciro's?" or "Why all the blood in the Bronco?" or "Have you no shame?" you just ignore the question and have fun.
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
There surely has to be one movie in this group that directly tackles the task of instructing Hollywood people on how they should conduct themselves. Sunset Boulevard (1950) went dangerously close to bad taste in this endeavor: it was a tale told by a corpse; it intimated that women over the age of 50 might want sex; and it left an odd after-flavor with its suggestion that maybe being in pictures could make you mad. Two years later, The Bad and the Beautiful got the recipe right.
Sure, it was a satire (if you must use that fatal word), and, OK, it did spell out that what animated Hollywood was the kind of wide-eyed, unprincipled ambition and self-adoration personified by the producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas). But then you had to notice that the alleged expose of Shields, built around the reminiscences of three people who had been used, abused, exploited and betrayed by the mogul, actually ended with all of them gathered round one telephone (a key weapon in the Shields arsenal) to hear what they wanted to do next. The frogs always reenlist to be stung by scorpions (another principle devised by Orson Welles).
What that resolution implies is that there is no actual abuse or betrayal in Hollywood, because the betrayers are our friends, or our kind of guy, and because we want to be used, deceived and shat upon--that is our role on the team and in the show. No matter how shabbily a Shields behaves--or you, or I--that mayhem is to be regarded as a part of the overall performance. It is what's to be expected; it was in the script. The world is there for the pirates, the outlaws and the strong to seize and ravish. Yes, they are bad, but they are beautiful too, like killer tigers, because they do badness with such flourish and panache. There is nothing in town as polished as a sharp, stylish heel--that is why all the most hilarious jokes are told about the killers.
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
In those mid-1950s, all America was waking up to a new deal: we would agree that teenagers were the center of the world if they would agree to just keep spending. The movies were only one of many businesses in the next few decades that would focus on teens and shape illusions for them. Rebel Without a Cause remains the most flagrant, beautiful and idiotic tribute to this notion of the eternal, virtuous selfishness of the teenager. But in Hollywood, a place always constitutionally opposed to the theory and practice of growing older, the teenager in this film became a surly model for adults suffering from new-deal guilt.
When he played the high-school senior Jim Stark, James Dean was actually 24 (Natalie Wood, by the way, playing 16, was 16--youth in the female is always more authentic and desirable). And so Dean showed Hollywood the possibility that someone already too old could still wear a T-shirt and jeans and impose his emotional tyranny on his elders.
It was a part of the rebel's credo that parents were, by definition, ludicrous, craven, stupid and chronically selfish figures who sometimes begged for attention or a life of their own.
A vital lesson began here: as the Hollywood power broker grew older (an inescapable reality, but never to be mentioned), he owed it to himself to hold onto the mindset of adolescence in which he was the big Me, the center of the household and the solar system, the one to be honored, attended to and spoiled. Only in that way could the power broker usurp the youthfulness and rights of his own children (as, inevitably, they came along), his most intimate rivals.
After all, the teenager had and knew feelings that were new and illuminating to the world; he was, just by being 17 or 18, brilliant, wise and right; he was an actor off on his own improv riff as other players stood by patiently, ready to turn their scripts into toilet tissue. With all those advantages, the career teenager, the devout adolescent, had no need of a cause. Or a "because." He was Me.
Some Like It Hot (1959)
What does that title mean? It's become a phrase that's often tossed around in a very cool way--as if hot (as in sexy, wild, crazed, abandoned, etc.) had also become "hot" (as in "Does he/she think he/she's hot, or what?"). In short, "hot" and its wildness became a terrific act, a campfire.
Some Like It Hot has a world only film can make, one in which we zip along on a night train with an all-girl band--and we're talking honeys--from frigid Chicago to sun-drenched Florida. Every detail of this world is cheerfully cliched. Pursued by gangsters intent on tidying up after a massacre, what can our boys do (just a tenor sax man and a bull fiddle player) but go all the way? They're in show business, aren't they? And sooner or later, that boils down to acting. So they put on heels and dresses, no matter the initial outrage to their own self-image. But they aren't just doing themselves up in drag--there's something sweet in the feeling of silk next to the skin.
No one would accuse Billy Wilder or Some Like It Hot of being gay, or even bisexual.
This is, after all, a movie in which we can indulge the fantasy of being perpetually kissed by, and nearly smothered under the pendant breasts of, Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn and Tony are together at the end for nothing less than the big bang and the black hole that men offer women. But somehow, along with offering up so much comedy that no one can complain (or escape), Some Like It Hot also proposes the giddy potential of acting gay. Jack may just settle for being Joe E. Brown's girl with the diamonds and a pampered life--you always want to follow the money. For the community of Hollywood, Some Like It Hot was the moment when the sexual safety net was cut down, and a guy was free to think about clothes and how he looked, and even to indulge in swift, cutting banter. "Going gay" became a routine.
Psycho (1960)
The influences Hollywood had already absorbed from its own movies by 1960 will leave the astute reader in little doubt about what had to come next--the validation of insanity. Or, I'm Crazy But That's OK Because Mother Still Talks to Me.
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was set in Phoenix, Arizona, on the open highway and at a nearly deserted rural motel, but Norman Bates was still a Hollywood kind of guy. He was, to begin with, a striking example of the new adolescent sensibility (he does, in his way, take over the family), and of the new surreptitious gay attitude (which finds Janet Leigh so breathtakingly, eye-stoppingly heterosexual she has to be removed). But what made Psycho so seminal a movie was the way, at the 35-minute point, its energy and momentum hit a switch and the train just abandons Janet Leigh's character for sad-sack Norman.
At the moment of transition, Norman gets his rocks off and is able to be himselves. The psycho jumps up, sharp as a knife, and says Me, me, it's a movie about me! (This is truly the eternal party game in Hollywood.)
Precisely because Norman has been, hitherto, the most melancholy and sensitive person in the picture (take another look, if you doubt that), the killing is a liberation for him, a shrugging-off of blame. The subtle consequence of this--we are talking 1960, when murder was murder--is to establish the killer as a kind of misunderstood victim. It's a whole other side of the film that Norman's knife acts out our urges of aroused voyeurism; Hitchcock has stealthily led us to the point where Norman can show us our crazy side. It should surprise no one that Hollywood folk, who were, in fact, pioneer psychiatric patients as early as the '30s, should be the first to embrace the handy notion that perpetrators are victims. And now that we're all dysfunctional ... bring on the Menendez brothers.
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather and _The Godfather Part I_I are the Machiavellian texts for modem Hollywood (the code formerly known as The Prince). They happened to provide everything the business ever wanted for itself--huge box office plus critical esteem, which is having your cake and eating it--but even more important, they established a religion of Cake.
Consider first how the chronicle of the Corleones is studded with axioms on how to succeed--"We made him an offer he can't refuse," "Whoever comes to you [with the news], he's the traitor," all the way down to, "If history has taught us anything, it says you can kill anyone." Those are sacred principles for the executive class in Hollywood--and they are all to be uttered with Michael Corleone's sad, chilly authority, as in, "It's not personal ... it's strictly business."
It's too easy to say that Michael is clearly intended to be understood as a bad man, that the first two films in the series chart his moral deterioration. Francis Ford Coppola couldn't resist the man's withdrawn charm, and neither can anyone in a studio. He is a model, a sinister paragon, a man required to make decisions so as to protect the causes of family, business and, ultimately, order. Michael is lethal but tidy paranoid and vengeful but representative of pure power in a potentially chaotic world. The movie respects him on first sight. And every Hollywood power-player has ever since measured himself by that standard--Am I respected? (As in, do they need me to greenlight their money?)
The family is a metaphor for the studio, of course, and Michael Corleone's silk suits and flawless self-denial (no women, no drugs, no diversions for him) make the icon that every picture business demon salutes in the mirror as he leaves the washroom to face his day and destroy all enemies. Which means anyone else, everyone else. In the end Michael will kill a brother and exclude a wife (women altogether are shut out of inner circles and private rooms). The rhetoric of family and studio is a fine veil disguising the monomania of the boss--the mad one, the kid in charge.
American Gigolo (1980)
Richard Gere in American Gigolo is not so much a prostitute as a sexual secret agent. He comes discreetly to service the household. With that supercilious smirk, he accommo¬dates all freaky tastes. He has an intricate expertise, like the rifling in an expensive gun. The quiet hired lover even resembles a hired killer. And so, with American Gigolo, Hollywood began to see how sex really did verge on death. The first lesson in Paul Schrader's fine but creepy film was that the engineered orgasm is a shudder gambling with fatality. (This was a movie made just before AIDS was understood.) Why not gamble? What else is there in 1980's open, empty life but that dread thrill--and the perfect wardrobe to gamble in, a stupefying panorama of designer shirts?
The extreme aesthetic of American Gigolo--the grays, aquas and teals; the steel; the cars as streamlined as the ethical exhaustion--is also a kind of anaesthetic, and a mummy's wrapping against further decay. Art in the high end of the showbiz world--where dinner parties are held to show off fresh acquisitions--is the syrup that coats all the other poisons in life. This art must be as cool as stone, though--vivid yet inert, spectacular but as shallow as Lycra. Indeed, this is an art that mimics the thinness of film stock--all that showiness on so wafery a base. It's not so much post-modern as mod-erne modish--the creative gesture, like the sign of the cross a devout Mafia hood makes before offing someone.
Richard Gere is the perfect actor in this style--hetero enough to pass, but with every knowing wink to gay and bi, except that all urges are ultimately surpassed by that other love, the best one (it has no critics), self-love. Those shirts of his are not just clothes or costume, they are the soul worn as a sleeve.
Fatal Attraction (1987)
The husband in Fatal Attraction says, Gee, I'm sorry, but I'm too busy to go away with the family. And, of course, in his business (lawyering) as in the picture business, the claims of family regularly take second place to the "pressure" of business. Isn't it the rewards of business dedication that let the family be happy? That is the justifying argument that the husband makes in his head when he is also not entirely averse to a little time "on his own." For loyalty is to be expected from those "ordinary people," the wife and children, but the properly ambitious, hardworking husband deserves a little liberty. How can he stay so lovable if he doesn't keep that itch for adventure?
Not that Michael Douglas's character in Fatal Attraction is a predator. No, Douglas is an archetypal actor because he makes it seem as if his adventures are imposed on him. No matter how lusty, or naughty, he manages to keep that upright, boyish self-pity that marks an adorable victim. And so he has the mixed luck to meet a devilishly attractive and flexible woman, a sensational fuck, but crazy, too. And, I ask you--he asks himself--is it my fault she isn't "realistic"?
The lesson here is quite complicated. It begins with the guy being restored to a bachelor-like freedom. Then he benefits from a chance meeting and the woman's desperate availability: her freedom is oddly confining next to his, for she is a prisoner of her nature and need. He is the sexual adventurer--notice that it is extreme sex he seeks out, sex on the edge, like sex in a movie. Presumably, sex with his wife is nocturnal, under cover of dark, entirely ordinary.
The crazy woman demands more: she doesn't know or admit the rules he's playing by; doesn't grasp the way his freedom has nothing really to do with his life, his family, those solid things. So he has to kill her--and there are producers and executives who will take any excuse to kill (or eliminate) a woman. A guy like this would especially appreciate it if his own wife put the key bullet in, looking after her careless man.
Working Girl (1988)
"I've got a head for business and a bod for sin," promises Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. All the politically corrects in Hollywood jumped on this film when it came out. "Breakthrough!" they cried, without noticing that Melanie had also given a neat definition for the whoring trade, and advertised anew the endless openings it has for working-class girls.
Modern Hollywood is very self-conscious about the way it has boosted such names as Sherry Lansing, Laura Ziskin, Amy Pascal, Paula Wagner, et cetera. Look at the women we've got in the executive class, they say. Working Girl is an anthem of this cause. But whoever claimed that Hollywood could be passed off as business, as opposed to blind gambling, schmoozing and job slavery? And whoever said that Hollywood is any readier now to give up being the boys' club it has always been?
Actually, if you look closely at Working Girl (which isn't pleasant--it's an awful picture), you can see just how much fear and loathing of women remains. The film holds up two women for inspection: Sigoumey Weaver, who, as the villainess, serves as a warning against education, ambition, dress sense and the business morals men take for granted. All she gets for presenting the perfect image of what actually succeeds in the world is being blackballed and called "bony ass."
Then there's Melanie--supposedly the model of working-class sense and probity--who can hardly say some of the long speeches she has without expiring, and who is shown all through the movie as something between an apricot danish and a sticky bun. The camera hates her! It spies on her in her tacky underwear in compromising positions.
When all is said and done, her "success" amounts to a small office at the end of the corridor with a secretary who's going to give her some of her own medicine. What else does she get? Harrison Ford, who behaves more like the janitor in a suit than someone capable of the real business life that neglects home and family. Why this film instead of Working Mother or Working Wife? Ask The First Wives Club.
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David Thomson is the author of Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, published by Knopf.