Six Great American Films, 1978 - 1988

...All the Marbles (1981)
This was Robert Aldrich's last movie, and I like to believe that Aldrich died happy, knowing he'd made it. Along with Abel Ferrara's Cat Chaser, made, at the tail end of the decade, this is one of the last true examples of film noir. It's simultaneously shadowy and colorful, in every sense. But what do you expect from Joseph Biroc, who gave the world the image-monuments of Forty Guns and the careful delirium of Confessions of an Opium Eater? And you end up wondering the kind of movies Peter Falk would've been in if he was born 20 years earlier--him and Harry Dean Stanton. How many bits of 80-minute grit could they have cranked out in the post-war years?

Big Wednesday (1978)
History, tugging like a hand on your sleeping shoulder. John Milius's best film, and one of the few epic films. The mise-en-scene is Vincente Minelli and John Ford arguing about a decade; you're never sure if the 1960s were a tragic romance or some great folly. Waves crash, punches are thrown, mistakes are made and lived through. Grandly sincere, or sincerely grand, this is Milius's attempt to make The Great American Movie. The attempt is a failure, but the result is a success regardless. That's the funny thing about movies: though the intentions behind them play a role, intentions aren't the final result. Yes, a film is a gesture, but it is more importantly a film. The writer only writes what he or she thinks up, while the moment you start running film through a camera, you let the world in. What language can't communicate, cinema wholeheartedly accepts, sometimes without us even noticing.

The Driver (1978)
The vague and the painstaking. The soundtrack is a terse musique concrete composition for voices, squealing tires and slamming doors. The driver of title is played by Ryan O'Neal, an actor without temperature, neither cool nor warm. Maybe that's why Stanley Kubrick managed to put him to such good use: Kubrick's cinema is climate-controlled, which leads many people to wrongly assume that it's cold. Walter Hill is an abstractor (this film, 48 Hrs.) and a parabalist (Streets of Fire, Crossroads, Johnny Handsome), which is more or less the same thing. To take something complicated (a history, a morality) and turn it into a parable is not very different from taking a real thing and, through its image, making something direct: a color is easier to understand at first glance than a street, the cold light of a headlamp is simpler than an oncoming car. But, of course, no two things are completely alike: the parable has only a limited meaning, while the image is bottomless.

Modern Romance (1981)
The present hasn't been too kind to Albert Brooks, but history will be kinder: we'll someday say "Brooksian" with the same ambiguous clarity as "Hawksian." Fed by a distinctly American sense of compromise, that sour taste that accompanies every sweetness, Brooks' cinema is not one of contradictions: the world is complicated, but it isn't fractured. Every happy thing is sad, and every sad thing is a little funny; there is no clear separation in our experience of things. It's through focusing on certain elements, through the sieves of our memories (or the editing of a film), that we are able to look back and distinctly say that an event was tragic or that it was good. It's the basic premise of Brooks' later Defending Your Life, in which the newly dead must argue that scenes from their lives display their strengths, even though it can just as easily be said that they show them at their worst. Absolute happiness is an illusion: it's just something you claim to win an argument. Modern Romance is a rejection of traditional dramatics, a serious approach to comedy. And always unflinchingly intelligent.

The Moderns (1988)
An incomparably passionate film by the most brilliant American director of the 1980s. The Jazz Age is to Alan Rudolph what the Belle Epoque was to Jean Renoir: an era of creativity that inspires more creativity through reflection. A film about the ideas of an era more than its specifics. Or, to rephrase, a film that takes inspiration from the ideas of an era to create something new. Keith Carradine is Keith Carradine is a painter, Wallace Shawn is Wallace Shawn is a gossip columnist, John Lone is John Lone is a businessman and Kevin J. O'Connor is some dream image of Ernest Hemingway. Here the elements that are used haphazardly or lazily by other directors become rigorous and expressive. Rudolph stands with Fassbinder--and now Hong Sang-soo--as one of the few poets of the zoom lens: what is done with a jerky hand-operated zoom in a brief sequence in The Moderns is more beautiful than most directors' camera movements. The use of black-and-white historical footage is genuine quotation instead of a lazy attempt to set a mood.

Paradise Alley (1978)
I refuse to believe that any movie directed by Sylvester Stallone isn't at the very least interesting. Sometimes, as in the curious case of Paradise Alley, the movie's much more than that: it's great. Case in the sense that Paradise Alley is isolated from its contemporaries and seemingly the rest of film history; curious in the sense that every film is the result of a set of choices, and the choices here are, as if often the situation with a great movie, infuriating--certainly more infuriating than Big Wednesday, and possibly more infuriating than The Moderns. A movie that seems to belong to no time and no mindset. Lit with the kind of neons that bathe a body but designed in the earth tones that make every character feel like a part of the room they're in, it's set in 1940s New York--more of a location than a period, just one of those places any story can be set as long as it's costumed accordingly (like "Morocco").

As a director, Stallone is always acting. Every one of his movies isn't directed by Sylvester Stallone, but by Stallone playing some directing archetype; he's clearly playing a different character behind the camera of every film. So maybe Paradise Alley is his best movie because Sylvester Stallone, Director of Paradise Alley is his most original character, the ordinary visionary he'd re-use for the first half of Staying Alive.

The Missing Passage

The recent Region 1 boxed set of David Lynch's work--"The Lime Green Set," as it's called--includes, amongst deluxe versions of his short films, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, a DVD that's referred to as the "Mystery Disc" on the packaging. Its contents are fascinating: the Rabbits online show, a large collection of shorts and, most interestingly, deleted scenes from the Wild at Heart work print.

It seems like the most accurate term for describing any moments ("scenes") from Lynch's films is to call them passages, a term that's also handy with Godard. So these aren't so much deleted scenes as omitted passages, sentences cut from the ends of paragraphs, the Gypsies that were trimmed out and painted over on the canvas of Manet's Boy with a Pitcher.

Importantly, these missing passages aren't included on the Wild at Heart disc--by being placed o the Mystery Disc, they serve as an afterword, a collection of numbered moments that we can insert into the Wild at Heart of our imagination.

The sequence labeled Scene 78 is the most fascinating, as potent and doomed as the famous Winkie's scenario in Mulholland Dr. or the phone call in Lost Highway. Like those sequences, it's in some ways completely self-contained. Viewed outside of the context of the movie, it could be a short film. On the other hand, if imagined as part of the whole of Wild at Heart--or, more importantly, once viewed, remembered as being part of Wild at Heart (and with Lynch the memory of a film is as important as the act of watching it)--it becomes significantly more ambiguous. It's both completely fathomable and a total mystery.




The Tradition of Consistency

Theophrastus gives us 30 characters. His intention isn't dramaturgy or social observation. He wants to be a guide (like a guidebook), to create a text that would help describe (you could say characterize) people in the same way a map describes a city (incompletely, that is, creating a set of names and coordinates to navigate through a whole with infinite social possibilities). So we have The Boor in the same way we have Logan Square and The Coward in the same way we have Lakeshore Drive. R.C.Jebb's 1870 translation has the old Greek writing:

"I will describe to you, class by class, the several kinds of conduct which characterise [people] and the mode in which they administer their affairs; for I conceive, Polycles, that our sons will be the better if such memorials are bequeathed to them, using which as examples they shall choose to live and consort with men of the fairest lives, in order that they may not fall short of them."

We've invented many more systems--as many systems as there are people, probably even more. Advertising is a system for dividing a population into consumer groups. Politicians create a system that clearly delineates people into us and them. A system is always a knife. It's for carving up a whole into pieces so that it can be more easily digested. People are not characters; character, characteristics are a system we use to more easily analyze something. When we think of any person as a character (and, in our memories and our experiences, we frequently do) we cut off part of them, and we can keep cutting. Perhaps this is the great Utopian aspect of cinema: that it does not include a system for dividing up its audience.

So why is it that film analysis -- whether it's published criticism or two people talking in a lobby -- wants to tether itself to a notion of character -- a very clearly delineated, orthodox concept of character, whether in respect to the subjects or the filmmakers (in auteurism, themselves characters)? There is nothing wrong with the character system -- many films have been made with it in mind. But it is never a good idea to use the same system for everything. Every film calls for a new approach. Though literature is our favorite scapegoat when it comes to attacking lazy criticism, adherence to the character system, the character tradition, is more likely the fault of the guide we frequently use to describe what we think constitutes "good" acting: consistency. A person has to be like an equation ("X would never do that!" when we should instead accept what X has done and try to understand it, and that involves more systems--morality, ethics, etc--illustrating that the mind is a sort of infinitely regressing trap).

The art of creating an "original character" is like the art of cooking: a new combination of old ingredients. Any original idea can be subdivided into older ideas. This does not discredit originality--but we should see things for what they are. Behind every new idea is a transposition of an old idea, a previous assumption. There will be new ideas as long as there are old ones. The older the better.

People who dislike David Lynch's work, or at least certain aspects of it, will occasionally mention the "poor characterizations"--especially in Wild at Heart. But with Lynch a person is never a character--instead, a character is ascribed to them. They are given names, but those names aren't theirs to keep. Sometimes a single set of characteristics can travel between actors (Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway) or the same actor can be given multiple distinct sets of characteristics and names (Inland Empire). Or, as in Twin Peaks, a notion (whether it's a character, a feeling of guilt) can spread out like an umbrella and cover multiple persons at different times.

There are no "characters" in Ozu's late films. Instead, familiar faces are given names and roles, but they're never characters in the orthodox sense. There are no "characters" in late Hitchcock (certainly not in Topaz): instead, images of people serve as magnets for the metal filings of our emotions. And the people of Cassavetes and Pialat are like quotes with ellipses on either side: there is a acknowledgment that we are seeing something out of context, removed from its reality, but it is important that this removed passage be quoted.

Lynch, along with Abel Ferrara, presents the most intelligent portrayal of identity of any contemporary American filmmaker: in every one of us, there is a million, and sometimes a million of us are one. It depends on the system.


Cut-Ups

Laura Dern in Inland Empire is as many characters as the viewers wish to divide her into (the more adventurous can say that she is really only one). Inland Empire and Mulholland Dr. are films without scenes--a scene, after all, is a system by which a whole can be clearly delineated. Instead, by presenting the work as an interconnected whole, Lynch gives us the opportunity to create our own systems, to cut them up as many ways as we want. Mulholland Dr., especially early on, frequently coalesces into something akin to scenes. But Inland Empire is a long cinematic superimposition, posing the same question a double exposure poses: are we looking at a single image, two distinct images, something else? As behind every new idea there are old ideas, behind every recognizable image is complete abstraction.

In 1984, a young Austrian named Peter Tscherkassky, a former student of journalism (the system of shaping experience into "news") and philosophy (the system of systems!), laid three minutes worth of celluloid down in a darkroom in the shape of a film frame and exposed a single still image from the Lumiere's first "actuality" (really the second take) on it, each blown-up microscopic section of the frame creating a new image. Concreteness—"realism"—is something that only exists on the surface, and the moment you begin to divide you find abstraction.

As a painter, Lynch knows this well. The painter coalesces, combining something completely separate from the painting (the paint) to create an image. Even in a "realistic" image, if we look far enough, we will see that there are "abstract" elements: colors.

This is what makes the Bible one of the greatest works of art. With its numerous versions, translations and rewordings, it is a text that can be subdivided infinitely. It provides us--like the concept of characterization when applied to people--with a rudimentary system (chapters and verses) as a guide (like a map), but it can be broken up and re-contextualized any number of ways: by word, by sentence, by any number of pages, verses, words, sentences, chapters, and, of course, passages. The Bible is a machine capable of generating an infinite number of meanings, working as long as someone somewhere is even thinking of it. And so is the cinema.



The Intruder

The first image of Scene 78 is one of its two close-ups. Johnnie Farragut (Harry Dean Stanton) is playing with a novelty pen. A wide shot: two men--who will be named later as Reggie and Dropshadow (or, rather, they will have those names ascribed to them) arrive and introduce themselves. They're embodied (and supporting players in Lynch films are always embodying something), respectively, by Calvin Lockhart and David Patrick Kelly.

The preservation of the original splices in the work print gives every cut a jittering quality, like a snare hit. Even the most casual viewer becomes aware that the image consists of pieces attached to each other to form a chain. The soundtrack is finished, crisp, clear almost as if to contrast with the unfinished nature of the images. It is a pair of ominous arms trying to hold something together, trying to keep it from falling apart.

Stanton, with his beige suit and dapperly held cigarette, is doing his best Cary Grant, his best American cool to Lockhart's affable Honduran. Lockhart is playing friendly, talkative, but what comes through is a subliminal menace. His blue shirt seems tuned to the low hum on the soundtrack, its electrical blue seeming more and more intrusive as the dialogue progresses. Lockhart says he runs an appliance repair shop and then tells Stanton he works for the Honduran government. He has a license to kill. He tells Stanton that he and Kelly are going fishing and them offers to show him his combat pistol, holding up a metal briefcase. You could edit out half of his lines and make him into a friendly tourist. Or you could edit out the other half and make him into a dangerous rogue. As Stanton stands up to leave, there is a close-up of a tattoo, somewhat illegible, across Kelly's knuckles.

Lynch is a filmmaker who is sometimes criticized for his simplistic worldview. That observation is accurate, though the idea that it's a detriment is misplaced. His work consists of many conflicting simplistic wordviews operating side by side, several systems going at once. In Lockhart's character alone, there are two possible pieces we can cut out and make something easy to understand (he is a friendly foreigner with a thick accent on a trip to New Orleans / he is a killer working for a foreign government), both originating from archetypes. Simple ideas an ordinary American like Stanton might have about people from other countries. Lynch does not reject the notion of "consistent character"--he embraces it more than any of his contemporaries. The more "consistent characters" a person can be, the merrier.

But say we put those two halves together, like Scene 78 does. What we are left with is not two characters, but a sort of infinite whole. Something that by contradicting itself (as the placidity of the wide shots is contradicted by the menacing second close-up) in every direction creates an ambiguous image from which ideas can be carved by anyone willing to hold a knife. Lynch can be cut up forever.