FLASHBACK 1992: Take the nation's pulse by going to the movies—then call an ambulance!
Hollywood Manifestos
By Phillip Martin
In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.
Title: Hollywood Manifestos
Author: Phillip Martin
Date: Aug. 12, 1992
These days there seems to be a different kind of patron spaced through the cool and grainy movie auditorium dim. I see them, by themselves or coagulated in sullen clumps of two or three, diffused light playing on their blank faces, making each of them little screens, oblivious to the way the movie backwash bends around their ordinary features.
Perhaps we ought to give the unemployed free movie tickets, distribute them through the same channels that food stamps are administered. For better or worse, we are a nation nourished by images, informed by Bruce Willis and Jodie Foster. An afternoon spent watching, say, Encino Man, in the company of young folk, or Fried Green Tomatoes, in the company of their parents, should convince any thoughtful individual of the merit in Alexander Hamilton's secret wish for an enlightened monarch. The people is indeed "beast."
And, at this moment, with the fires of Los Angeles barely tamped and Bill Clinton's nomination attained, that beast is tortured and confused, roused from the Reagan-induced naptime of the 1980s into the burbling slapstick of the Bush Age. Does America so long for that quaint "security" that it would embrace H. Ross Perot? We were almost treated to a sequel.
A year after George Bush's Gulf War production (which conservative humorist Rush Limbaugh has cast as a mini-series) the mood of the country has collapsed into a simulation of Jimmy Carter's malaise. There is a new skepticism working itself out; Spielbergian science fantasies and blow-up martial operas don't seem to cut it anymore.
Now we're watching creepy-crawly films like Grand Canyon and Radio Flyer, films that insinuate that America is just one great big dysfunctional family. Americans are obsessed with their own victimization, and the "recovery" movement has developed a chic momentum. We all harbor abused inner children, and nothing is really our fault, much less the mis-wired political interstices of modern America.
What a lot of films seem to be telling us these days is that we are all battered children here, all scared and shivery when, like Kevin Kline in Grand Canyon, the damn Lexus breaks down in Watts. We're at the point where dignity has become so rare that a character who mouths platitudes and levels his eyes looks good to us.
Grand Canyon, despite—or perhaps because of—its blather and unevenness, is the recent film that seems most attuned to the zeitgeist. In it, Danny Glover endows his mechanic, Simon, with nothing more or less than decency, and we take that as refreshing. America, betrayed by the simple-minded rhetoric of less-than-decent people, has learned to cherish decency. To protect us, we need Simon, or best of all, the benevolent Terminator.
Our movies are manifestos, confronting us with our nation's health and pulse. At no time since Coming Home and The Deer Hunter began to frame the Vietnam malaise that took Rambo and the war in Iraq to explain away, have our films been as pessimistic as they are now. Anyone who cares about politics and the presidential election should pay close attention to what Hollywood is trying to tell us—and what we are trying to deny—about ourselves.
What could be more symptomatic of a society in denial than the adoption of a cartoon as a national treasure? Perhaps the most beloved movie of last year was Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Widely viewed as an escapist anomaly, Beauty is more the sort of desperate gesture people resort to in hard times. While, like Triumph of the Will, it is a magnificent piece of work, it owes at least part of its success with adults to the vulnerability of the American psyche in the post-Reagan economy. That this G-rated film is more clever and better attuned to the mythopoetic tradition than most Disney whitewashings (it is possible to read Beauty as a critique of that other recent Disney blockbuster Pretty Woman) is incidental to its popular success.
We make Beauty suffice as the sequel to the Star Wars and the Rambo trilogy (Grenada, Panama and Iraq) that made us all so proud.
At a crucial juncture of David Cronenberg's crafty reinterpretation of Naked Lunch, Peter Weller tells the Kerouac and Ginsberg doppelgangers sent to rescue him from Interzone that "America is not a young land; it is old and dirty and evil."
It is interesting and instructive that a movie such as Naked Lunch, however briefly, makes its way into American multiplexes to flicker on the faces of idle moviegoers. Interesting in that such a highly idiosyncratic vision—Burroughs filtered through Cronenberg isn't the usual mall fare—is instructive because Hollywood, like other manifestations of popular culture, is essentially a reactive medium. Its films are reflections of a streamlined, supercharged existence that accentuate different details but rarely startle us. The movie-making apparatus serves as a recycler for defining images, it chews up books and lives, reducing it all into a digestible pabulum.
But in this media-driven age, even those films that rely on our morbid appetites are occasionally overtaken by real events, as when Body Parts was obliterated by the Dahmer revelations. Movies show us what we look like, albeit with the advantage of makeup and flattering lighting.
As much as the Hollywood establishment likes to validate the happy ending and the fuzzy afterglow, four of the five movies nominated for the best picture Oscar this year work on the spirit like warm vodka, inducing a rather joyless intoxication.
Whatever the merits of Bugsy, The Silence of the Lambs, JFK and The Prince of Tides, none of the remaining nominees for best picture of last year could be described as "feel good" movies. All end with their stars shaky or shattered, having run through some madness or horror. No one gets out unscarred.
Perhaps it is too much to ask that a big film move beyond simple-minded rhetoric, perhaps we oughtn't look to entertainment for "answers," but the point is our entertainment is essentially a funhouse mirror. Hollywood is a factory town, and for all the pretentious silliness promulgated by its actors and "auteurs" in celebrity stroke magazines and on Arsenio Hall, it is still subject to market pressures.
Movies are designed and merchandised as consumer goods, as gross mass entertainment, as gross actions devised to capture as large a share of the available consumer dollars as possible. It is probably a good thing that people are beginning to be able to see around the sides of things, that we are all becoming less the mark and more the hustler, even though that transformation from passive watcher to critic necessarily involves the destruction of innocence.
You can see this decay of innocence in the theatres, manifested in a kind of renewed modernism, with the "hard, dry" images T.S. Eliot so craved. Betcha old Thomas Stearns would have loved the police helicopter searchlights of Boyz n the Hood, an image later echoed in Grand Canyon.
None of this restlessness with formula bodes well for an incumbent anything, much less something so rickety as a president. Inertia can save most installed things, but it is just as easy to vote against George Bush as it is to vote for George Bush. If people had to get up and drive someplace to pull a switch so that there wouldn't be a revolution, then there would be a revolution, wouldn't there?
People are more likely to vote for or against a self-styled cultural power like Perot or Pat Buchanan than they are to vote for or against a Bush or Clinton. (If Clinton has missed his chance, he's missed it because of his own reluctance to assert his personality.) Non-candidate Perot succeeded in casting himself against type, the little-guy billionaire with the common touch. Perot even looks Disneyfied; think of Dopey with a fabulous portfolio. Having grown used to fairy tales, we must have seen Perot as a saving fix.
Bush is just last year's model, the cynical super-pol who'll do anything to be elected. He can't deliver his lines as well as the Gipper, the guy who originated the role.
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