I find it an interesting but somewhat disquieting
phenomenon that High Fidelity, like two highly successful recent
movies--The Sixth Sense and
American Beauty--should be primarily a showcase for performers, and this
phenomenon has prompted the following prefatory reflections. (To go
directly to the review of High Fidelity, click here.) The traces of this
phenomenon--of a basic split between vehicle and talent--can be detected
everywhere in commercial film production in the United States today, but they
are far more painfully evident in "serious" films like The Sixth Sense
or American Beauty than in blatantly macho displays of ego on celluloid.
Actually I am by no means sure that the average Chuck Norris or Jean-Claude Van
Damme movie would look any worse minus its star, but I have little doubt the two
films I just mentioned would collapse like a house of cards minus their leads. The
question of the relation between performers and the movies in which they act
is in no way an obvious one, and broad generalizations are of little help
in addressing it. But looking over the history of movies in this country, it is
possible to make a few observations. In the silent period and up to nearly
the end of the 1940's, the personae of many great stars were as much a fictional
creation as any of the characters they portrayed. In his biography Garbo, John
Bainbridge relates that even before meeting Greta Gustafsson, Mauritz
Stiller already had "a name and a plan" for the still to be discovered
actress he intended to promote to stardom. No small part of the charm of
viewing an MGMediocrity like Mata Hari or As You Desire Me lies in watching the
seductive interaction of two beings who seem to be perpetually exchanging roles.
Is it the "real" Garbo playing a once "real" Mata Hari or
an "imaginary" Mata Hari imitating an equally "imaginary" Hollywood icon?
However, the alchemical operations which transformed an ordinary mortal into a
Garbo, a Norma Shearer, or a Joan Crawford took place behind the walls of studios, far from the
prying eyes of the public, the result of skilled collaboration between studio
bosses, directors, cinematographers, makeup artists, and costume
designers, not to mention the elaborate machinery of studio publicity
departments. Where Eighteenth century philosophes had sought to demystify
religion by tracing the origin of the gods back to superstitious fear and the
posthumous deification of human heroes, the studios--certainly without the help
of the Enlightenment--sought to reverse the process. Mystification typified the
cinematic cult of personality in which everything served to make screen luminaries into deities who looked
down upon their fans from a height to which the latter could never hope to
attain.
This situation began to change
radically in the 1950's, most obviously as a result of the gradual decline of
the traditional studio system. But it is also possible to discern two other,
less obvious if not more potent forces at work. The first of these is the
massive shift away from stylization in the direction of "realism" at
all levels--subject matter, visual style, but certainly acting--in commercial
motion picture production after the end of World II. Not that stars themselves
became more "ordinary" and less charismatic than in the old days--Marlon
Brando, a crucial agent in the transition from stylization to
"realism," who made a point of contemptuously rejecting all the
industry's usual tricks for wooing the public's favor, never could have been
confused with the guy next door, no matter how much he seemed to have carried
the traits of Stanley Kowalski into his life offstage. But performers first of all
needed to be credible in a role, even if changes in movie financing ultimately
enabled the actors and actresses most in demand to pick and choose their
projects in a way undreamed of in the days of Louis B. Mayer, Jack L.Warner, or
Darryl F. Zanuck. Few movies any longer can serve simply as vehicles for
expensive talent as they often did in the studio period, and although some
action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jean-Claude Van Damme still wield a
strongly iconic appeal for their devoted followers, only someone with a
monstrously bloated ego like Kevin Costner would imagine making a career
out of playing himself on screen. The era of John Wayne--not to mention that of
Douglas Fairbanks Sr.--is long past, and today actors have to walk a thin
line between bending to a role and keeping their image visible. Bruce Willis,
who certainly does possess iconic power, does not play Malcom Crowe in The Sixth
Sense as John T. McClane any more than Tom Cruise plays Frank T.J. Mackie in
Magnolia as Maverick. But this shift, which already had the effect of somewhat
bringing stars down from their pedestals, and which was not without its positive
side, converged with another, more dubious and thoroughgoing change, one in the
way stars were presented to the public by the media.
Charisma in the old
days of Hollywood was a function of distance, which became more intense the
farther removed audiences were from its source. Practically speaking, things are
not so different today--superstars have their own personal security guards who do
just as effective a job of keeping unwanted interlopers away as studio lackeys did in the past.
Nevertheless, owing to the national obsession with peeping
through keyholes, pandered to by a host of publications from People down to
The
National Inquirer and its ilk, as well as assorted "investigative"
television programs--all dedicated to destroying the last vestiges of privacy in
the country--any celebrity is subjected to more public scrutiny of his or her private
life than ever before. But it is figures from the entertainment industry who are
the prey of preference for the media predators. Even in the "golden
age" of American movies, the attraction of fans to their idols had a
highly ambivalent quality, as readers of Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust
are well aware. On the one hand, the infatuation of fans could extend to a
demand to take physical possession of stars; on the other, the fundamentally
aggressive component of this demand revealed itself and became openly
murderous when the fans felt rejected, or when they sensed a star was on his or
her way down from Olympus. Today, when the media have brought the stars down to
earth, even if they haven't succeeded in bodily transporting the public into
their front rooms, the destructive side of the cult of personality has emerged far
more starkly than its mystifying one. Sometimes it is difficult to resist
the impression that nothing would delight the segment of the population
fascinated with prying into the lives of the rich and famous more than if one of
its favorite leading men was caught exhibiting himself on the nearest street
corner in broad daylight. And wouldn't it be a stroke of luck if someone armed
with a camcorder happened along and recorded the moment for posterity?
Instead
of simply demystifying stars, this double process has a seemingly contradictory
effect. While the ever growing power of the media has the power to cast a
speciously charismatic aura about whomever it chooses, regardless whether that
happens to be a great actor, a notorious criminal, or a piece of human flotsam
and jetsam it capriciously decides to elevate to the momentary status of
celebrity, at the same time what fuels the light to attract moths in that same
aura is not the idealized image of a star but primarily a stream of vicious
gossip. All the rumors about a performer's life off screen down to the most
intimate details of his or her sexual behavior, or even penile endowments in the
case of males, all the rumors that studio flacks once hastened to keep as
invisible as possible now quickly find their way into the tabloids or onto the
Internet. To be sure, the great organs of public opinion like television
networks do not themselves usually deign to purvey these rumors, but once rumors
gain currency they become newsworthy--and who would want to stand in the way of
the public's right to know? How apt that one of the leading figures in the
battle to carry snooping to new and greater heights should bear the name Drudge!
Dryden and Swift would have been elated to find a target for their satire
bearing such a cognomen. But how can this not affect the way audiences see stars?
The stars are no longer ornamental decorations in the facade of a great studio,
but isolated "personalities" whose life off screen becomes not
only fused with but confused with that on--and just as Brando is the
outstanding representative of the rise of realistic acting in the modern
American cinema, the paradigmatic figure here is Marilyn Monroe, who combined a
disastrously unhappy and well-publicized private life with a masochistic
capacity for exhibitionism.
But the
changes wrought by marketing which aim at bringing entertainment
"personalities" ever closer to the public only serve to bring to the
surface a far deeper problem, and one with a far longer and more complex
history. It is highly unlikely, I think, that many people today believe in a
Platonic realm of ideas existing apart from experience, yet when these same
people start to look at movies they reason like the most intransigent idealist
as if movies were only--or should be only--the imaginary double of "the
real world." But to take
"reality" as a standard of aesthetic judgment--even if this
"real world" is conceived of in the most narrowly positivistic and
anti-"metaphysical" fashion of "the facts, and nothing but the
facts"--is no less ontological than appealing to Plato's world of pure
mental forms. The belief that art and "reality" can be neatly
separated and compared with one another is a mirage which has its origins in
both theo-ontology and ideology. Nonetheless, this mirage continues to
exercise its sway over both audiences and reviewers as the recent success of High
Fidelity with both groups attests. In a quote from a review in the
Chicago-Sun Times used as advertising for the picture, Roger Ebert states that
"Watching 'High Fidelity,' I had the feeling I could walk out of the
theater and meet the same people on the street--and want to, which is an even
higher compliment." With all due respects to Ebert, I find this a fairly
dubious compliment, as if the highest a movie could aim for would be a
literalistic replication of life outside the theater. There would be a good
deal to say about both the stultifying philosophical and aesthetic
implications of Ebert's statement, but the worst thing that can be probably
said about it is that it makes all too clear the main attraction of High
Fidelity, which I now turn to.
Click
here
to go to Dave's review of High
Fidelity