The Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago (5/31/00)
carried an article by Stephen Farber enitled "Mission: Familiar"
attacking John Woo's big hit Mission:
Impossible II, starring Tom Cruise. Farber's
indictment of the film contained two main accusations. First, that the new
movie has "lifted" its basic plot elements from Alfred Hitchcock's
Notorious. Second, "the fact that "M:I-2" isn't up to the
standards of "Notorious" says a lot about what's happened to
big-budget Hollywood films, where any rougher edges have to be smoothed away in
fear of alienating the audience." Since I had not not yet had a chance to see
Mission: Impossible II when I wrote these lines, I hesitated to jump into a controversy like this almost as
much as I would hesitated to mix in a street brawl that I had accidentally
happened upon. Nevertheless, there were evident flaws, both historical and
theoretical, in the way Farber had drawn
up his brief, flaws that would have been just as glaring if M:I-2 were among the worst
films of all time and his complaints thoroughly justified.
I thought the best place
to begin my refutation was with the first of these points since it was the most
easily disposed of. Even granting that the intention of Robert Towne, the
screenwriter, was to intentionally borrow from the plot of Hitchcock's film, it
would be quite easy to show that the dramatic situation Farber has in mind--one
in which a lady spy seduces a man in order to obtain vital secrets from him--was
a stock convention of the spy film genre long before Notorious came
along. To cite only a few well-known examples, the scenario shows up in
at least two early sound pictures, George Fitzmaurice's Mata Hari (1932), with
Greta Garbo, and in Josef Von Sternberg's variation on the same theme, Dishonored
(1931), with Marlene Dietrich, as well as in the silent film Mysterious
Lady (1928),
directed by Fred Niblo, also starring Garbo, not to overlook Lewis Milestone's
extraordinary The General Died at Dawn (1936) in which Madeleine Carroll
played the femme fatale.
In fact, since the spy film and the movie drama of
illicit love share in common the themes of deception and betrayal, it would be a good deal
more surprising to find an example of the spy movie in which taboo erotic
relationships do not occur,
as they often do in the James Bond movies and many other stories of espionage
made after the decline of the Production Code. In
Hitchcock's pre-Notorious spy thrillers of the 1930's, sexuality is never far in
the background: The 39 Steps commences with Richard Hannay's casual pick up of a
woman who turns out to be a spy and in Secret Agent the pair of English spies
played by Madeleine Carroll and John Gielgud have to pretend to be married in order to carry on their activities. In
Notorious, Ben Hecht's screenplay simply gave Hitchcock a chance to intensify
the possibilities of this scenario in a way he had not previously done. If Towne
borrowed from Notorious, Hecht and Hitchcock could hardly claim to have been the
first to discover and exploit the conjunction of seduction and spying on
celluloid.
But considerations of this kind by no means deterred Farber from his
quest to bring in a verdict of guilty. He began by announcing that Towne
"looked for inspiration" to the older movie, and then wrote of
"a romantic triangle lifted directly from Hitchcock's 1946 movie."
Evidently there is a difference in being inspired by a movie and lifting from it,
but the tone becomes far more overtly accusatory when Farber subsequently stated that
"A touch of plagiarism might be forgiven if the pilfered ingredients were
put to good use." What starts out as inspiration ends up as grand larceny.
To which I would have to reply: not proven. Farber has been only able so far to
show that M:I-2 employs a dramatic situation common to a number of older spy
pictures which also appears in the Hitchcock production, and not at all that the
creators of Mission: Impossible II
set out to intentionally steal from Notorious--and presumably to hoax the public in the process.
Behind this attack lies the highly dubious
prestige of originality, which itself derives from the Romantic myth of the
artist as a god-like being who creates masterpieces ex nihilo. Deprived of the
pathos of that myth, which few artists today would be so rash as to proclaim in
its unadulterated form, originality has little more to recommend it than the
quite unaesthetic value of a marketing device, the artist's version of having
something new to offer for sale. Pablo Picasso was certainly among the greatest
artistic innovators of this century, but where would Picasso have been without
Cezanne? And where would the latter have been without the Impressionists and
their break with traditional form in painting? Art of any kind is the product
of a collective, historically conditioned process, not the work of a solitary
geniuses who appears out of nowhere like the hero of an Ayn Rand saga to
enlighten the benighted masses. However vehemently this proposition might be
contested by some practitioners of the traditional arts, anyone would be ill-advised to look for
counter arguments in an art form which is dependent upon technology like no
other before it and whose specific mode of production is based upon that of
advanced industrial capitalism with its highly specialized division of labor.
And if
the technical conditions of filmmaking already pushed it in the direction of
collaboration more than that of individual creation, these conditions were
powerfully reinforced by the evolution of the studio system in this country,
which from early on privileged genres and looked for themes, plots, and dramatic
situations it could profitably recycle. In this way, the
American movie industry has always somewhat resembled the Elizabethan theater, whose dramatists constantly reworked the
efforts of other writers; even Shakespeare, the greatest of them all, did not
invent the plot of one play but adapted material he found in older plays,
historical works, and collections of popular stories. Had he lived in the
sixteenth century, Farber might well have endorsed the embittered remarks of
Robert Greene who denounced Shakespeare as an upstart crow adorning himself with
the borrowed feathers of his betters.
In fact, Farber does
not seem to notice that the same argument could be applied to the œuvre
of the Master himself with equally devastating force. David Thomson
in his biography of David O. Selznick, Showman, plausibly argues that
William Dieterle's Portrait of Jennie (1947) influenced Hitchcock's Vertigo,
and I think an equally strong case could be made out for Otto Preminger's Laura
(1944) as another influence. Psycho, hints of which already appear
in Hitchcock's early masterpiece The Lodger (1926), may well owe
something to Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1946)--which
Hitchcock had declined to direct for Selznick--as well as to less obvious
sources such as Siodmak's The Strange Case of Uncle Harry (1945), Mark
Robson's The Seventh Victim (1943), and even the Universal horror
thriller The She Wolf of London (1946), directed by Jean
Yarbrough.
But where would Notorious itself be
without the example of George Cukor's Gaslight (1944), an equally great
but quite different movie? Cukor took a classic melodrama about a damsel in
distress, Angel Street by Patrick Hamilton, which had been previously
filmed as a straightforward thriller, Murder in Thornton Square, by
Thorold Dickinson in 1940, and transformed it into a powerful Jamesian
meditation on the baleful persistence of the past in the present, combined
with a disturbing gloss on the meaning of the word "diva". Hitchcock
took the persona so brilliantly embodied by Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight,
the persona of a woman that is the de facto prisoner of a husband who
sadistically manipulates her and inserted it, replete with leading lady, in
the context of a romantic spy drama, the genre that he had made wholly his own
over a decade earlier. The appropriate word to
describe this metamorphic process is not originality but innovation--to
"make it new" in Ezra Pound's phrase and not just to recycle the
same old dreck over and over again--where directors borrow material from one
another and nevertheless manage to impose their own signatures on it.
Need I emphasize that innovation at this level is the exception rather than
the rule in commercial film production?
In his peroration, Farber denounces M:I-2 as
"a completely soulless exercise without an iota of true human drama,"
inadvertently exposing the web of theo-ontological assumptions which prop up his
maladroit phillipic. No doubt the "real" creator, the one who
possesses "originality," is supposed to breath a "soul" into
his or her "creation" like God breathing life into Adam in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco of the Creation, transforming dead clay into
"true human drama." What a strange idea! Is a film to be evaluated in
the future on the basis of how much "soul" it contains? And exactly
what is the standard for deciding whether or not it supplies "true human
drama"? I personally think Notorious is a great motion picture, but I have
some difficulty in seeing that its greatness derives from being a "true
human" drama. How many viewers have ever encountered characters like the ones in
the movie in their own lives? Notorious owes its power in the first place to the
imaginatively constructed world Hitchcock produced on film, using the resources specific to
that art form.
The "reality" of Notorious owes its existence to the
machinery of movie studios and the conventions of movie genres, not to the
extent it conforms to "true human drama," whatever that might mean. To
imagine anything else is not only to confuse "art" with
"life," but to tacitly efface the difference between the two
altogether. It is ironic that Farber, who a few months back distinguished
himself with an equally vacuous attack on auteurism, should resort in this
article to theologically tinged arguments that would make most auteurists
blanch. The validity of auteurism rests upon a demonstrable empirical fact--that
some people direct movies well, others badly, and some, like Hitchcock, totally
astonish us. Critical auteurist theory does not need to support its claims by
appealing to the Romantic cult of genius, and even less to a quest for soul on
screen.
Farber has no real interest in clarifying
questions of film history or aesthetics, questions that are well worth
addressing. His evident purpose in manipulating evidence in such a tricky
fashion is to use the older film as a stick for beating the newer one--to be
prosecutor, judge, and executioner all in one. But the second accusation only
holds up if the first one does. If Towne and Woo had indeed plagiarized the plot
of Notorious for that of
M:I-2, if they had intended for their movie to compete
with it, then there might be some slight trace of validity in Farber's lament. However,
I see even less evidence for the second than for the first charge. M:I-2 is
delivering exactly what it promises: a high adrenaline action picture. Who could
confuse that with what Notorious aimed at doing? Namely, supplying a glamorous
romance set against a background of intrigue. In the 1950's, when Notorious was
reissued, the newspaper ads--which I would guess were the same ones that had been
used for the original release--emphasized the affair enacted on screen by the
two stars, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, far more than they did either
Hitchcock or the spy story, although the latter may well be what strikes the
attention of viewers today.
Moreover, why would any knowledgeable moviegoer
confuse Hitchcock with Woo? For the former, the spy story framework was always a
justification for an in depth analysis of character. For Woo, however, the
conventions of the action genre have always served as a pretext for staging
grandiose effects, in the same way nineteenth century composers used stories
taken from Romantic novels and plays as the libretti of grand operas with
ravishing arias and ensembles. What is a
diving board for the one serves as a launching pad for the other. M:I-2 may be
piece of junk but reasonably it makes more sense to compare it with Mission
Impossible I, or even with Tony Scott's Enemy of the State, or one of the
Die
Hard pictures, than with Notorious. Farber has a perfect right to dislike
M:I-2,
but I think the primary motive behind this misguided invective is resentment at
a big box office hit and its star. If anyone wanted to employ this line of
reasoning to critiquing a recent movie, it could be used with far more
satisfying results to Gladiator. It is far better to have made an
entertaining imitation of Hitchcock than a turgid imitation of old historical spectaculars
that is inferior to Cleopatra or Fall of the Roman Empire.