JonathanRosenbaum.com

Prisoners of War

This appeared in the June 18, 2004 issue of the Chicago Reader. —J.R.

Bitter Victory

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Nicholas Ray

Written by Rene Hardy, Ray, and Gavin Lambert

With Richard Burton, Curt Jurgens, Ruth Roman, Raymond Pellegrin, Anthony Bushell, Andrew Crawford, Nigel Green, and Christopher Lee.

Jane Brand: What can I say to him?

Captain James Leith: Tell him all the things that women have always said to the men before they go to the wars. Tell him he’s a hero. Tell him he’s a good man. Tell him you’ll be waiting for him when he comes back. Tell him he’ll be making history. –Bitter Victory

This week, as part of its series devoted to war films, the Gene Siskel Film Center is showing a restored version of Nicholas Ray’s little-known masterpiece Bitter Victory—a powerful, albeit flawed, black-and-white CinemaScope feature set mainly in Libya during World War II. This 1957 film offers a radical reflection on war, and its relevance to the current war in Iraq goes beyond the desert settings and references to antiquity.

Many films are regarded as antiwar, including ones that proceed from antithetical premises; in the 60s a popular revival house in Manhattan liked to run a double bill of Grand Illusion and Paths of Glory. Ray’s critique—parts of which could probably be traced back to his radical activism during the Depression, before he turned to making movies—is deceptively simple. On the surface the story concerns a courageous hero, Captain James Leith (Richard Burton), quoted above, and a cowardly villain, Major David Brand, Leith’s superior (Curt Jurgens)—the husband Jane (Ruth Roman) refers to. Both men are assigned to a special unit that’s being sent from Cairo to steal important documents from Rommel’s Nazi headquarters in Benghazi. Leith, a Welsh archaeologist who has previously lived in Libya, has little military experience, and Brand has spent most of the war behind a desk. Both men want the assignment despite the enormous dangers. Leith and Jane were lovers before the war, until he departed without warning for Libya, and—shades of Casablanca—she then married Brand even though she was still in love with Leith. Brand realizes she’s attracted to Leith when he sees them dancing together in a restaurant, and he becomes sick with jealousy. Shortly afterward, he and Leith leave for Benghazi.

Disguised as Arabs, they stand outside the Nazi headquarters, and when Brand can’t bring himself to stab a sentry with a dagger, Leith does the job for him. They successfully seize the documents, but their return trek across the desert becomes a series of ordeals and disasters, made even more agonizing by their mutual enmity.

Bitter Victory may well be Ray’s most ambiguous and disquieting work—its only competitor in his oeuvre is the similarly pessimistic Bigger Than Life (1956), which makes ordinary American middle-class life look almost as deranged as war does here. Bitter Victory, made when he was in his mid-40s, was his first attempt to break away from Hollywood, and judging by Bernard Eisenschitz’s biography of Ray and a recent memoir of screenwriter Gavin Lambert, the production was extremely troubled.

Ray was in California when he began adapting a French novel by Rene Hardy with Hardy and Lambert, the former editor of the English film magazine Sight and Sound. Ray had brought Lambert to Hollywood as a screenwriter (on Bigger Than Life and The True Story of Jesse James) and as a lover. Their relationship was on the wane when he accompanied Ray to North Africa to scout locations and then to Paris, where Ray hired blacklisted writer Vladimir Pozner to make script revisions without the knowledge of producer Paul Graetz. Graetz would later insist on rewrites by Paul Gallico that Ray would either alter or ignore. To complicate matters further, Hardy had final script approval.

The casting was also tragicomic. Ray wanted Burton, but as Brand rather than Leith (for whom he wanted Montgomery Clift or Paul Newman). His choice for Jane was Moira Shearer, and he wanted Jurgens, who was German, to play a captured Nazi officer, not Brand. (To explain Brand’s accent, Graetz insisted on adding an early line of dialogue identifying him as a Boer, and he apparently hired Gallico in response to Jurgens’s complaints that his character wasn’t sufficiently sympathetic.)

Things got more chaotic. Lambert was fired by Graetz after refusing to report back on Ray’s drinking (a real problem), though Ray continued to phone him regularly. Behind schedule, Ray shifted to studio shooting in Nice and Paris. He spent his evenings gambling compulsively—losing $60,000 one night in Monte Carlo—and got involved with an 18-year-old Moroccan girl who was a heroin addict. By the time he completed the film’s sound mixing he had to be hospitalized for exhaustion.

What relevance does all this have to the finished film? A great deal. On the numerous occasions when I met Ray in Paris and New York during the 70s, he, like Ernest Hemingway, seemed a victim of his own macho poses, something his biography only confirms. I once found him stranded in the rain in Paris around 10 AM and invited him to a nearby cafe for a drink; he promptly ordered, with an obvious touch of bravado, tequila and a beer chaser.

In Bitter Victory Ray repeatedly exposes the childish vanity of such behavior, making the film a ruthless autocritique that’s periodically confused or at least complicated by the casting. (An earlier foray in the same general direction was his semiautobiographical noir masterpiece of 1950, In a Lonely Place.) Ray’s bisexuality may have given him insights into gender codes, including macho attitudes. He exposes not only the painfully obvious self-absorption and self-deception of Brand, but the same, less obvious traits in Leith, who’s played by Burton in his most suave, romantic, literary Welsh manner, gets the best lines and most quotable rejoinders, and is seen by everyone else in the film as heroic, especially alongside Brand, who’s regarded as a hypocrite. Yet the film’s dialogue and story, including the opening and closing scenes with hanging stuffed dummies used for bayonet practice, are full of ambiguities regarding motives and behavior, and they ultimately imply that he’s a smug poseur. He’s determined to have the last word on every subject, dishonest about his feelings for Jane, and infatuated with his own nihilism and suicidal despair (which we’re also expected to relish). Meanwhile, the hapless Brand is much less successful at hiding his feelings–Jurgens, with his plaintive cocker spaniel eyes, plays him as a classic cuckold figure–and is treated by everyone as a scapegoat.

If Ray had had his way with the casting, the antagonists surely would have been more evenly matched. Nevertheless, the better acquainted I’ve become with this film over the years, the more questionable Leith’s overdetermined charisma becomes. When Brand shows real courage by being the first to drink from a well that may have been poisoned, Leith immediately dismisses the act as another attempt to cover his shame for his previous cowardice, implying that there’s no way he could ever redeem himself. Yet earlier Leith has been ordered by Brand to stay with two dying soldiers, and he finds the “courage” to shoot the German but not the “courage” to put one of his own men out of his misery, even after the man begs to be shot. We come to realize that both men are ultimately condemned by the rhetoric of war to assume absurdist positions: as Leith eloquently puts it, “I kill the living and I save the dead.” And as English critic Geoff Andrew has pointed out, Leith is more generally a coward “since he fears life itself.”

In either case, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Any form of self-testing becomes a futile macho pose—an infantile form of acting out encouraged by war and the license it provides. The film’s mix of psychoanalysis and existentialism also implies that bravery and cowardice might even be alternate versions of the same cheap impulse—the positive and negative sides of the same dubious mythology. In the end the issue isn’t whether wars accomplish good things or bad things—we never get a clue about why the captured documents are important—but why some men seek them out or welcome them.

This isn’t the only Ray film to offer male antagonists who achieve a kind of mystical equality. In Wind Across the Everglades, the next film he directed, in 1958, an Audubon Society game warden (Christopher Plummer) and a renegade bird trapper (Burl Ives) in the swamps of Florida wind up as temporary drinking buddies and fellow celebrators of “protest.” In Rebel Without a Cause (1955) Jim Stark (James Dean) and Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen) are teenagers arriving at an unexpected rapport and moment of mutual recognition immediately before competing in the absurdist macho ritual of a “chickie run.” Bitter Victory takes this premise further, depicting rivals who can find neither friendship nor understanding but whose identities are eerily fused, like Jekyll and Hyde.

The film’s final scene with the stuffed dummies makes this idea inescapable—a scene missing from the truncated original release in the UK, which must have made nonsense of the rest. (That version was 90 minutes long, the original U.S. release was 82, the French dubbed version 87; the restored version showing at the Film Center runs 103.) Prisoners of the rhetoric of war, both men are literal as well as figurative dummies; Leith simply has the better cover story, making him even worse in some ways than his honestly bumbling and universally scorned rival. On a more mystical level, the two men become morally and existentially equivalent: Leith, who loves Jane, has consistently lied or been evasive about his feelings for her, but Brand, lying to her about what he thinks Leith’s final words for her might have been, imagines they were a declaration of love and tells her they would have been his last words as well—and in his case we know that’s the truth.

“Basically [Ray] was both of them,” Lambert is quoted as saying in Eisenschitz’s book. “And I think that was the mainspring of the film for him….I liked the idea that the outcome of the mission [really had] nothing to do with how they performed it, but with what they felt about each other. That, in a way, said something about war. That it was an example of people’s neuroses coming out. And that if people could discover how neurotic they were in a war…it might never have happened.”

A dozen years ago in Rotterdam, I attended a special screening of Bitter Victory, part of a symposium about the first gulf war, which was then in progress and being widely celebrated in the U.S. The second gulf war hasn’t been celebrated nearly as much—at least not since the infamous “mission accomplished” banner flew behind Bush as he spoke on an aircraft carrier—and the increasing relevance of the film to this country’s queasiness about it starts with the title.

Shortly after 9/11 Bush declared war on terrorism and was almost immediately transformed from an unpopular president who seemed unsure of himself into a popular one who exuded confidence and purpose—in the process switching from a Brand to a Leith. And his use of the word war magically helped transform the terrifying and unfathomable singularity of the terrorist attacks into something far easier to process. September 11 was miraculously made to rhyme with Pearl Harbor, and we were suddenly back on familiar ground. Even if war on terror conjured up a military engagement with no conceivable end, that was OK because it somehow felt right—it brought back the patriotism of previous military campaigns, including the cold war, and evoked the nostalgia of wartime unity embodied in a movie like Casablanca. The use of the word war told us that we were all together again, all members of the same family—the same thing that reverent saturation TV coverage of Reagan’s funeral proceedings told us, at least if we could bear watching it.

But then, after we were told it was virtually over, the Iraq war resumed. The possibility that we might be witnessing a war of independence fought by citizens who didn’t like being occupied didn’t fit the idea of war as Bush and his minions in the media were using it.

Their war has more to do with abstraction and fixed notions of good and evil than with human beings– which might be why Bush favored a war on terror over a war on terrorists. The chosen catchphrase sounds more metaphysical and more frightening, limiting the need to provide detailed arguments and explanations and making it easier to rationalize things such as torture—even after the Red Cross reported that military officials estimated 70 to 90 percent of the people imprisoned in Abu Ghraib were there by mistake. (Some people, including Fox News pundits, went even further and defended the torture.) The abstract slogan also seems to have made it easier for Bush to call both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein evil—without acknowledging that both men are former U.S. allies and without coming up with some explanation for why they weren’t evil when the U.S. supported them, or why they were less evil at that time than communists or Iranians, or why the U.S. was wrong then but is right today.

But that would require an admission that the world is never as simple as Bush and so many others want to believe, even when it comes to evil. It might also require them to recognize that war isn’t just a real activity with real consequences but a playing out of infantile and macho fantasies. And so we all become like Leith, who’s trapped in his own rhetoric, or like Brand, who feels so hollow about the medal he’s been handed that he pins it on a dummy.

Take Two: THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T.

The principal source of this article — written for American Film, and published in their October 1978 issue — was a fairly lengthy phone conversation I once had with Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991), better known as Dr. Seuss, when I was living in San Diego. More specifically, this happened while I was teaching in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego, and booked The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. for one of my film classes. I can no longer call whether this was for my course called Paranoia or for one of Raymond Durgnat’s classes that I took over for him after he unexpectedly and rather mysteriously returned to London in the middle of a quarter. (He was also a big fan of the film.)

Geisel, the main auteur of the film (at least as I saw it), also lived in San Diego, and hoping that he could come to the class as a guest lecturer, I managed to get ahold of his address and wrote him a letter. By way of replying with a friendly refusal, Geisel called me one day at the house in a Del Mar canyon that I was subletting at the time (along with filmmaker Louis Hock and, for the time he was around, Ray Durgnat) and politely begged off, explaining that his relation to this movie was rather traumatic. To explain himself, he gave me a lengthy account of his friendship in the U.S. Army with Carl Foreman and Stanley Kramer, their joint project to make a fantasy film, and various disastrous occurrences that interfered with the original plans. I also recall asking him if I could write about this and he said sure, as long as I didn’t quote him — which is why I refrained from mentioning our phone conversation in the article. (Another thing I refrained from mentioning, at his request, was the fact that Kramer wound up directing a good deal of the film after Roy Rowland suffered some sort of breakdown during the film’s production.)

American Film was a rather bland mainstream monthly whose fees were largely supporting me and paying my rent while I was writing my first published (and, to date, least mainstream) book, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980). I’ve recently tweaked the editing of this piece in a few spots—J.R.

Take Two: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Neglected films come in various shapes and sizes. There are movies whose aesthetic importance is overlooked or whose social impact has been forgotten simply because prints are scarce or unavailable. There are movies nurtured by nostalgia, touchstones or tombstones of former feelings, that are more prone to reappear, like phantoms on television.

Then there is a third category: the unclassifiable oddity. Without a comfortable pigeonhole to encapsulate its essential qualities — a familiar genre, star, or auteur — it is doomed to walk the night as an isolated freak, excluded from most textbooks and popular histories because it doesn’t “fit” any ordinary survey standards.

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. is one such outcast, although for me it also has distinctly nostalgic overtones. I first saw it when I was ten years old, on a family trip to New York in June 1953, shortly after it opened. I liked it so much that I returned to it twice when it eventually reached my hometown in Alabama later in the year.

Bart Collins (Tommy Rettig), the movie’s hero, was also ten, which obviously helped to bolster my attachment to this weird musical fantasy. But that wasn’t the whole story. I could sense that this movie postulated — and was postulated on — a certain form of rebellion against the adult world. Aside from short episodes at the beginning and the end, the film is offered as Bart’s nightmare, a pure distillation a ten-year-old boy’s grasp of his world and his sense of the degree to which adults occupy and control it.

The film was written by Alan Scott and Dr. Seuss. The latter’s name, of course, was no less familiar to us. I knew that his real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel. I had checked out from the library several of his illustrated children’s books, including The Cat in the Hat and Horton Hatches the Egg. I also knew that he’d created the title character of Gerald McBoing, Boing, the cartoon that had won an Academy Award for 1950.

What I hadn’t realized then was that Geisel had already been associated with two previous Oscar winners. While he was attached to Frank Capra’s filmmaking unit during World War II, he wrote and directed an indoctrination film, Your Job in Germany, which was later released by Warner Bros. under the title Hitler Lives, and won the 1945 Academy Award as the best documentary short. The following year, as a civilian, in collaboration with his wife, Helen Marion Palmer, he wrote Design for Death – described in the press as “a history of the Japanese people” — which was released by RKO and won the Academy Award for best documentary feature.

It was during the war that Giesel, Kramer, and Carl Foreman, all serving together in Capra’s film unit, first hit on the idea of some day concocting a lavish film fantasy. After the war, Kramer went on to become a producer, and Foreman worked with him as scriptwriter on Home of the Brave, Champion, The Men, and Cyrano de Bergerac.

But during the production of High Noon, Foreman was summoned to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Unlike Kramer, he refused to cooperate and immediately was blacklisted. Foreman severed his association with Kramer and moved to England, and the director’s post on Kramer and Geisel’s project — now an expensive production to be distributed by Columbia Pictures — went to Roy Rowland, a former assistant to W.S. Van Dyke on Tarzan films.

Geisel’s idea for the film stemmed from piano lessons he’d had as a boy “from a man who rapped my knuckles with a pencil whenever I made a mistake….I made up my mind I would get even with that man. It took me 43 years to catch up with him.” Thus was born the ferocious Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conreid), Bart’s authoritarian piano teacher whose institute serves as the sole location  of Bart’s feature-length dream.

Certain changes in Geisel’s conception were made for commercial reasons. In the “real-life” episodes, Bart befriends a plumber named Zabladowski working in his house who turns up later in Bart’s dream, where he functions as an alternate father figure. Geisel wrote the part for Karl Malden, but it was decided, instead, to use Peter Lind Hayes, a popular radio star who formed a singing team with Mary Healy. Healy herself was given the role of Bart’s mother. This led to an injection of “romantic” interest between Bart’s mother and Zabladowski.

Various difficulties beset the shooting. Probably the most spectacular of these involved the climactic title sequence, when Dr. T. marshals 500 boys to play his own composition, “Ten Happy Fingers,” on two gigantic keyboards — a notion of Busby Berkeley at his wildest. The scene required the film’s most spacious set, designed by Rudolph Sternad and built on RKO’s largest sound stage.

The problems started when three days of rain began to flood the set. Only about 400 boys were eventually used in this sequence. Between takes, all of them gorged themselves on hot dogs in the studio commissary. One boy became ill on the set and threw up — setting off a violent chain reaction. The resulting surrealism must have been more unsettling than anything Salvador Dali might have imagined.

As a paranoid fantasy, the film is quite straightforward. Falling asleep after a piano lesson with Dr. T., Bart finds himself in the dream institute as the first recruit for the 5000-fingered recital, forced to wear an official Terwilliker beanie. Soon the boy is in flight from legions of guards, the most bizarre of which are Judson and Whitney (John and Robert Heasley), Siamese twins connected by a single gray beard who pursue Bart on roller skates [see below]. After attempting to enlist the aid of a reluctant Zabladowski — who is installing sinks to prepare for the influx of 499 other boys — Bart discovers that Dr. T. has issued an order to have the plumber disintegrated at dawn.

Continuing his flight, Bart comes across a dungeon in which are kept all the musicians who play instruments other than the piano. The real Dr. T. had described them as “scratchy violins, screechy piccolos, nauseating trumpets, et cetera, et cetera.” This occasions the film’s most remarkable sequence — a ballet choreographed by Eugene Loring and featuring an assembly of green-skinned prisoners performing on outlandish instruments.

One xylophone is a radiator, and another is played by several men with brightly colored, crisscrossing mittens. Dress dummies serve as bass fiddles, and violinists and tuba players carry wraparound instruments encasing their entire bodies. Other parts of the orchestra suggest torture instruments (an enormous harp strummed by prisoners’ heads), surreal objects (a man dancing on a drum with abnormally long mallets) and circus props (a man on a high wire sailing across the set to strike a small cymbal).

Bart carries the execution order to Zabladownski and engages him in a blood pact, joining together their pricked thumbs and getting him to assent to the Boy Scouts’ pledge. But Terwilliker’s guards turn up, and Bart and Zabladowski are imprisoned in a dungeon. There they concoct a magic potion designed tp sabotage the grand recital by swallowing up noise, through Zabladowski warns that it may be “atomic”.

The formula works, and the 500 little boys, led by Bart, celebrate their palace revolution and defeat of Dr. T by pounding out a discordant version of “Chopsticks” with their hands and feet. (The only exception — an indelible passing detail — is a tearful boy who still wants to play “Ten Happy Fingers”.) The portion proves to be atomic after all, sending up smoke, crackling sparks, and finally explosions.

Bart awakes in terror beside his piano, and in a hasty conclusion, it is implied that maybe the preceding wasn’t only a dream. He and Zabladowski still have bandages on their thumbs from their blood pact. The movie ends with Bart playing outside with a baseball and mitt, accompanied by his dog, an image of Middle American normality that evokes Norman Rockwell.

***

Why was the film such a resounding flop at the box office, reportedly losing more than a million dollars? Acknowledging certain lapses — mainly a few descents into tacky sentimentality or awkward pictorial whimsy — I would still guess that its commercial failure stemmed from its strangeness and originality, which gave audiences more than they could handle.

Like the contents of Bart’s pockets that go into the “Music-Fix” magic potion — an endless assortment of objetsd that is beautifully “rhymed” with the confiscated possessions of the 499 other boys — the movie remains a rather awesome hodgepodge. The steps of different shapes and sizes leading up to Dr. T.’s headquarters, and the Flash Gordon-like paraphernalia found inside, suggest the “mental projections” of German expressionist films from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Metropolis. But the tunes of Frederick Höllander (alternately chipper and saccherine) and the extravagant use of 50s Technicolor interact with this tradition in a decidedly peculiar way, as if Dr. Mabuse and Esther Williams were suddenly to find themselves in the same movie.

Seen today, the film has an additional layer of interest as a complex reflection of American attitudes and feelings during that period. For one thing, the popular applications of Freud are everywhere apparent, as in the dreamlike equation made by Bart after his blood pact with Zabladowski. He accepts the plumber as a father figure and, consequently, as a husband for his widowed mother (in striking contrast to Dr. T., who holds his mother under a sinister hypnotic trance).

If we pick up some clues from the sociological approach of Raymond Durgnat — one of the few critics to have acknowledged the film’s special interest — the kinship of this oddity with other movies of period becomes much more apparent. Far from being a “pure’ fantasy, its nightmarish landscapes and details evoke Cold War anxieties linked in the public’s mind with Russia, Korea, and the atomic bomb, as well as memories of World War II. Such diverse details as the electrified barbed wire and searchlights surrounding the Terwilliker institute and the grotesque goose steps performed by Dr. T. — after being dressed in his elaborate “Do-Mi-Do Duds” for the recital — hark back to related fears.

The anti-egghead bias of the early 50s is clearly bound up with in the portrayal of Dr. T. As embodied in Hans Conreid’s brilliant performance, the character is a veritable anthology of negative responses to Europeanized and “feminized” notions of high culture. From his pink powder-puff slippers and his vaguely continental accent to his stern disciplinary manner, he makes a striking contrast to the “manly” working-class virtues of an all-American Zabladowski.

None of this is meant to suggest that the film can’t — or shouldn’t — be enjoyed by children and adults today. On the contrary, when it was revived at a children’s show at Filmex in Los Angeles last spring, the response was overwhelming warm and enthusiastic. I’m sure that many of the 10-year-old boys must have identified with Bart as strongly as I did 25 years ago. And the movie’s cockeyed inventions still shine with a singularity that places this film in a class by itself.

—American Film, October 1978

The Birth of a Notion

This article appeared in the October 9, 1987 issue of the Chicago Reader, and one good reason for reviving it now is to point up how out of date some of its remarks about Feuillade’s invisibility have become almost 22 years later. Back then, I noted, there was only one book about Feuillade; today I have seven more (all in French) of diverse sizes and scopes, and I’m sure my collection is far from exhaustive. Two full serials, Les vampires (1915) and Judex (1916), are available on DVD in the U.S., and an excellent restoration of the multichaptered Fantômas (1913-1914) can be found in France and the U.K., so I’m hoping that Tih Minh (1918), still my favorite, not to mention Barrabas (1919) and even La nouvelle mission de Judex — a 1917 crime serial I’ve never seen which is reputed to be inferior to the others — will also surface eventually.  Also, Kino International has just announced a three-disc box set to appear on September 1, Gaumont Treasures 1897-1913, with one of its three discs devoted to Feuillade short films made between 1907 and 1913, as well as a documentary “featurette” about him. —J.R.

LES VAMPIRES

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed and written by Louis Feuillade

With Musidora, Édouard Mathé, Marcel Lévesque, Jean Aymé, Delphine Renot, Stacia Napierkowska, Fernand Hermann, Renée Carl, Louis Leubas, Louise Lagrange, Moriss, and Bout de Zan.

I am convinced that surrealism preexisted in cinema. Feuillade’s Les vampires was already an expression of the 20th century and of the universal subconscious.

–Henri Langlois, 1965

One of the supreme pleasures in all of cinema, Les vampires, a thrilling ten-part serial released in France in 1915 and 1916, came out during the same period as The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Yet the odd thing about this conjunction is that, far from being contemporaries, D.W. Griffith (1875-1948) and Louis Feuillade (1873-1925) seem to belong to different centuries. While Griffith’s work reeks of Victorian morality and nostalgia for the mid-19th century, Feuillade looks ahead to the global paranoia, conspiratorial intrigues, and SF technological fantasies of the current century, right up to today.

The filmmakers’ styles are as disparate as their outlooks. From the vantage point of the present, Feuillade is as cool and hip as Griffith is overheated and square. While both filmmakers specialized in melodrama, the style of acting that we associate with Griffith is so theatrical that we can practically hear the floorboards creaking; Feuillade liked to use actors without much stage experience, and trained them in a less grandiloquent, more naturalistic style. While Griffith depended a great deal on montage, Feuillade was a master of long takes and deep focus, usually developing a complex mise en scène in relation to a stationary camera.

But because Feuillade’s films are unusually scarce in this country, and have remained so since the 20s, we’ve never had much opportunity to assess him. A filmmaker for the last 20 years of his life — after serving in a cavalry regiment, working in his family’s wine trade, and writing for conservative Catholic newspapers — Feuillade estimated near the end of his career that he had written at least 800 scripts and directed about 700 of them. The original negatives of 500 or so of these films, ranging from one-reelers to full features, still survive at Gaumont, the production company where Feuillade served as artistic director for most of his career. But it seems likely that no one alive has seen much more than a fraction of them.

Only one book has ever been written on Feuillade — an excellent one by Francis Lacassin, published in 1964 — and it has never been translated from the French. In the U.S., only one of his films, the 45-minute Juve vs. Fantomas, has been in distribution since the silent era; otherwise, one has to depend on those rare occasions when prints are lent out by European archives. As a consequence of this massive neglect, Feuillade’s work is routinely omitted or skirted over in most film history surveys, and many knowledgeable film buffs have never encountered his work at all.

Les vampires, the best known and most celebrated of Feuillade’s masterpieces, has recently been restored to its original form at the Cinémathèque Française by Jacques Champreux, the filmmaker’s grandson, and this version will be screened in two parts at the Film Center this weekend. The film runs for about eight hours, but these are conceivably the least boring eight hours that one could spend at the movies anywhere. The film’s ten episodes are of unequal lengths, and they usually don’t end with the sort of cliff-hangers that we associate with American serials; but seen together, they take on an undeniable power.

Prior to this restoration, the film was missing all of its intertitles, and although one could still figure out many of the plot’s essentials without them, one of the revelations of the complete version is that some of the same ambiguities remain. The plot concerns the exploits of an infamous gang of criminals, customarily clad and masked in black, known as the Vampires — not a clan of bloodsuckers, but a band of evildoers who hold most of Paris in their sway. As full of disguises as a masquerade ball, the serial features so many characters with multiple false identities that part of the fun of each episode consists of trying to guess in advance who will turn out to be whom. The voluptuous Irma Vep (Musidora), for instance, whom we recognize in her black tights and mask as the leader of the Vampire Gang (her name, in fact, is an anagram of “Vampire”), characteristically creeping over rooftops, also assumes one or more supplementary disguises in each installment — as family maid, male secretary, lab assistant, wealthy widow, street tough, switchboard operator, and spiritualist, among others — and when the hero, journalist Philippe Guerande (Édouard Mathé), impersonates someone else as well, the spectator may feel temporarily lost in a sea of characters.

Such confusion is always purposeful in Les vampires, where nothing is ever quite what it seems. Shot largely in the streets of Paris and its suburbs, in dingy shacks and basements, and in ornate Belle Epoque interiors, the film revels in the familiar and the everyday, only to explode with unexpected eruptions that transform this peaceful world into a charged universe of unlimited evil and corruption. As critic Annette Michelson has suggestively described this process, “Haussmann’s pre-1914 Paris, the city of massive stone structures, of quiet avenues and squares, is suddenly revealed as everywhere dangerous, the scene and subject of secret designs. The trap-door, secret compartment, false tunnel, false bottom, false ceiling, form an architectural complex with the architectural structure of a middle-class culture. The perpetually recurring ritual of identification and self-justification is the presentation of the visiting card; it is, as well, the signal, the formal prelude to the fateful encounter, the swindle, hold-up, abduction or murder.”

Some writers have suggested that the Vampires’ criminal exploits were influenced by the real-life escapades of the anarchist Bonnot gang, which were followed avidly in the press in 1911 and 1912. Others have theorized that the French experience of World War I, which is never alluded to in the serial, may be reflected in some of its violent dislocations and ruptures in tone, and it is worth noting that Feuillade started the film only a few weeks after he returned from the front.

The dreamlike transitions of Les vampires from normalcy to fantasy are always poetic as well as unpredictable. After shooting a Vampire burglar who falls from a second-story window, a woman looks out the same window, only to find herself lassoed and pulled down into a getaway car that speeds away in a matter of seconds. At a fancy party given for the Paris aristocracy, knockout gas smelling like perfume pours in through a vent, and dozens of guests rush madly for the doors before collapsing where they stand, fluttering to the floor like so many handkerchiefs; doors in the back of the hall open, and black-clad Vampires emerge in silhouette to gather up the guests’ jewels. Moreno (Fernand Hermann) — the head of a rival gang, who briefly holds Irma Vep in his power through hypnosis — is rushing out of a house with her; a trapdoor at the foot of the stairs suddenly opens, and they both fall into an enormous sack held by the police. In a plush hotel room, a bishop presses a button, and a giant cannon emerges from the fireplace, ready to fire a missile into an adjacent nightclub.

These surprises, and countless others like them, caused Surrealists like André Breton and Luis Buñuel to celebrate Feuillade’s serials, even when they ignored the name of the man who made them. (Other French avant-gardists of the period, on the other hand, who resented these films’ wide popularity, were more prone to attack Feuillade, and by name.) Partially because the villains exert a lot more fascination — and usually display much more ingenuity — than the forces representing law and order, one suspects that the Surrealists discovered in Les vampires a form of subversion that was wholly compatible with their own aesthetic designs.

Significantly, the Vampires prey only on the rich, and the putative hero, Philippe Guerande, comes across as a pampered nincompoop who, until he belatedly collects his wits and defeats the gang in the last episode, has to depend on his mother, family friends, and a team of other helpers to work out most of the clues and effect most of the rescues. (Even when he triumphs at the end, it is his new bride who polishes off the sexy Irma Vep.) For most of the serial, the police are fairly ineffectual as well — a point that wasn’t lost on the Paris chief of police, who banned the serial for two months in 1916, until Musidora paid him a visit and charmed him into letting the series resume. Significantly, the efficiency of the police takes a quantum leap over the last four episodes, and the following year, Feuillade released another serial, Judex, in which the forces of good are much more prominent.

The most fascinating of Guerande’s ingenious helpers is a comic character of indeterminate class named Mazamette, played by Feuillade regular Marcel Lévesque [see above], a balding actor with a mustache who bore a striking resemblance to the director himself. A former member of the Vampires who is also identified at separate points as an undertaker and an employee of Guerande’s newspaper, Mazamette differs from the other major characters by virtue of his shameless mugging, some of which is addressed directly to the camera. Francis Lacassin suggests that Feuillade’s use of this clown was his own way of winking at the audience — sort of a Hitchcock appearance by proxy — and it must be admitted that Mazamette lends a certain note of self-reflexivity to the proceedings that is part of the serial’s striking modernity. In the eighth episode, Mazamette’s son Eustache also makes an extended appearance; played by Bout de Zan, a popular street urchin who was the star of no less than 52 of Feuillade’s comic shorts between 1913 and 1916, this amiable brat displays the same complicity with the camera and audience — making him, like Mazamette, a detached commentator on the action as well as a participant.

In point of fact, Mazamette and Eustache are merely two examples of a personal, premodernist attitude that informs the movie throughout — a tendency to superimpose the euphoria of the filmmaking process itself over the fictional action, which we more commonly associate with later directors such as Jean Renoir, Jacques Rivette, John Cassavetes, and Robert Altman. Reportedly all but the last two or three episodes of the serial were improvised by Feuillade on a day-to-day basis, without a script — a form of “automatic writing” that surely taps on what Henri Langlois called “the universal subconscious” — and certain plot twists were determined by vicissitudes in the shooting.

After Jean Aymé, the Swiss actor who played the Grand Vampire in the early episodes, repeatedly turned up late to work, Feuillade spitefully killed his character off by having Irma Vep shoot him under Moreno’s hypnosis. Two episodes later, the character’s replacement, Satanas (Louis Leubas), also had to die — in this case by poisoning himself — after Leubas was called back to the front. Two separate scenes are set in the Gaumont Palace, the same Paris movie theater where the installments of Les vampires premiered, and according to Lacassin, many of the characters’ names can be traced back to Feuillade’s birthplace in the south of France.

Most of the stunts were performed by the actors themselves. One scene shows Musidora lying on her back between railroad tracks while 52 freight cars pass over her; another has her plunging head over heels down a rope from a ninth-floor attic to the ground. In a document published in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1964, she claims that Feuillade persuaded her to perform the first stunt without a double; in the second, she fell from the attic to the eighth floor, and then later from the second to the first, landing on a mattress, while a dummy was employed for the six-floor drop in between. The fall is seen in a single, unbroken trajectory, and whether or not this was accomplished through trickery, it is an awesome sight to behold. (A remarkable woman in many respects, Musidora was discovered by Feuillade in a Parisian music hall. Born Jeanne Roque in 1889 — “the same year,” she wrote, “as the Eiffel Tower and Chaplin” — she grew up in a family of artists, derived her stage name from a poem by Theophile Gautier, hung out with Colette, directed a few films, wrote several books and screenplays, shifted to journalism, and, before she died in 1957, worked for Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque Française.)

Feuillade’s fascination with technology and mind control anticipates Fritz Lang’s three Dr. Mabuse films, and his depictions of upper-class decadence, global conquest, and sexual domination through hypnosis all had an undoubtable influence on the nightmarish thrillers that many film historians assume started with Lang. Richard Roud has pointed out that certain Hitchcock touchstones such as the crop-dusting sequence in North by Northwest can be traced back to the world of Feuillade, and one might add that some of the deadly gadgets featured in Les vampires — a poison ring, a glove concealing an anesthetizing tack — could just as easily turn up in a James Bond picture.

But perhaps an even purer Feuillade legacy is to be found in certain poetic versions of the uncanny created by Jean Cocteau, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, and Georges Franju. These include the mythological Paris of Orpheus and Alphaville, the trapped party guests of The Exterminating Angel, the labyrinthine hotel and garden of Last Year at Marienbad, the paranoia and antiparanoia of Out 1: Spectre, and the nocturnal forest interludes in Eyes Without a Face — not to mention Franju’s direct hommages in his 1963 Judex, adapted from a Feuillade script by Champreux and Lacassin, and his less successful Feuillade spin-off, Man Without a Face, made in color a decade later for French TV.

Some of these “documentary fantasies” might be regarded as refinements of conceptions found in Feuillade’s serials. But as great as many of them are, none can be considered an improvement. (And, for the record, as extraordinary as Les vampires is, there is another Feuillade serial which is possibly even finer — the 1918 Tih Minh, set on the French Riviera.) Alone among cinema’s pioneers, Feuillade implies that the past 70-odd years of moviemaking may be far less essential than most of us have supposed. As critic David Thomson puts it, he is “the first director for whom no historical allowances need to be made.” Come to think of it, he is probably one of the last as well.

Introduction to the Chinese Edition of MORE THAN NIGHT

The following essay was both commissioned and written quite recently, in early June. My thanks to the Chinese translator Zhanxiong Xu for giving me permission to publish the original English version here. –J.R.

Introduction to the Chinese Edition of More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

I

“The Chinese don’t accord much importance to things of the past,” Maggie Cheung maintained in an interview with a French magazine roughly a decade ago  (1), “whether it’s films, heritage, or even clothes or furniture. In Asia nothing is preserved, turning towards the past is regarded as stupid, aberrant.”

Interestingly, this statement helps to explain why so many of the most important Chinese films, at least for me, are concerned with the discovery of history, and represent various attempts to reclaim a lost past. I’ll restrict myself to a short list of a dozen favorite Chinese features, all of which exhibit these traits: Fei Mu’s Xiao cheng zhi chun (Spring in a Small Town, 1948); Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Bei qing cheng shi (City of Sadness, 1989) and Xi meng ren sheng (The Puppetmaster, 1993); Wong Kar-wai’s A Fei zheng  chuan (Days of Being Wild, 1990) and Fa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love, 2000); Edward Yang’s Gu ling jie shao nian sha ren shi jian (A Brighter Summer Day, 1991); Stanley Kwan’s Ruan Lingyu (1992); Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Lan feng zheng (The Blue Kite, 1993); Li Shaohong’s Hong fen (Blush, 1994); and Jia Zhangke’s Zhantai (Platform, 2000), Sanxia Haoren (Still Life, 2006), and Er shi si cheng ji (24  City, 2008). As I once described Ruan Lingyu in the title of a 2001 essay, this is a bit like “Building History in Quicksand”. And even many of my other favorite Chinese films that are stuck in the present, and view this present in all its modernity, such as Hou’s  Nan guo zai  jan, nan guo (Goodbye South, Goodbye, 1996), Peter Chen’s Tian mi mi (Comrades: Almost a Love Story, 1996), and Jia’s Shijie (The World, 2004), might be described as ambitious efforts to view the present historically.

Cheung’s statement also describes the biases of many Americans, although it’s somewhat less true of the portion of the United States where James Naremore and I both grew up, the South. Ever since losing the Civil War (1861-1865) — the most traumatic cultural crisis our country has suffered to date (in part because it put an end to slavery), depicted in two of the most famous American films, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone With the Wind (1939) — Southerners have often had a somewhat wistful nostalgia about a mythical Golden Age that supposedly existed before that war. But one could also argue that cherishing an imaginary past is yet another way of devaluing history. It’s also a valuable capitalist tool that allows certain products to be sold and resold, especially in a present that both yearns for history and deeply mistrusts it.

Film noir has a complicated and ambiguous relation to the past reflecting this ambivalence, and Naremore is, to the best of my knowledge, the critic and historian who has done by far the best job in describing this phenomenon and helping us to understand it. In a way, he starts from the paradox that virtually anyone who enters a video store in the United States today knows what “film noir” is, yet the original American audiences for the Hollywood classics in this branch of filmmaking, all made during the 1940s and 50s, wouldn’t have heard or known this term. Consequently, one could argue that, in certain respects, a taste for film noir today respects a kind of nostalgia for a past that never existed—or at least one that didn’t exist in the terms by which we currently know that past.

II

Jim Naremore has been a good friend for over two decades, and I suspect that one thing that has made our tastes and interests so compatible is a tendency to view film at least partially as a branch of literature — a reflection of our academic backgrounds and our reading habits. I consider this background relevant to what makes More Than Night the best book about film noir, because, as Naremore himself shows in some detail in his first chapter, even the term “noir” has literary connotations: It was a term partly inspired as well as paralleled by the French publisher Gallimard’s Série noire – a series of  black-jacketed paperback crime novels inaugurated in 1945 by an editor with a background in Surrealism, Marcel Duhamel (and, according to the French edition of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, a series named by an even more celebrated French Surrealist, writer Jacques Prévert — who scripted the famous film Les enfants du paradis the same year). Even though French writers in the late 1930s had already employed the term “film noir” in reference to such atmospheric French films as Pépé le Moko (1936), Hôtel du Nord (1938), and Le jour se lève (1939), it entered common usage thanks to a book series that specialized in French translations of such American authors as Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, Dashiell Hammett, Ed McBain, Horace McCoy, and Jim Thompson, many of whose works had been (or later would be) adapted into films. (To complicate this lineage, according to Wikipedia, Duhamel also started another book series at Gallimard in 1949 called Série blême — literally, “pale series,” with green instead of black jackets — devoted to suspense novels; their first title was a French translation of I Married a Dead Man, by William Irish, a pseudonym for Cornell Woolrich, the same writer who wrote the original stories for many famous noir films, such as The Leopard Man, Phantom Lady, and The Window, as well as the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Rear Window.)

It’s important to add that the association of film with literature, as in the case of noir, is largely a French tradition that came to fruition with the Nouvelle Vague — most obviously in such films as Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (1960) and Alphaville (1965, where film noir gets cross-bred with science fiction) and François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le Pianiste (1960, based on a novel by David Goodis)  and La mariée était en noir (1968, based on a novel by William Irish). Over three decades later, Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s 2 X 50 ans du cinéma français (1995) ends with a moving tribute to French film criticism — using that term broadly enough to include precursors as well as poets, art critics, and filmmaker-theorists — by offering a honor roll of 15 individuals, from Denis Diderot (1713-1784) to Serge Daney (1944-1992), each of whom is accorded a portrait, a page of text, and an offscreen recitation of a brief passage read aloud by either Miéville or Godard. And the same orientation is evident in the film magazine that Daney founded shortly before his death, Trafic, which Jim and I have both contributed to. (Jim’s contribution, appropriately, was about the classic noir Double Indemnity, also discussed in depth in More Than Night.)

Naremore’s background in literature plays more than an incidental role in his writing. His very first book, The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1973), is about one of the key figures in early 20th century English modernist fiction. And among the special virtues of his subsequent book The Magic World of Orson Welles (New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1978; 2nd edition, Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989) — making it, for me, the best critical study of Welles in any language — is its unusual sensitivity to literary as well as political issues in Welles’ career, both of which have tended to receive superficial treatment in most of the other books about him. A similar case could be made on behalf of Naremore’s most recent book, On Kubrick (London: British Film Institute, 2007), which I similarly regard as the best critical study of Stanley Kubrick, although in this case the mastery that Naremore brings to his subject isn’t just a matter of literature (evident in his comprehensive treatments of Kubrick’s literary sources) but also a matter of art history (in both his precise account of Kubrick’s early career as a photojournalist and his broader treatment of “grotesque” aesthetics, which actually combines visual and literary analysis).

More generally, one of the unusual strengths Naremore has as a critic and historian — no less evident in his groundbreaking Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), his short book The Films of Vincente Minnelli (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and the study guides he has written or edited devoted to Psycho, North by Northwest, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Citizen Kane, and film adaptation (not to mention a good many superb essays that have not yet been collected) — is the literary distinction and grace of his prose, which makes him stand apart from his more jargon-ridden academic colleagues.

III

French appreciation of American culture, including literature and film, has had a decisive effect on the appreciation of Americans — including Naremore and myself — for their own culture. This is certainly true in my case, because a major part of my film education was conducted during between 1968 and 1974, when I was living in Paris, and had direct access to many of the greatest American films of the past, westerns and noirs in particular, that were less readily available in the United States, especially in commercial cinemas. (Jim has lived in Europe as well, albeit in Germany rather than France.) It’s significant that writers as important as Edgar Allen Poe and William Faulkner were taken seriously in France long before they were in their own country, and the same is largely true of such American-based directors as Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Frank Tashlin, and Orson Welles, all of whom have been associated with noir at one time or another.

Just as the present-day American taste for noir tends to combine a nostalgic view of the past with a reluctance to view that past historically, there is a similar ambivalence regarding the relation of film noir to political and social criticism. One of the most valuable aspects of Naremore’s criticism is the degree to which it’s inflected by a leftist critique of American culture. This means, on the one hand, that’s he unusually attentive to films that criticize American culture from a political perspective, such as Try and Get Me (1950) and The Glass Shield (1995),  and, on the other hand, he’s uncharacteristically critical from a leftist perspective of some of the most popular neo-noir films, including Chinatown (1974) and L.A. Confidential (1997), in contrast to most other American critics, who tend to accept their defeatist politics without challenge.

Naremore also takes the unusual step of  considering experimental films that utilize the imagery and themes of film noir, such as Mark Rappaport’s 36-minute Exterior Night (1994) — one of the many titles analyzed in detail here that isn’t available commercially. It’s an unfortunate habit of many American film critics, in academia and journalism alike, to reflect passively the whims and omissions of mainstream distributors by either consciously or unconsciously canonizing the few films lucky enough to receive millions of dollars in publicity while frequently ignoring most or all of the others. Like all of the best film critics, Naremore has a view of both culture in general and cinema in particular that’s much wider than the marketplace. For the past two years, he has been writing lengthy articles for the magazine Film Quarterly devoted to his ten favorite films of the previous year — an unusual step to take for an academic film writer who lives in a small town, even a retired one who spends part of every year in Chicago. (For the remainder of every year, he lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he used to teach.) But nowadays, with the wide circulation of DVDs, it’s no longer necessary to live in New York or Paris or Tokyo or Beijing in order to keep up with the major currents of  film history from an artistic as well as commercial standpoint. And it’s worth adding that his favorite film in 2008 was 24 City.

__________________________________________________________________

1. Les inrockuptibles, December 1, 1999.

Adolescent Eye

The following article, which originally appeared in the April 20, 1990 issue of the Chicago Reader, without any star rating, is the only time I can recall writing at length in the Reader about an American TV series. (An edited version of this piece appears in a 1995 collection edited by David Lavery for Wayne State University Press, Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks). From a vantage point of almost two decades later, I wouldn’t be as quick today to insist that David Lynch’s work is devoid of any social commentary. What he has to say about the Hollywood community alone, especially in Inland Empire (2006), shows that he’s no longer as detached as he was.–J.R.

TWIN PEAKS

Directed and written by David Lynch, Mark Frost, and others.

With Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Ontkean, Piper Laurie, Joan Chen, Madchen Amick, Dana Ashbrook, and Richard Beymer.

In my opinion, the first problem–the most important problem in our world—is the problem of dissemination, and it’s the conception of this dissemination that may lead to catastrophe. . . . The way it’s used now, the influence of the masses leads to nothing but the scattering of material. For example, think of a liter of wine: it’s certainly sufficient when shared by three or four people. But if we want this same liter of wine to be shared by one thousand people, we have to put water in it, and then it’s useless. We have to wonder whether something like this doesn’t happen in the process of dissemination. —Jean Renoir, 1957

“Wars, conflict—it’s all business. One murder makes a villain, millions a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow.” The remark of Monsieur Verdoux to a reporter near the end of Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 feature finds a striking application in the media’s response to David Lynch over the past 13 years. When the remarkable and independent Eraserhead, his first and by all counts most artistic feature, received its world premiere at Los Angeles’s Filmex on March 19, 1977, the review in Variety was far from enthusiastic. “Dismal American Film Institute exercise in gore,” ran the headline, adding, “Commercial prospects nil.” The review conceded that this “sickening bad-taste exercise” had “good tech values (particularly the inventive sound mixing), but little substance or subtlety. . . . Lynch seems bent on emulating Herschell Gordon Lewis, the king of low-budget gore.”

Two and a half years later, after Eraserhead had gone on to achieve some success as a midnight feature, it opened for a week’s run at New York’s Cinema II. It did dismal business, and the New York Times gave it a review that was every bit as hostile and dismissive as the one in Variety, calling it “murkily pretentious,” “interminable,” and “sophomoric.” But over the past decade, Lynch has gradually learned how to expand his audience by working in more popular forms—in The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, and now, watering down his eccentricity and artistry still further, in the TV miniseries Twin Peaks, the pilot of which was broadcast on ABC on April 7. And the response of both the media and his audience to this development has been little short of rapturous.

“The year’s best show!” crowed the cover of Entertainment Weekly; “the wingdingiest thing to make it onto network television in many a full moon,” echoed Ken Tucker in the same magazine. “An erotic watershed in the history of broadcast TV,” claimed Amy Taubin in the Village Voice. “As in a Fellini film, strange moments abound,” wrote Timothy Carlson in TV Guide. And in the New Yorker Terrence Rafferty called it “an exhilarating ride, at once scary and mysteriously tranquil, like the children’s nighttime journey down the river in The Night of the Hunter.” This followed a favorable comparison of Twin Peaks to Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in which Rafferty went so far as to imagine Buñuel turning his film into an extended TV series as well.

It’s hard to quarrel with the enthusiasm of the TV reviewers. In the context of mainstream television, even diluted Lynch is a welcome jolt. But when movie critics start comparing Twin Peaks to art films, it’s time to wonder whether someone—critic or reader—is being sold a bill of goods.

Though it seems reasonable enough to regard Lynch, the director and cowriter (with Mark Frost) of the pilot, a surrealist, linking him with the Latin surrealism of a Buñuel (or even the Latin semi-surrealism of a Fellini) is a grotesque kind of shorthand, one that pares away most of what makes both filmmakers distinctive. The drier Belgian surrealism of painters like Paul Delvaux and Rene Magritte [see below]—bourgeois surrealists whose nearest well-known American equivalent might be Edward Hopper—is much closer to Lynch’s turf, as is the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. All these artists excel in taking familiar bourgeois settings and situations and eroding them with creepy undertones, a lingering sense of disquiet—a tactic that is quite different from inflating them into cartoons (Fellini), turning them into poetic fairy-tale landscapes (Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter), or exploding them (Buñuel).

This distinction is important because Surrealism as an organized movement began largely as social protest, with Buñuel one of its most committed members throughout the span of his career. (To imagine Buñuel turning one of his most corrosive masterpieces into a TV series is roughly tantamount to imagining Eisenstein directing one of the Rambo sequels.) Lynch, by contrast, has never shown the slightest inclination toward social commentary, much less protest. Eraserhead, a very private meditation about fears concerning sex, procreation, and parenthood, is founded on a certain biological determinism that is pessimistic and conservative in its implications, with no hint of any social analysis in sight. The Elephant Man and Dune, both of which were inherited by Lynch and based on books, are a little harder to judge, but neither seems very engaged with the social aspects of its material; the fake piety of the former and the awkward, mechanical exposition of the latter both suggest that Lynch was essentially mining the stories for opportunities to “do his thing.” Lynch’s social orientation becomes much clearer with Blue Velvet, and now Twin Peaks: it consists basically of an infatuation with 50s small-town America and its dirty little secrets, coupled with a view of women that essentially regards them as either madonnas or whores. A nostalgic regression, in short, to the worst aspects of the Eisenhower era—the site of his adolescence—represents the sum of Lynch’s social agenda, which is light-years away from that of Luis Buñuel.

If I’ve singled out Terrence Rafferty for attack, it’s only because his review expresses the desire to liberate Twin Peaks from its ideology even more nakedly than the other forms of hype I’ve encountered. There’s something wistfully, desperately, and quintessentially American, as well as postmodernist, about collapsing a Marxist anarchist devoted to the overthrow of bourgeois complacency (and, initially, of civilization itself) into a formalist with no interest whatever in altering the status quo. (”I couldn’t care less about changing the conventions of mainstream television,” Lynch remarked in an interview published in the London newspaper the Independent last November; he repeats the same sentiment in the current issue of Elle, and there’s no reason to doubt his sincerity.)

Under the circumstances, it seems useful to point out that with a sheriff and a federal agent as its principal charismatic male buddies, a sentimentality about homecoming queens that borders on gush, a Reaganite preference for the wealthy over the poor (and for WASPS over everyone else), and a puritanical Peyton Place brand of sociology, Twin Peaks is ideologically no different from other prime-time serials; if it is supposed to be leading us to the promised land, it is still hauling the worst of our 80s and 90s baggage along with us. Lynch’s attitude toward this baggage, moreover, seems not so much committed as expedient. One might simply say that he’s an artist who likes to hang his work—his arresting compositions, weird ideas, and haunting sounds—in the biggest museums he can find; prime-time TV, baggage and all, offers the biggest museum in the world.

The distance traveled by Lynch in prestige from Herschell Gordon Lewis to Buñuel and Fellini is certainly not a matter of any increase in craft or artistic maturity—or, rather, it is only if one identifies these values exclusively with a capacity to reach a wider audience. It can be argued, for instance, that the absence of Alan Splet on Twin Peaks—the prodigious sound technician on Lynch’s previous features—points to a corresponding shrinkage in the originality, range, and effectiveness of Lynch’s aural palette. And seen more generally in terms of Lynch’s career as a “pure” artist following his own bents, Twin Peaks is in many ways as much of a step down from Blue Velvet as that film was from Eraserhead.

But context has a way of changing everything; as Chaplin’s Verdoux puts it, “Numbers sanctify,” and because we live in a culture where it’s generally considered more important for watered-down wine to reach a thousand people than for the pure stuff to reach three or four, the progressive watering down of Lynch’s art has generally been applauded. The two-hour Twin Peaks pilot wound up reaching almost 20 million households, roughly twice the number watching any competing show, and the first regular one-hour episode, four nights later, nearly tied in ratings with the popular sitcom Cheers. The fact that a media blitz helped to gain the show its initial audience only serves to intensify the process of Lynch’s upgrading—giving the hype some of the aspects of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

***

In order to get a clear sense of what Twin Peaks is actually up to, one must consider both its authorship and the open-ended nature of the series. Only the pilot and episode number 2 (the third installment counting the pilot, to be shown April 19) were directed by Lynch; he cowrote the pilot and first two episodes with TV veteran Mark Frost, and he and Frost served as executive producers on all seven episodes, which means they supervised and approved all that they weren’t directly involved in. Frost wrote episodes 5 and 7 single-handedly and directed 7; the other directors in the series include film editor Dwayne Dunham (1), who edited the pilot; Tina Rathbone (3), who directed the recent Zelly and Me (in which Lynch costarred); Tim Hunter (4), whose best-known directorial credits are Tex and River’s Edge; and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (6), who directed The Escape Artist.

Several separate endings to the series have already been filmed by Lynch, and the question of which one will be used on American TV largely depends on whether or not the series becomes a regular show in the fall. The pilot is currently available on video in 13 other countries in a version that’s 18 minutes longer, including an epilogue set 25 years in the future. When and how this longer version of the pilot will become available in the U.S. is not yet clear, but what is clear from various overseas reviews is that the epilogue leaves a good many plot questions hanging; although the torturer and murderer of Laura and other female victims is revealed, the resolution has been described as “arbitrary,” and one that leaves a lot of red herrings in its wake. (The epilogue, moreover, to judge from descriptions in both Monthly Film Bulletin and Cahiers du Cinéma, is more avant-garde and less explicable in narrative terms than anything in the pilot.)

Lynch’s major achievement in all this is that he plays strictly by the dubious rules of his elected genre and still finds numerous opportunities to display his quirky humor and other forms of aesthetic distancing. The results are both formulaic and goofy—a far cry from the overall coherence of an Eraserhead (or a Feuillade serial, to cite another of Terrence Rafferty’s strained comparisons), but certainly a bright development in a moribund genre, and a story that sets up enough mysteries to get some genuine momentum going. (Whatever my doubts or misgivings about the series as a whole, I expect to stay plugged in through the final episode on May 24.)

The novel elements of the two-hour pilot have little to do with basic aspects of the characters or plot; rather they are matters of mise en scène and certain areas of emphasis involving quirks in the characters and plot. One of my favorite quirky moments occurs close to the beginning, following a credit sequence comprising tranquil views of the fictional northwestern town of Twin Peaks. Pete Martell (played by Lynch regular Jack Nance) discovers the nude body of a tortured and murdered teenage girl named Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic beside a lake; he calls the sheriff’s office in shock, and the sheriff’s secretary Lucy (Kimmy Robertson) summons the sheriff (Michael Ontkean)—who happens to be named Harry S. Truman—to the phone in the following manner: “I’m going to transfer it, the phone on the table by the red chair—the red chair against the wall. The little table with the lamp on it—the lamp that we moved from the corner? The black phone, not the brown phone.”

This totally inessential and daffy piece of confusion injected into a grim (if generic) moment is an early signal that Lynch’s auteurist identity is mainly going to proceed neither with nor through the plot, but at oblique angles to it. This is pretty much the pattern that he follows throughout the pilot—carving out little pockets in the mechanical plot and creating shapely formalist designs inside them. Where these designs differ most from those in his previous pictures is in his willingness to adapt them to the purely narrative dictates of the serial form. If a fluorescent light splutters over Laura’s corpse in the morgue, creating a typically Lynchian visual and rhythmic pattern, there’s a line of dialogue by an attendant (”I think it’s a bad transformer”) that serves to account for it. If a gigantic elk’s head covers much of a table in a small room where the sheriff and federal agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) are about to examine the contents of Laura’s secret safety-deposit box, you can be sure that someone—in this case a bank assistant—will naturalistically justify this anomaly as well (”Oh—it fell down”). Even the brief oddball appearance of Johnny Horne (Robert Davenport)—a 27-year-old in an Indian headdress who grieves over Laura’s absence by slowly beating his head against a doll’s house—is eventually rationalized or “justified.” He is only half accounted for in the pilot, but in episode 1 his kid sister Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) explains to Cooper that her brother, whom Laura used to tutor, is still in the third grade and has “emotional problems.”

What emerges from the pilot is a kind of ongoing working arrangement between bourgeois surrealism and conventional narrative—a relationship that probably reflects to some degree the collaboration between Lynch and veteran TV writer Frost. (This ambivalent structure is both reflected and to some extent mediated by Angelo Badalamenti’s Morricone-like wallpaper score, providing a highly emotional main theme that alternately comes across as “sincere” and as somewhat facetious, as well as some drier and more noncommittal stretches featuring cool jazz.) Some of this same pattern can be found in the collaboration between the characters Dale Cooper and Harry S. Truman as they pursue the mystery together, forming a duo that suggests Sherlock Holmes and Watson (a link explicitly acknowledged by Truman in the first episode), the eccentric artist-detective and the square straight man who marvels at his deductions—except in this case it is the supersleuth, Cooper, who serves as unofficial narrator, continually speaking into a small cassette recorder to an unseen secretary named Diane.

This sort of evenly poised aesthetic balance—or, if one prefers, schizophrenia—between weirdness and normality is regrettably upset in episode 1, directed by Dwayne Dunham from a script by Frost and Lynch; here the series reverts to a mise en scène that is much closer to TV norms. Although the opening shot features an elaborate and extended pan around Cooper’s hotel room that proceeds down his entire body as he hangs by his feet from a ceiling bar, the overall effect is more fancy than artistic. Much later in the episode, a couple of subjective shots from the viewpoint of Laura’s grief-stricken mother—a sudden superimposition of Laura’s face over the face of her best friend, and an almost subliminal flashback glimpse of a strange fellow who may or may not be the killer—are marginally effective without being either beautiful or hallucinatory in the Lynchian manner. Even more regrettable, though not surprising, Dunham’s direction of the actors, while competent enough on a conventional level, squelches much of the spooky wit in the dialogue. With six more episodes to go—and even more if the show turns into a regular series by fall—Cooper’s improbable deductive powers and his obsession with restaurant food like cherry pie are already becoming a bit tiresome and flat, like the unvarying bits that are virtually de rigueur in an ongoing serial format. Lynchian details still crop up in the story at regular intervals—a fish in a coffee maker, a cigarette planted like a candle in a slice of cake, the second appearance of a rather mystical character known as the Log Lady—but without Lynch to realize them on screen, they lose much of their punch and vibrancy. By the time we get to the third episode, which does without Lynch’s direction and his writing, it is altogether possible that Twin Peaks will have become a soap opera with relatively little distinction at all.

***

ABC’s willingness to experiment with a show like Twin Peaks comes at a time when network TV, feeling the heat from both cable and video rentals, is clearly in trouble with a shrinking audience. The question of whether Lynch and Frost’s show may help to turn the tide by encouraging more experimentation is an important one, but it shouldn’t be confused with an appraisal of Twin Peaks in relation to Lynch’s other work, or even an appraisal on its own merits. Having at this point seen only a third of the nine hours produced so far, I obviously can’t pretend to make any final judgments on the whole, but the precipitous decline in overall quality between the pilot and first episode is not encouraging.

Part of what so far seems to make the show a “winner” in terms of contemporary taste is its distance from humanism, a quality that can also be found in Peter Greenaway’s current art-house hit The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. This distance is correctly perceived as a certain kind of artistic freedom. Both Lynch and Greenaway started out as painters who turned to experimental filmmaking before they adopted more mainstream narrative tactics, and both can be described as formalists whose imaginative freedom largely consists of their capacity to work outside the moral categories that restrict most forms of humanist fiction. In other respects they are quite different—Lynch is intuitive and poetic while Greenaway is intellectual and systematic—but the recent fascination of both filmmakers with violence, eroticism, cruelty, and suffering, unaccompanied by the usual varieties and amounts of empathy, give their latest works a cold, pornographic luster whose widespread morbid appeal is surely telling us something about the temper of our times.

I’m not sure what it says about me to admit that I find Lynch’s brand of antihumanism, which is characterized by the preoccupations of male adolescence, a lot more alluring than Greenaway’s, which is characterized to the same degree by the preoccupations of a middle-aged male. (Even the name of Lynch’s town and show can be read as a horny male teenager’s term for female breasts.) I’m certainly bored stiff by most of the teenagers in Twin Peaks, apart from the giddy and sexy amorality of Audrey Horne, but the adolescent eye trained on the other characters is something else again—it makes the corruption of adults look fresh because it is viewed as if by someone who is innocent enough to be discovering corruption for the first time.

A similarly fresh and alien quality is imparted to the grief that the adults of Twin Peaks display after the discovery of Laura’s body. The tears of the sheriff’s deputy, both of Laura’s parents, and the high school principal are lingered over with a kind of numb, abnormal curiosity that suspends the narrative well past the point of conventional movies, much less soap opera. (Laura’s mother Sarah receives most of this attention, and her initial crying even provokes one of Lynch’s formalist pirouettes—a slow camera movement from an overturned phone down its cord to the dangling receiver.) Some of the teenagers, notably Donna and James, are shown crying at some length as well, but these stretches are usually more recuperable as prime-time tearjerk material, while the wailing grown-ups are converted more into slightly uncanny art objects, regarded with the same kind of inquisitiveness that a 13-year-old might have about, say, an exotic beetle. This singular angle of vision has been part of Lynch’s equipment from the beginning, and it surely says a lot about both him and his audience, not to mention his country, that Twin Peaks would be–and may even, by the end of the series, turn out to be–as flat as stale beer without it.