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Looking for America [UNCOMMON SENSES]

From the Chicago Reader (August 26, 1988). — J.R.

UNCOMMON SENSES

Directed and written by Jon Jost.

The film essay, as opposed to the documentary, remains in some respects the most neglected of contemporary film genres, by filmmakers and audiences alike, perhaps because it is seldom acknowledged as a film form at all. The only recent mainstream examples that come to mind are the first two parts of Godfrey Reggio’s trilogy, Koyaanisqatsi (1983) and Powaqqatsi (1988). As an English reviewer remarked of Koyaanisqatsi — a film that, incidentally, owed most of its exposure to Francis Ford Coppola’s distribution — “Its vainglorious appeal as a ‘new cinematic experience’ is really to an audience that would rather be open-mouthed than open-minded.” I found its glib borrowings from the avant-garde so irritating that I had no sense of regret about missing its sequel.

On the other hand, the most masterful examples I can think of from the last two decades — Orson Welles’s F for Fake (1973) and Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1982) — both flopped commercially in this country. And most of the other distinguished examples from the 70s and 80s seem to appear only on the experimental film circuits: Trinh T. Min-ha’s Reassemblage (1982) and Naked Spaces (1985), Chicago filmmaker Peter Thompson’s Universal Hotel/Universal Citizen (1986-87; available on tape at Facets), Jane Campion’s 1984 Passionless Moments (which showed at the Film Center last weekend), and Jon Jost’s Speaking Directly: Some American Notes (1973; also available on tape at Facets).

Uncommon Senses, a kind of sequel to Speaking Directly, might be called Jost’s second feature-length State of the Union essay, made 15 years later. Like its predecessor, it is composed of several different and relatively autonomous sections, each of which has its own form and mode of address. While both films can be described as didactic, the first is overtly autobiographical, the second more a multifaceted statement about America. Subtitled Plain Talk & Common Sense, Uncommon Senses is Jost’s eighth feature to date, and it can be regarded in some respects as a summation of his previous efforts — a varied, durable body of independent work that, despite its limited exposure, has tended to grow in resonance and power over the years. At the same time, like each of the preceding features, Uncommon Senses can be seen as a fresh effort, a departure. (Jost’s ninth feature, Rembrandt Laughing, was completed earlier this summer.)

Composed of a prologue, ten sections, and a postscript, Uncommon Senses confronts head-on the notion of multiplicity (which all ambitious writers about this country have seemed to rely on — from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg to John Dos Passos to Thomas Wolfe to Jack Kerouac and beyond). The rapturous catalog is its organizing principle. The endlessly burgeoning list — with counterparts in everything from the Bible to the Sears Roebuck catalog to almanacs and telephone directories as well as in such writers as Herman Melville, Allen Ginsberg, and Thomas Pynchon — has always had its seductive and contagious side; this sentence shows its influence. But few artists in this country have ever tried to analyze or critique this list-making habit as a rhetorical and ideological impediment, a mode of discourse that conceals and mystifies in the process of showing us “everything.” Part of the originality and importance of Jost’s new film is that it proceeds to do just that — to critique list making even as it employs it.

Jost seemingly arrived at this critique by default rather than by design. He has driven across this country and back more times than any other filmmaker I know, typically taking back roads rather than interstates; and when he received a sum of money from English television to make a low-budget feature essay about present-day America, he made another extended and extensive cross-country trip, shooting footage as he went. Yet when he returned from his travels, he found that, by conventional filmmaking standards, he had shot practically nothing at all — a total of two hours or less. The implications of this and the reasons for it are an implicit part of what the film explores. Jost’s unusual rigor and frugality in all of his work obviously accounts for some of it; his shooting ratios are considerably lower than those of most other filmmakers. But in this case, he had the resources to shoot a great deal if he wanted to, and the fact that he didn’t clearly stemmed from the evolving essayistic, rather than documentary, thrust and content of the film.

Jost first evokes America as a “place,” a “thing,” a “sound,” a “presence,” and a “power” in his offscreen narration — while focusing on a shot of a lovely field that dissolves slowly into closer shots of dark grass, moving water, and a large hand appearing in double-exposure over the water. He then moves on to part one of the film, “Four Corners.” He plants his camera at a roadside tourist spot where New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah meet, and records from several passing tourists their fascination with this place, meanwhile ruminating briefly on a theme that will gradually come to dominate the film: the attraction exerted by such spots in the United States. They represent “that something which we would like to get our grips on” — an emblem of the elusiveness of the country itself.

Section two, “Coasts,” attacks that elusiveness in a more conceptual manner — it virtually parodies the Whitmanesque impulse to contain multitudes, to reach for all-inclusiveness. Over 340 years of American history and the entire geographical expanse of the country are encapsulated in a matter of a few minutes. On the sound track, overlapping voices recite portions of texts, beginning with the 1620 Mayflower Compact and ending with Allen Ginsberg’s 1961 poem Kaddish, encompassing over 100 chronologically ordered quotations in all. What we see are beautiful overlapping NASA satellite photographs of the American mainland, proceeding sequentially from the east to the west — photographs taken in black and white and then luminously colorized by computer for scientific reasons.

Part three, “Crosscurrents,” takes up the multiplicity of “received images” of America, literally as well as figuratively, by running through a partially pixilated inventory of postcards and similar American iconic images (both still and in motion). These images appear in various ways: several appear on the screen at once or in succession; the images themselves range from toy tanks moving over dollar bills to Mount Rushmore to apple pie a la mode being eaten in fast motion. Meanwhile Jost’s offscreen narration contrapuntally discusses the range and nature of this imagery. (In more ways than one, this is the sequence that shows Jost’s technical and conceptual virtuosity at its most impressive; it would be impossible to paraphrase all he does here without creating an endless catalog of one’s own.)

Sometimes as many as 16 moving or still frames appear on the screen at once, but the commentary gradually moves from emulating this profusion to questioning it: “To go on in such a way would be only to emulate, to demonstrate by copying, and finally to succumb to the very thing we are trying to see clearly. No, the simple truth is that to pile on more and more will only obscure and confuse–and perhaps do exactly what this system, whether consciously or not, is designed to do: to hide itself, its little inner workings and aims, by dipping behind a vast array of surfaces.” Eventually the images are reduced to a single promotional film short for a city in Colorado; it occupies most of the screen, narrated by a woman’s voice that supplants Jost’s.

Part four, “Inside/Outside,” focuses on Rockwell International’s management of nuclear facilities in Colorado and Washington, moving through more promotional material as well as a few bald facts to offset it — such as the fact that Rockwell did over $12 billion in business in 1986, almost double the figure for 1982. Part five, “Songs,” mainly juxtaposes a poem in the beat style (written by Jost) with a shot taken from a moving car driving past an endless military installation, and part six, “Numbers,” gives us a skeptical mini-essay on the use and nature of statistics while treating us to a visual onslaught of statistical data about Americans. This data crosses the screen both forward (in yellow letters) and backward (in red), along with an equally horizontal procession of nude figures taken from Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century motion studies.

As in the overlapping voices and images of “Coasts,” Jost is orchestrating densely interwoven tapestries and mosaics not to convey information, but to convey the problems in understanding that derive from too many facts about some things (”outside”) and too few about others (”inside”). In part seven, “Americans,” he returns to the simpler and more direct documentary manner of “Four Corners” — this time without any offscreen narration — by inviting a series of people to introduce themselves to the camera however they see fit. Standing against a black background, each is allotted about 30 seconds.

Parts one and seven, “Four Corners” and “Americans,” are in some ways even more challenging and difficult than all five of the intervening sections because of the relative freedom that they offer the spectator in processing what is shown. In contrast to the factual overloads and absences of the other parts, the question of what constitutes a fact or adds up to information about these people is much more open and ambiguous. The temptation of some spectators to snicker at these people or feel that Jost is somehow exploiting them is in a way a displacement of their own discomfort in not knowing how to respond. The didacticism of sections two through six may be hard to cope with in spots, but the absence of didacticism here puts us completely at sea. Much of the subtlety and brilliance of the structure of Uncommon Senses has to do with its diverse and ingenious strategies for deprogramming our responses, alternately giving us “too much” and “too little” in order to confront us with the kinds of rhetorical structures that we tend to encounter unthinkingly elsewhere.

Part eight, “America,” returns us to the conceptual didacticism of “Coasts” by giving us another carefully controlled history lesson, this time through animated maps, accompanied by original music by John A. English that reflects some Native American influence. Here the history covers about 500 years in five minutes, with red dots denoting Indian settlements and white dots standing for whites. The focus is mainly ecological — the withdrawal of forests, the beginning of farmland and irrigation, and eventually the construction of military installations. But it must be admitted that here the absence of narration creates a problem — what I know about this sequence comes from a conversation with Jost, and without his tips, I doubt that many spectators will have much of an idea about what they’re seeing.

Part nine, “Heart of the Country,” shows us first the demographic center of America, “in the farmlands a little southwest of Saint Louis, not far from the Mississippi,” and then the geographic center, “a bit north of Belle Fourche, South Dakota, hard by the Wyoming border — the center of a hypothetical geographic plane which includes all of the mainland, Alaska, and Hawaii.” The geographic center proves to be the same lovely field that we glimpsed in the prologue.

“Here is another place,” says Jost offscreen, “like the quadrant of Four Corners, designated by the happenstance of politics and geometry, to symbolize, to represent, to stand, it seems, for some ineffable something: somehow, here, at the ‘center of the nation’ one anticipates a revelation, that the metaphysic of nationhood would stand stripped, turn physical, palpable, something one could get one’s hands on.”

No such luck: there’s only sky, plains, and wind, which the camera gracefully traverses until we gradually turn upside down. But ironically, we hear, this spot, lies within the boundaries of Ellsworth Air Force Base, whose missile fields extend for hundreds of miles around; buried directly beneath this placid setting are Minuteman missiles armed with nuclear warheads. And the “heart of the country,” Jost concludes, lies in neither places nor symbols, but in ourselves and what we choose to do.

This leads to part ten, “The Bottom Line,” a lecture about the income tax delivered by a man dressed in judge’s robes, with emphasis given to the fact that a citizen does not have a right to know what happens to his or her tax money. And this is followed in turn by a postscript lecture by Jost himself that denounces the “Nation/State,” specifically the inner workings of this country and the evils it perpetrates.

The two concluding lectures, one should note, were both written by Jost, and however reductive and prosaic they may seem in relation to what has gone before, the film’s overall structure and cumulative drift might be said to make them inevitable. At the same time, whether or not this coincides with Jost’s own aims, I think it would be shortchanging the overall richness of the film to interpret it exclusively as a linear argument. The materials set before us can be mentally juggled and synthesized other ways as well, and each of the sequences can be regarded as starting points for an analysis as well as consecutive building blocks. The argument in “Heart of the Country,” for example, that what we call “America” tends to be hidden rather than visible, although it certainly applies to nuclear warheads, also applies to poverty, racism, sexism, and a great deal more.

In his first feature, Speaking Directly, Jost essentially began with himself and his own life — including his two years in federal prison for draft resistance in the mid-60s, and the conditions of his career as a low-budget filmmaker — and eventually expanded to a detailed political critique of the United States in the early 70s (and incidentally one of the best political analyses of that period on film that we have). In Uncommon Senses, Jost has in some respects inverted that process, beginning with a general critique and then working his way toward its more personal implications, winding up with his own solitary figure. In the 70s, the targets of his critique were a good deal more visible, both to himself and to the public. Today they are harder to get at, and require new modes of perception — reflection about not only how this country is constituted, but how our understanding of it is constructed. For anyone who cares about such matters, Uncommon Senses is an uncommon and invaluable act of clarity, and, better yet, a tool.

Betrayed

The usual limitation of director Costa-Gavras (Z, Missing) is that he makes well-crafted thrillers with liberal political themes that preach to the converted. The interesting thing about his latest movie, scripted by Joe Eszterhas (Jagged Edge), is that it does something rather different–more unsettling and morally ambiguous and, as a look at the underground white supremacist movement in the U.S., more disturbing and explosive. Debra Winger plays a federal agent who infiltrates a murderous group in the rural midwest in order to discover the murderer of a racist-baiting Chicago radio talk-show host (inspired in part by Alan Berg, the Jewish radio personality who was murdered in Denver). She becomes involved with one of the leaders (Tom Berenger) and his homespun all-American family, and is forced by her Chicago-based operative (John Heard) to hang on for dear life. Rather than give us stock racist villains, the film offers a relatively three-dimensional view of their life, their community, and their all-American eccentricities. (Berenger’s character, for example, hunts down blacks in cold blood and teaches anti-Semitism to his cute little girl, but he won’t shake the hand of an American Nazi.) To complicate matters further, the ethical issue of Winger’s own role as an infiltrator who is both personally drawn to Berenger and nauseated by his ideology is played for all it’s worth. The result is a blood-chilling and far from simple look at a subject that most American movies haven’t the guts to go near, beautifully shot by Patrick Blossier, and tautly directed, with a number of fine performances; Betsy Blair, John Mahoney, and Ted Levine are among the costars. (Commons, Chestnut Station, Ridge, Harlem-Cermak, Evanston, Hillside Square, Norridge, Webster Place)

Self-Portraits [TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM & THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST]

This originally appeared in the August 19, 1988 issue of the Chicago Reader. –J.R.

TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Written by Arnold Schulman and David Seidler

With Jeff Bridges, Joan Allen, Martin Landau, Frederic Forrest, Mako, and Dean Stockwell.

THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Written by Paul Schrader

With Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey, Harry Dean Stanton, David Bowie, Verna Bloom, Randy Danson, and Andre Gregory.

While it might initially seem like a shotgun marriage to consider together movies as different in tone and subject as Tucker: The Man and His Dream and The Last Temptation of Christ, it is worth noting first of all that these films represent comparable watersheds in the careers of their respective directors. Even if we put aside that Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese are contemporaries (born in 1939 and 1942, respectively) with Italian and Catholic backgrounds, and that both became star directors during the same period — with Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972 and Scorsese’s Mean Streets in 1973 — we are still left with the fact that their latest features are both intensely personal projects, nurtured by their creators over many years and through a number of vicissitudes.

Scorsese’s interest in making The Last Temptation of Christ can be traced back to 1972, when Barbara Hershey gave him a copy of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, although he has stated that his desire to make a film about Jesus began during his early childhood, when he was simultaneously becoming involved with movies and with the Catholic Church. (He nearly made The Last Temptation in Israel about five years ago, with Aidan Quinn [of Reckless and Desperately Seeking Susan] cast as Jesus, but the budget fell through at the very last moment.)

Coppola, on the other hand, traces his fascination with car designer and manufacturer Preston Tucker back to the time when Coppola was eight and his father took him to a car show; his father was one of the original investors in Tucker’s company, so the connection went deeper than mere aesthetics. Coppola has been interested in making a movie about Tucker at least as far back as the 70s; after Apocalypse Now, he briefly worked with Leonard Bernstein in developing a musical about him, “a multi-image extravaganza.”

As a result of these virtually lifelong involvements — obsession in the case of Scorsese and Jesus, fascination in the case of Coppola and Tucker — the films qualify as the testaments of their respective directors, as well as their passionate if idiosyncratic self-portraits. To my mind both are flawed works, but each represents a major advance over its director’s more recent bread-and-butter work: Tucker is a solid improvement on Coppola’s The Cotton Club and Peggy Sue Got Married, and The Last Temptation is much more impressive than Scorsese’s After Hours and The Color of Money. Both films have been getting a lot of press about their subject matter and very little about their styles, although it must be conceded that their styles are as radically different as their subjects (and their respective social impacts, which are no less important). The reason for addressing these distinctions is that the differences between these films are as pertinent as their similarities: what each one lacks, the other has in spades.

Above all, Tucker has showmanship, and showmanship is in large measure its subject. The story of Preston Thomas Tucker — described by Collier’s magazine in 1949 as “a bewildering combination of P.T. Barnum, Huck Finn, Jimmy Walker, and Baron Munchhausen” — is basically the story of a particular version of the American Dream that took root in the postwar 40s. Part of it is epitomized by the Tucker Torpedo, a dream car that was based on aerodynamic principles and offered fuel injection, disc brakes, a single button to open and close all the doors, several novel safety features (including a pop-out windshield), and a relatively affordable price. But an equally important part of the dream (according to the film, at least) is the extended family that produced and promoted the car: Tucker’s own large family, which was an omnipresent and integral part of the enterprise, plus his business manager. Abe Karatz (Martin Landau), his grease monkey Eddie Dean (Frederic Forrest), his test driver Jimmy Sakuyama (Mako), and such figures as his housekeeper, his press agent, and the filmmaker who made promotional shorts about him and his car.

In short, the dream of Tucker, composed from a combination of fact and fancy, is about both a product and a style or mode of production. As many commentators have noted, this dream bears a distinct relationship to Coppola’s own ambitious and ill-fated Zoetrope Studio, which was designed to foster collective innovation and brainstorming as much as individual self-aggrandizement (at least in theory). Zoetrope, like the Torpedo, perished under a pile of debts and unsympathetic pressures from big-business competitors (Hollywood in Coppola’s case, Detroit in Tucker’s). Tucker’s talents seem to have been those of an entrepreneur and a showman rather than those of a lone thinker and a solitary inventor; similarly, at the same time Coppola’s stock as a director and auteur was suffering severe depreciation — mainly because of One From the Heart, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, Peggy Sue Got Married, and Gardens of Stone – he was stamping his name in large letters over (mainly) much better films and film events by Abel Gance (Napoleon), Hans-Jürgen Syberberg (Hitler, a Film From Germany and Parsifal), Jean-Luc Godard (Passion), Wim Wenders (Hammett), Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion), and many others, as producer and/or promoter.

(The same notion of an extended family was vividly conveyed in TV coverage of the Democratic Convention last month — not so much the separate families of Dukakis and Jackson, although these were certainly evident, as the intermingling of diverse factions within the party, despite the efforts of most TV commentators to play up the conflicts and differences. Tucker seems perfectly timed as a slice of populist uplift to accompany the Democratic campaign, juxtaposing the wide-eyed aspirations of the “little man” with the crushing obstacles of big business.)

Combining upbeat big-band music and handsome ‘Scope framing with the luscious period recreations of production designer Dean Tavoularis and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (both charter members of the Coppola “family”), Coppola creates a heady enthusiasm not only for the idealism of the late 40s, but also for the remnants of that euphoria that survive in the present. The main stylistic models in evidence all come from the 40s: Citizen Kane (in the flashy transitions between scenes and in the promotional film about Tucker that opens the movie, a pastiche that functions much like the Kane newsreel); Capra’s Meet John Doe and It’s a Wonderful Life; and the films of Preston Sturges.

But there’s a significant difference between Tucker and these predecessors. Coppola’s protagonist is a character incapable of introspection and self-scrutiny, a triumph of pure image. Jeff Bridges, who plays the part well and likably, keeps virtually the same shit-eating grin plastered on his face throughout the movie, regardless of whether he is celebrating the completion of his first prototype car or smashing objects in a rage against the wall. The shallow smile is an emblem; Coppola views Tucker, his period, and his world exclusively in terms of advertising — the Norman Rockwellish view of America found in magazine ads and illustrations of the period. The cartoon villains of Tucker are like the comical Republicans recently evoked and derided in Atlanta — one-dimensional reductions of media images that lack dimension to begin with. The movie has a flat surface that allows Coppola a great deal of grace and fluidity in traversing his material (as happened to a lesser extent in the foreshortening of One From the Heart), but it can’t dig far enough into the dark corners of its dream to create a world as dense as those of his ostensible models.

What Tucker offers in terms of stylistic innovation combines the narrative thrust of The Godfather with the technologically contrived dream bubbles of One From the Heart; both the meat of the former and the froth of the latter are trimmed in the synthesis, but what remains in the giddy spatial effects is occasionally as exciting as anything Coppola has done, and it is directly expressive of the extended family idea as well. The grandest moment of all, fully worthy of Kane, is a spectacular transition between Tucker’s cozy and crowded kitchen in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and his empty 73-acre factory in Chicago, waiting to be filled. During a brainstorming session in the kitchen, Abe describes the factory that’s just been acquired; Tucker says, “It’s perfect!” He twirls his hat around his finger, and without a cut steps directly into the epic reaches of the plant — an exhilarating hop from dream to reality. Only slightly less effective is the stylized framing of certain phone conversations between Tucker and various members of his family; both ends of these conversations take place within the same theatrical space, which similarly suggests a utopian proximity between home and work.

In a wholly invented scene designed to push home Coppola’s message, Howard Hughes (nicely played by Dean Stockwell) points to his Spruce Goose and asks Tucker, “Who cares whether it flies or not? That’s not the point.” Later, after Tucker offers an eloquent self-defense (another ahistorical addition) at his trial for fraud — declaring, in tones worthy of a Capra hero, “If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he’d be thrown in jail for flying a kite without a license” and virtually predicting the future importing of Japanese radios — he manages to be sanguine about the fact that only 50 Tucker cars ever made it off the assembly line. “What’s the difference, 50 or 50 million? That’s only machinery. It’s the idea that counts — and the dream.”

The simplicity of all this may finally not be enough, but at least it is genuine; and unlike the high-flown simplicities of One From the Heart and the cop-out rhetoric that mars the endings of The Rain People and Apocalypse Now, it isn’t condescending, either. The heavy-breathing portentousness of the earlier Coppola — which led to such self-regarding glibness as the use of Nino Rota’s ubiquitous Godfather waltz theme on the church organ during a communion scene in The Godfather Part II — has here given way to a relaxed vernacular and a relative modesty that permit Coppola to get through Tucker without ever tripping over himself. The scale of his own aspirations may be smaller now, but he plays it straight, without filigree or filibuster.

***

“You don’t make up for your sins in church,” says Charlie (Harvey Keitel) offscreen at the very beginning of Mean Streets; “you do it in the streets; you do it at home. The rest is bullshit, and you know it.” Here in a nutshell are the contradictions of Martin Scorsese’s cinema: an unrequited desire for absolution crossed with profanity, a tortured conflict between flesh and spirit, and a spiritual crisis that is so internalized that it never moves beyond self-scrutiny. (The first act performed by Charlie in Mean Streets is to get out of bed and look in a mirror.)

Far from being “nice,” Scorsese’s Catholicism has always had its unhealthy and even repellent side; but Scorsese goes immeasurably farther into both his obsessions and the possibilities and implications of his art than a nice-guy director like Coppola; niceness isn’t the point. (One could never accuse Scorsese of holding to the notion that George Orwell found in Graham Greene, that “there is something rather distingué in being damned”; Scorsese seems to know hell like the back of his hand, and he doesn’t find it amusing.) Coppola is content to stick with his little kernel of truth, heat it until it pops, and savor the fluffy corn for all it’s worth; Scorsese plunges into the unknown without a return address, riddled with guilt and conflict, and what emerges is both an authentic and an authentically upsetting struggle, illuminating yet perpetually unresolved.

If Scorsese is easy to misunderstand, so are virtually all the leading filmmakers of doubt — Dreyer, Rossellini, Godard, Rivette, Preminger, Cassavetes — for whom a shot is often a question rather than an answer, a hypothesis rather than fact. This is a kind of filmmaking that implies an intimate and serious dialogue with the audience, but a good many spectators — and not only members of the Coppola parish — would rather be preached to, simply and entertainingly.

The religious doubts of Scorsese, one should stress, are not doubts about religion, but, on the contrary, doubts that could only exist within a system of religious belief. Not that this makes the doubts any easier to swallow, even for nonbelievers. Writing about Roberto Rossellini — another devout but conflicted Catholic — in 1955, Jacques Rivette stated that “Catholicism is by vocation a scandalous religion; the fact that our body, like Christ, also plays its part in the divine mystery is something hardly to everyone’s taste, and in this creed that makes the presence of the flesh one of its dogmas, there is a concrete meaning, weighty, almost sensual, to flesh and matter that is highly repugnant to chaste spirits.”

For Scorsese, who discovered movies and Catholicism around the same time, film itself has both its sacred and profane sides — a notion that is clearly shared by the less talented but equally divided screenwriter and director Paul Schrader, who came from. a Dutch Calvinist background in which movies were strictly forbidden, and who worked on the scripts of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The Last Temptation of Christ. Left to his own devices, Schrader has often exploited religious conflicts to express a violent worldview that borders on the fascistic; Scorsese’s uses of this worldview in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are full of problems and rife with contradictions, but they can never be read as unambiguous celebrations of fascist power to the degree that Schrader’s own films (such as Mishima) sometimes are. With and without Schrader, Scorsese has most often in the past used his religious conflicts to dramatize, objectify, and explore his secular subjects, not to exploit them.

In the case of The Last Temptation of Christ, in which Scorsese finally confronts these conflicts squarely and directly, they become the struggle of Jesus Himself between His own humanity and His divinity — between the constant temptation of evil and the acceptance of His martyrdom. This is the theme of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, which uses this struggle to radically reinterpret Jesus’s life (and which provoked its own share of controversy when it was first published in Greece three decades ago). In Kazantzakis’s version, Jesus is so alienated from His divine calling that He is first seen as a carpenter building crosses for the Romans to crucify Jews on. Only through the efforts of Judas is the establishment of Christianity made possible; he is a political activist who sets Jesus on the right path, and who ultimately betrays Him to the Romans only at Jesus’s insistence, as a strategy to ensure His martyrdom. And after Jesus is lured down from the cross by Satan (who is disguised as a guardian angel) to lead an ordinary human life with Mary Magdalene and, after her death, with Martha, it is Judas again who persuades Jesus to return to the cross and accept His final suffering “like a man.”

While I haven’t read Kazantzakis’s novel straight through, I’ve spent enough time with it to confirm that Scorsese’s film is a reasonably close and faithful adaptation, at least in terms of plot. Even the use of contemporary American accents and plain (as opposed to exalted) dialogue can be defended as a sensible substitute for Kazantzakis’s use of the popular, “demotic” language of the Greek peasantry rather than the “puristic” language of Athenian intellectuals (as described by his English translator P.A. Bien); the use of electric guitars and some hints of rock percussion in Peter Gabriel’s score (along with traditional North African and Middle Eastern music) can be justified on similar grounds. Kazantzakis, one should note, successively embraced Bergson, Nietzsche, Buddha, Lenin, and Odysseus as his spiritual guides before he returned to Christ, whom he first encountered as a teenager; he didn’t write The Last Temptation of Christ until his late 60s.

Scorsese has argued that the view of Christ he has taken from Kazantzakis is not so much a reflection of his own belief as a revealing postulate: “I don’t say the concept . . . is the truth, but it is a fascinating idea. In Kazantzakis’s depiction, Jesus wrestles with the human side of His nature as He comes to terms with the God within Him. Because of His dual nature, human and divine, every moment of His life is a conflict and a victory.” The film, like the novel, seeks to stage the same conflict and victory in the spectator/reader, and the figure of Jesus becomes, in effect, the theater of that encounter. The challenge of the story, in short, isn’t merely that Jesus is tempted by human frailty, but that the audience is asked to identify with this same conflict, masochistically as well as narcissistically.

It is a conflict that leaves little room for any developed sense of community, and just as little space for love as something more than an abstract sentiment. Everyone who sees The Last Temptation will bring his or her own sense of Jesus to match against Scorsese’s version. My own sense of Jesus, for example, is that He loved lepers more than Ronald Reagan loves AIDS patients, but this is not the impression that Willem Dafoe’s Jesus leaves us with. Like all the other actors in the film, Dafoe is admirable and impressive (although I for one wish he were a little less well-groomed), but the film keeps him so tightly focused on Jesus’s inner struggles that the evidences of humanity around Him seem to figure mainly as props. As in Scorsese’s other films, the notion of the extended family, so central to the Gospels (as well as to Tucker), is simply beyond the reach of the protagonist, who is caught mainly between various forms of narcissism and self-loathing. (Indeed, one reason why The King of Comedy may be Scorsese’s masterpiece to date is that he found the perfect medium for this stalemate in TV — a combined Narcissus pool and family surrogate for nearly all of the film’s major characters.)

Although Scorsese’s own family is inscribed in much of his work — both his parents, for instance, play significant if elliptical roles in The King of Comedy — his heroes are isolated in ways that Coppola’s heroes seldom are (apart from the striking exceptions of Apocalypse Now and The Conversation): in place of the extended and/or surrogate families in The Rain People, the two Godfather films, Rumble Fish, and Tucker, we get characters who are profoundly estranged from their real or surrogate families throughout Mean Streets, New York, New York, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, and The Last Temptation. The dream sequence in the latter, which is what causes so much grief to fundamentalists — a dream of normality, domesticity, and procreation that offends only because Jesus is the dreamer and protagonist — corresponds precisely to what is unattainable in Scorsese’s world, and omnipresent in Coppola’s. Women may be the ultimate status symbols in Scorsese’s films, but the principal passion in these films exists between men, whether this passion is expressed through love or brutality. (In The Last Temptation, it is basically the love that passes between Jesus and Judas, and Harvey Keitel as the latter has never been better in his expression of this tenderness.)

This leads to a curious difference between Satan (disguised, remember, as a guardian angel) in the novel and Satan in the film. In the novel, the angel is male; in the film, she is a beautiful little girl with an English accent. I can understand the reason for the English accent, which Scorsese assigns to all the Romans as well (including David Bowie as an effectively underplayed Pontius Pilate); apparently it is meant to link these characters to a more recent example of empire. But  Scorsese’s use of females throughout the film to signify only maternity and temptation (of the male) makes me wonder if women of all denominations should be objecting to this film rather than fundamentalists of both sexes. (Admittedly, though, the roles of women in Tucker are even more restricted — in this case, to domesticity and decor.)

Previously, the hallmark of Scorsese’s style has been male hysteria, a special province that is shared (at least with Scorsese’s degree of intensity) only by a few other filmmakers — Jerry Lewis, Marco Ferreri, and — more intermittently — John Cassavetes and Elaine May. In The Last Temptation, this emotional register is present only fitfully, in certain moments of violence and in a couple of panicky subjective pans that convey Jesus’s sense that God is dogging His heels as He moves along a riverbank. On the whole, Scorsese’s stylistic strategies here add up to a series of negative decisions — a deliberate move to curtail the range of his expressive arsenal (in terms of color, framing, editing, and camera movement) in all but a few key moments, in order to concentrate more on theological questions. The narrative fluency of a film like Tucker is miles away from the broken rhythms of The Last Temptation, which proceeds mainly through fits and starts until Jesus arrives at the cross and His last temptation, when the action finally becomes compressed and powerful right up through the end.

Still, The Last Temptation is in no respect a timid or cautious film. In contrast to the easy-to-take Jesus of Cecil B. De Mille and Nicholas Ray’s separate versions of King of Kings (in 1927 and 1961, respectively), Scorsese’s life of Jesus is courageous enough to risk ridicule at every turn, and just as his doubts are exclusively those of a believer, his film’s address is essentially to believers and to those already steeped in the story of Jesus. (Others, like myself, may have to go back to the Gospels to clarify such incidents as Peter cutting off Malchus’s ear and Jesus replacing it.)

At the same time, it has to be admitted that a director’s own degree of religious faith has never been a guarantee of acceptability for other believers. Carl Dreyer, we now know, was not particularly religious, but it is conceivable that his depictions of religious faith in The Passion of Joan of Arc and Ordet are the greatest that we have on film, for believers and nonbelievers alike. (Whether his own projected but unrealized life of Jesus, conceived historically and polemically as a statement against anti-Semitism, would have met with strong objections is impossible to say.) By contrast, few Hollywood directors were more devout than Leo McCarey, but in his My Son John (1952), made during the height of the McCarthy witch-hunts, the authority of the Catholic Church, as represented by a comic local priest, plays a weak second fiddle to the patriarchal authority of the FBI.

Part of the difficulty in assessing The Last Temptation within the present climate is that the rash of fundamentalist protests against an idea associated with the film — it’s hard to call it a protest against the film itself if most of the protesters haven’t seen it — discourages close analysis by allowing certain misconceptions about the film, and about filmmaking in general, to hog the spotlight. The ludicrous widespread claims that MCA chairman Lew Wasserman is the “author” of the film — which is rather like calling Bennett Cerf of Random House the author of James Joyce’s Ulysses – is a chilling commentary on what Reagan capitalism has done to contemporary views of art and artists, a confusion of authorship with ownership that has already made personal Hollywood projects such as The Last Temptation almost impossible to conceive (and a project such as Tucker unthinkable without the sponsorship and “practical advice” of executive producer George Lucas). This focus on Wasserman has in turn occasioned an onslaught of anti-Semitic invective, from California to Italy (where director Franco Zeffirelli declared on national public radio that the unseen film was the product of “that Jewish scum from Los Angeles, which is always spoiling for a chance to attack the Christian world”).

The equally absurd claim that the film, the least commercially conceived project in Scorsese’s career, was made chiefly in order to turn a profit — presumably in contrast to such “pure” examples of religious exploitation as The Exorcist — is further complicated by the fact that the protest against the film is itself being used as a profit-making ploy by some fundamentalist leaders, at the same time that it is visibly helping (rather than hurting) the film’s box office.

The film’s depiction of Jesus’s wavering and temptation, which remains at the center of the controversy, is handled mundanely rather than salaciously by contemporary standards, but the fact that the film asks us to consider it at all still constitutes a challenge. By implying that Christianity is a battle that must be fought continually rather than a serene and unshakable given, it brings the question of faith alive again in a way that few religious films have attempted. On the other hand, by virtually restricting the world and humanity itself to a group of bit players and mere spectators to this conflict, the film can function politically (if at all) only within the church; from the vantage point of the world outside, it comes dangerously close to solipsism. The agony of the flesh is never far away, but because this agony is chiefly that of Jesus rather than the agony of mankind, the film often registers as convoluted inner turmoil rather than as social confrontation.

The interesting thing about both Tucker and The Last Temptation is that they place their emphasis not on worldly achievement but on the visions that rule the minds of two individuals. Much as Coppola’s Tucker can declare, “It’s the idea that counts — and the dream,” Scorsese’s (and Kazantzakis’s) Jesus can end His life on the cross by declaring, “It is accomplished,” referring not so much to the acceptance of His martyrdom as to the acceptance of the idea of His martyrdom, which Judas finally helps Him to put into place. Yet while Coppola can only conceive of Tucker’s vision through collective effort, Scorsese’s conception of Jesus’s vision rests on the belief that He basically lives and dies on the cross alone, and that His struggle — like that of the spectator — essentially remains a solitary one. After Jesus smiles and closes His eyes in His triumphant pain, a spray of psychedelic colors crosses the empty screen, followed by white. In this, the only moment of euphoria provided in the film (but in Scorsese’s terms, a moment that has been fully earned), the spectacle becomes a wholly private one for each spectator, not a communal experience to be shared.

Cane Toads: An Unnatural History/Films by Jane Campion

One hundred and two cane toads were brought into Queensland, Australia, in 1935 with the hope that they would get rid of sugar-cane grubs. The toads quickly overran the countryside, eating everything except cane grubs. In this documentary featurette, filmmaker Mark Lewis extracts as much grim humor as possible from this problem–which persists–with all its grotesque ramifications. (The strange mating habits of cane toads are described in detail; their poison has not only caused ecological disaster in the area, but also has served as an illegal hallucinogenic drug; many children treat the toads as pets; and so on.) On the same program, and much more interesting as filmmaking, are three highly original independent shorts by New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion, all of them made while she was attending the Australian Film and Television School: Peel (1981) and A Girl’s Own Story (1984) are about family quarrels and transgressions; the remarkable Passionless Moments (1984), made with Gerard Lee, is a series of fictional miniessays that defy description. All three Campion films are strikingly photographed and edited, and comprise the most interesting Australian independent work that I’ve seen. (Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Saturday, August 20, 6:00 and 8:00, and Sunday, August 21, 4:00 and 6:00, 443-3737)

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

Robert Englund is back as Freddy Kreuger in the fourth installment of the popular horror series; Finnish director Renny Harlin directed from a story by William Kotzwinkle and Brian Helgeland. Having missed the three previous installments in the cycle, I found much of the story only semicomprehensible–even after a few explanatory plot points were thrown my way about 40 minutes into the film–but it’s hard to think of many other movies where narrative is so thoroughly beside the point. This is a series of extravagant visual set pieces, one right after the other, drawing upon such sources as Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. and Through the Looking Glass, with the usual collection of Silly Putty special effects that one expects from current horror films. Harlin’s arsenal of conceits and visual effects–pirouetting overhead angles, dancing trigonometry formulas, a pizza flavored with tiny human heads, a lot of fancy play with a water bed, and much, much more–keeps it consistently watchable and inventive. With Lisa Wilcox, Andras Jones, Tuesday Knight, Ken Sagoes, Danny Hassel, and Toy Newkirk; and the combined special effects talents of Steve Johnson, John Buechler, Kevin Yagher, and Screaming Mad George. (Bolingbrook, Chestnut Station, Forest Park, Golf Mill, Orland Square, Plaza, Woodfield, Dearborn, Hyde Park, Norridge, Evanston, Evergreen, Hillside Square, Bel-Air Drive-In, Double Drive-In)