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The Danger of Putting Our Cultural Destiny in the Hands of Business

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 1998. –- J.R.

Ever since a Barnes & Noble bookstore opened in my neighborhood in Chicago, I’ve been cultivating the habit of hanging out there, a bit like the way I used to frequent the public library in my hometown as a teenager. I often stop there not with a particular purchase in mind, but on my way to someplace else – a movie at the same shopping center, a nearby restaurant — or on my way home from work. The relaxed idleness offered by the roomy store and the various incentives to linger — the generous selection of hardcovers and paperbacks, the current magazines, the tables where you can spread your stuff out and read for as long as you want to, the Starbucks coffee bar, not to mention various appearances by authors and periodic meetings of discussion groups — create an alluring kind of community space.

It’s a kind of space that I haven’t found in public libraries in recent years, especially since the removal of card catalogues and easy chairs. Some younger people I know, who harbor no fond memories of public libraries, are enjoying visits to places such as Barnes & Noble as a new kind of experience altogether, a theme park that features words instead of rides. Such bookstores seem at first to be a prime instance of the benefits of corporate initiatives replacing crumbling state-run institutions. Yet, when I compare my Barnes & Noble with the public library in Florence, Alabama, when I was growing up in the 1950s, I’m not sure that all of what Barnes & Noble offers is an improvement.

True, the choices of reading matter are much wider and broader, but how one makes one’s choices is another matter. The monochrome magazine binders and jacketless books of the library made the objects less alluring on the outside but often more mysterious and historically inscribed on the inside. There, the traces left by other readers — even when those traces were as rude or incoherent as bathroom graffiti, or as anonymous as previous checkout dates –_made each encounter a fresh link in a social-historical chain.

By contrast, the colorful magazine covers and book jackets in Barnes & Noble are all essentially advertisements, clustered within various other “purchasing incentives.” Some of these inducements are more obvious (i.e., less deceitful) than others: Displays in publisher-manufactured kiosks at the safes counter clearly are advertisements. But how many of the books chosen for discussion groups or featured as staff “favorites” are determined by publishers’ promotions, as opposed to the individual passions of store managers? More than one book agent has told me that publishers pay money -– as they would for advertising –- to get a particular title displayed as a staff favorite.

The rise of corporate-sponsored cultural and educational activities — from bookstore reading groups to classes offered by the Walt Disney Company – to replace declining publicly financed opportunities is disquieting. Corporate cultural initiatives, even at their most alluring, have a totalitarian feel to them, in that they make it difficult to distinguish between true education and advertising. The propaganda of Stalinism may not be identical to the “educational” choices made on our behalf by global capitalism and marketing, but the two have traits and strategies in common.

When Disney holds all-day “seminars” about American Indian culture and modern animation techniques for grade-school children in shopping malls as part of its campaign to promote the movie Pocahontas, it is not necessarily disseminating propaganda. Yet the point at which education ends and propaganda begins (or vice versa) is difficult to pinpoint. And when teachers welcome such assistance, how far are we from asking Disney to take over the role of public education, thereby allowing the company to emphasize the “facts” that best promote its products?

A growing distrust of government programs and of artistic projects supported by federal money has led the public to welcome corporate initiatives without exhibiting a corresponding skepticism about the special agendas of corporate-financed education. The immense popularity of the Disney seminar and bookstore-sponsored reading groups are evidence of this.

Occasionally, the government cooperates with big business. making it even less likely that people will be out the lookout for a corporate agenda. A recent Omnimax  film called Special Effects, for example, shown to much popular acclaim in museums around the country, sold itself as a film- history lesson, mainly by offering a few glimpses of a very bad print of Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune and some trick camera work in King Kong. But this “educational” film was devoted mainly to promoting Jumanji, the rerelease of the Star Wars trilogy, and a few other current blockbusters. Ironically, the film received major funding from the National Science Foundation, demonstrating that perhaps the easiest way to get state aid these days is to represent business interests ass blatantly as possible.

***

Having lived in Paris and London for most of the 197Os — including a two-and-a-half-year stint as assistant editor on the British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin — I saw firsthand the benefits of government support for education and the arts. The trend in the United States of putting our cultural destiny in the hands of business executives seems especially misguided when compared with the achievements of government-supported initiatives in Europe.

Take, for example, the French government’s involvement in film culture. It’s generally thought that France’s main contribution to cinema over the past half-century is the New Wave movement, which emerged in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. What’s much less well known is the degree to which state policies and support for the arts made that sort of movement possible. A law passed in 1957 guaranteed “final cut” to directors. That law didn’t eliminate state censorship, but it did protect film makers from the meddlesome cutting and re-editing of their work by producers, distributors, and theater programmers. Such intrusion -– with an eye more on the marketplace than on the artistic integrity of the film – is common in the United States, and is systematically perpetrated by both Miramax, which is the largest American distributor of foreign films (and is owned, incidentally, by Disney), and Bravo, the only national cable-television channel devoted to foreign films.

The state-supported Cinémathèque Française -– co-founded (in 1936) and directed by a passionate eclectic, the Turkish-born Henri Langlois (who was anything but a state bureaucrat) — provided a school and training ground for film makers such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, who would form the core of the French New Wave. Many of their early features were made possible by a system of government advances on projected ticket sales. Commissions from state television also played an important role in keeping those film makers working, just as, in the 1970s, it was largely state-run German television that helped to launch the New German Cinema of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders.

Government activity in the United States played a crucial role in nurturing the French New Wave and New German Cinema here as well. A Supreme Court antitrust ruling on July 28, 1949, broke the major studios’ exclusive control over theaters and what they exhibited. That allowed independent theaters to flourish, which in turn led to the growth of art houses — more than 1,000 were operating by the late ’60s –-and to their ability to show foreign and independent films. But once President Reagan came into office, the government stopped enforcing antitrust laws favoring independents; as a result, movie theaters that want to show films not released by the major studios have had a hard time supporting themselves.

Knowing the good that state support has done for film in Europe, I was shocked back in the mid-1980s to read Charlton Heston, then the president of the American Film Institute’s Board of Trustees, implying in American Film magazine that European directors who benefited from state subsidies were denied the creative control that American directors enjoy. When Europeans such as Marcel Ophüls (director of The Sorrow and the Pity) wrote letters in protest, Heston expressed amazement –his word — at discovering that French law protected film makers’ editorial control. He concluded, nonetheless: “To suggest that creative control can be legislated in a democratic society is . . . debatable.”

At the time, I interpreted Heston to mean that to legislate artistic control in any manner is to deny full creative control to capitalists. But more recently, I’m sorry to say, his statement sounds prescient. French directors have told me that enforcement of the 1957 law is less rigorous than it used to be. And there’s no question that the state-supported, but retooled, British Film Institute, headed today by the film director Alan Parker, is more interested in supporting studio blockbusters than in encouraging independently made films.

If government support for the arts is either unavailable or biased toward the bottom line, it is all the more important for us to look critically at the forms of corporate “education” that are replacing public programs. When a superstore promotes an author or a book, or a corporation sponsors a seminar, we must ask what attitudes those corporate initiatives foster and whose interests they promote. There’s no harm in checking out the magazines at Barnes & Noble over Starbucks coffee, but students should understand that, no matter how cozy, a bookstore doesn’t replace a library.

Mamet & Hitchcock: The Men Who Knew Too Much

From Scenario, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1998. –- J.R.

“Hitchcock lives!” I was inspired to write at the head of my review of House of Games, David Mamet’s first feature, in 1987. Ten years later, Mamet’s fifth feature, The Spanish Prisoner, boasts plenty of Hitchcockian elements of its own. But this time I’m not as prone to employ the same assertion.

The difference has less to do with Hitchcockian influence than with the use of that influence — the issue of whether Mamet is borrowing something substantive from the Master of Suspense, or drawing upon Hitchcock only when it suits his strategies. But one of the salient differences I find between reading the script of The Spanish Prisoner and seeing it realized is the difference between finding a Hitchcockian thriller on the page and not quite seeing one on the screen. Both are clearly Mamet creations, but the first comes closer to showing Hitchcock’s special qualities in tandem with Mamet’s, whereas the second shows them shooting off in separate directions.

Put somewhat differently, the distinction has a lot to do with issues that seem central to any evaluation of Hitchcock as well as Mamet -– namely, the ethics and aesthetics of deception, which are intimately tied to the ethics and aesthetics of representing a real world where deception becomes possible. It s interesting to speculate, for instance, on why there are many more Japanese tourists in the script of The Spanish Prisoner than in the film itself. In both script and film. Mamet is interested in saying something about the operations of multinational business, the fantasy of controlling global money markets — a subject that is relatively abstract in movie terms. Japanese tourists, who serve many different kinds of evocative and deceptive functions over the course of the story represent one possible way of making that subject seem less abstract, usually through their appearances as “local color” in various locations — faint but distinct reminders of the forces at play in multinational intrigues. Yet when it came to putting them on the screen, Mamet chose to make them less prominent –perhaps because he felt that they detracted attention from his dialogue, the principal medium of his deceptions. Hitchcock, who tends to depend more often on images for his own deceptions, probably would have left them all in.

Although Mamet has also followed the example of Hitchcock in developing an artificial, jokey persona to mask the more personal side of his work — macho and cryptic in his case, macabre and droll in Hitchcock’s — it should be emphasized at the outset that the relation of each artist to filmmaking is profoundly different. Hitchcock was first and last a man of the cinema, and every item in his bag of tricks was a resource intended to protect or develop that identity. Mamet is first and last a man of the theater, which ultimately means that cinema for him is something that he usually practices with his left hand — whether this entails light entertainments as a screenwriter on certain projects or more serious application of his gifts to a medium that, even then, he regards as less important.

Where the filmic practice of these two artists differs most sharply is less in their taste for fantasy than in the evocation of a sense of normality and the real world that makes that fantasy possible. The conventions for establishing everyday reality in film and on the stage are radically different in terms of time as well as space –- a fact that becomes readily apparent if one examines Hitchcock’s process of adapting plays in such movies as Rope and Dial ”M” for Murder. Performing for a live audience within a shared space and shared block of time entails a different kind of social contract from the more scattered and piecemeal practices of filmmaking, involving different kinds of illusion as well as reality. Thus when Mike (Joe Mantegna) whispers secret questions and instructions to Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse) at a pivotal poker game early in House of Games, asking her to observe the gestures of another player (Ricky Jay) to tell whether he’s bluffing about his hand, the physical proximity of the Mike and Margaret characters to the other players in the room threatens credibility — something that wouldn’t happen in the same fashion if the situation were taking place on a stage, where we’d find it easier to accept the premise of a private conversation within a confined space without wondering why the other players don’t seem to notice. If we accept the premise that the other poker players don’t perceive what’s going on, this is most likely because we agree to accept the stage conventions that are Mamet’s stock-in-trade rather than accept the location as a film set.

Similarly, when, much later in the film, Mike, a professional con artist, takes Margaret, a professional psychologist, along on an elaborate scam involving one of Mike’s colleagues (Mike Nussbaum), a planted suitcase full of money, and a supposedly innocent bystander (J.T. Walsh), the four characters wind up in the bystander’s hotel room at night, arguing about what to do with the money. After a fade-out, we find the same four characters in the same hotel room at 8:30 the following morning — an ellipsis that arguably carries a different kind of weight in a film and in a play by being indicated quite differently. If the same scene were unfolding on a stage, the ellipsis would probably be handled with a momentary blackout or the curtain falling, and how the audience would piece together the missing hours would differ somewhat as a result. Here again, I suspect that Mamet’s instinctive reliance or stage conventions creates a momentary suspension of belief — a small hole in the narrative that wouldn’t be noticed as much if House of Games were a play.

Although I’ve focused here on two minor flaws in House of Games that I think are derived from Mamet’s failure to adapt his stage instincts to movie terms, I don’t mean to suggest by this that House of Games is in any respect a failure. On the contrary, it’s a stunning first feature, and one that adapts certain principles from Hitchcock in a masterly fashion. Charting the means by which a repressed woman is enticed into a man’s life of crime through an elaborate con game that relies on her secret urges — a process she ultimately views as therapeutic once she succeeds in forgiving herself for her gullibility and in exacting revenge — it also comprises a critique of spectatorship by luring the viewer who follows Margaret Ford’s quest into a comparable series of self-deceptions. In this respect, it combines the Hitchcockian theme of voyeurism as played out in Rear Window and Vertigo with the no less Hitchcockian theme of therapeutic self-discovery as exemplified by thrillers as diverse as Rear Window and Marnie.

The author of a celebrated book called Driven: Compulsion and Obsession in Everyday Life, Margaret Ford is a study in disavowal, someone who tells herself that her interest in confidence tricks is strictly professional — much as James Stewart’s apartment-bound photographer in Rear Window supposedly spies on his neighbors just out of idle curiosity, and his convalescing detective in Vertigo agrees to tail a man’s obsessed wife (Kim Novak) simply as a favor. Ford turns up at the aforementioned poker game because one of her young patients. a compulsive gambler named Billy, brandishing a gun and threatening suicide, tells her of a $25,000 gambling debt he is unable to pay. She gets him to hand over the gun and later decides to see Billy’s debtor, Mike, to ask him to let up on the boy, which leads her to the House of Games. Before she leaves her office, she comes across Billy’s gun — a moment described in the script as follows:

Interior: Ford’s Office — Later — Night

AngIe. Ford, alone at her desk, with a cup

of coffee. Smoking. Writing (pause), she

sighs, looks up, takes off her glasses.

Shakes her head. from side to side. She

picks up off her desk Billy’s nickled

automatic pistol.

Angle — Insert. The pistol in her hand. She

lays it on the desk. Camera follows her

hands. She picks up a sheaf of notes,

shuffles through the notes. Brings up a

sheet from the botton. On it is written:

“…The character of Mike — the ‘Unbeatable

Gambler.’ Seen as omniscient, who ‘doles

out punishment’…HOUSE OF GAMES.” (1)

Significantly. Mamet’s realization of this pivotal moment as a director demonstrates that he’s an apt pupil     of Hitchcock. especially when it comes to fashioning a logic of continuity in Ford’s gestures and what they imply. In the film, where she’s already established as a chain smoker, she comes upon Billy’s pistol inside her desk drawer while she’s looking for matches to light a cigarette; after briefly fingering the piece, she returns it to the desk drawer, which she closes. It’s a small alteration, but a psychologically revealing one, because a token of one of her own compulsions (smoking) leads her to a token of Billy’s gambling compulsion (the gun); and the fact that she then returns the pistol to its hiding place suggests repression as well as compulsion. This is precisely the sort of gestural notation that Hitchcock excelled in, and Mamet’s use of it to clarify her motivations is as letter-perfect as her casual, post-therapeutic stealing of another woman’s lighter in the movie’s final sequence, which evokes Marnie.

Reinterpreting data is what a psychologist like Ford does for a living, and it’s also what the heroes and spectators are kept busy with throughout House of Games, Rear Window, Vertigo, and Marnie -– not to mention The Spanish Prisoner, The 39 Steps, and North by Northwest, to propose another homogeneous Mamet-Hitchcock cluster. The second cluster might be termed Mamet-Hitchcock Lite in comparison with the first — a trio of jaunty chase comedies without the same brooding psychological undercurrents — and if Mamet proves less of a match for Hitchcock on this more picaresque and rambling terrain, part of the reason may be that he doesn’t want to be. Another reason is that he adheres more closely to Hitchcock’s theory than he does to his practice.

I’m thinking in particular about Hitchcock’s theory of the “MacGuffin” — expounded on at some length in his celebrated book-length interview with François Truffaut, with specific reference to the chase thrillers cited above. For Hitchcock, the MacGuffin is “the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers the spies are after”:

Most of Kipling’s stories, as you know, were set in India,

and they dealt with the fighting between the natives and the

British forces on the Afghanistan border. Many of them were

spy stories, and they were concerned with the efforts to steal

the secret plans out of a fortress. The theft of secrtet documents

was the original MacGuffin: So the “MacGuffifn” is the term we

use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents,

or discover a secret, it doesn’t matter what it is. And the

logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a

MacGuffin, since it’s beside the point. The only thing that

really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or

secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters.

To me, the narrator, they’re of no importance whatever. (2)

In The 39 Steps, the MacGuffin is the formula for the construction of an airplane engine; in North by Northwest, which in many ways is a distillation of Hitchcock’s previous chase films, it’s simply “government secrets.” In The Spanish Prisoner, it’s something known as “The Process” — a profitable business strategy developed by the hero, Joe Ross (Campbell Scott), for a company based in New York, whose essence is contained in a mathematical formula. At the beginning of the picture, Ross presents this invention to his boss (Ben Gazzara), a colleague (Ricky Jay), and a few businessmen at a cloistered board meeting in St. Estephe. There, he and a company secretary, Susan Ricci (Rebecca Pidgeon), cross paths with a mysterious tycoon named Jimmy Dell (Steve Martin), who asks him to deliver a book to his sister in New York — launching Ross into a series of predicaments and deceptions during which The Process is stolen and pursued and eventually winds up in the final resting ground of all secrets in today’s surveillance culture — as a mass-produced CD-ROM.

The fact that we never know what The Process is functions as a self-reflexive joke that wouldn’t be out of place in a novel like Henry James’ The Ambassadors (which is similarly reticent about the object manufactured by its hero’s company), but at least on the screen, it interferes with the usual operations of a Hitchcockian chase thril1er. Like Hitchcock’s theoretical MacGuffin, The Process matters a great deal to the movie’s characters and not at all to the film’s author. Yet unlike Hitchcock’s practical use of the MacGuffin, which cons the audience, Mamet’s withholding of what The Process actually is reduces the audience’s own investment in the proceedings, perhaps because Mamet is after something else. Identification with the hero -– crucial in House of Games, Rear Window, Vertigo, and all the Hitchcock chase movies — becomes disrupted if it’s established at the outset that the hero knows something we don’t. The audience of North by Northwest may not care much about the MacGuffin once it’s finally unveiled; but prior to that unveiling, when Cary Grant is undergoing a series of bewildering mishaps and trying to understand his predicament, it’s pretty difficult not to care. So the logic of continuity that allowed Mamet to create Ford’s attraction/ repulsion toward the world of crime -– an ambivalence shared by the audience — comes across as relatively unimportant in The Spanish Prisoner when it’s built around an empty signifier that declares itself as such; the stakes are automatically lowered.

On the other hand, Mamet’s interest in male gamesmanship and competition is a far cry from Hitchcock’s usual turf, and keeping the spectator less invested in the plot and characters might make it easier for certain points lo be made about the exploitation of creative individuals within multinational game plans. (lf The Process functions in The Spanish Prisoner as the ultimate player’s tool, spelling out what it is only confuses the issue. From this standpoint, the fact that Joe Ross is something of a Boy Scout, as Susan observes in the opening scene — more asexual than Robert Donat in The 39 Steps and Cary Grant in North by Northwest, but less androgynous than Margaret Ford in House of Games – surely counts for more than the precise nature of what he’s invented for his company.)

The relatively pared-down settings of House of Games allow Mamet to convince us that the world he’s presenting us is complete and fully realized. In The Spanish Prisoner, by contrast, where we’re shunted from the Caribbean to New York and then off to Boston, between characters purporting to be millionaires and characters purporting to be FBI agents, in transport ranging from airplanes to cars and shuttle boats, and locales ranging from palatial resort suites to Central Park and police headquarters, the task of establishing a recognizable and homogeneous world, which Hitchcock is so adept at, is only cursorily attended to. As often happens in Mamet’s work, the words conjure up a mannerist universe where everyone talks the same way while the images seem more borrowed than invented. (Consider the offices and apartments of both Ford and Ross, defined mainly by their neutrality, or the fact that both heroes arrive at key moments of self-recognition in the public, impersonal spaces of airports.)

None of this matters if the words do enough of the job by themselves, which happens more

readily when we read the screenplay. As an exercise in deception and subterfuge, complete

with an earnest hero and Janus-faced Girl Friday, The Spanish Prisoner is diverting and

absorbing, even when it makes room for dark suggestions about mutable natures and

untrustworthy loyalties. But it wouldn’t be accurate to say that “Hitchcock lives” in the

case of this film. Both House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner offer moments of

horrified reckoning when Margaret Ford and Joe Ross, innocent victims of other people’s

machinations, find themselves literally with blood on their hands. In the first case,

though the blood belongs to Ford herself, it’s a dramatic turning point, leading her

inexorably to the point where she’s ready to shed someone else’s blood. In the second

case, the blood belongs to Ross’s best friend, and this death is one more link in a vast

impersonal chain that illustrates the chilling notion of multinational interests as

inscrutable and unstoppable.

*****

End Notes.

1. Mamet, David, House of Games, NY: Grove Press, 1987, p. 11.
2. Truffaut/Hitchcock, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1967, p. 99.

The Object Of My Affection

A social worker (Jennifer Anniston) finds herself falling in love with her gay roommate and best friend (Paul Rudd), an elementary-school teacher, as she becomes pregnant by her lawyer boyfriend (John Pankow), decides to have the baby, and concludes that she can’t live with the father. Adapted by Wendy Wasserstein from Stephen McCauley’s novel and directed by Nicholas Hytner (The Crucible), this entertaining comedy-drama often plays like ideologically upgraded Neil Simon, and though I was grateful for many things in itI especially love the fine shading of an English drama professor played by Nigel HawthorneI never could shake off the impression that the whole thing was propaganda, even if I agreed with everything the propaganda was saying. The mixture of sincerity and sitcom phoniness is bewildering at times, but on some level, I guess, the film works. With Alan Alda, Allison Janney, and Tim Daly. (JR)

Sonatine

The release of Fireworks, Takeshi Kitano’s seventh feature, belatedly goaded Quentin Tarantino and Miramax into releasing the writer-director-actor’s fourth (1994, 94 min.) after they’d sat on it for years, thereby making it possible to view this bizarre mannerist artist’s work in an even purer state, without the distractions of sentimentality or lousy paintings. Another gangster tale, this one features Beat Takeshi (as he’s affectionately known in Japan) as an underboss ordered to settle a dispute between two warring gangs in Okinawa. After losing several of his regulars and then finding out that his services weren’t even necessary, he and his surviving stooges hide out and goof off on a remote beach. Like Fireworks, this basically becomes a movie about waiting. Even if you’re like me and find Kitano’s films relatively empty apart from his self-parodic macho stoicism and quizzical style, these qualities alone provide quite an eyeful and earful; preternatural quiet and stillness alternate with flurries of loud violence in a manner that is singularly his, and the colors and compositions are riveting. The deadpan humor is somewhere east of Harry Langdon and north of Jacques Tati, though far from humanist. Attitude is everything, and if you get into his moodsI do about half the timethat’s plenty. (JR)

The Newton Boys

The Newton Boys

Not to be hyperbolic, but Richard Linklater’s first big-budget movie may be the Jules and Jim of bank-robber movies, thanks to its astonishing handling of period detail and its gentleness of spirit, both buoyed by a gliding lightness of touch. Linklater, Clark Lee Walker, and Claude Stanush (who also worked on the script of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men) have adapted Stanush’s oral history about the Texas-born Newton brothers, who between 1919 and 1924 became the most successful bank robbers in the U.S. The film may occasionally bite off a few more narrative strands than it can chew, but that’s merely the flip side of its generosity and energy. You can keep your L.A. Confidential; here’s a vision of the American past that I’m ready to climb inside. Matthew McConaughey, Skeet Ulrich, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Ethan Hawke play the brothers; with Dwight Yoakam and Julianna Margulies. 600 N. Michigan. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still.