Summer Film Roundup, Part 6: Coming to America, Surviving in America

America, America (1963)

A moving and magnificent film that Elia Kazan considered his personal favorite -- not surprising, since it's the tale of how his own Greek family came to America, leaving behind their lives as an oppressed minority in Turkey.  The immigrant story strikes home because it's really the story of so many of our own families. The Turkish Greeks in the film are reminiscent of Eastern European Jews who fled Tsarist Russia for a better life in America.  It's probably one reason why Kazan got along so well with the Jewish playwrights and directors he worked with in New York like Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Lee Strasberg, and countless actors.

Stavros, the young hero of the story played by newcomer Stathis Giallelis, is based on Kazan's own uncle; he's an Odyssean hero (though in The Odyssey, Odysseus is returning home whereas Stavros is seeking a new one.  He allows nothing to divert him from his of reaching America, and there are plenty of diversions along the way.  A lesser man would have given up and returned to his family after being swindled of everything he owns by a smooth-talking  bandit he meets early in his journey; the lesser man would have settled for marriage to the wealthy merchant's homely daughter, Thomna (portrayed by Linda Marsh who's actually a rather attractive young woman, but whose make-up gives her dark eyebrows and swathes of facial hair).  Could I have made the trek to America the way Stavros did? No way.  Could you? Ask yourself that as you watch this compelling film.

I particularly relished Paul Mann's as Aleko Sinnikoglou, Stavros's would-be father-in-law.  After the big meal when he opens his belt and tell Stavros about the life they're going to enjoy together in the years to come, getting old and wealthy and fat, the expression on Stavros's face is not unlike that of Christopher in The Sopranos after his girlfriend tells him she's been cooperating with the FBI and that the two of them can go into the Witness Protection Program, and he sees a disheveled husband and his fat wife and two kids coming out of the supermarket. It's not an appealing vision of the future. But Christopher ultimately chooses death whereas Stavros choose his life. In pursuit of his dream he has a touch of a amorality In him that I think Kazan had as well. I genuinely felt sorry for the poor girl who really loved him and lost him.

Kazan's based this film on his own novel, which was published a year before the film was released.  It's revealing that he wrote the book in a style that's half-fiction, half-screenplay, the same style in which Arthur Miller wrote the book of The Misfits.  I don't think that's a coincidence.  Kazan was somewhat  envious of Miller and Tennessee Williams because he wanted to be a writer himself during all the years he was directing their landmark plays.  I think America, America, the film, is very well written, but I noticed that some of the reviews say that the writing is clunky, which may be the impression given by characters from different cultural environments attempting to communicate with one another.

In her review of the film Pauline Kael confesses that  she finds the actor who plays Stavros uninteresting and unbelievable as someone with the brains and stamina to make the journey to America. She also asserts that despite some memorable scenes, there are embarrassing melodramatic touches, like the Judas figure who betrays Stavros and steals all his money, and the Christ figure at the end who gives up his life for him. I disagree with her on both points.  I suspects Kael just didn't find the affirmative nature of the film hip edgy enough for her taste.  Full throated affirmations always left her uneasy. 

The one aspect of the film that the reviewers unanimously praised is Haskell Wexler's remarkable cinematography. This nearly three-hour epic benefits enormously from his gorgeous black-and-white photography, mostly shot on location.  But Kazan doesn't linger for too long on any of the many striking compositions the way Antonioni would. Kazan is a storyteller who lets you see the image and then quickly moves on.  He later said that Wexler was the most brilliant cinematographer he'd ever worked with, and also a huge pain in the ass

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Virtually all the critics slammed it when it first came out, but their judgment was based on the version butchered and released by MGM to 103 minutes; this leisurely film is in fact immensely enjoyable and it's now-restored length of 124 minutes. (I have a hunch the bordello scene with its casual nudity was the first thing to be cut by the studio back in 1973. Nudity was hot in movies back then, but only when presented as something shocking, not natural and a matter of everyday life.)  Sam Peckinpah's "revisionist westerns" are highly addictive -- he captures the grit and realism of what certainly seems like the authentic Old West so that you can almost smell the leather holsters and feel the floorboards of a bar beneath your feet. No cheap indoor sets to be found here. Critics found the film slow and even boring, yet the deliberate pacing gives you the feeling of what it must really have been like to slowly stalk an outlaw like Billy the Kid, surprisingly well portrayed by Kris Kristofferson. And of course James Coburn is unmatchable as Pat Garrett, along with countless supporting players like Slim Pickens and Barry Sullivan, who are not presented as star cameos but casually allowed to do their thing and then let the film move on. 

Peckinpah knows how to fill a wide screen with endless details while subtly directing your eye to the main action. His style reminds me a bit of Robert Altman, letting you take it all in without highlighting moments or parts of the screen in the old Hollywood manner.  Lots of gun fights and killings, as you would expect in a Peckinpah film (the sights and sound of men being shot off their horses soon feel as expected as characters bursting into song and dance in a musical) but they too seem entirely natural in the American West at that time.  Even the odd friendship between Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett comes across as convincing, since they both started out as outlaws together in the beginning.  The unlikely inclusion of Bob Dylan in a supporting role along with his music on the soundtrack gives the film a 1970s spirit at the same time you feel you're in the late 19th century. It's a crime that this film was overlooked in 1973 and that it's critical and commercial failure helped derail Peckinpah's career.  Peckinpah grew up out west and knew and loved that part of the country; he had no illusions about it, though he may have retained an illusion or two about Hollywood's willingness to allow a director to pursue his personal vision in a mass medium like feature filmmaking. The failure of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid left a bitter mark on Peckinpah, I'm the man who had directed Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969) never made another Western again.

Browbeaten

     (Photo: Life, 1949) 

A new "battle of the brows" has been taking place in the pages of the New York Times Sunday Book Review during the past few weeks.  On July 29th, Thomas Mallon and Pankaj Mishra entered the ring with two pieces jointly titled "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow -- Do These Kinds of Cultural Categories Mean Anything Anymore?"  For his part, Mallon realizes that the digital democracy we now live in makes those old cultural distinctions more archaic than ever.  (He helpfully points out that the term "highbrow" came into popular use in 1902 by a New York Sun Reporter named Will Irvin, based on the then-faddish science of phrenology, which judged a person's intelligence by the height of his or her forehead; naturally the one with the highest brow was the most intelligent, a theory which Mallon notes has "a certain whiff of racialism and eugenics," which alone should make the term highbrow a no-no in today's more enlightened culture.)  

But the categories of highbrow, lowbrow, and -- most detested by intellectuals for decades  -- middlebrow, no longer exist, as people of diverse cultural backgrounds routinely mix and match YouTube clips, sreaming videos, instragrams, Facebook updates, "reality" TV shows (you'll never see an ostensibly "thoughtful" piece about it without the inevitable quotes around "reality"), pseudo-serious "fact-based" documentaries, the occasional Kindle downloaded -- no pun intended -- with Fifty Shades of Grey, or the latest Malcolm Gladwell opus, "funny" pictures mocking the celebrity du jour, endless quizes testing whether or not you're a great lover, loner, or loafer, (and yes, blogs), along with iPods loaded up with music of every imaginable kind, each haphazard consumer guided purely by their whims, certainly not any hierarchies of taste.  Could there possibly be room for War and Peace in the midst of this cacophony of images and noise?  (Fear not:  Harvey Weinstein is producing a 6-part TV-miniseries of Tolstoy's novel to be aired in 2015.  But will our distracted age watch 6 hours of fictional 18th-century French aristocrats at war and play?)  Mallon,  as befits a novelist  and critic of undeniable stature, nevertheless calls for maintaining serious distinctions within the realm of criticism while accepting that we live in a rowdy, often vulgar democracy.  But can an aristocracy of critical thought coexist with a leveling political democracy?  Nearly two hundred years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed his doubts, seeing the American experiment in democracy the template for the future of the rest of the world.  He predicted that democracy will produce many writers of talent, but few if any of genius.  Today, even the word genius has a whiff of politically incorrect elitism .

No Awakening from the Nightmare of Modernism

Meanwhile, Pankaj Mishra laments that the high Modernism of the early 20th-century, celebrated by anyone with intellectual pretensions at the time, has resulted in another kind of leveling -- the widespread, relentless, often brutal wiping out of indigenous cultures all around the world; folk songs are replaced by mass-produced pop songs, villages are bulldozed to create sterile highrise apartments, national literatures are gradually supplanted by American TV shows or local imitations of them that are even worse.  The modernist dream of intellectual elites has become the default mode of cultural exchange; today, modernism doesn't mean Kafka and Jackson Pollock, but the high-tech entertainments, buildings, and news-presentations whipped up by the graduates of elite universities (with some help from talented if educated singers, actors, and assorted celebrities) for consumption by the working-class and increasingly declasse middle-class, while the elites themselves are too busy making money to worry about acquiring any serious culture at all. (I've heard more than one doctor, lawyer, and successful professional virtually boast to me that they haven't had "time" to read a book for pleasure since they were in college.  And how many students today read books for pleasure even while in college?)  For Pankaj, our ancestors' dream of modernism has become our nightmare of modernity.

The match continued in the August 1st issue of the Book Review, as A. O, Scott weighed in with "The Squeeze on the Middlebrow: A Resurgence in Inequality and Its Effects on Culture."  For him, the loathsome "middlebrow" culture of the American 1950s seems like a Golden Age in retrospect.  Yet at the time, he observes, intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald denounced what he called "midcult" (from his celebrated essay, "Masscult and Midcult") -- he saw it as an easy way for an expanding middle-class to "acquire" culture without the hard work of actually reading difficult books or grappling with challenging, serious art.  For Macdonald, midcult included Hemingway's Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bells Tolls; the "Book-of-the-Millennium Club" (sic); the Revised Standard Version of the Bible; and Mortimer Adler's Great Books program, to name just four particularly egregious examples.  (Macdonald had particular scorn for the "Syntopicon" volume which came with the set of Great Books -- it meticulously listed where every mention of concepts such as "liberty," "justice," "beauty," "equality," and so on appeared in everyone from Homer to Freud.  Pages numbers for each reference included.)  Macdonald, like Virginia Woolf, had a grudging respect for honest "lowbrow" culture which made no pretensions to offering anything but mindless pleasure; in fact, Woolf saw a kind of virtuous alliance between highbrow aristocrats with working-class lowbrows doing an end-run around the vulgar, grasping, and ever-striving middlebrow middle class.  Here we see the origins, or at at least a striking instance, of radical chic at its self-regarding best.

Keeping Up with the Ernest Joneses

Scott cites Thomas Picketty's "surprise" bestseller Capital in the 21st Century -- journalists are always surprised when a "deep-thought" book becomes a bestseller, though it happens regularly every few years; remember Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind? -- as evidence that the shrinking middle-class is helping to shrink whatever's left of middlebrow culture; and more's the pity, says Scott.  Yes, the categories of high, low, and middle that became so prevalent after the Second World War were, in part, marketing tools -- it helps to know the audience you're trying to sell to -- as well as "markers" for people quickly rising up the economic, social, and cultural ladders.  The car you drove, the books you read (or at least had on your shelf), the plays or musicals you saw, the music you listened to, the stuff you hung on your walls (we're assuming you had walls), all served to show where you were in the great pecking order of postwar American life.  The ability to talk about the latest "serious" bestseller -- David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, let's say -- showed you were a person of education and taste, just as being able to toss off some references to Thomas Picketty's new book at a cocktail party today may gain you brownie points among your new friends.  (See -- some things never change.)  But Scott is not a Virginia Woolf or Dwight Macdonald aesthetic snob.  He's a fine film critic who recognizes that the vanished middlebrow culture also represented genuine efforts by Americans to "better" themselves, to partake of the riches of a culture which has been heretofore reserved only to those with wealth and leisure time.  All those Signet paperbacks of the classics weren't just to impress the neighbors -- they were way stations for millions of people to appreciate writers and thinkers whose works were previously available in expensive hardcover editions for the happy few.  The thought of a very large happy middle-class happy sent shivers of horror down the refined spines of Woolf and Macdonald.

Scott rightly laments the disappearance of the middlebrow film from the Hollywood studios.  Such films were hardly Hiroshima, Mon Amour, but a great many of them had strong scripts, plausible characters, superb acting, and visual pleasures more subtle than the CGI effects of the blockbusters churned out nowadays.  While the vast middle of films -- as well as books, theater, and TV -- has dropped out of the equation, the high (represented by independent films designed for niche audiences) and low (check out what's playing at your multiplex cinema tonight) have  remained, for the most part, the two available options.  One could argue that such movies as the "prestige" films produced by the aforementioned Harvey Weinstein like The King's Speech demonstrate that middlebrow is alive and well, but such films, regardless of well they may or may not be, are a very tiny piece of a very large high/low pie.  And as Scott suggests, even arguing about whether a film or book is highbrow, middlebrow, or lowbrow, would be inconceivable to young culture consumers today, who blithely mix and morph and post and tweet snippets from everything to everyone, all day long.  Conversations about what's highbrow and what's lowbrow are what their parents or grandparents had during college bull sessions -- at least those of their grandparents who went to college.  Today, going to college isn't even middlebrow anymore -- it's become a virtual luxury item.

Middlebrowism Reconsidered

Scott is not the only one who regrets the middlebrow boom of the postwar years.  Recently Commentary magazine published a piece by Michael J. Lewis, "How This Magazine Wronged Herman Wouk," which essentially apologized to the perhaps-archetypal middlebrow writer of the 1950s to 1970s and reassessed his entire career, this time acknowledging his genuine novelistic gifts and regretting that the magazine had slighted him for not measuring up to the modernist writers then in vogue among the literary intelligentsia.  Wouk is still going strong at age 99, and working on a new book.  Perhaps those neglected middlebrows have more staying power than anyone suspected.  (Ironically, Wouk's  last novel, The Lawgiver (2012), with its interweaving of emails, text messages, snippets of screenplay, transcripts of conference calls, and even snail mail, to tell the story of the production of a film about Moses, was even described by some critics as -- wait for it -- "postmodern."

A personal note:  I recall from my publishing days a distinction that senior editors made about bad books.  They were either "junk" or "trash," and while junk could be good fun, trash was not worth wasting your time reading (except as part of the job, so that it could be sold to those lesser folks who actually enjoyed trash).  In the late 1960s, film critic Pauline Kael published her famous 1969 Harper's essay, "Trash, Art, and the Movies," in which she celebrated trash, was suspicious of art (arty movies, at any rate), and rejoiced that movies were a form that was ecstatically "beyond" both trash and art.  All of this now sounds so old and quaint.  No wonder A. O. Scott is nostalgic.  We're drowning in the vast, undifferentiated culture bog, as it becomes increasingly clear that the only kind of status that really impresses anyone these days is not cultural or even social.  It's just having money.  Lots of it.  Nobrow* is the only brow that's left.

*From Lowbrow to Nobrow is actually the name of a book by Peter Swirksi, published in 2005.

An Introduction, an Apologia, and a Hearty Welcome

No, that isn't a typo.  It really says "Robert Nason's Culture Bog."  And considering all the times I (and probably you) have valiantly attempted to type the highly-common word "blog" in an email to a friend, only to have that pesky spell check "correct" it to "bog," why not simply give in to technology (or to serendipity, which may just be a cheery mask for the same thing) and accept "bog" for "blog," though this is indeed a blog (or, How I Learned to Stop Recorrecting and Love the Bog.)  

But where, exactly, does the "Culture Bog" come in?  Well, you've come to just the right place to find out.  The culture bog -- a concept I've adapted from R. Emmett Tyrrell's, earlier, more narrowly political and somewhat Germanic formulation, "kultursmog" -- is the bog we all live in -- an all-encompassing swamp of texts, images, memes, sound bites (or bytes, if you will), classics and commercials (thank you, Edmund Wilson), and conflicting contexts that permeate the air we breathe and the space we inhabit for now and the near future; a cacophony of warring websites and unsocial media that fill our brains from the moment we take our first breath, accompanied by understandable wailing and gnashing of baby teeth, to our last, medically-induced, addled spurts of consciousness of the nursing home TV's current offering of disaster and catastrophe, either fictional, news-informational, or "reality" based -- and who can tell which of the three at that point, or even long before then?  Pixels and propaganda now fill our waking hours while our dreams are increasingly dominated by whiz-kids from Industrial Light & Magic.  We're stuck in the bog, and there's no escape.

But as the late Marshall McLuhan -- one of the unsung heroes of this blog -- famously said, the way out of the whirlpool was discovered by Edgar Allan Poe, a well-sung hero, in his story "A Descent into the Maelstrom": The hero must give in and stop resisting; by riding the whirlpool out to the very end, he can be sucked into the center and find an escape of sorts. But you'll have to read (or reread) that tale for yourself.

To put that into practical terms, it means that I, along with you, derive a great deal of pleasure from savoring the detritus and desire swirling about in our shared bog -- films old and new, novels cheap and novels classic, beloved TV shows from vanished youth, comics (now reborn as Graphic Novels), science fiction, mysteries, comedy, painters and sculptors, poster art and architecture, and the political machinations of scoundrels and statesmen, who surprisingly switch from one to the other given the crisis at hand.  And culture more broadly includes the whole farrago of customs, fads, forgotten trends, romance, disillusion, hope springing eternal, then ending again.  It's all part of the mix. And with luck, perseverance, and Poe's hero in mind, we might rise up from the swirling muck like the fabled Swamp Thing and find ourselves composed of the same stuff we were mired in, the same stuff that stars are made of, ready for action.  In other words, there's fun to be had and adventures to be embraced.  We'll walk that contemporary tightrope between academic naysayers who insist that all culture is mediated by power and privilege and the unwashed masses who simply love the show in all its myriad forms.  The former will grouse that it's just Bread and Circuses; those of us who are not entirely unwashed since we do believe in bathing now and then, will cheer that the human imagination has been so fertile in so many astounding ways.  We'll shoot zingers at both sides and pray they don't let go of the rope.

(A friend has advised me that there is indeed a distinct difference between a bog and a swamp; and in fact, there are many kinds of bogs, from the Valley bog to the Raised bog, the Blanket bog, the Quaking bog, and even, God help us, the Cataract bog.  There is even a sport known as "bog snorkeling" -- don't ask.  But the promising aspect of bogs in general is their "accumulated peat, "a deposit of dead plant material," plus assemblages of plants and animals, leading to a biodiversity from which the living can be reborn from the detritus of the dead -- or, for our purposes, the decayed but still valuable peat of old films, paperbacks, TV shows, comics, and ideas.  And since Stanley Kubrick is one of the resident gods of this blog, it's worth remarking that in the Anthony Burgess novel from which A Clockwork Orange was made, "blog" is the slang word for God.)

Bog is to the early 21st century what Beat was to the mid-20th.  They were beat, we're bogged down.  But to be beat was also to move to the beat, to beat the system, to achieve beatitude.  Our bog god beckons us to move beyond stagnation and overproliferation.  (Call it stagliferation -- not unlike the "stagflation" of America during the Carter years, that lethal combination of stagnation and inflation of the late 1970s).  This blog will, with luck, help encourage the nutrients in the bog to flourish, and provide hints for all of us to develop a more discerning culture-diversity.

In am interview some year ago, culture critic Susan Sontag was asked by Christopher Lydon, "What writers influence you, which ones do you light candles to?"  Sontag protested, "I don't light candles.  I read the writers I admire, and reread them," and went on to say she was interested in many things, and that listing all of them "would be pretentious."  I'm hoping the following list won't be pretentious.  At least I don't light candles to them (though in the case of Grace Kelly I've been tempted to).

Some of the people and subjects that might pop up here (and ultimately I'm the one who does the popping) are:  

Cinema masters Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Preston Sturges, Woody Allen, Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Francois Truffaut; screen icons Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Groucho Marx, Gene Tierney, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Natalie Wood; TV legends  Rod Serling,  Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Mary Tyler Moore, 1950s' Superman's George Reeves, Honey West's Ann Francis, Dick Cavett and Tom Snyder; magisterial film critics Pauline Kael and David Thomson, British giants and eccentrics George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, W. Somerset Maugham, Philip Larkin, Malcolm Muggeridge, Colin Wilson, Winston Churchill, The Beatles, and honorary Brit Arthur Koestler; Irish geniuses Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett; French writers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Boris Vian; American literary virtuosos F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Henry Miller, Raymond Chandler, James Thurber, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, P. J. O'Rourke, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; literary critics H. L. Mencken, Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, Joseph Epstein, Clive James, and Louis Menand;  playwrights Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Tom Stoppard; speculative fiction wizards Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein; historians Paul Johnson and John Luckacs; artists Salvador Dali, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Edward Hopper, Fairfield Porter, and Charles Addams; plus The New York World's Fairs of 1939 and 1964, Aurora monster model kits from the 1960s, Commentary, MAD, EC comics, Film Comment, Charles Krauthammer, Ben Hecht, jazz, Gustav Mahler, women, Paris, Vienna, kibbutzim, coffee, and the joys of Elmer's Disappearing Glue Stick.  (It sounds like it should be called Elmer's Disappearing Glue Trick, but we'll leave the magic for another time.)  

I should warn you that some of the above eminentoes are people with whom I have strong disagreements, but they nevertheless occupy significant places in my own mental culture bog.  (The links above will take you to some surprising and delightful places.)  I should further warn the faint-hearted among you that some of my views could be categorized as moderately conservative -- a good friend of mine has suggested I'm to the right of Carnegie Hall.  I'd revise that to read I'm slightly to the right of the Carnegie Deli.  That should provide the appropriate flavor to the proceedings to follow.

To conclude:  This is the place to come for the real lowdown on both the High and Low and every hybrid imaginable.  Put your cards on the table, face up -- and remember that the odds always favor the house, but here every man's a king and every woman's a queen, and there are two chickens in every garage and a car in every pot.  But please, no pot in here -- we welcome sober (but not solemn), thoughtful, clear-minded readers eager for a probing analysis of all the news that's not yet fit to print -- though as Ezra Pound noted, literature is news that stays news.  Personally I'll be shocked if any scoops are broken here, but I welcome any you might have to offer.  This blog will sometimes be playful, even silly, but despite Cary Grant's admission to Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, "At my age the last word a man wants to hear is 'serious,'" it won't hesitate to be serious when the seriousness warrants it.  And remember -- sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  So jump right in, the water's brine.  Or at least mine.