Movies
Movies have been the imaginative revelation of modern times, summoning up a sense of anything and everything—Vikings, space ships, ballrooms in nineteenth century Russia—and constituting a quasi-religious force in its own myth-making right. The large, glowing screen compels and mesmerizes as no other presence has done. What is perhaps most remarkable about movies is that although they are the result of numerous mechanical contrivances, they have come to seem like a natural phenomenon. To imagine a world without movies would have been hard and remains hard for a modern person. In the sense of irrefutable immediacy, they have come to seem something like life itself.
The people on the screen are both embodied and disembodied, there and not there. The viewer has—merely by sitting down in the dark—created these people, scenes, and events. That is a preposterous, illogical thought and yet the feeling persists that a world begins with each movie and that the moviegoer is a god of sorts. Words summon up enormous vistas but movies make those vistas visible and audible. Even the worst movie provokes a species of awe. Even on a small screen, movies are larger than life.
That the actors should be considered demigods comes as no surprise. They participate in the near-miracle of film and are able to assume what seems to be another category or dimension of being, at once human but somehow more than human. Reading about their foibles in something called “real life” is reassuring (“They are people like us”) yet beside the point. The point of their existence is that they partake of something magical that informs them and that they inform. Although the realism of late modernism has taken the mythic nature of stars down some notches, some of the magic still pertains. The viewing public is always ready to be seduced and enchanted by some indefinable human presence that the screen magnifies and solidifies.
Over the course of a hundred-plus years, the medium has oscillated between frank, commercial spectacle and tentative art. Most of the time, movies have resided squarely in the former category. Sheer spectacle has been sufficient to lure people to part with their money. What the spectacle constituted has been almost irrelevant. There is a movie—end of conversation. How many millions of human beings have whiled away how many millions of hours watching movies as a distraction, a time-filler, or a respite while barely noticing the events unfolding in front of them? “I saw some movie last week.” “What was it about?” “Well, there was this guy and this woman but there was this other guy or woman or debt or he got fired or she got fired and then there was a bad guy and a real scary monster. . . .”
What haunts the movies is the dissimulation that haunts modern times: what has been conjured up is palpable yet unreal. Like a vision of utopia, no one can live there but the scenery looks inviting. Traditional religions have held out the prize of salvation to the faithful. The afterlife prize is enormous but one must wait. In modern times, means such as movies have gotten rid of that waiting (unlike ideologies such as communism that posited an indeterminate amount of waiting for a mendacious outcome). In keeping with the tenor of modern times, movies offer a distant immediacy. The gap between the viewer and the screen is bigger than any chasm. The gap reassures, however. This is just a movie. Modern people have witnessed so much trafficking in visions that such remarkable sights have come to be routine.
The great directors have been captivated and haunted by the smooth intransience of the medium. There is that sense in the likes of Hitchcock or Bergman or Truffaut or Wajda of trying to get the medium to stay still and move forward at the same time, to compose and impel. Because the scenes keep moving, the reflective gaps between scenes and acts that theater offers are impossible. Momentum is everything. As the pictures must keep rolling and only so much time can be devoted to motives and inner history, the medium is inclined to glibness. Since life seems to go forward each day, we are inclined to agree with that glibness, regardless of what is being portrayed on the screen. Since, unlike life, the individual movie is seamless in its presentation, the inclination to agree is all the stronger. The great directors consciously confront (or finesse) that glibness.
Along with the momentum, movies offer—to make up a word—essentialization. The audience is given the opportunity to be in another world and make whatever judgments they choose to make. The aim of the movies is not so much aesthetic deliberation, however, as stark enthrallment. The concentrated nature of the experience, both the viewing and the witnessing of some typically large amount of time represented in a mere two hours or less, promotes a minor form of bewitchment. We have all seen photos of people watching movies. Those slack, gawking faces can make us somewhat nervous. Most of us have been in that place. Most of us have forgotten where we were.
Movies are external. They cannot show what goes on in a human mind as words can. (It’s not just that a good book may not be a good movie, rather it’s that the two mediums have little in common.) A good actor can make us feel all sorts of feelings that are going on within a person but that artful blend of gesture, voice, and facial expression is not the same thing as a paragraph of careful discrimination and insight. The abstract inwardness that language inherently embodies—those letters marching across pages—is foreign to movies. From Sophocles to Shakespeare to Beckett, the written play revels in the soliloquy and does not require much of a setting to create stark magic. Movies, however, even when they are up in outer space, are constrained, since they must honor some form of organized, external verisimilitude, a “set.” For all the magic, a laborious quotient remains. The camera is a manipulative tool. We see only what we are allowed to see, a situation at once narrow and thrilling.