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AMERICAN
CINEMA PAPERS
1984
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THE TIME MACHINE DEATH IS THE ONLY
IMMORTAL by Harlan Kennedy Movies make an
almighty boast of transcending Time. We've grown up with appraisals of cinema
that paean its ability to be a magical continuum, to defy age and decay, to
catapult the past into the present. Timeless! Ageless! Immortal! – read most
thumbnail gushes to famous films or famous film stars and these are the top
honorifics. Garbo is ever young and
beautiful in Camille, Gable ever macho and gallant in Gone
With The Wind, etc. No other art flaunts
such a seeming triumph of the final effect (the now we see on screen)
over the realities of creation (the then of the production process).
Books are a continuous present but of our own imagination, clothing a semantic
notation in fresh subjective detail. Music is ever changeable, differently
alive with each performance or interpretation. Theater (and opera,
ballet) is self-proclaimed, evanescent, physically circumscribed artifice.
Poetry, sculpture, and still photography are pieces of moment-in-time
immobility, deep-frozen art to be thawed out imaginatively by each new
spectator's response. Films alone – being at
once animate, graphic, realistic, and unchanging – seem to have Time conquered.
Yet the most obsessive love affairs the cinema has had have not been with
Time's conquerors but with its victims. Movies direct their passions not to
Utopian celebrations of immutability but to the horror, pathos, or comedy
resulting from human pretenses of immutability. From Citizen Kane to
I Walked With A Zombie, from
Last Year at Marienbad to The Nutty
Professor, age and
change and the folly of trying to cheat them are ever-present themes. It's as
if the cosmetic denial of Time in moviemaking has merely consigned the
reality of Time to a feverish subconscious that has annexed whole
territories of cinema. Film, the art that "transcends" time, is
also the art most obsessed with it. HORRORSCOPE The most
stand-up-and-beg-to-be-noticed examples of this obsession are in the horror
and fantasy genres. In grand guignol
tales
that play with the themes of immortality and immutability, the audience
lives out its own anxiety responses to the faked time conquest of movies as
an art. Zombies and vampires purport to transcend time, but their condition
is gnawed at by sickness and evil. Zombies walk with a metronome automatism
that is the badge of their inhumanity. It's like a slow-motion flicker – the
Undead's equivalent of 24 frames-per-second.
Vampires, like movies, thrive in the dark and are put to flight or oblivion
by daylight. Though folklore and literature invented these picturesque
examples of the undead, it took the movies to give them mass exposure and
popularity. Why? Because they were a mirror held up to the nature of cinema. The vampire lives in a
dwelling as oversized and fantasticated as the
earliest movie theaters (and sometimes with a Mighty Wurlitzer to
boot). He plays looming, luminous host (like the movie) to a sequence of awed
and vulnerable visitors (the movie audience). And often there is a butler
(the usherette) to open the door and show the visitor to his room. But the main link to
cinema is in the vampire story's overriding fascination with age and time.
The Hubris of agelessness is invariably linked to evil, of course; otherwise
we might all begin to like the idea too much. And it is also linked to the
vampire's own tragic last-act Nemesis, which often takes the supremely apt
form of a sudden accelerated aging process. (Or rapid-reverse face-lift.)
This is most memorably instanced in Terence
Fisher's
1959 Hammer Dracula, where,
thanks to trick photography, Christopher Lee establishes the world speed
record for becoming a pile of ashes; and in Tony Scott's 1982 The Hunger where,
thanks to elaborate makeup ingenuity, David Bowie ages by the second in a
hospital waiting room. In vampire films the
punishment for time-cheating fits the presumptuous crime. In zombie films the
iconography of l'immortalité maudite changes. Zombies, unlike
vampires, "come not single spies but in battalions." This is
chiefly because they are less charismatic as protagonists, lacking the wit,
suavity, and dress sense of the vampire, and therefore best rendered
interesting by totemic multiplication. The zombie is often not his own
master, furthermore, but in the far-off grip of some greater cosmic or
earthly force. As with vampires, the
manner of destruction for these creatures often changes from film to film,
but the reason never changes. Like cinema itself, they flaunt the
sinister, overweening pretense of eternal life and must receive due
corrections – from voodoo exorcism in White Zombie, 1932, to a bullet in the
head in George Romero's 1979 Dawn of the
Dead. With zombies belong
another picturesque manifestation of the undead popular in movies. Egyptian
mummies are risen corpses who walk again in a hostile world. And they carry
twined about them the very insignia of artificial preservations: the
embalming bandages wrapping them from top to toe. They are as inscrutable,
macabre, and charismatic as a movie star under her face-pack. And fittingly,
mummies didn't come from literature, they jumped almost straight into movies
from the springboard of real life: the discovery of Tutankhamun's
tomb in 1920 and the subsequent mysterious loss of life among the discoverers. The message of mummy
movies, again thundering darkly against the horrors of immortality is:
Respect death, all you living humans, and do not disturb its peaceful
finality. They wag a blanched and bandaged finger at cinema's presumptuous
exhumations of the past, and at filmmakers taking a rash and arrogant spade
to the inviolability of time. The zombie and mummy
figure are potently combined, though without the gift of immortality, in a figure
from the Gothic nursery cupboard who pre-dates both: Frankenstein's monster.
Ineluctability; ghastly pallor; cocooning
bandages;
enslavement to a hubristic Greater; rolling, stiff-jointed walk; the sense
of a clockwork power that won't stop coming on. This image of a pale and
potent automatism, with a hint of ponderous flicker in its gait, is so close
to the character and aesthetic impact of early movies themselves that it's
hard not to detect a rhyme between the oneiric,
mechanistic stridings of these Gothic creatures and
the macabre-and-magical rhythms of film as a form. Remember: Electricity is
the power that made possible both Frankenstein's monster and the cinema. Frankenstein's moer was
also the most notable forebeaer in a line of
semi-indestructible hulks, stretching right down to our age, culminating in
Darth Vader and his cohorts and the faceless killer in the
Halloween films. The latter, though apparently gifted with a suprahuman immunity to most known weapons, boasts the
eerie attribute of walking everyday streets in everyday clothes and seeming
(almost) like one of us. In the 1980s we don't
need folkloric seals of approval from the official Union of Non-Humans and
Immortals (vampires, zombies, and mummies being chief members) to quake at
the notion of indestructability. It's horrific
enough – it's more horrific – when the death-defying creature who
won't lie down appears to be a normal homo
sapiens. Androids, for example,
have been eating up the screen in recent years, in movies like Alien, Blade Runner, and Android
itself. The sinister thing about this line in superhuman non-humans is
that we can't tell them from the real thing. In the old days you didn't need
a diploma in sleuthing to identify a vampire. He (or she) could be reliably
expected to sport formal evening wear, look somewhat pale around the gills,
and be extremely long in the incisors. Zombies were equally upfront about
their identity: the deathly pale, the limbs akimbo, the staring eyes, The
Walk. But today, how could
you know that David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve
were vampires in The Hunger,
unless you had been formally introduced to them as such? Or that
the townspeople of Santa Mira in Halloween 3 were
androids? Or that Ian Holm in Alien or
Joanna Cassidy in Blade Runner were androids? The reason for the
change is clear. In the early decades of cinema the theatrical,
high-contrast primitivism of the movie form was matched by an equally
high-contrast, theatrical, and primitive line in grand guignol indestructibles. Today, when movie
resources can create an image virtually flush with real life, the new
immortals and meta-humans have adapted their colors to the new cinematic
environment. You can't pick them out. But though styles have changed, what
hasn't changed is the continuous interactivity between the immortality theme
in cinema fiction and the nature of cinema itself; and the darkly urgent
warning that no dream changes more swiftly into a nightmare than the dream of
cheating time and death. BAROQUE AROUND THE
CLOCK No American filmmaker
has plugged into the theme of time more obsessively than Orson Welles; and
no European filmmakers more than Jean Cocteau, Alain
Resnais, and Nicolas
Roeg. Welles' protagonists
are distantly related to the Gothic indestructibles
lined
up above. They tend to live their whole lives like the last seconds of the
Nemesis-visited vampire: in a surreally accelerated spurt through the
stations of age and aging. Kane's aging process
is on the face of it preposterous: not as representing a real life-span but
seen as a spectacle contained within a two-hour movie. It's virtually a
time-lapse guide to senescence – almost each scene adds a new wrinkle, a new
white hair. But these surreal telescopings of time,
this very preposterousness, becomes part of the film's tragic thrust. In The
Magnificent Ambersons, the story's single giant mythic given is age.
Anything can happen to anyone, but the one thing you can't stop is the onward
stomp of aging. And in The Immortal Story, every character is – physically, metaphysically, or
vicariously – clutching at youth. Again, Welles' work
is as much about his response to cinema as it is about the apparent real-life
territory he has marked off. In Kane
the
kaleidoscopic narrative is inspired by the instant-memory
impact
of newsreels – a uniquely 20th-century phenomenon whereby bits of a man's
youth or middle age can suddenly rear up at him in ellipses and éclats as
quick and bright as lightning flashes. Unlike the
horror-fantasy movie axis, where immortality is presented in the
changeless-continuous mode, immortality in Kane
is a hall of mirrors where one catches
sudden glimpses of oneself at different points in one's life. Kane's tragedy
is not that he grows old, a loveless, disillusioned, and tyrannic
egotist, but that – thanks to the black magic of cinema – he lives with
the half-dozen other Kanes he was. In The Magnificent Ambersons the newsreel is discarded in favor of a
technique that's almost equally lethal: the family-album-cum-home-movie view
of time. Scenes unfreeze from photo-album still pictures (like cinema being
born from still photography), and the narrative has a juggernaut linearity
that hangs the cyclical beauty of changing seasons on ever more forlorn and uncyclical human faces. The time-lapse effect on Kane is slowed down, but like Kane, the film says that every fluid or
frozen memory we preserve from the past becomes something to mock us in the
present. Photography and cinematography make us live with every one of our
former selves – an immortality we can carry all the way to the grave. Welles' brand
of time-exploring Baroque finds an echo in two French filmmakers: Cocteau
and Resnais. For Cocteau the mirror is the
time-lapse symbol for human life. In Orpheus
he
takes the proverb "The eyes are the mirror of the soul" and
rewrites it into "The mirror is the eyes of the soul." Through that
reflective surface we see first ourselves and then into ourselves –
first the older outward appearance we present; then, through the eyes (the
one part of the face that doesn't change), we see into our timeless self and
selves. Cocteau's Underworld, visited through mirrors, stands not for a
specific Hell or Heaven, but for whatever within us is beyond the reach of
obsolescence and the tyranny of time. Where the Gothic immutables were locked into a tragic continuity and the Wellesian heroes into time-lapse contractions, Cocteau's
time warriors have found the reverse button on the moviola.
They can keep diving into themselves to find the past and out of that
another world. Time isn't so much extended (as with Gothic) or baroquely re-rhythmed (as with Welles),
as
suddenly open to the possibility of furloughs from mortality. Once again
cinema's own ability to escape from time is translated into the blueprint
for a human escape from time. And once again this
presumptive flight of fantasy cannot finally go unpunished. Before the
audience is released into the daylight, the filmmaker must show the dream of
timelessness crumbling. So Orpheus is sent back to the
real world, and the poet's Nemesis for the Hubris of falling in love with
Death is the full restoration of prosaic reality. Resnais' films put Cocteau
and Welles in a blender, playing on Cocteau's elegantly fantasticated time dives as they personalize and
poeticize the Wellesian kaleidoscope of time. Time
in Marienbad, or Muriel, or La Vie est un Roman is shredded into a
rainbow of ribbons that we can arrange in
any order that seems most meaningful or flamboyantly dreamlike. There's
often a reckless arbitrariness in the result which suggests that Resnais isn't concerned with grandstanding about human
hope and tragedy in the face of the finite (as Welles
and
Cocteau differently were), but with free-form flights of conceptual fancy –
showing how movie poetry starts where time's petty tyrannies end. Marienbad is life seen as a series of wildly formal games,
maneuverings, postures, and assignations, none of which has any traditional
cause-and-effect narrative suspense but instead are gratuitous acts set in a
giant eternity. Here Time has been pulled like a rug from under everyone's
feet. What is the point of starting to seduce a woman if in the next few
seconds you will find yourself warped back into a state of
never-having-met-her? The exaggerated formality of the proceedings is not
just because surrealists love formality (as mustache painters love the Mona Lisa),
but because formality leaps into the giant vacuum left by Time. In Resnais
– as in Welles, Cocteau, and the horror genre – what is in
theory a Utopian world of Time denied can quickly turn into a nightmare. But
in Resnais it's a near-comic nightmare in which you
still have to dress for dinner even though by the time you reach the table it
may be breakfast. Life without time is content without form. So Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet (who wrote Marienbad)
mischievously and deliberately stuff in the substitute form of
manners, evening wear, gallantry, protocol. And the absurd social rituals and
auto-pilot deportment continue, just as the humans in Mon Oncle d'Amerique carry on business as
usual even when wearing rat-heads and inhabiting a giant cage. The idea is
that, just like good suits and social decorum, Time is an exchangeable
formality. Resnais has discovered the
surreal philosopher's stone offered by the movie editing process. If you take
time apart, who says you have to put it together again? ... and in the same
order? Resnais' characters thus become, in the best
sense, weightless people enjoying their existential zero-gravity. For a while, at least.
Resnais knows that though the cinema has made nonsense
of Time and we live with this platonic model for a timeless world right in
our hands, we are no nearer to being able to live without time in the real
world. So eventually disillusionment or punishment must catch up with us.
In Providence a sour
and tyrannical master puppeteer (author and father John Gielgud)
is revealed presiding over all the apparently free-form droppings. And in La
Vie est un Roman a pair of Mephistopelean look-alikes (Vittorio
Gassman and Ruggero
Raimondi) preside royally over the slipstreams of
spontaneity going on in separate stories in 1914 and 1980s France. ELSEWHERE IN EUROPE Robbe-Grillet in his own movies as
director (from L'Immortelle to La Belle Captive), Raul Ruiz in L'Hypothèse du Tableau Volé or
La Ville des Pirates, Joseph
Losey in Accident or Monsieur Klein, all suggest the
metaphysical earth tremors that can happen when Time's plates are allowed –
or encouraged – to slip deep beneath the ground. Nicolas Roeg gives us even stronger, more continuous tremors, and occasional
outright quakes. Roegs movies are fiercely undecorative. There is none of the parlor-game
aestheticism embraced by French or Latin directors like Cocteau, Resnais, Ruiz.
If
Roeg is baroque in his treatment of time, he's at
the hard end of baroque, where muscular expressionism hasn't yet leaned toward
swoony rococo. Yet the message of Roeg's films is close kin to theirs. Every Roeg character
swarms with different selves, like a diamond flashing in a beam of light.
Cinema has to find a way to show all these different one-character selves in
symbiotic existence. This is something the novel can do by patient
exposition, the painting by an accumulation of expressive detail which the
viewer can pore over at leisure. Roeg
insists
always that cinema must find its own way. So imitating a novel or a painting,
as many filmmakers do by piling on verbal exposition in the one case, or in
the other by holding closeups until the face has
registered every nuance required – won't do. Roeg
prefers
to take the instrument unique to cinema, the editing machine, and exploit its
ability to tell a story by darting about through space and time. So a character or a
relationship always exists in simultaneous triplicate with Roeg: as
what has been; what is; and what will be. An initial trauma or cataclysm (a
father's self-immolation in Walkabout, a daughter's drowning in Don't Look Now, the discovery of gold in Eureka) creates a splintered,
kaleidoscopic compound-time that simultaneously holds the longed-for past,
the painful present, and the feared but mystically alluring future. All these directors – Welles, Cocteau, Resnais, Roeg – have created an art of spider's-web intricacy spun
out of the material of cinema. Cinema's technical possibilities have given us
the vision of a poetic world where time can be stopped, reversed, cut up,
accelerated, slowed, scrambled, and denied or defied ad libitum. But the real world doesn't accommodate these flexible
variants on Time. So the filmmaker is left dangling between Heaven and
Earth: trying to find sense and meaning in the tension between the fantastic
possibilities of movie time and the intractable reality of worldly time. And here again, as in
the horror genre, the pattern forms itself into one of Hubris and Nemesis.
The pretense of imperishability, or the artful dodging of time, nearly
always meets it's comeuppance: in Welles
with
the grim march of ineluctable decay; in Cocteau with Orpheus' doomed
rescue attempts from Death; in Resnais with the
macabre puppet master figure who hides behind the veils of time; in Roeg with the notion that time's disequilibrium is the result of trauma, a chaos of the mind and spirit
that must eventually seek a reconciliation with reality. CAMP Camp was born, at
least as an articulated and celebrated concept, in the age of cinema, and it
is intricately bound up with the tensions between real time and cinematic
time. Camp is about posture and façade. It feeds on datedness, it loves
flamboyant obsolescence, and it is predicated on a wild disproportion between
resilient style and perishable content. It is what remains behind on the
cultural seashore when a new movement of New Wave has ebbed right back and
left idiosyncratic deposits no one perceived at the full flood: aesthetic algae,
stranded starfish, baroque and dry-docked flotsam. Camp is created by
cinema's unique power as a recording machine. Unlike other "live"
art (play productions or concerts or opera performance) which before the
cinema only survived in report and legend (Edmund Kean's
Hamlet, or Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth), cinema
has always survived as both text and performance. The core of camp is florid
gestures and emotionalism built around themes people do not take seriously,
or have stopped taking seriously. And it depends for its finest flowerings on
the survival of all the evidence: hence on cinema as a medium. In movies the pretense
of timelessness makes the datedness of a star or a style or a story
especially poignant or comical. A star's efforts to hold back time can result
in a fixed totemized identity that takes on a
zombie-like quality (as with Joan Crawford or Marlene
Dietrich). It
is the rictus of high glamour. It's camp because concentrated
Style – the fortifications of makeup, of exaggerated élan or luminosity –
have had to replace what was formerly natural personality, beauty, youth.
Because cinema lasts forever, and because a star's youthful presence is
always available to the spectator, on film or on cassette, cinema's creatures
have a special imperative not to be seen to change and decay. This is the Sunset
Boulevard syndrome. The zombie or vampire – and Norma Desmond
was a conflation of both – is alive and well and living in Beverly Hills. Camp is the tragicomic
punishment that swoops down upon the crime of a pretense of agelessness. The
"poignancy" of a figure like Judy Garland is based on the viewer's
sympathetic shudder at the merciless dictates of cinematic timelessness (and
its zombie-masters, the producers), which tries to turn human beings into
obsolescence-proof artifacts, with the inevitable emotional havoc wrought
upon the human being. When the attempt to preserve the star in all his or her
pristine charisma starts to crack or fissure, the cinema finds its real-life
equivalent of the Frankenstein fable. Movies themselves are
seen as vulnerable to this process as their individual stars. When we giggle
at Plan 9 From Outer Space or luxuriate in the wackier
sentimentalities of a Douglas Sirk movie, it's
because one age's portentous sincerity – made, like all cinema, for time – is
coming humanly apart at the seams, creating exactly the capricious
serendipity of response that cinema, the dream machine, often tries to deny
or transcend. In themselves,
vitality and passion, talent and personality are timeless. But the particular
works of art into which these energies may be channeled are all too tuneful.
Camp movies happen when passion gets out of synch with fashion. When Bette Davis in Beyond The
Forest ejaculates "What a dump!", we see a whirring machinery
of mannerism and histrionic élan working full out on a line of idiot
banality. Of course the lines weren't intended to be banal; it was
once a cry of Hollywood Bovaryism, the ennui-eaten
heroine spitting out her hatred of domesticity. But time has washed all that
après-Flaubert pretension away, leaving the style high and dry without the
content. The passion remains after the fashion has changed. In Camp, flamboyance
and vivacity and charisma all work in time-defying harmony; it's only the
kitschy message that's gotten out of synch. Thus, Time once more wreaks its
vengeance on the "timeless" art. THE KINGDOM To die beautifully. In
the genre of the love story, early deaths are much prized. This is the
gift-wrapped obeisance of romantic fiction to the proverb "Quit while
you're ahead." It's also the cinema's riposte to the campy dangers of
aging. The bloom still hangs on the cheeks of Ali
McGraw
in Love Story or Margaret Sullavan
in
Three Comrades or Garbo in Camille or
Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment. The cinema has power not only to
prolong life's sentences but to shorten them, to find the perfect romantic
period. And stars who die young in real life, like Valentino or
Dean or Monroe (or even who exit young from the limelight
like Garbo), preserve their legends forever in amber. This particular form
of apotheosis –self-enhancement by destruction or self-exile – has been with
us in art and myth at least since Sophocles' Antigone.
But it's especially germane to cinema, since it says two things about the
art. First, it proclaims that, despite the magical continuity of the movies
and their power to synthesize youthfulness or to keep a young image before us
in the aspic of old films, Nothing Is Forever. Secondly, it says that beauty
that trusts itself to the Pygmalion of the picture business is offering
itself up as a human sacrifice. Cinema has a tendency to keep stars looking
as young as possible as long as possible, and when it can no longer do that,
their wrecked charisma is cut up and thrown into whatever gruesome casserole
the industry thinks fits. Sometimes, as in Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane, the
very attempt to preserve youth is gleefully parodied. At others, a star will
play an over-the-hill mirror image of his or her younger self, as Vivien Leigh
did in Gone With The Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire. So to die young and
beautiful is to pick the moment, not to have it picked for one. Robert
Altman's Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean explores
with a cunningly curdled romanticism the time-slips of cinema and the
time-denials of movie fans. The mirror is the way back to the past here, as
it was in Cocteau; it's also an analogue for the movie screen. It combines
the twin lures of narcissism and nostalgia. The characters in Jimmy Dean aren't
looking back to the youth and beauty of Dean but to their own youth and
beauty: and hope. In the very same breath that cinema eternalizes our idols
(with the paradoxical help of a well-timed death) it gives us a thumping,
graphic reminder of our own age and decay. The grapes of timelessness are
flourished Tantalus-like before us, but we're grimly, salutarily
reminded that we can never partake of them. The only genre in
which death (alias Time) seems to have no place in the cinema is in the
cartoon – and in the more fantastical outposts of slapstick comedy (Frank Tashlin, Jerry Lewis,
1941). Cartoon animals and slapstick heroes bounce back from
destruction more often and more successfully even than the resurrected bodies
reverse-motioned into life in Cocteau's Orpheus. Only the cinema can
show a cat being flattened like a pancake by a ten-ton garbage truck and then
in the next shot show the same cat restored to unscathed life and charging
full-throttle after the mouse of the day; all as if it were happening before
our eyes. When Jerry Lewis is flattened by a
collapsing door or a stampede of students in The Nutty Professor, we're not at all surprized to see him walking about hale and hearty and
sound of limb in the next scene. Time isn't being
reshuffled here; it's being given an indefinite license for renewal. Each
crisis moment that crowns a comic crescendo in cartoons or slapstick movies
(say, the Coyote's boomeranging ing murder attempts on the
Road Runner) marks a cut-off point. Then we simply go back, or forward, and
pick up Time at a point where what has just happened never happened. At first this looks
like the Utopia we've been searching for – where the cinema can happily
represent a world totally independent of real time, and go unpunished for
this presumption by any last-minute Nemesis. But the Catch-22 of these films
is that just as physical renewal is on indefinite license, so is physical
injury and punishment. Each time Bugs Bunny or Sylvester
the
Cat or Julius Kelp (Jerry Lewis)
bounces
back from the dead it is to meet another maelstrom of insult and injury.
This isn't Utopia, Hollywood: it's catastrophic frustration on a 24 fps
treadmill. WHERE SEQUELS DARE On the battlefields of
Time, filmgoers will probably never give up the quest, through the magic of
movies, to find eternity in a finite world. The modern-day manifestation of
this urge is the epidemic of sequelitis. The distinctive
feature of Star Wars and Rocky sagas, for example, is that
despite token bows to chronological progression there is virtually no sense
of development in the characters or story from film to film. Not only do the
protagonists refuse visibly to age, but each story is almost nakedly a rerun
of the last one. The individual details may change but the main stations of
the narrative are identical. In Rocky we must have the semi-reluctant
comeback, the big-brute antagonist, the sweetly keening wife and the
pulverizing prize fight. In Star Wars we must have the scattered
forces of Good brought slowly together from picturesque trouble spots so that
they can be flung at the villains in an expIosive
last-reel team effort. In the Thirties,
Forties, and Fifties the filmgoer's appetite for continuity was satisfied
chiefly by the star system. It was enough to see the same beloved star return
in film after film, and most other kinds of series were otiose (or else
relegated to Saturday matinee fare). But when the star system began to
crumble, another form of continuity was needed and it became the continuity
of the series. Beginning with the unstoppable Bond (born to movies in 1962),
it went on to encompass Airports,
Rockys, Jawses, and Star Warses, plus Burt Reynolds chain-Smokeying in redneck America, a brace of Godfathers, a hecatomb of Dirty Harrys and
a tandem of Travoltas dancing the neon night away
as Tony Manero. The biggest non-stop
saga is Star Wars – a series devised with a built-in reverse button.
Recall that, before decay can possibly affect the characters or the plot,
after parts IV, V, and VI (ending with Return of the Jedi), we will whizz back to Part I and begin again pre-natally. Meanwhile, though they have been subjected to
every danger and injury from light-swords to giant walking tanks, not a
single one of the leading human characters has lost his or her life; even Sir
Alec Wan Kenobi is on permanent consultative recall. In the cinema of
wish-fulfillment, death has no dominion. Yet human beings cannot sit idly by
and watch these celebrations of immortality go unchecked and uncounterbalanced. The flipside to Star Wars is the
relentless and prolific wave of horror sagas (the Halloweens, Friday the 13ths, and
their ilk) which hoist high the spectacle of death. Here the mantle of
immortality, or at least superhuman resilience, is conferred on only one
character: the killer, Death itself. And who could deny that Death is the
only immortal? Popular taste in
movies, though many critics would have you believe otherwise, is never in
the last analysis arbitrary or meaningless. Star Wars is a Utopian
fantasy of what we would like life to be: a saga of endless renewal in which
wounds magically re-heal, knowledge and wisdom are on permanent tap, evil is
always defeatable, and Death can somehow always be
postponed. Friday the 13th, Halloween and company are what adult filmgoers have demanded
as a counterweight: Death is the only "force" that keeps coming
back for more. By the unlikeliest and shlockiest
of back roads, the low-budget horror movie, cinema has found a way to reconcile
its own miraculous imperishability with a statement of our own perishability. Which is where, in an appropriately
timeless loop, we came in. The creatures of the horror film – from zombies
and vampires and the rest of the gang to the never-say-die killers of Camp
Crystal Lake and elsewhere – are embodiments of our refusal to allow the
immortality machine, the cinema, to pretend to us that we ourselves can
transcend Time. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE
NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED
IN FEBRUARY 1984, THE 100th ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN
KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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