Arthur Schlesinger on Film

“Film is the only art in which the United States has made a real difference. Strike the American contribution from drama, painting, music, sculpture, dance, even possibly from poetry and the novel, and the world’s achievement is only marginally diminished. But film without the American contribution is unimaginable. The fact that film has been the most potent vehicle of the American imagination suggests all the more strongly that movies have something to tell us not just about the surfaces but about the mysteries of American life.” —Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The Top 10 Shots of 2007

Part I & Part II

(Via Kottke.)

Cigarettes Are Sublime

There’s a great scene in Definitely, Maybe in which the characters played by Ryan Reynolds and Isla Fisher bump into one another in a convenience store and flirtatiously debate the merits of Marlboro Reds versus American Spirits. Reynolds’s character can’t believe Fisher’s character pays a couple dollars more per pack for “natural” cigarettes. Fisher’s character counters that Marlboros contain additives to make them burn faster; thus, although she pays more per pack, each of her cigarettes lasts longer so she ends up paying less money in the long run. Skeptical, and more than a bit intrigued by her joie de vivre, Reynolds’s character agrees to an impromptu “smoke off” outside the store. Outside they light up at the same time and continue their flirting. Reynolds’s character loses the contest when his Marlboro Red burns down before her American Spirit, but he wins an opportunity to accompany Fisher’s character to a party that evening. It’s her birthday and her boyfriend has stood her up. She’s looking for a date and he quickly agrees to accompany her.

What’s noteworthy to me about the scene – other than the chemistry the two actors have – is the role cigarettes play in it. That is, cigarettes help bring the two of them together. They also lend the scene an erotic charge. It’s as if time has stopped and these are the only two people in the world. When Fisher’s character coolly blows smoke out of her mouth and seductively gestures with her cigarette, she’s arguably more appealing to Reynolds’s character (and to us as audience members) than she would be if she were sans a cigarette. As Richard Klein writes in Cigarettes Are Sublime, a wonderful, nearly 200-page apologia for the beauty and benefits of cigarettes,

For many women, at certain moments, lighting a cigarette is the socially countenanced mode of signaling hostile or aggressively sexual feelings aroused by the intrusion of another subjectivity. In circumstances when a man might display anger or come on to her, a woman will often light up, summoning fire and smoke, jabbing with the tip of her cigarette between nails or teeth. That explains why, among women, smoking began with those who got paid for staging their sexuality: the actress, the Gypsy, the whore. Such a woman violates traditional roles by defiantly, actively giving herself pleasure instead of passively receiving it. Lighting a cigarette is a demonstration of mastery that violates the assumptions of feminine pudeur, the delicate embarrassment women are expected to feel, or at least display, in the presence of what their innocence and dignity are supposed to prevent them from desiring. A woman smoking may be thought to be less “feminine” because more active, aggressive, masterful, but she is not therefore more “masculine” – in her own eyes or in those of many men; she may in fact be more desirable because she appears to be more free. (117)

Scenes such as this one, of course, can be found in lots of movies (e.g. The Big Sleep [1946]), but they seem less and less common. It’s significant that the scene is set in 1992, before the present anti-smoking campaign in the United States really took off. Though I don’t smoke, scenes like this one almost make me want to. No wonder some people bemoan Hollywood’s glamorization of smoking. Still, as Tom Chiarella’s recent and fascinating Esquire piece “Learning to Smoke” suggests, I am not alone in wanting to do something that movies make look so cool, if only for a short while.

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Lobby Cards

Vanity Fair: “Lobby Cards: The Leonard Schrader Collection”

(Via kottke.org.)

Cary Grant’s Suit

Whilst cleaning up some of my Safari bookmarks, I once again came across “Cary Grant’s Suit” by Todd McEwen, a wonderful little piece from a few years ago on the suit Cary Grant wears in North By Northwest.

Money Quote: “North By Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit.”

(Related Reading: The Sartorialist: Cary Grant – North By Northwest.)

Stallone’s Father Issues?

In his review of Rambo, film critic David Edelstein mentions something I had never heard before about Stallone, namely that he might have (or had) some father issues:

his impossible-to-please father thought his physique in the first Rocky looked puny – and did he show Dad

If this is true, it’s fascinating. Unlike Schwarzenegger, who started working out seriously as a teenager, Stallone didn’t start hitting the weights in earnest until he was in his thirties, and arguably didn’t peak physically until the mid to late-1980s, sometime between the releases of Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, when he was training with guys like Franco Columbo, Arnold’s old workout partner.

Arnold, by contrast, peaked physically maybe ten years earlier, in the mid-1970s. Arnold has often mentioned that his father was a stern taskmaster, and it doesn’t take a psychology degree to deduce that he has (or had) some father issues, and that those issues might be partially responsible for his throwing myself into bodybuilding as a kid, but I’ve never heard anyone suggest as much about Stallone. Lou Ferrigno, yes, but not Stallone. Come to think of it, I don’t really know much about Stallone’s father. Can anyone confirm this?

Rambo (IV)

Some thoughts on Rambo (2008) — or as Alex Muniz calls it, Rambo IV — on this, the day after I first saw it.

In his review of the film, A.O. Scott notes that Rambo’s name “is sometimes still used, perhaps a bit unfairly, as a synonym for revanchist, go-it-alone militarism.” Note the parenthetical “perhaps a bit unfairly,” for Rambo’s politics — and for that matter the politics of Rambo franchise — have always been more a bit more complicated than most people think.

Stallone maintains that Rambo himself is apolitical, and suggests that Reagan is the reason everyone thinks of him as an essentially conservative, reactionary character:

Rambo has always been apolitical, but once Ronald Reagan, who I admired, stated, “Rambo is a republican.” In some reference to Rambo and Gadhafi in the ’80s, that sort of sealed my fate and since then Rambo has always been equated with America’s military aggressiveness, but nothing could be further from the truth. Rambo is a solitary creature, not part of any military machine.

In short, according to Stallone, Rambo is a loner, a warrior.

Tom Lutz, by contrast, in his wonderful book Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, sees Rambo as a liminal figure:

Rambo was an ambiguous hero, of course, not the tough John Wayne type … or the neotough Clint Eastwood. Rambo straddled the cultural conflict between the peaceniks and law-and-order forces, a hippie Green Beret, a decorated macho killer with long hair and antiestablishment anger: when the [first Rambo] film opened in 1982, Variety deemed the film itself “socially irresponsible.” Rambo’s position on the margin allows him to act in ways unavailable to the men around him, men in more obviously proscribed social roles. He knows no fear and feels no physical pain, but sobs and moans and cries out his emotional woe. Unlike the Greek hero who is expected to cry because he is heroic, Rambo earns the right to violate the macho prohibition against crying (as does Stallone’s previous character, Rocky) through his heroism.

(Of course, one could argue that the Rambo of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988) is more conservative than the Rambo of the first film, but even in these films it’s not quite as cut and dry as people make it out to be. In Rambo III, for instance, Rambo fights on behalf of the Mujahedeen!)

In his aforementioned review, Scott brushes aside questions about Rambo’s politics by suggesting that what’s really important is (1) the quality of the films and (2) how similar Rambo is to the archetypal male characters found in Westerns and Samurai films, two genres with considerably more status among the so-called chattering classes than action films. Scott writes:

The first installments in the cycle were better films than polite opinion might lead you to believe. At the time their politics made some people nervous, but to dwell on Rambo’s ideological significance was (and still is) to miss his kinship with the samurais and gunslingers of older movies.

My point here is to suggest that Rambo (both the character and the movie franchise) deserve to be taken seriously. To its credit, the New York Times published an article titled “Tough Guys For Tough Times” a couple weeks ago that I blogged briefly about. The article unfortunately perpetuates some of the one-dimensional thinking that I have tried to complicate above by including Rambo in a list of the “leading action symbols of the Reagan era — with all their excess, jingoism and good vs. evil bombast,” but it at least tries to make sense of why, two decades after Rambo III, Rambo is suddenly back.

Sociological and cultural reasons aside, the obvious reason, of course, is so Stallone can cash in on his second-most successful screen persona before he gets too old. I wonder, however, if Stallone just wanted a crack at directing a Rambo film? Maybe he thought he could do better than Ted Kotcheff, George P. Cosmatos, and Peter MacDonald, the directors of the first three Rambo films, respectively.

Did he do better? I don’t think so — the characters are paper thin even by action movie standards, the Herschell Gordon Lewis-style gore was a little too one-note for me, and action set-pieces aren’t particularly clever, save perhaps for the scene were Rambo dispatches a group of bad guys with his bow and arrow while a well-armed team of mercenaries cowers on the hill above — but Rambo is still a fascinating film for all sorts of reasons.

I was surprised, for instance, by how critical it was of missionary/relief work. The white bourgeois Christian group from Colorado that engage Rambo to take them into Burma are presented at best as naive, at worst as contributing to the destabilization of the region by sticking their noses in other people’s business. “Go home,” Rambo tells them at one point. A case probably could be made that the movie is actually anti-Christian. It certainly seems contemptuous of humanitarian efforts, religiously based or otherwise, which is odd considering that one of Stallone’s reasons for setting the film in Burma, at least according to his comments on Ain’t It Cool News, was to draw attention to the injustices there.

Military intervention is hardly presented in a better light. The mercenaries are just as incompetent as the missionaries. In the world of the Rambo movies, the only solution to a problem is Rambo. Anything short of Rambo is doomed to failure.

Yet as critical of the movie is of missionary/relief work and military intervention, it also falls into the trap of presenting the Burmese people (both the good guys and the bad guys, I thought) as non-white, primitive “Others.” Whatever light is shed on the problems of Burma, it’s overshadowed by the implicit message that whatever is going on over there in the jungle isn’t something “we” (read: white Americans) have to worry about, unless of course, we’re stupid enough to try and help. For this reason, a case probably also could be made that the movie is racist.

Some might read all this ambivalence as a deceptively sophisticated problemization of American foreign policy, but I don’t think I’d be that generous. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it confused, but I will say it’s complicated, which is what the Rambo franchise ultimately is, despite people’s attempts to reduce to something that’s anything but.

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Becoming Cary Grant

“In his blending of the urbane and the rambunctious, he found a way to be true to his own background, which he plainly adored, while reconciling that background to the vision of a suave man-about-town that he had aspired to as a working-class young man. Although Grant’s early Hollywood image seemed a denial of his former self, he kept Leach very much with him after he came into his own: he always spoke matter-of-factly and lovingly of his working-class origins, and he savored playing Cockney characters – see Sylvia Scarlett, Gunga Din, and the uncharacteristically sober None But the Lonely Heart, his most personal film; his references to ‘Archie Leach,’ of course, would be an affectionate running gag in his pictures. The key to his appeal was that, as Kael noted decades ago, his ‘romantic elegance is wrapped around the resilient, tough core of a mutt, and Americans dream of thoroughbreds while identifying with mutts.’” —Benjamin Schwarz, “Becoming Cary Grant,” The Atlantic Monthly

Non-Traditional Viewing Practices

“Nathan’s reminiscence of watching The New World on his laptop reminded me that, at Cannes this year, no less august a cinematic eminence than David Cronenberg rhapsodized to me about how much he enjoys watching movies on his laptop, propped on his stomach as he lies in bed, perusing a few chapters at a time the way one reads a book, and having an altogether different – but by no means illegitimate – experience of cinema than one has in a proper theater.” —Scott Foundas

Alone at the Movies

“People who need movies, the true moviegoers, go in the afternoon.” —Mark Edmundson