12:01 p.m. - 2005-09-04
movies, news, more movies
"Weekend" finally came out on DVD and I bought a copy. The last time I saw it was a few years ago at a campus film society screening, with Kia. A few minutes into the film, the female protagonist sits on a table, scantily-clad, and flatly describes a series of decidedly naughty events to the man with whom she's apparently having an affair. It sounds sad and pornographic, but it's actually a really funny scene, owing to the way it's shot, with the camera constanly zooming in and out of close-ups of the actress, and periodic bursts of ominous music that foreshadow some sort of revelation that never occurs. Also, by this point in the movie the woman and her husband have been established as broadly drawn models of bourgois comic malevolence whose horrible words and actions aren't meant to be taken seriously...or ARE they?
Anyhow, that's one of the first scenes in the movie, and we were sitting at the campus screening, and a couple minutes into the scene a young woman who was sitting toward the front got up and walked up the aisle, a look of disgust on her face, her stride brisk and resolute. She was leaving and not coming back, and probably was never going to watch any more Godard if she could help it. Then, about twenty seconds later, a young man, also sitting toward the front, followed her up the aisle, looking slump-shouldered and sheepish: clearly they were together, perhaps on a first or second date, and clearly the movie had been his idea. Kia and I witnessed this scene with fascination. One of us turned to the other and said, "Is this the greatest movie ever?" to which one of us replied, "Yes. There was your proof."
Then, after that scene come the car crashes, the murders, the setting Emily Bronte on fire, the long socialist lectures, and the anarcho-cannibal hippies. It's still one of my favorites and it holds up well, but now that I have it on DVD I find that I can't watch it. Shot in 1967, it now seems a little TOO prescient, a little too much like what society seems in danger of turning into. Like everyone else, I've been watching the news this week with a combination of horror, sadness, and anger. Up here in the north we anxiously await updates, wondering if there's anything we can do, we give to the red cross, someone's organizing benefits around town, etc. Meanwhile, the people in power are spending thousands of dollars shopping for shoes and acting put-out when their long, long vacations are cut short. Meanwhile, god knows how many thousands of people are being subject to a slow death of starvation, dehydration, violence, neglect, every bad thing imaginable, punishment for the unspeakable crime they've commited: BEING POOR IN AMERICA. I know this isn't a terribly new or original idea, but it appears to be the reality we're stuck with just now. The thing I'm wondering is: is a tragedy of this magnitude enough to inspire real change, to make us a better, more compassionate, more thoughtful people? Or is New Orleans today more or less the future for all of us?
This was all fresh on my mind yesterday when Kia and I decided to take in a movie. (As you may have guessed, we go to the movies a lot.) We saw "The Last Mogul", a documentary about Hollywood agent/power-broker/long-time Universal CEO Lew Wasserman. It wasn't a terribly well-made film and bogged down several times with numbing business minutiae and was really more about corporate/mob/political America than about movies. The thing that stayed with me after the movie was over was how pathological Wasserman and almost everyone in his world seemed. Most of the people interviewed were abject sycophants, obsessed with power and the projection of influence. Since they were lacking these, they glommed onto Wasserman's, and it wasn't a pretty sight, the parade of botched or expired face-lifts not withstanding. Wasserman himself was said to have been devastated when he lost control of Universal, and kept hanging around his offices in the Universal building right up until he died. The strange, sad thing is, he was already in his seventies at that point. I could only think, shouldn't someone of his advanced age have some kind of PERSPECTIVE, which would enable him to let go of the trappings of power a little bit? But then I realized, his perspective is CONFINED to the trappings of power. Anything else would be totally beyond his imagination.
And this is why we're in the mess we are today: the people in power are the people who WANT to be in power, and these sorts are the most single-minded, delusional, morally bankrupt and, often, stupid people on earth. The question humanity's survival hinges on is how to isolate them in such a way that their sickness won't affect others. Or, maybe there's a gene that they possess that could eventually be isolated and wiped from the planet, giving the non-mentally-ill a shot at running everything. I'm not a big fan of the social engineering, but it couldn't be any worse than what we've got now.
