The movies have been our biggest collective dreamscape

By Jay Carr, Globe Staff, 12/05/99

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS... We don't remember whole movies. We hardly even remember scenes. What we remember, unbidden, are moments. From the thousands of possibilities, here are 10 great movie imprints straight from the cranial databank: 1. "The Immigrant" (1917) Charlie Chaplin's impoverished tramp, not having the money to pay a restaurant bill but ever the gent, smiles and tips his hat before being tossed out by a much bigger waiter. 2. "Metropolis" (1926) Our first view of Fritz Lang's spectacular Art Deco futuristic city (in an imagined 2000!), which set the mold for such great, dark, looming cityscapes as those in "Blade Runner," "Brazil," and "Batman." 3. "The Thin Man" (1934) William Powell and Myrna Loy as rich sleuths Nick and Nora Charles, hanging around their apartment in pajamas, popping Christmas-tree bulbs and dry witticisms, usher mass culture into stylish sophistication. 4. "Citizen Kane" (1941) Orson Welles and Dorothy Comingore, as William Randolph Hearst and his mistrees, Marion Davies, sit at opposite ends of a table the size of a small airstrip - showing us in one glance the gulf that has developed between them in Hearst's gloomy castle and in Welles's rule-breaking masterpiece. 5. "Casablanca" (1942) Nightclub owner Humphrey Bogart lounges against Sam's piano, showing ushow to be cool at Rick's, growling like a cynic but keeping a small flame of hope alive through every nihilistic wisecrack. 6. "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) A besotted Gene Kelly, too much in love to use his umbrella as anything but a dance partner, ecstatically sloshes his way into musical nirvana in the title song. 7. "Midnight Cowboy" (1969) Dustin Hoffman's scuzzy Ratso Rizzo interrupts a rant to Jon Voight's greenhorn to bang on the hood of a car that's crowding him and rasp, in a moment of pure Noo Yawkese, "I'm wawkin' heah!" 8. "E.T. the Extra-Terrestial" (1982) E.T. and the suburban kid he befriends are silhouetted against the moom as the alien propels their bike airborne; it's the perfect distillation of a kid's dream of making his broken home whole again with help from a benevolent beyond. 9. "Do the Right Thing" (1989) Spike Lee unites urgency and artistry in his sizzling canvas of a Brooklyn neighborhood about to explode in racial conflagration when Radio Raheem's boombox is silenced. 10. "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991) Anthony Hopkins gives the movies their most seductive monster, the cultivated cannibal Hannibal Lecter, who carries mind games to horrifying places. This only makes his mentoring of Jodie Foster's FBI agent - and every murmur of "Clarice" - even creepier.

Tick, tick, tick. As the millennium looms, film is an endangered species, an endangered word. Images on celluloid with sprocket holes will soon become collector's items, along with the round flat cans they travel in. Before long, digital images from digital cameras will be transmitted via satellite and decoded at theaters. Film will barely make it across the millennial finish line. It probably won't last until 2020, much less Y3K. Yet it took our century on some terrific rides. It's been the biggest ride in the theme park known as the 20th century. Although the millennial passage ends with TV mopping up after movies, it's movies that got us through most of the century, feeding us models of what was cool, waving the baton over collective dreams we learned to dream in the dark.

The shrinking life spans of new technologies now make us speak of image-delivery systems. But what they deliver won't change. Stories. Big pop myths that have been with us since shadows flickered on the walls of caves, serving us up to ourselves, arranging experience, giving form to dreams, showing us how to look, act, and behave. Film and projectors will go away; we'll call films something else. But people spent the century learning to believe in film. That won't change. We'll still sit in big spaces in the dark. Those big images will imprint with their unique psychovisual authority. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao (the first two were big film fans) may have been insane, but they weren't stupid. All three knew that what film could do for Chaplin and Garbo, it could do for them.

Although film came late to the art party, and most of its greatest artists were more comfortable thinking of themselves as craftsmen, there's no question that it's the century's dominant art form. Prove it to yourself by doing a little data retrieval from your 20th-century cranial attic. Our brains are awash in imagistic flotsam. We all carry bits of hundreds of movies in our head, massive collages. Umberto Eco once wrote that in certain cases a movie is no longer a movie. It becomes part of a larger entity - movies.

Eco was writing about "Casablanca." Before he took on eternal life in cyberspace, Bogey had long been living in the heads of millions of us, looking creased and world-weary in his white dinner jacket, masking his idealism with cynicism. He has no end of company. Cary Grant survives, immaculately tailored, suave, edgy. E.T. is there, looking pickled. Marlon Brando's Godfather, too, mumbling an offer you can't refuse. Westerns are bookended on John Wayne's face, open and hopeful in "Stagecoach," bitter and misogynistic in "The Searchers." Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis could have straightened him out. A leering Groucho Marx could have shriveled him with a wisecrack. Maybe you'll conjure up Dietrich slinking toward a white piano. Or Fred Astaire dancing away from one. Or Cagney or De Niro or Schwarzenegger smashing one.

They're all there. Darth Vader, Meryl Streep, and Jack Nicholson, too. Alfred Hitchcock, Audrey Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart. And that's only the Hollywood contingent. What about Jean Gabin, Jean Renoir, Catherine Deneuve, Francois Truffaut, Gerard Depardieu? France, after all, gave film its public launch when the Lumiere brothers hung a sheet in a room in 1895 and sent audience members shrieking out into the street at the sight of a locomotive rushing toward them. Edison and his assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, a native of France who actually invented the movie camera credited to the Wizard of Menlo Park, were first with film, which they saw as an adjunct to recorded sound. None of these pioneers knew exactly what they had, never imagined what it could turn into.

Movies deny time, freeze moments, render them immune from aging, trump death with immortal looping. Nothing has shaped our consciousness as film has. Shakespeare wrote his plays for the ear. In this century, art is aimed at the eye - as portal to the subconscious. Film never was an intellectual construct: more primal, it flies in under our radar. It wasn't the potency of cheap music that should have struck the Noel Coward of "Private Lives," but the potency of cheap films.

Silent film quickly became the universal art form. At its most potent, film is about faces, about messages sent from behind the eyes of big, shimmering faces. And the silents stopped time with light on the faces of stars - Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, John Barrymore, Garbo. In Hollywood's hands, film became mostly about stars, about colossal silvery revelries.

At first, film was about whatever the camera was pointed at. The first Lumiere film on the first Lumiere program was of factory workers at quitting itme. Grainy and flickery as those early shorts seem today, their lifelike look grabbed audiences. So did the illusion of motion. What people saw not only looked real - it acted real. Only the ignorant condescend to early silents. Often they're bursting with energy and innovation. The grammar of film was put in place by D.W. Griffith in the United States, by Abel Gance in France, by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, and Dziga-Vertov in Russia.

And we can still understand the same film language. "The Great Train Robbery" of 1903 is more than just exciting to watch. It's not only the model for Westerns; it's more dynamic, more thrilling than most Westerns that followed it. Eventually, of course, Westerns turned our grabbing and transforming of a continent into myth (then made war on the myth in such films as "My Darling Clementine," "The Wild Bunch," and "Unforgiven"). It was a natural match - a country born of self-reinvention hooking up with a medium based on self-reinvention. Not that the recasting of experience into palatable form was an American invention. World cinema has played the game, too, often for big psychic stakes; one need only recall Japan rejiggering its nuclear trauma via "Godzilla" movies.

So we're not talking about a yawning gulf between that train that terrified Parisians in 1895 and the locomotive crash that thrilled audiences in "The Fugitive" in 1993. As much as it has been about romance, adventure, and comedy, film has also been about spectacle, about visceral thrills and movies' capacity for delivering them. At the heart of film's appeal is its ability to make private fantasies communal - whether love stories or train wrecks. Or even simple speed.

The one constant throughout the history of film is change. When sound arrived, people still argue, the greatest era in film comedy died. Not just Keaton and Chaplin with their exquisite grace and astonishing inventiveness, but the Keystone Kops, with their sheer pizazz and flivvers souped up by running the projector fast. Comedy's energy level dropped when sound came in, though screwball comedy soon proved that sound could mean the addition of wit. Paradoxically, the Depression unleashed a gusher of gusto - urban (and urbane) comedies: "The Awful Truth," "Bringing Up Baby," "The Thin Man," "It Happened One Night." Working-girl melodramas, too: "Skyscraper Souls," "Sadie McKee," "Stella Dallas," "Platinum Blonde." And gangster movies that jumped off the screen: "Scarface," "Public Enemy," "Little Caesar."

In England, Hitchcock put his German Expressionist training to resourceful use, fashioning a string of crisp suspense entertainments: "The 39 Steps," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "The Lady Vanishes." Then he came to this country and did it all over again. In France, Renoir gave us "Grand Illusion" and "The Rules of the Game." Eisenstein dominated Russian cinema with "Strike," "Battleship Potemkin," "Alexander Nevsky," and, Stalin permitting, "Ivan the Terrible." And Hollywood extinguished a comet named Orson Welles almost as soon as he rose with "Citizen Kane" by hacking away at his even greater "The Magnificent Ambersons" and essentially drumming him out of the club.

Color, arriving with postwar prosperity, was a mixed blessing, slowing things, yanking film away from the stylization that enabled it to reach the dream state more readily in black and white - especially in genre pictures. Film noir transmitted entrapment and dread - of nuclear uncontrollability, of strong women, who were being crowded back into traditional roles after having been liberated by performing many hitherto male jobs in World War II. But mainstream postwar film almost did itself in, first by ignoring TV, then by generating too many dead-whale spectacles in an effort to give the public what TV could not. For every "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Bridge on the River Kwai," Hollywood cranked out stillbirths like "King of Kings," "El Cid," "The Fall of the Roman Empire," or "Cleopatra." Eventually Hollywood realized TV wasn't an enemy, but another film market. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas rediscovered and reinvented spectacle in "Jaws," "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," and the "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" series, putting the fun back in bigness as expressed through amped-up Saturday serials.

At the same time, the '70s brought to fruition the postwar American rebel acting school led by Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, and Jack Nicholson. The door was opened to films - "Bonnie and Clyde," "Easy Rider" - that challenged Hollywood's business-as-usual reinforcement of the status quo even more than "The Blair Witch Project" freaked the big studios this year because it was a huge hit they had nothing to do with. What Hollywood didn't realize at first was that the antiestablishment cachet of these films was largely what made them popular. When it did, it threw lots of money at making silly films trying to nail the youth market. But the Vietnam era had led to a challenging of values, a rise of antiheroes. Clint Eastwood's alienated loner succeeded John Wayne and his retooled Monroe Doctrine.

Meanwhile, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro broke the ethnicity barrier, giving us "The Graduate," "The Godfather," and "Mean Streets." Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola became important directors. Blaxploitation movies - determined to go beyond the saintly presences of Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte - opened the door to serious black filmmaking aspirations. A young generation of black filmmakers, led by Spike Lee, has followed, and African-American stars - Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, Whitney Houston - have joined the A-list.

In the '60s, also, America discovered an appetite for foreign film. Serious filmgoers wouldn't think of not seeing the latest Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Antonioni, Godard, Satyajit Ray. America also began to reevaluate and revere figures it had taken for granted - Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks. And it stopped being ashamed of a weakness for trash, once the doctrine of camp was invented to rationalize it. It was more than a case of anything goes: It was nothing less than a reversal of high and low culture. Hollywood never was comfortable with art, really. Its idea of art was a handful of lavish, stuffy spectacles that it called artistic. Suddenly, Hollywood relaxed, or at least relaxed its standards. Comic books (rechristened graphic novels in a post-literate age) became films. TV shows became films, too.

Ironically, today's films in many cases are becoming TV. Writers, directors, and the executives who bankroll them often come from TV, bringing the same reflexes. TV screens, thanks to the growth of ancillary markets, have become film's ultimate destination. It sometimes seems that film has shrunk, changing from something larger than life to something smaller than life. Of course, it tried to bulk up again in the Reagan-Bush years, with "Top Gun," "Terminator 2," "Total Recall," and the "Batman" franchise. "Jurassic Park" blurred once and for all the line between films and theme parks. For all the clucking about the huge sums present-day films cost, the aggregate Hollywood budget of several billion dollars approximates the cost of a couple of Stealth bombers. And besides, I suspect that, in our hearts, hearing about all that money feeds a certain perverse satisfaction. If Hollywood can't come up with quality, it's some consolation that it can at least still come up with lavish excess.

A generation ago, some of us believed that small, personal films - many made in foreign languages - would supplant the big sensory-jolt movies. Instead, big, technologically sophisticated Hollywood action spectacles are driving out the national cinemas of Europe and Japan. It's encouraging to note that the cinema of China, the rest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America seems able to renew itself. And even more plentiful than small, personal films from these countries have been films from American independents. A generation ago, they hardly existed. Now they matter. As better, cheaper equipment arrives, they'll matter more. The Internet reinforces the up-for-grabs feeling. I find it hard to believe that people will switch in big numbers to watching feature-length movies on the Internet any time soon, not when DVD is moving in. But the Internet is a terrific calling card, a tool to create visibility and awareness.

It also plays mightily to widespread anti-monolith sentiments. The bigness of the studios just as often works against them as for them, especially with a generation that listens to music by a group called Rage Against the Machine. In fact, opposing forces seem to be at work as the millennium aproaches. Ironically, George Lucas could emerge as the prophet of the new century, with his "Star Wars" vision of a world ruled by trade federations, with the role of the Evil Empire played by merged multinational coroporations sporting budgets larger than those of many countries. On the other hand, monoliths are breaking down, as evidenced by the fact that networks are losing their grip on audience shares. Newspapers and magazines, too: The so-called big media no longer have a monopoly on public visibility. For every "Jurassic Park" or "Phantom Menace" in the '90s, there's been a "Pulp Fiction" or "The Crying Game" or "Full Monty" - something original that came out of nowhere to rebuke Hollywood for becoming bigger, slicker, and glitzier, an assembly line for product (apt word!) with the spiritual energy of a dead battery.

In Hollywood, today's stars aren't the actors we see in movies. They're the people who control movies. Artists and executives have been at one another's throats in Hollywood since day one. What's changed is that money and power have become what's sexy in an era when any video-store clerk can quote you weekend grosses. As the century ends, Europe apes Hollywood and Hollywood apes Citizen Kane. Hollywood no longer is just about movies. Hollywood sees itself - but fears it isn't - at the center of a reinvented vertical corporation finding multiple ways to sell the same item, ranging from viewings on ancillary outlets to merchandising, to TV and theme-park franchising. And Hollywood wonders why it's losing audience share to video games.

The film business may yet be replaced by the image-delivery business. IMAX and other new projection techniques (recalling CinemaScope and the technologies of the '60s) rear their three-dimensional heads. Filmmakers now have competition from alternative dream factories. Edison's dream of fitting images to music lives on in music videos. Movies no longer have a captive audience for models of what's cool or captivating. But movies' only hope is to keep trying to force its unnatural marriages between artists and pitchmen. Administered with enough of a free hand, hokum has always been as good a rocket fuel as any for movies. And hokum was, is, and ever shall be Hollywood's stock in trade. Perhaps the most underappreciated millennium-themed movie is Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 "Strange Days." What's memorable is not its apocalyptic LA, but its gadgetry, especially that tinny electronic claw that Ralph Fiennes and his shady buddies clap on their heads to receive images directly in their cerebral cortices. If movies have taught us anything, it's that today's peep show is tomorrow's "Intolerance" or "Gone With the Wind" or "Casablanca."

This story ran on page M01 of the Boston Globe on 12/05/99.
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