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Selling Movies

By J Rosenbaum
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 30, 1998, at 4:23 PM ET

Dear David,

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Maybe we're both suffering from an excess of holiday cheer and good will, but it seems like the more we communicate in this manner, the more we wind up agreeing with one another: not about absolutely everything, of course, but at least we can follow each other's respective arguments most of the time.

I'm flattered that you've tapped into my reviews on the Chicago Reader Web site. Ever since my reviews went online, I've been discovering a much wider audience than I ever believed I could have. Earlier this month, in Tokyo, I met a grad student in film who told me that she reads me periodically, and I have friends in Melbourne who from time to time give me feedback on Monday regarding articles that are published on Thursday and go online on Friday; and my defense of Small Soldiers got quoted in the Paris newspaper Liberation a few months back. It's also a disconcerting experience when I get email from strangers in different parts of the world responding to individual capsule reviews I wrote ten or eleven years ago, asking me specific questions about the film I reviewed as if I just saw the thing yesterday.

But it all adds up to a much more optimistic sense of what film audiences are like across the world in terms of their enthusiasm, interest, and (sometimes) knowledge, in contrast to the more jaded profiles of contemporary audiences that one finds in various end-of-cinema laments by David Denby and others, not to mention the deliberations of a good many studios and publicists. For me there's a strong parallel between this misrepresentation of audience taste (as I perceive it) and the false idea that what's happening right now in Congress and in the media in relation to Clinton reflects the opinions and interests of the public at large. The self-fulfilling prophecies that control so much of our cultural life nowadays seem to derive from the fact that (a) most of what's being sold is worse than it ever was, but (b) the methods for selling these goods have vastly improved. Which means, in our profession, that movies today could be ten times better than they are (and, in fact, a good many movies that practically no one sees are ten times better than what practically everyone sees) or ten times worse (which still could happen) without affecting seriously either the business or what's said by most critics. A frightening notion, but I think it's true. It reminds me of the joke about the Florida orange juice stand that offers "all the orange juice you can drink for a dollar," and after you drink one measly thimble-sized paper cup of the stuff they tell you, "That's all the orange juice you can drink for a dollar." So studios kill some of their own movies by withdrawing publicity so that no one hears about them and then they say, "See? Nobody's interested." And sometimes they work out deals where theaters have to play some pictures for a given length of time, and many people wind up going to see them because there's nothing else around (which happens in a lot of suburban malls), and then the studios say, "See? The public likes this movie." The most striking example of this double-talk relates to a 70s turkey called Lucky Lady--a big-budget atrocity with Liza Minnelli and Burt Reynolds that nobody liked but which grossed an enormous amount of money because they kept it in theaters endlessly.

One minor tweak I'd like to make regarding your account of my account of Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry: My argument is that what you call "the bewildering 'it's only a movie' coda" is for me a coda that says "it's also a movie," which is far from being the same thing. In fact, I think you could say that a major difference between American culture and what I perceive as Iranian culture could be found in the difference between these two phrases. In Iran, artists--and that includes poets as well as filmmakers--are treated with reverence by the public at large (this is especially clear in Kiarostami's Closeup); even the fact that they have to worry more about censorship than American artists is connected to that respect, because this implies that what they say and do has consequences. So the phrase "it's only a movie" is purely an American sentiment as I understand it; you'd never catch a French or Iranian or Chinese cinephile saying it in the same way with the same meaning. In this culture, just about everything that doesn't entail making money is somewhat suspect from the outset, and for the most part in our profession--present company excluded--movies are taken seriously only insofar as they make money for someone. But their importance isn't expected to go much further than that--a sentiment that "it's only a movie" expresses perfectly.

To say, on the other hand, "it's also a movie"--as I believe Kiarostami does in the final sequence of Taste of Cherry, even if this sequence is paradoxically shot on video--is to say, at least implicitly, my movie is about life, not about other movies, and it's important because life is important, not because it might or might not make money for some producer or distributor; and the fact that it's also a movie doesn't undercut its importance, it places that importance in a somewhat different perspective. Because we're all sitting privately in a community when we watch a movie in a theater--experiencing something private in a public space, at least to some degree--and for me the whole focus of Taste of Cherry, a film about interior spaces set exclusively in exteriors, is about that experience. When we get up from our seats after seeing a movie we have to acknowledge, however briefly, that we're surrounded by other people. And the coda of Taste of Cherry is very much about that acknowledgement and that experience; it tells us that we aren't really alone even if we pretend to be.

We're basically on the same wavelength when it comes to harboring certain doubts about The Thin Red Line. Is a philosophical approach to war necessarily a historical copout? I don't think so, but Malick makes it seem like it can be, at least if you have to go to the trouble of screening out history in order to arrive at your philosophical position. It's a bit like Nolte's general quoting Homer in Latin--although maybe not, because he says that's the way he read Homer at West Point. Anyway, if you (i.e., Nolte's character, not Malick) need to go back to Homer to say something about World War II, in one sense you're in trouble precisely because you're choosing to opt out of all sorts of other kinds of trouble. And there's another question I'd like to bring up that relates equally to Saving Private Ryan and which seems especially relevant to a filmmaker who once translated Heidegger--namely the existential question of how qualified a non-participant is to talk about the ultimate meaning of the experience of war.

I feel this problem with particular keenness when it comes to the Spielberg, because I deeply resent someone like David Denby writing (if I'm quoting or paraphrasing him correctly) that Saving Private Ryan "blows every other World War 2 film out of the water." (In passing, how interesting it is that violent military metaphors are often used to justify this supposedly pacifist or at least semi-pacifist movie.) I mean, this is saying that someone like Sam Fuller--who experienced that war more comprehensively than anyone I've ever known, and whose distillations of that experience in several war films were freely and extensively pilfered by Spielberg--has to take a back seat to someone who knows how to "sell" Fuller's experiences (regarding treatment of POWs, for instance, as shown in The Steel Helmet) better than Fuller did himself. Because Spielberg is nothing if not a salesman. But goddamit, he didn't fight in World War II and neither did Malick--or I, for that matter. And I'm not so sure you can always trot out the Stephen Crane argument when it comes to presuming to speak about the experiences of others. I admire Full Metal Jacket enormously in all sorts of ways, but I also respect the response of a former marine sergeant in Vietnam who now teaches film theory (Edward Branigan) and who informed me when the movie came out that it was a crock of shit as far as having anything to do with the actual experience of fighting in Vietnam. (Another factor that needs to be considered is national perspective; I'm told that Wim Wenders has called Saving Private Ryan racist in its depiction of Germans, and on the whole it seems to have been received much more coolly in Europe. An exception may be Italy, where I'm told that audiences love it as much as Life Is Beautiful.)

I'd be happy to serve as your proxy at the National Society of Film Critics meeting if it weren't for the fact that I've already agreed to do the same for Stuart Klawans. Parlaying three votes in each category may be more than I could handle. On the issue of acting categories, I'm on your side when it comes to Nolte in The Thin Red Line but not in Affliction (by the same token, I'd conceivably vote for Sean Penn in the same movie but not in Hurlyburly.) Holly Hunter is splendid in just about everything, Living Out Loud included. I haven't seen Home Fries (though I'm a sucker for Catherine O'Hara in other pictures; like Jennifer Lopez, she's what you might call an axiom) or Meet Joe Black (or Shakespeare in Love or Beloved or that remake of one of my favorite Lubitsch movies, the latter of which sounds especially like torture), all of which I've assigned to my trusty second-stringer. Regarding other actor favorites, I'll have to think about it more--look at lists of the year's releases to remember all the candidates, for starters.

For logistical reasons, this will have to end my side of our correspondence. It's been a very interesting and instructive exchange, and I hope you've found it agreeable as well. Happy New Year.

Best,

Jonathan