Friday, January 04, 2002

Why Thinking about Movies is a Bad Thing to Do

A student came into my office the other day and cheerfully told me that I had forever wrecked his ability to watch movies. It seems that the film class he had just taken with me had permanently damaged him. All that analyzing, all those messages that needed to be decoded, all the history behind the film, and how it related to the stories we tell ourselves about the very nature of America...he couldn’t stand it anymore. His plaintive plea, “I just can’t sit back and watch a movie anymore....I’m constantly reading into it” was not so much a weird way to ingratiate himself with me, as a simple declaration that I had, like that snake in the Garden of Eden, forever corrupted him.

His lament has stayed with me since. What could provoke this student to say something that was so innocently rude to my entire profession? Now mind you, no student has ever walked into my office after we had a class on the origins of the cold war and said they preferred their earlier ignorance on this subject. Generally speaking, historians--indeed all teachers--work from the premise that the more knowledge one brings to bear on a subject the better off everyone is. This is why, after all, universities are often derisively labeled as “ivory towers"--a place where people can sit and reflect on the world even as it falls apart all around them. But not, it seems, when it comes to the movies. There’s just something about going into Showplace 16, sitting back in those really comfy seats, having the lights go dim, and then letting the sights and sounds of a movie transport you to another realm that defies upper-brain activity. And with your mouth full of popcorn or Milk Duds it becomes impossible, then, to digest the simple fact that when Clint Eastwood says “make my day” to a psychopathic killer in a Dirty Harry film he’s really acting out white male rage against the social chaos of the 1960s. Or, to take another example, when Scarlett O’Hara announces at the beginning of Gone With the Wind, “war war war...who cares,” that she has championed historical amnesia on all matters relating to the most divisive episode in our national past.

This process of unpacking the pure entertainment offered by Hollywood works on the premise that viewers just want to be comfortably numbed for two hours--and to confront this point can be quite jarring. For the less flexible in our midst, this argument can easily devolve into the standard litany of complaints against the radical professor who hates America (for whatever reason this is never quite explained) who wants to impart his scepticism to our serenely innocent college students. So, when I teach film history I tell my students that if they want to know our past, a movie like Gone with the Wind must be taken seriously because it has had a tremendous impact upon how generations of Americans have come to think about the Civil War. And given that far more people have seen it than have read any of the thousands of books on the subject, the film--its murky politics and its rosy vision of race relations--demands our serious attention.

Tied into this history is the process of myth-making that is so quintessentially American, be it Clara Bow defining what an “It” girl should be like in the 1920s or John Wayne’s continuing impact upon our notions of American manhood. This sense of how American fact and fantasy stem from the movies becomes particularly weird when one considers that Ronald Reagan got the idea for his Star Wars program--one that our current President has embraced with an equal fervor--from a “B” movie he starred in, entitled Murder in the Air. Of course, learning how to live our lives from the movies isn’t all bad. The great movie critic Pauline Kael said that Americans have become better kissers by watching those Hollywood stars smooch.

Yet it’s possible that we learn most of what we know about our past from the silver screen. From Charlie Chaplin’s California Gold Rush, to those smartly tailored Nazis in The Sound of Music, to Oliver Stone’s crazy JFK, Americans have probably soaked up in films ten times what they ever learned from history books. This brings me back to my student’s sadness at what had been done to him. And upon reflection, I think I like what he said. If we have to learn our history from the movies at least let’s learn it deliberately, consciously, and with a capacity for critical reflection that will allow us to sift the true expression of humanity and the accurate reflection of the past from the simply moronic and mundane. Besides, that student’s response was much better than the student who came into my office later that day, looked around, and said, “you have a lot of books in here....I don’t like to read.” Ah progress.

Broadcast by Jonathan Nashel on January 04, 2002
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