Prompted by Tom Sutpen's insightful thoughts about Kiss Me, Stupid, posted at Illusion Travels By Streetcar, I finally watched this 1964 film by Billy Wilder.  Posing as a sex farce, the movie is actually a poisoned-pen letter to the American male — full of bitterness and bile.

As Tom pointed out, Wilder's great sex comedies, like The Apartment, poke fun at the puerile obsessions of American males, but also offer humane female characters who forgive them and to a degree redeem them.  The dynamic is at work in Wilder's darker dramas, too, like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, but the women don't forgive in those films and the men are not redeemed — they are simply released by death.

There is bitterness and bile directed towards weak, collapsed males in all these films — it's just a question of what, if anything, balances the equation.

Kiss Me, Stupid is unique in that the equation is hardly balanced at all, and in only the most perfunctory way — and yet it is, nominally, a comedy.  “Kiss Me, Stupid” might serve as the title for most Wilder films about collapsed males.  Its frankness as the actual title of this one seems to reflect Wilder's inability to restrain his contempt for the modern male to any degree at all.

The film opens with a nightclub performance in Las Vegas by “Dino”, played by Dean Martin, parodying — or incarnating, depending on your point of view — his stage persona as a horny, alcoholic hipster.  He delivers some patter about the showgirls in the act — cheap sexual innuendo masquerading as humor.  The waiters looking on laugh like jackasses at the prurient jokes — the exaggeration of their stupidity is disturbing, totally undercutting the “glamor” of the show and the venue.

It's a kind of set-up for the rest of the film — suggesting that anyone who finds it funny is an imbecile.  Wilder has moved from despising the American male to despising his audience.  It's a radical act — perhaps not entirely conscious.  Kiss Me, Stupid is a film that seems to be powered on some level by a hatred that's gotten out of control.

The women in the film are decent, sensible human beings — like Miss Kubelick in The Apartment.  They offer a running commentary on the brutish imbecility of the men.  But for once Wilder doesn't give us any avenue leading towards sympathy with the men.  “Dino” remains a cartoon boor.  The doltish protagonist is played by Ray Walston, who lacks the charm of a Lemmon or a Ewell, which took the edge off of their stupidity in The Apartment and The Seven Year Itch, respectively.

Kiss Me, Stupid ends with the Walston character “humanized” by his encounter with a good-hearted prostitute called Polly the Pistol, played by Kim Novak, but the change isn't convincing — it plays like a sop to audience expectations that comes too late, unfelt and under-dramatized.  You sort of hate his wife for settling for a dimwit like him, even if she's found a way to manipulate him into being an acceptable mate.

The film is commonly regarded as an unpleasant failure, but it fails only because Wilder didn't follow his venomous vision to its uttermost ends.  But how could he — at least in what purported to be a mainstream comedy?  You get a feeling in Double Indemnity that Wilder truly hates his lead couple — not for their criminality but for their bad taste, cheap banter, infantile desires.  In a drama, he could resolve this hatred by killing them.  In the “comic” world of Kiss Me, Stupid he has to leave his dumb males in their nihilistic hell.  The barely perceptible glimmer of hope, of redemption, he felt compelled to offer them reads as a confession of artistic bafflement by Wilder.

You can't kill off every collapsed male in America, after all — but for most of Kiss Me, Stupid you get a feeling that's just what Wilder wishes he could do.  He settled for humiliating and degrading them, and in the process humiliating and degrading anyone who might find their predicament amusing.

[Be warned — from this point on in my tableau-by-tableau march through Godard's Vivre Sa Vie there are spoilers which might affect your enjoyment of the film if you haven't seen it.]

The film's fifth tableau is titled “The boulevards — The first man — The room”.  It begins with shots, from a moving vehicle and on tracks, of streets where prostitutes are plying their trade.  Nana, walking along one of these streets, is approached by a man who asks if she's available.  She says yes and takes him to a cheap hotel room.

She closes the curtains of the first-floor room, which looks out onto the street, and prepares to have sex with the man.  Nana has committed herself to a life of prostitution.

The room is shabby but clean.  The man is not unattractive and behaves well at first, giving Nana more money than they've agreed on because she doesn't have change for his 5000-franc note.

But then, when he embraces her, he tries to kiss her, and she resists this, withholding the one intimacy prostitutes traditionally refuse to sell.  (This reminds one of Goethe's great line — “The kiss is the ultimate sexual experience.”)

The tableau ends with Nana's struggle against the kiss still in progress.  She has been cool and businesslike up to this point — now she looks disgusted and afraid.  This dynamic is part of Nana's character as presented in the film.  She seems a bit dim, a bit cold about selling herself, but also pathetic.  The pathos is all the more powerful for this — she's not a whore with a heart of gold, just a rather ordinary woman of no special distinction, beyond her good looks.  She seems incapable of estimating where her path in life will actually lead her, morally and emotionally.  This enables us to preserve our pity for her.

Next:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 6

Previously:

The third tableau, or chapter, of Godard's Vivre Sa Vie is primarily about the cinema.  It begins with a transitional scene connecting it to the preceding tableau which showed us the protagonist Nana's working life.  She returns home but cannot get the key to her apartment from the concierge, because she owes back rent.  We know from the preceding tableau that Nana has lent 2000 francs to a co-worker, who wasn't at work that day.

Cast adrift in the city, Nana meets a friend by chance on the street, the guy she was breaking up with in the first tableau, who shows her some pictures of his child, apparently a child he had with Nana.  Her only relationship with the child now seems to be through these photographs, through images.

Nana refuses an offer of dinner from her ex because she wants to go to the movies.  She goes to see Carl Dreyer's silent film La Passion de Jeanne Arc at the Jeanne d'Arc theater.  She's sitting with a date, who has his arm around her, but she is utterly absorbed in the film.

Godard shows us a relatively long passage from the film, cut into his own film — in other words we don't see this passage as images playing on the movie theater screen, which is never shown in the shots inside the theater.  Thus, when Godard cuts from Dreyer's extreme close-ups of the suffering Joan about to meet her death to a close-up of Nana reacting emotionally to the images, a kind of equivalence is suggested, on two levels.

Nana is identifying with the character Joan . . . but Anna Karina, playing Nana, is also mirroring or doubling the actress Falconetti, playing Joan.  Karina is entering the history of film as an image.

After the film, Nana ditches her date, whom she's apparently just hustled for the admission price to the movie, and goes to meet another man at a café.  We've seen Nana “servicing” a male customer at the record shop — now we've seen her trading a little groping for a movie ticket.  In the first tableau, her boyfriend accuses her of breaking up with him because he doesn't have enough money — and she doesn't exactly deny it.  Godard is establishing the idea of her persona, especially her sexual persona, as a marketable commodity.

Nana and the new guy she meets sit beside each other at the café bar, like Nana and her soon-to-be ex in the first tableau, but they face each other, and we can see their faces.  The camera tracks back and forth between them nervously, mostly keeping them in a two-shot but one that's constantly reconfigured.

This nervous, apparently unmotivated tracking makes us conscious of the camera, even as Nana and the man discuss photographs he's going to take of her to help her break into the movies, which is her dream.

The ironies grow elaborate.  Godard has already put Karina into the movies, into this movie among others, and suggested an equivalence between her image and some of the most iconic images in all of cinema — but the character Nana is somewhere far behind the actor playing her.

Curiously, this dissonance doesn't disrupt either our sympathy for the character or our delight in Godard's abstract aesthetic gambits.  The two levels of meaning play against each other in a logical and beautiful way, like two counterpointed lines in a Bach fugue.

Next:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 4

Previously:

The second tableau or chapter of Godard's Vivre Sa Vie consists of a single very complex shot.  It opens on a counter in a record shop where the film's lead character, played by Anna Karina, works.  She is servicing a customer, checking to see for him whether the shop has albums by various artists in stock.

At one point she has to move to some bins on a lower level of the shop and the camera pans and tracks with her as she does.  In the course of this she chats with two of her co-workers, asking about another employee who's absent from work and who owes her money.

She finds the record the customer wants and returns to the counter as the camera pans and tracks back to the original shot and then tracks along further in the same direction to the cash register, where the transaction is completed by the cashier.  The camera tracks and pans back the other way, losing Karina, revealing now a shop window across the street.  Continuing to track and pan the camera comes to rest on a view of a busy Paris street seen through the doorway of the record shop.

Next:

VIVRE SA VIE — TABLEAU 3

Previously:

4-walling suddenly seems like an interesting alternative to traditional distribution, since theater owners still need people marching past their concession stands and since the costs of 4-walling have fallen to within the capacities of independent producers — if they can figure out how to do it right.

A free concert in a park or shopping mall might be the modern equivalent — or even a parade, done in collaboration with some local group with a connection to the film's subject matter.  We're talking about relatively small towns here, places where a little free entertainment is a big event . . . but the train circuses played lots of relatively small towns and made most of their money from them.

We're also talking about films that don't cost too much to make — ones with budgets in the hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars range, not the millions-of-dollars range.  And that means they have to be really, really good films.

The theater experience needs to become an event as well — with the stars of the film in attendance, programs, ushers in character costumes (volunteers from the local high school drama club).  And I mean “stars of the film”, not “stars” in the current sense of the word, because such stars won't show up in Cheyenne, Wyoming for a live appearance in a shopping mall or at a rodeo.  All the creators of the films of the future will need to think of themselves as part of the traveling circus that the film will become.

The online communities that coalesce around certain films also need flesh-and-blood equivalents — a convenient venue, for example, where people who've just seen a film can assemble to discuss it and to bond.  Such assemblies would be mighty engines of the word-of-mouth advertising that any film needs to succeed — and create the core of future audiences for future films from the same artists.  These assemblies are also opportunities for merchandising — just like the CD and T-shirt tables at rock concerts.

Theater owners used to cook up ballyhoo like this, with the help of the studios, even back in the days when almost everybody in America went to the movies every week.  Now that more and more people are declining to go to the movies, such exploitation has become critical.

Producers of small films need to wake up and take charge.  The days are past when you could just feed your movie into the distribution machine (if you were lucky), do a little press in the big media centers, and hope for the best from newspaper reviewers and the audience.

We need to revive the spirit of Barnum (above) — who would do anything, and I mean anything, to drum up interest in his attractions, at his museum or in the rings of his traveling circuses.  He realized that ballyhoo is itself an entertainment, an art form — that people love to be bamboozled out of their pocket cash if the bamboozling is daring and spectacular enough . . . and if the first dose of it is free.

Ironically, in this virtual age of ours, the time has come for showmen to get back out on the road — to feed the virtual world with real-life hokum.  This is what musicians have come to realize — their money today is made on the road, in live concerts, in providing unique experiences for their fans.

Of course, it will all be meaningless if the attractions, the movies, don't work for people — but that's another advantage of being out on the road.  You find out what people want and don't want in the most direct and sometimes brutal ways.  They teach you what kind of movies to make — in a way no focus group or demographic analysis ever could, and certainly in a way no studio executive trying to parse the box-office returns in Variety ever could.