HOW THE WEST WAS WON

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How the West Was Won is not really the frontier epic it aspires to be but a curious sort of Western-themed variety spectacle, a cavalcade of “attractions”, something like Buffalo Bill's Wild West.  On its original release, the central attraction was the Cinerama process in which it was presented — a three-projector system which wrapped a super-widescreen image nearly halfway around a theater for a grandly immersive experience.



It was genuinely enthralling, as I can attest from having seen it in that process twice, once as a kid when it came out and once nearly forty years later as an adult.  On both occasions I got lost in the hallucinatory beauty of the images, and didn't think too much about the intertwined narratives they served.



The vertical seams between the three strips of film which made up the Cinerama image were apparent in the original process, although one tended to ignore them after a while.  Recently, though, the film has been transferred to DVD with the seams digitally removed, more or less completely, which allows one to experience the images in a new way.  Of course on a TV screen they don't have the visceral impact they did in the theatrical Cinerama presentation, but one can still appreciate how beautifully they are composed, and the film's narrative content assumes a new prominence.



The film is episodic, covering a wide range of locales and time periods, but the episodes are all linked by characters established in the opening section (above) whose descendants carry on the drama through time.  The script, which won an Academy Award, is very skillfully constructed in this regard, so that the sweep of the narrative never feels chaotic.  It does fall apart at the end, though, in the final of the five major episodes, “The Outlaws”.

This section of the film had script problems and was revised and re-shot in parts during production.  What's left is a halfhearted reprise of High Noon, culminating in a shoot-out on a moving train, which mixes stunning location work with crappy backscreens in which the principal actors do daring things in a studio.

It's an unfortunately underwhelming end to the big show.



The film has an all-star cast, with actors that are often not really suited to their roles, chosen instead for their iconic stature as stars of the Western genre.  Jimmy Stewart is way too old for the role he plays as Carroll Baker's love interest, and Gregory Peck is way too staid for his role as a feckless gambler.  But it doesn't matter — these stars are just being paraded before us for nostalgic purposes, the way an aging Buffalo Bill was driven around the arena at his shows in a carriage when he was no longer able to sit a horse comfortably.



Debbie Reynolds is given several song and dance numbers which are stylistically closer to scenes in a musical than to musical interludes in a Western drama — but again, it doesn't matter.  This is, as I say, a variety show, not a coherent epic.



The biggest problem with the casting is that George Peppard, bland and unconvincing as a man of action, must take the baton for the final dash to the film's finish line, and he's not up to it.  He is asked to carry the anti-climactic climax — something a star of real charisma might have done — but instead only contributes more mediocrity to the perfunctory conclusion.



Still, all in all, it's a most unusual and entertaining variety show, elevated often to a higher level by the stunning images of classic Western iconography — river rafts and steamboats, wagon trains, Indian attacks and a buffalo stampede, steam locomotives and galloping bandits — all brilliantly shot in the real wide-open spaces of the real American West.  In those rare moments when the drama works on its own terms, the combination of spectacle and emotion is thrilling.

[In a follow-up post, here, Paul Zahl reflects on one of those rare moments, in the John Ford-directed section of the film, with photographs of the location where it was filmed, which Paul recently visited.]

THE ZAHL FILE: REPORT FROM THE ROAD — GRASSY ISLAND

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Paul Zahl writes of more mysteries explored on his recent trip to Reelfoot Lake in western Tennessee:

This was taken from the northwest edge of the lake.  I asked my guide Jeff Earp if
this were where the evil deed recounted in Irvin S. Cobb's 1937 mystery entitled
“Judge Priest Turns Detective” was done.  He had not read the story,
but when I told him the mechanism of Cobb's plot, he suggested that it
would have occurred in the one spot on the Lake where the depth is down
to 60 feet, where even now it is possible to drive a boat fast.  Cobb
accepted the 100-year-old local story that in that spot, which Cobb
called “Big Hole”, great prehistoric fish lived at depth and in
tunnels, tunnels by which they could escape into the Tennessee River if
Reelfoot Lake were ever drained.

When the murderer strangled his
victim in “Judge Priest Turns Detective”, the criminal pushed the body
into Big Hole.  The body did not surface for weeks, and by then . . . the
catfish had got it.

CATALOG RAISONNÉ ON WILLIAM BOUGUEREAU

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If you are, like me, a fanatical admirer of the much mocked and despised 19th-Century academic painter William Bouguereau, you will want to save your pennies for an extraordinary new work devoted to his art, the Catalog Raisonné On William Bouguereau.  It's a massive, and very expensive, two-volume biography and catalog raisonné listing and reproducing all his known paintings.  Beautifully printed and bound, with hundreds and hundreds of mostly excellent color reproductions, it will take your breath away.

Devoting this much attention to Bouguereau is almost an act of defiance — a way of asserting his importance in the face of decades of scholarly scorn.  His popularity has never needed defending, despite the unwillingness of museums to show his work throughout most of the 20th Century.  People have always loved his images.  Now, prices for his paintings are escalating at an astonishing rate, and the Musée d'Orsay has recently acquired five new works by him, including L'Assault, pictured above, and Compassion, pictured below, which will hang on permanent display with the two the museum already owned.



I pre-ordered a copy of the Catalog ages ago, at a greatly reduced price, and waited patiently as its deadline for publication was constantly pushed back.  I confess there were times when I wondered if the project was all a fantasy.  But the set arrived a couple of days ago, and it was worth the wait.

Today, post-publication, the set will cost you $350 — from the Art Renewal Center, which co-sponsored the project — and many months of your time to browse and read.  (If the price is too daunting, the Art Renewal Center plans to donate copies to libraries, so you'll be able to get your hands on one for free eventually.)  The Catalog may spark a reappraisal of Bouguereau's work in the art world, or not — that hardly matters.  It will certainly expose many new people to the work, and promote a consequent suspicion of the judgments of the art world.

Bouguereau's visions are meticulously conceived and executed, and often quite mad.  They are endlessly astonishing and entertaining, and sometimes moving.  They have a regard for sentiment and a connection to popular taste that most painting lost in the 20th Century, but will reclaim someday.  Bouguereau is not about the past — he's about the future.  Get to know his work and you'll see why.  Virtuosity combined with pleasure and surprise never goes out of style, at least not for too long.

GOODBYE, LIBERACE

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Dancer and filmmaker Celia Rowlson-Hall (website here) was in Las Vegas briefly this week — we managed to make it to the Liberace Museum just before its imminent closing.

Above, Celia channels the spirit of the Las Vegas showgirl.

THE ZAHL FILE: REPORT FROM THE ROAD — KEEPING WATCH

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Paul writes, of his recent trip to the area around Paducah, Kentucky:

Two Bald Eagles surveying the scene over their Winter
flyway and nesting ground, Reelfoot Lake, in northwestern Tennessee.   I saw four Bald Eagles that morning.  They are noble birds — all four of them took flight after this photograph
was taken, slicing through the air.  They circled us and then took up
new sentinel positions to the left, on the shore.

I can't believe how big they look . . .

THE ZAHL FILE: REPORT FROM THE ROAD — REELFOOT LAKE

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Indefatigable pilgrim Paul Zahl recently traveled to the area around Paducah, Kentucky to visit a few places enchanted in his imagination.  Reelfoot Lake has associations with Irvin S. Cobb, a once celebrated American author on whose stories John Ford based two films.  Paul writes of the picture above:

I took this in the early morning — Bald Cypresses standing out
of Reelfoot Lake in western Tennessee near the Kentucky border.  The “umbrella” root-balls are growing on top of the thousands of original
cypresses that were submerged in a single night during one of the “New Madrid” earthquakes of 1811 and 1812 — a series of three massive temblors that probably exceeded 7 points on the Richter Scale.  John James Audubon witnessed one of the quakes, during
which he said the earth “rolled” in waves.

Irvin S. Cobb set his famous horror story
“Fishhead”, which is believed to have influenced H. P. Lovecraft
directly, on Reelfoot Lake, conjecturing a school of human-sized
catfish that drag the two villains to their deaths at the end of the
story.

For more on Irvin S. Cobb, check out Paul's podcast on the writer here.

WILSON

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Wilson is a new graphic novel by Daniel Clowes, the author of Ghost World.  Clowes is one of the great fiction artists of our time, and Wilson is his darkest work to date.

It's a sort of existentially bleak version of Winsor McCay's Little Sammy Sneeze, a strip McCay drew in the years before he created the legendary Little Nemo.

In McCay's strip, Sammy finds himself in a new place and situation every week, and as events unfold around him he starts a build-up to a sneeze, which explodes eventually with awesome power, severely disrupting or destroying everything around him.  It's a strange idea for a strip, not really funny but oddly satisfying, in an anarchic way.



Wilson consists of self-contained one-page episodes all featuring a single protagonist, Wilson, a lost soul.  Wilson has insights into life or hopeful encounters with other people all of which explode by the end of the page in an outburst of self-deception or cruel narcissism.  As these emotional dead ends accumulate, Clowes constructs a portrait of genuine and utterly hopeless despair.  Kierkegaard said that “the precise quality of despair is that it is unaware of itself”, and such is Wilson's.



It's not satisfying on any level, but rather heartbreaking, infuriating, sickening.  It sucks us into the black hole of Wilson's psyche and makes us feel that there's no way out of it.  It's slightly terrifying.



A life's narrative emerges from the self-contained episodes, a story of sorts, and they are varied by being done in contrasting styles, usually in Clowes's familiar naturalistic mode, using color panels, but sometimes in black-and-white pages and sometimes in crude comic-book caricature style.  The variations only serve to emphasize the relentless coherence of Wilson's spiritual pathology.

It's a profound meditation on contemporary angst and one of the finest of all graphic novels.

A. I.

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When I walked out of A. I. I truly didn’t know what to make of it.  It's an extremely weird movie, and I couldn’t decide if it was weird on purpose or by mistake.

My first reaction was that it had a lot of interesting ideas that weren't really thought through or dramatized — that it was just a kind of philosophical mess, and very cold.  But then I started to wonder . . . and I couldn’t stop wondering.

I think Kubrick must be responsible for the emotional subversiveness of the film — you root for a robot, while all the human characters seem hollow and lost.  It's like a world where humans have put all their dreams into machines and are empty as a result.



David doesn't get to act like a real hero, and you can’t fully trust his passion, because it's created, “artificial” . . . and yet his quest is so pathetic, and he's so brave and hopeless, that eventually it seems very touching (partly because Osment's performance as David is so brilliant.)

I began to think that perhaps it's not a statement about machines versus humans at all, but just a fiendish Kubrick trick, a way to talk about parenthood and divorce and self-obsession — about the way some modern parents see kids as toys or consumer goods, reflections of themselves, disposable when inconvenient.



There has certainly never been a more powerful metaphor for a child's need for unconditional love from a parent — David stares into the face of the Blue Fairy for two thousand years! — and to see that need unfulfilled is very disturbing.  And maybe, I thought, it's also some kind of cautionary tale about humanity surviving only as an echo, in the machines it has created.  And maybe, too, the robots are symbols of the stories we tell, and these stories are our only true reality . . .



A few days after seeing the film I remembered that while watching it I associated the animatronic teddy bear with an Ewok.  There are so many movie references in the film.  The fake forest with the mist and the moon from E. T., the “Flesh Fair” from the Road Warrior series, the gigolo echoing Clockwork Orange, The Wizard of Oz, of course, in many places, Titanic and Close Encounters (and even 2001) at the end . . . and Pinocchio and The 400 Blows throughout.



I started thinking about the connection between A. I. and E. T., which Spielberg has always said was about divorce, his own parents' divorce, explaining that when his world busted apart he took refuge in fantasy and sci-fi, and it saved him.  But in the end he had to say goodbye to it — to let E. T. go.  On one level, A. I. is about how hard it it is — maybe how impossible it is — to let go of such fantasies, which linger in our psyches the way the robots haunt the humans.  All the robots are like fairytale characters, simple and unchanging, and noble — even Jude Law, whose desire to please women is so sweet and heartfelt.  But they aren't real, so in the world of A. I. we see what happens when we we abandon our kids to Disney, use the TV as a babysitter.  We make it impossible for our kids to be “real”, which we can only do by loving them and spending time with them.



A friend of mine knows some young parents in Pennsylvania for whom having kids is just something extreme to “do”, like getting a tattoo or a body piercing, something to make life more “real” . . . but A. I. warns what happens when we want to be loved unconditionally without feeling the responsibility to love unconditionally in return . . . we create robot children, with yearnings that can never be fulfilled.

In some ways, A. I. is a horror film version of E. T..



I think it was kind of cool, in a fiendish way, to relate the teddy bear visually to an Ewok.  I loved the Ewoks and I loved the teddy bear.  Just one more example, I think, of telling us that the robots are our dreams and fantasies.

I was literally raised on TV.  I grew up in a household where the TV was turned on in the morning and never turned off until the last person went to bed, even if no one was in the room with it.  But all this is different for Spielberg because of his parents' divorce.  Faced with the terror of that he turned to his fantasies for salvation, and they saved him, but only temporarily.  He had to let E. T. go and learn how to make it in real life.  I think maybe A. I. is a tragic vision of the impossibility of that for a child scarred by divorce or abuse, by what seems (at least at the time) to be a withdrawal of a parent's love.



This all makes more and more sense to me in terms of A. I..  We give our kids to TV and movies and video games, then we get angry at the TV and movies and video games for not raising them right, just as the orgas in A. I. are angry at the mechas — not because the mechas are less human than they are, but because they are more human . . . as the characters in fairytales are more human, more real, more present than many kids' parents today.



The question that’s so hard to answer about the film is “Why can't we like it?” — why is it so disturbing and unsettling?  One possible answer is that we aren't meant to like it — that it's a tragedy . . . reminding us that the only thing that creates the wonder of childhood, or goodness in a person, is a parent's unconditional love, and if that is withdrawn, it can't be recaptured, except in a fleeting moment of fantasy.  In a way, it is only David's intense, heroic need for his mother's love that “creates” the moment at the end.  This is the only reward Spielberg offers him in the film — the memory of his need, that survives everything, civilization, humanity itself.  It's a way of saying that long after our world is gone, the one thing that will echo through time is a child's need for love.

In that sense, the movie is meant to make us afraid of failing children, to hate ourselves for failing children — to judge everything by how we treat our children.  In this day and age, that doesn't make for a fun film.



In this sense, Spielberg is criticizing his own movies, to the degree that they may seem to offer fantasy as a redemption of the world we have made.  Fantasy is just a bandage for the wounds of an unhappy childhood, wounds that never heal.  It would have been so easy for Spielberg to make us cheer for David, to show him doing heroic things, to restore him to his mother forever, to have her make everything all right.  But he refuses to do this — and we hate him for it, hate the movie for it.  But maybe that's just a way of displacing the hatred we're meant to feel for ourselves, for what our society has become on the most basic level.



The movie thus becomes a deconstruction of Spielberg's own work, a deconstruction of corporate cinema, for selling us this bandage as a cure.  And this is bound to make us angry, because we love Spielberg, we love corporate cinema.  But think what it meant for Spielberg himself to execute this deconstruction — because he probably loves Spielberg movies even more than we do.  E. T. was what Spielberg, the child in Spielberg, created to take the place of his absent father.  Perhaps only finding a substitute father in Kubrick allowed Spielberg to really let E. T. go — to upend it, to subvert our memories of it.



If Kubrick and Spielberg were doing this on purpose, then perhaps A. I. does become one of the greatest movies made in our time — an analysis of the narcotic cinema that distracts us from real things.  If they did it by accident, then it still might be one of the most important films made in our time.  It opens a way to the future of movies, not by showing us the future of movies but simply by blasting an opening through the movies of today.

A friend of mine said the audience he was in laughed when the teddy bear climbed up on the bed at the end.  It was ridiculous and pathetic, totally anticlimactic.  But maybe we are laughing at ourselves, maybe Spielberg is laughing at himself, maybe Kubrick was laughing at Spielberg.  We thought the Ewoks would save us.

SEVEN SAMURAI

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Watching Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece for the fifth or sixth time, in the wonderful DVD edition from Criterion, I finally realized what it's all about — not war, not courage, not sacrifice, but character.  It's a movie about how to live.

The down-at-heels samurai who get recruited to defend a village of farmers, for some rice and for the hell of it, have trained themselves meticulously for a profession which is no longer in demand.  Their dream of attaining wealth and status through fighting has vanished.  Isolated and impoverished, their kind is often hunted down, robbed and killed by the peasants they used to dominate.  These samurai take on a job which their leader tells them “could be the one that kills us”.  They are truly past hope, even of surviving.  But that's not the end of it — only the beginning.  I'm reminded of a moment in a Terence Rattigan play, pointed out to me by my friend Paul Zahl, in which a character is asked, “What is there beyond hope?”  He answers, “Life.”  So it is in Seven Samurai.



In facing and accepting a life without hope, the seven warriors are able to live it to the fullest.  They find out, at last, who they really are, and they have a chance to prove who they really are to others, to us.

The farmers they set out to save turn out to be hardly worth saving — this is not a tale about defending the good, the innocent, the worthy but weak.  The samurai come to have affection for the farmers in spite of their imperfections, with the full knowledge that the farmers would betray them at a moment's notice if it served their interests.



It is altruism for its own sake, just as fighting the bandits is warfare for its own sake.  The odds are never calculated too finely.  If they were, everybody in this film would just go out and hang themselves, as one hysterical farmer suggests doing at the beginning of the film, when warding off the bandits seems impossible.

Most importantly, this is not a movie about redemption, of the sort that almost every Hollywood film for the past twenty years has promoted.  It is not the story of some losers who, by hard work and gumption, achieve the goals they have set for themselves, redeem their lot in life.  Nothing is changed by the epic battle fought here — it has not made the life of farmers better as a general rule, nor has it fulfilled the thwarted dreams of the samurai.  Something changes, or is revealed — a terrible beauty is born, in Yeats's phrase — but it's all interior, some might say spiritual.



There is nothing programmatic about the existential gesture of the samurai — each one faces hopelessness in an individual way, one with philosophical calm, one with steady resignation, one with cold competence, one with good cheer, one with irony, one with idealism, one with self-hatred.  Each response offers its own strength to the collective, and it is the collective acceptance of and respect for difference which make this aggregation of strength possible.



It is a warrior's code, on one level — there is no fudging things in mortal combat, good intentions don't matter, illusions can be fatal.  One faces the world as it is, one plays the hand one is dealt.  But the code of these hopeless samurai, a warrior's code divested of self-interest and expectation, transcends the profession of arms.  It seems to suggest a way of living for all men and women — the only way of really living, really being alive, in a brutal, ugly world.



Once, in a time of despair about his life and career, and perhaps about his faith as well, Bob Dylan says that these words popped into his mind — “Here I will stand, whether God will deliver me or not.”  He says that his despair immediately vanished.



To make a stand without hope is where life begins, and eternity as well.  In this film the seven samurai, the ones who live and the ones who die, become immortal.