An example of image pastiche…
I’m not exactly sure why I like the number 10. I suppose John Lennon was right when he said the number 9 was perfect because it is the highest number. I’m actually a fan of the number 7, as I was born on the seventh, and finding other people born on the seventh is actually rare. I do think instead of focusing on the number 10 I should be focusing on the word decade. I spend a dramatic amount of my life studying history, and the decade seems to be that which defines us recently. In the Ancient World, nothing changed for thousands of years. It took the Renaissance to really wake the world out of it, excepting Asia, which lie for another five centuries. By the 1700s, it was clear that centuries could be defined by thought, or fashion, or other trends, but not remembered, as no one ever lived long enough for that. By the twentieth century, time and ‘progress,’ whatever that is, started moving fast enough that we could remember whole decades.
When I was in college, I remember reading a feminist history called “From the Front Parlor to the Back Seat” in which the courtship of women was recorded from 1910 to 1960. Women were respected once, it was said. Courted. Dated. Married. Then life started. Halfway through the century they were in the back seat of some boy’s car, giving away the only thing that made them unique. That long view of the twentieth century shook me. My grandmother was born in 1920. “During the Wilson Administration,” I would joke to my friends. She passed away in 2006. When she was born, barnstorming was an aerial sport. When she died, SpaceX announced it was going to make the moon a regular habit soon.
That wound up being delayed, but you get the drift. In that span of a lifetime, of a hundred years, what was it that made us remember the decade 1911-1920 as original as the one before it? How did we go from Victorian to Edwardian? We are aware of the Roaring Twenties. The Great Depression defines the 1930s. The Second World War and the Shoah is the cataclysm that divides the century in the 1940s. Every decade the past century is definable. Nameable. There are several markers to go by. Politics. Fashion. Sexual Culture. This year will mark the one hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States. Why can we do this in the 20th Century and no other? I’m sure many scholars have written tomes devoted to this subject. I haven't cared to research any of them. I’m just going to talk out of my ass, like I normally do, and say it is cinema.
Cinema is what defines our memory of each decade. Cinema is why the world started moving forward in terms of ten years, and not in the terms of centuries. Cinema is the ultimate art form because it is made in a time that is defined by that time. That’s why I choose each film in my second decade on the Super 70 Podcast to represent a single decade in American History. Each film is unique, but every film is. What does each film represent in our history? Racism. Sexism. Misogyny. Fear. Corruption. Hope. Futility. Nostalgia. Othering. Purpose. That is what defines the Super 70 Podcast’s Second Decade. That is what defines American History for it’s first hundred years on the silver screen.
Like everything else in our history, Buster Keaton was a complex individual. He was a genius choreographer who stuck to comedy and decided to do a film about the Lost Cause of the South. When he helped direct The General with Clyde Bruckman in 1926, there were still a multitude of Civil War veterans still attending the sixty-first anniversary of the war’s end… and some of them still weren’t too happy about it. The first films of our country made racism acceptable. Not just The General, but D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation from the previous decade, and even Gone With the Wind two decades later didn’t just ‘tolerate’ racism, but espoused a false history with the purpose of subjugating a long suffering minority of our population. If you think I am exaggerating, just head on over to www.boxofficemojo.com and look at Gone With The Wind’s all time adjusted for inflation position. Number One, with a bullet, with ONE POINT TWO TRILLION DOLLARS. Racism pays in America. This isn’t something that we didn’t know already. The NAACP protested The Birth of a Nation, as they protested The General. As they gave Hattie McDaniel shit over collecting her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Gone WIth the Wind while she was waiting for the honor in a separate...but equal I’m sure… section at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Racism still pays in America. Our President was elected on it.
As if racism was not bad enough to contemplate about ourselves, Ginger Rogers prances out on stage in the first two minutes of a film called “Golddiggers of 1933” with a silver dollar hanging over her vagina. What more symbolism do you need to prove women are not people but commodities? Still a non believer? What about when she looks into the camera and sings “we’re in the money, come on in, honey?” Throughout the film, rich men skirt chase women a quarter of their age and we are led to believe it is the woman's fault their sexuality is being valued and constantly discounted.
Mildred Pierce follows this up with an out and out hate fest of Joan Crawford’s working woman character of the same name. She’s so successful, we hate her. For taking our husband’s jobs. For taking their pride. Their masculinity. And in the end, they’re not even thankful for us fucking thier teenage daughter. And if that hypocrisy isn’t enough, we have insinuate the real reason Mildred is upset isn’t because her husband is sleeping with her daughter (which is okay, because after all Monti and Vida are not blood related) but because Mildred secretly wants her feminine daughter for herself. Incest is the worst accusation you can make of a person, and in this case it would be incest and pedophilia, and that’s what we thought of women in the forties. They are threats. And when we see threats, what do we do? Discredit them.
It is a woman that betrays Monti, and it’s a woman that betrays Miles in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1954) but the focus of that film isn’t necessarily sexism, which is pervasive even in that film, but rather fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of this Battlestation. Sorry. Wrong movie. Fear of everything, even your next door neighbor. My own son made it forty minutes in this film and turned to me with his fifteen year old mind and said “this movie is about communism, isn’t it?” Yes, it is, son, and about how paranoia, when we’re right, is even worse.
Paranoia is an undercurrent of The Graduate. Ben doesn’t trust anyone, especially if they are over thirty.. He doesn’t trust anything. He is surrounded by ‘plastics,’ a catch phrase from the late Sixties youth generation that signifies anything fake or phoney. And yet, smug little Ben surrounded by all the things his parent’s money can buy just can’t seem to treat women right, regardless of who they are. Ben’s duplicity in the Graduate underscores the duplicity of the liberal left in America. The film would be much more interesting if it were much more honest.
And if you want honesty, look no further than Gordon Parks, Jr.’s Super Fly. Not a single shot is on a set. You can pick up the dingy bedrooms, the dilapidated basements, the bombed out neighborhoods. Parks’ tale of drug dealer Youngblood Priest’s struggles trying to get out of the narcotics trade might be just as far-fetched as any spy movie in which Val Kilmer in The Saint, or Pierce Brosnan in The Heist, tries to get just ‘one more score,’ but the struggle against the man, and the inner-racial disharmony is real. Priest might just make it out alive, but how long he can stay clean is another film that was never made. It’s ending is just as uncertain as his life, and that makes this the most real film in the next decade.
The unreal, or dishonest, or the plastic if you like, angle of The Terminator presents a different challenge to the viewers of the 1980s. Though clothed in the hypermasculinity of the time, Cameron’s Greek God as killing machine is worse underneath the cheap plastic sunglasses. The real hero of this story is Sarah Conner, who not only perseveres in her struggle against man and machine, but against her own reservations as well. She emerges strong, victorious, and in complete charge of her body. In giving birth, she will save all mankind. This type of hope is what we needed in the 1980s after such four straight decades of soft serve dog shit.
Pastiche is defined on Wikipedia as “a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists. Unlike parody, pastiche celebrates, rather than mocks, the work it imitates.” No one is more skilled in the art of pastiche than celebrated director Quentin Tarantino, the former video rental clerk who has become grouped with Scorsese and Fincher as one of the greatest living film directors. Although Steven Soderbergh uses pastiche more masterly and effectively in telling a story, Tarantino’s original screenplays all emphasize character over the visual, other than Soderbergh’s other-way-around. Tarantino has been accused of not just using pastiche well, but too well, to the point of plagiarism, and if ever there is such a thing, there is no better person to point it out than Mike White of The Projection Booth Podcast. I will ask Mike to join us for more commentaries in the future. I hope he will consent.
No one has accused Ridley Scott of using pastiche. In fact, it might be the only thing he is not accused of. In Kingdom of Heaven we see a troubled storyline (a low born knight trying to make his way to heaven) hampered by a troubled time (three years after 9/11) and a troubled release (critics hated it and it's director’s cut). I asked Dave Anderson, who sat in on The Terminator podcast, to sit with me through this long, slow, slog of a film and help me understand why, why, for god sakes why did Ridley Scott make such glaring mistakes? And isn’t that what our country was doing in the ten years following 9/11?
Perhaps the greatest film from 2010-2019, or perhaps the greatest film of this Decade of podcasts, The Social Network in many ways exemplifies the direction western society is taking, iPhones firmly gripped in our hands. The tech giants have us by the balls, and they want the world. Why? Because they just can’t emote with that one girl they love. And isn’t that most people now, or at least most millenials? What kind of society are we in which we have to use code in order to express our emotional feelings with each other? The irony of Mark Zuckerburg, who appears to be a very withdrawn individual, creating a website that exemplifies the very nature of all ‘Social Networks’ we find online, is too rich to pass up. Coupled with Fincher’s bizarre sense of humor and a film crew that can pull off the most technical of shots, The Social Network is literally the nerds telling us the story of other nerds, and we love it.
I’m pretty sure the first film I saw with Dave Anderson was his laser disc copy of Clerks in Late 1996, early 1997. We watched it in his economy apartment in West Houston with another friend. This was after geology classes and constant bickering over the right Fleetwood Mac line up and whether or not Louis Malle was worth our time. We cooed when the Oyster Scene in Spartacus was put back in and just about passed out when Kubrick announced he needed more scenes for Eyes Wide Shut. We were Edwins, and we loved it. Somewhere in my files is a seventeen page email in which we argued point-by-point on whether Raging Bull was one of the greatest movies in the world, or just pure shit. Dave and I are nothing alike. We come from different neighborhoods, different backgrounds, have different interests, and though we used to work together, have very different careers now. But in the middle of all of that he’ll send me a Ringer Podcast on Roger Deakins and I’ll send him an article on Barry Lyndon that’s so good, he’d rather read that than watch the film again. Somehow, on this one thing, we just click. We don’t always agree. I hate Zoolander and Game of Thrones. He orders his Criterions by spine, which makes it damn near impossible for me to find anything. But we seem to understand why we disagree. And that might be the only thing we have in common. Oh yeah, we’re both white.
I asked Dave to help knock out some movies and then we chatted ‘live’ for a few episodes. The Terminator wasn’t perfect, and The Kingdom of Heaven was almost painful. But the Special Reports have their own charm and we’re getting better all the time. By the Social Network, we seem to have our shit together and he’ll be back for an indeterminate number of episodes in the future. He seems to get the Decade idea, and that’s worth exploiting.
The history of the United States as told through ten films was not easy, and it took forever, but it was well worth it. I got so wrapped up in this that I still haven’t finished my last two novels. Dave and I have planned out the next decade and he’s going to sit in a few. I’ve got a standing invitation to Mike White to come back for another episode, and I’ve got a couple more tricks of my sleeve. Stay tuned.
Thanks to you, the listener, for subscribing and occasionally transferring your free interest in my random thoughts on film to actually ordering my books online. How else am I moving copies in Manchester? It has to be the podcast. It’s been an interesting decade. I hope the next one will be just as entertaining. Namaste, Mariska Hartagay.