Movies in Literature Part 1: Walker Percy’s ‘The Moviegoer’ (further continued)

 

I found this intriguing comment on the sequence we have been looking at from The Moviegoer. It was posted beneath an article on the novel, on the New York Times online:

I grew up in New Orleans and attended college — or mostly didn’t — there as well. I’ve always thought the movie theater that Percy describes so well at the beginning of the book was the lonely movie theater next to the University of New Orleans on Elysian Fields. In Gentilly (where Binx lives).

Don’t bother Google Mapping it — it was replaced, pre-Katrina, by a Taco Stand (I think). I can’t remember what it’s name was.

It was a lonely little movie theater, not popular, not nice, not far from Lake Pontchartrain, and in fact I can remember when the wind was really whipping it up you could hear it shaking the walls of the theater unless you were watching some blood bath with supersonic Jet levels of sound.

I saw David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” there and this remains one of the frightening-est film experiences of my life. The film, the creepy guy down front, the howling wind, the absence of any real neighborhood life when the University wasn’t in session… it was, in its way, absolutely perfect.

Jude Bloom

I’m tempted to treat this comment as yet another text to be deciphered. There are certainly some interesting parallels with Percy’s writing as well as with my interpretation of Percy. I like that Jude emphasises the cinema as ‘lonely’ and talks of sounds as ’shaking the walls.’ Both are examples that hardly only claim to affirm the literal reality of the setting as described by Percy. They rather stake a claim on the affirmation of its spiritual and psychological truth-value. 

Yet this might be saying too much. Jude’s comments here made me think a little about my last two posts on The Moviegoer. I noticed particularly that there seemed to be something close to contradictory in the fact that I first chose to describe the sequence as ‘beautiful’, then, after presenting it, to dwell on its negative criticism of cinema and moviegoing. After all what did I find beautiful? Of course it was the description of cinema: of the process of going to the cinema and of the pleasures one can attain from this. And how could the sequence give me these feelings about cinema (and Jude too, since he likewise concludes a criticism of the ‘not nice’ “real” cinema by stating that it was ‘perfect’) while seemingly at the same time attempting to undercut cinema’s worth?

I’m not sure I can claim to have a definitive answer to this question but I think it’s an important one to consider. It reminds me in passing of the protagonist narrator in Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Underground as he notes that ‘There is pleasure in a toothache.’ It’s perhaps that the very fact of touching on real experience, however dark this may be, can have a positive effect – of making it real to us. This may even perhaps be literature’s main purpose.

Alternatively and just as likely, however, tho admittedly somewhat more banal, is the possibility that Jude and I are quite simply choosing to read against the grain, adding to the text our own passion for cinema. We are taking the pleasure without the toothache..

A third possibility, also highly likely I think, is that Percy wants us to identify with his protagonist’s happiness, aligning our own pleasure with his, but also wants to suggest its problems on a perhaps more subtle, as yet only partially noticeable level. This might suggest an approach with therapeutic aims, hoping to cure us of our affliction.

These are just tentative thoughts and I imagine will remain this way for some time. Please let me know what you think. Reading one, two or three?! Or a combination of two or three of these readings? Or something completely different?

p.s. Jude’s comment can be read in full here. His excellent website Bloom Radio can be found here.

The original sequence from The Moviegoer can be found here. My reading of this sequence can be found here.

 

Shopping and C******

 

I’m an avid fan of Christian Hayes’ Classic Film Show. My thoughts here have developed from and in response to some of those raised in his article The Obsessive Movie Collector: Space, Time and Videotapes. I particularly like Christian’s honesty. ‘You really shouldn’t be buying more movies – you haven’t even watched the ones you’ve got’ he says. ‘Sorry mom’, we respond. Then sheepishly, as if with a little grin he admits, ‘Well, if I’m honest, this weekend I..’

And he’s right. I doubt very much he and I are alone in having many more movies and books in our respective houses than we’re really going to watch or read anytime soon. Christian briefly brings up box sets – I think this is the thing that tips the balance for many of us.. They’re just so damned cheap. And yet each one leaves you with four or five more films you really want to watch but still haven’t. Each time you buy one.. The guilt mounts.. ‘I have too much stuff and no space!’

I’m going to leave aside Christian’s emphasis on collecting, which may be more his thing than mine. I want to talk about shopping and… charity. Like many people these days it is an extremely rare occasion that I buy either books or movies at full price. The reason for this is a combination of having only a moderate amount of money and having a certain degree of pride at being good at sniffing out a deal. I go online, yes, and things are always cheaper. But mostly I go to charity shops. 

In both cases – but particularly the latter – the possibility of buying cheaply comes with an important added prospect. Chance. When you can afford to buy something on the hope that it might be interesting you discover things that, before, would have been out of sight, or perhaps visible only on the periphery. Now they sit on your shelf. You glance up at the dense book called Social Theory and all of a sudden you’ve read a chapter on Hegel and you’re thinking dialectically and feeling very clever. Then you notice the kids’ book that a friend, who’s a schoolteacher, told you was quite special and it turns out to be sharp and breaks your heart. And then again you read a collection of stories because it has Louise Brooks on the cover..

The kids’ book was The Boy With the Striped Pyjamas. I’m going to let you guess about the short stories – Any ideas? I picked up The Moviegoer from a charity shop, too. I’d never heard of Walker Percy. Just a few examples..

The book Close-Ups (pictured above) set me back £1.50 in a PDSA shop today – it is A4, over 600 pages long and includes writing by industry figures from Hollywood’s Golden Age - writers, directors etc – on the stars of the Golden Age (as well as unfortunately ‘beyond’.) Most books in charity shops are not quite this good value! And, thinking realistically, many of these books I buy remain on my bookshelf untouched. Yet saving money has nothing to do with what I’m talking about here. In fact I sometimes like to imagine the duds as counteracting the successes, so that I don’t really save much money, as it makes me feel less as though I’m ’stealing from the charities.’

Even if I had the money to buy books and films in bulk from mainstream bookstores this kind of chance occurrence simply wouldn’t occur to the same degree.. Firstly, almost all the books I buy in charity shops are simply not available in the mainstream bookstores. Secondly, the shelving is set out to avoid random chance and to set up instead calculated chances, e.g. you’re tricked into only buying recent fiction with special ‘3 for 2′ deals, rather than anything older. (I sometimes feel a little wary of the ‘If you like this, you’ll love these’ operation on Amazon for this reason- that it can deter you from looking elsewhere on the site.) And thirdly, sections of book genre are rigidly separated and subdivided.. Customers that are into ‘buses’ might get disturbed by ‘cars’ every once in a while but that’s about as crazy as it gets.. (The search engine system can cause the same problem on Amazon and the web in general since you decide what genre you want in advance, by the words you choose, rather than really browsing over everything on offer as you might in charity bookshops.) In contrast, charity shop staff are not paid so they are under no obligation to expend too great an amount of energy on shop layout etc!

So. It’s the combination of sheer bulk, obscure titles and genres of book outside one’s normal scope that matters. These three are what charity shops offer a reader who is willing to truly respect chance – to walk into a shop with no idea what kind of book he’ll come out with.. And videotapes too – I found the original 70s TV series of Survivors on video a few years ago. I’d never heard of it before – and it’s terrific. I got Timeslip recently too, another 70s TV series, which may not be as good I fear. That’s the risk you take, but it’s definitely worth it.. And who cares if you end up with too much stuff – just take the stuff you don’t want right back to a charity shop – preferably one that’s for a really good cause like the British Heart Foundation or Cancer Research – and let the whole thing come full circle. Happy buying!

p.s. You’ll notice I didn’t even mention second-hand bookshops in this article.. They didn’t even occur to me most of the way through writing – surely a sign of the times, since these can really only be found in Central London now. There’re some that say charity shops are taking over from second-hand bookshops and these people are not happy about this.. Let me know what you think on this anyone? Certainly there are more specialisms and rarities in second-hand bookshops. Tho on the flip-side they always seem to be a bit more expensive and they’re shelved more clearly – both of these lead to less possibilities for chance to have its effects.

Movies in Literature Part 1: Walker Percy’s ‘The Moviegoer’ (continued)

 

The above painting is Edward Hopper’s New York Movie (1939.) It is well known that Hopper was heavily influenced by cinema in his painting style.. This painting actually depicts a cinema (the screen is on the far left.) I’ll get to this in a little while, but first let’s start with The Moviegoer (1960) and the short sequence from the last post, which opens Walker Percy’s novel. If you haven’t read this yet I suggest going back to it before reading this post..

It’s a strange and fascinating sequence. Not unlike much of the rest of the novel, which seems to flit from one idea to the next without any apparent narrative ‘motivation.’ The motivation is instead very much psychological and seems to serve the purpose of placing us squarely within the psyche of this man and thus the mindset of a moviegoer. Which begs the question, What does Percy think goes on in the mind of a moviegoer?

Well o.k., firstly I’d better warn you that I think the answer is ‘pretty dark stuff’.. He seems to be comparing movies and moviegoing to denial (1.) Acting like a soldier at hearing of one’s brother’s death would surely not really be a good idea.. Let it all out, that’s what I say. And the memory of this injunction and his apparent contentedness to follow it reminds our protagonist of a movie he saw in which a character up and leaves his whole life behind to start anew. Admittedly it’s blamed on amnesia, but this was a typical trope of post-WW2 film noir, usually with some relation (however metaphorical) to a wish to forget, i.e. deny/repress, the traumatic experience(s) of WW2. It seems rather that cinema has become our character’s method, in his adult life, of continuing this controlling of his emotions (2.)

There is something extremely perverse about the fact that our character says ‘It was a fine night and I felt good. Overhead was the blackest sky I ever saw; a black wind pushed the lake toward us.’ I guess a black sky might denote a lack of rain clouds (!) tho this is hardly our initial impression. Rather the character seems to be relishing in darkness which I would say is the darkness of depression; just as Churchill famously called depression his ‘black dog.’ I like the way in this sequence the real world seeps into the movies in the sound of the waves and conversely the movies blare out to the outside world from the sidewalk speaker. This interchangeability of the two spaces finds a purpose when we realise that pleasure in ‘the blackest sky’ outside is for our character only an extension of the darkened room of a cinema. Our character’s moviegoing is presented as not merely a pastime, but as something that envelops his life, a dark sky of depression and denial, which he seems to relish.

I think this is the point at which we can begin to compare this sequence with Hopper’s painting above. Here we equally have a dark, slightly depressive cinema, its audience, on the left of the image, pointedly male and in shadow. And the girl on the right of the frame could very easily be Linda, the secretary in this sequence of The Moviegoer, all dressed up, with movie-star glamour, but with no-place to go – solemn and pointedly abstaining from watching the film. In New York Movie she’s an usherette; in The Moviegoer she’s the secretary and girlfriend – in both cases money has something to do with the situation, tho it is not necessarily everything..

Percy and Hopper even both choose to define their ladies by the colour blue (the usherette wears blue while Linda likes to dance in the Blue Room); in both cases this is in contrast to the male black. That said, I don’t think either of these texts have a great deal invested in an overt feminist critique of patriarchy. Yet they can both be read as to some degree sympathetic to women’s struggles within patriarchy, each for example emphasising the woman’s negative emotions in her situation. In fact they register these emotions in very similar ways since the description of Linda in The Moviegoer could just as easily be that of this usherette, as she ’stood by unhappily.’ The ’standing by’ is essential here, pointing to the characters as being on the periphery, i.e. outside of patriarchy.

The most significant difference between these texts is that in New York Movie we remain within the cinema – the real world is really only a mysterious possibility, up the stairs.. Indeed, as already noted, the usherette looks like a movie-star.. She’s in a way not an entirely real person, still part of the dream, like a ‘real’ person in a David Lynch movie maybe (3.) (That’s not to say that there isn’t enough reality in her for us to register her unhappiness, as noted in the previous paragraph, however; just that she comes across as significantly more trapped within the movie world.) I’d say The Moviegoer offers some level of contrast to this. Linda forces the protagonist’s hand as she gets him to take her dancing. And the crashing of the waves create a racket that you can hear even from inside the cinema. The waves offer up something more elemental than cinema and also don’t really lend themselves to being perceived as merely a projection of the protagonist’s mind, as the black sky does..

Each perspective has its purpose. In the Hopper painting, we are trapped in the insular, unified world of the cinema. The faux-glamour of the orange lights above the patrons is parodied by the simplicity of the orange lights by the usherette. Yet at the same time these may not be the opposites we first take them to be. The added orange of the curtains add to the sense of the cinema as a unified universe. This speaks of  the way in which Hollywood cinema can suck us into its narcissistic self-reflexivity, without first warning us that we may never get out.. 

In contrast, Percy in The Moviegoer wants us to be aware of an alternative to cinema and to the life of a moviegoer, which as I’ve suggested is perceived as one of denial. We can see this reflected in the style of this sequence, and indeed the book as a whole, with each paragraph seeming to jump on from the previous without filling in the gaps. This is a style that is maintained throughout the book, so that while it’s easy to read for plot, it’s much more difficult to actually understand its ideas (tho well worth the effort..) This jumping-ahead is just like the idea of a kid acting like a soldier, denying past trauma rather than working it through – simply ploughing on ahead without reflection. Since the book rigidly follows the thoughts of its central character, we come to recognise the falsity of this way of living.

A good example of Percy’s wish to show the world outside of the Hollywood image can be seen in the aberration of this cinema to which the protagonist and his girlfriend go. We hear it was built in the hope that it would be one part of a suburb that would grow out to meet it. The suburb never grew and the cinema is instead an absurd ‘pink stucco cube, sitting out in a field all by itself.’ Thus on the macrocosmic scale we see this idea of jumping-ahead without thought. It is a cinema, yet it is the antithesis of the glamour that Hollywood promises. It represents a dream that went horribly wrong..

 

(1) Percy appears to be influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre who argues in Being and Nothingness that the individual chooses projects for himself which can be harmful but which allow him a sense of identity, of his ‘being.’ Acting like a soldier might be considered one such ‘project’ for our protagonist, aimed at denying his emotions, and moviegoing is a ‘determination’ of this project, meaning that it is another project determined by the first project. Sartre would have us believe that this acting like a soldier is also a ‘determination’ of yet another project that is broader still and that this pattern of ‘determinations’ will lead us back ultimately to the character’s failure to attain ‘Authenticity’, which is the first ‘determinable’ causing a string of ‘determinations.’ This failure to attain ‘Authenticity’ Sartre labels ‘Bad Faith.’ In The Moviegoer the protagonist dramatises this concept of having a project as he returns continually to a rather vague project, which appears important to him but which is never really explained, which he calls ‘the Search.’ Percy may have developed Sartre’s ideas in his own direction.. A very easy, helpful and trustworthy summary of Sartre’s Existential Psychoanalysis can be found here.

(2) Incidentally, in Paul Auster’s Oracle Night the central character, an author, describes a very similar scenario as appearing as a minor aside-story in Dashiell Hammett’s novel of The Maltese Falcon, which never made its way into John Huston’s film.. I think it’s not amnesia but a near-death experience that causes the character Flitcraft to change his life, but there is a similarly bourgeois conclusion and a similar existentialist emphasis on this hope for a change being false, a case of ‘Bad Faith.’ Auster’s fictional novelist then writes his own version of the Flitcraft story in which the man ends up getting himself locked inside an underground nuclear bunker with the only key that could get him out on a man who has just died on the operating table. It’s tempting to imagine that Auster was thinking of this passage from Percy’s novel.. Or even that Percy was thinking of this section from Hammett.. Other films in Percy’s novel are named but this one is not, could Percy be playing with the relationship between literature and film? And does Auster know this? Is Auster quoting Percy, quoting Hammett while thinking of Huston. The answer to all of this is very likely no. But it gives me more than enough pleasure that the possibility exists..

(3) Thanks to Todd Swift for his suggestion of a link to David Lynch in this painting, which can be found here.

Movies in Literature Part 1: Walker Percy’s ‘The Moviegoer’

 

As you’ve probably guessed from the title this post is to be the first in a series offering up sequences of fiction writing that will be of value to those of us with a love of and an interest in cinema.

The young man with his leg outstretched in the photo is Walker Percy when he was a freshman at the University of North Carolina, queueing to see a movie. You don’t normally find photos of the artist before they were famous as striking or as fitting as this. I’m also always a sucker for old photos of cinemas..

I’ve decided to begin at the beginning with this one, since I find this opening passage in Percy’s first novel The Moviegoer (1960) the most beautiful in the whole book. One time I spent an age searching through this book to quote this sequence to a friend and couldn’t find it.. This afternoon I opened the book on page 1 and there it was – Enjoy!

*****

  This morning I got a note from my aunt asking me to come for lunch. I know what this means. Since I go there every Sunday for dinner and today is Wednesday, it can mean only one thing: she wants to have one of our serious talks. It will be extremely grave, either a piece of bad news about her stepdaughter Kate or else a serious talk about me, about the future and what I ought to do. It is enough to scare the wits out of anyone, yet I confess I do not find the prospect altogether unpleasant.

  I remember when my older brother Scott died of pneumonia. I was eight years old. My aunt had charge of me and she took me for a walk behind the hospital. It was an interesting street. On one side were the power plant and blowers and incinerator of the hospital, all humming and blowing out a hot meaty smell. On the other side was a row of Negro houses. Children and old folks and dogs sat on the porches watching us. I noticed with pleasure that Aunt Emily seemed to have all the time in the world and was willing to talk about anything I wanted to talk about. Something extraordinary had happened all right. We walked in step. “Jack,” she said, squeezing me tight and smiling at the Negro shacks, “you and I have always been good buddies, haven’t we?” “Yes ma’am” My heart gave a big pump and the back of my neck prickled like a dog’s. “I’ve got bad news for you, son.” She squeezed me tighter than ever. “Scotty is dead. Now it’s all up to you. It’s going to be difficult for you but I know you’re going to act like a soldier.” This was true. I could easily act like a soldier. Was that all I had to do?

  It reminds me of a movie I saw last month out by Lake Pontchartrain. Linda and I went out to a theatre in a new suburb. It was evident somebody had miscalculated, for the suburb had quit growing and here was the theatre, a pink stucco cube, sitting out in a field all by itself. A strong wind whipped the waves against the sea wall; even inside you could hear the racket. The movie was about a man who lost his memory in an accident and as a result lost everything: his family, his friends, his money. He found himself a stranger in a strange city. Here he had to make a fresh start, find a new place to live, a new job, a new girl. It was supposed to be a tragedy, his losing all this, and he seemed to suffer a great deal. On the other hand, things were not so bad after all. In no time he found a very picturesque place to live, a houseboat on the river, and a very handsome girl, the local librarian.

  After the movie Linda and I stood under the marquee and talked to the manager, or rather listened to him tell his troubles: the theatre was almost empty, which was pleasant for me but not for him. It was a fine night and I felt good. Overhead was the blackest sky I ever saw; a black wind pushed the lake towards us. The waves jumped over the seawall and spattered the street. The manager had to yell to be heard while from the sidewalk speaker directly over his head came the twittering conversation of the amnesiac and the librarian. It was the part where they are going through the newspaper files in search of some clue to his identity (he has a vague recollection of an accident). Linda stood by unhappily. She was unhappy for the same reason I was happy-because here we were in a neighbourhood theatre out in the sticks and without a car (I have a car but I prefer to ride buses and streetcars). Her idea of happiness is to drive downtown and have supper at the Blue Room of the Roosevelt Hotel. This I am obliged to do from time to time. It is worth it, however. On these occasions Linda becomes as exalted as I am now. Her eyes glow, her lips become moist, and when we dance she brushes her fine long legs against mine. She actually loves me at these times-and not as a reward for being taken to the Blue Room. She loves me because she feels exalted in this romantic place and not in a movie out in the sticks.

  But all this is history. Linda and I have parted company. I have a new secretary, a girl named Sharon Kincaid.

*****

My readings of this sequence from The Moviegoer can be found here and here.

Beyond the Frame: An Introduction to Iranian Cinema

 

Today I attended a lecture/seminar on Iranian cinema. It was part of a series called ‘Beyond the Frame’ currently running at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. Last week was the screening of Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s The May Lady (above), from 1998. The film is quite incredible and one of the best that I had seen from this country.. For me the seminar this week was a revelation, since I have had a passion for Iranian cinema for quite a few years but have no real knowledge of the society and politics nor of the history of the nation’s cinema.. 

Here’s a few interesting tit-bits that were brought up..

It appears that the first Iranian films were made in 1900 and were films of the Iranian King of the time as he toured Belgium and France. The lecturer showed us a clip – apparently the King was ‘the one with the big moustache.’ These films were not shown in cinemas or peepshows etc but only in the palace to the King’s family.. Movies were not allowed as they were thought to taint the morals of the ordinary people.

Since I have some Armenian heritage and since there seems to be very little Armenian cinema out there – any recommendations anyone? – I was fascinated to hear that the first Iranian feature (made pretty late in 1930) was by an Armenian. Pity AAbi and Rabi is lost..

The first Iranian sound movie The Lar Girl (not lost) followed soon after in 1933. This was filmed in Persian and set and shot in India. We see a man trying to pull a woman to safety as she dangles on a rope hanging over the edge of a cliff.. Then some other guy comes and attacks him, so that every now and then while defending himself he drops the rope and has to run to grab it again.. She goes up and down – pretty thrilling stuff..

The 1950s was the beginning of Iranian cinema as an industry and that paralleled the modernisation and urbanisation within the country in general. Equipment was primitive. Documentary newsreels were made to be shown before the features. And, ha, I seem to recall something about Eisenstein feeling that images should move left to right across the screen to parallel with Russian script. It turns out the same thing was being said in Iran, where the documentarists were told to pan from right to left – as in Persian script!

Cinema became extremely popular in Iran in the 1960s – a film that was a hit was Croesus’ Treasure (1964.) There were also intellectuals making movies as part of the Iranian New Wave, many of them writers.. The female poet Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1963) is famous, is highly-acclaimed and is all about lepers. 1969 was the main break for the New Wave with the films The Cow and Qeysar. I’d seen The Cow before, which is pretty strange – about a man who is in love with his cow.

Qeysar had a revenge narrative – in some ways it looked a little more conventional, tho we only saw a clip of course..  It was interesting because it had a murder in a shower that seemed to me to be clearly influenced by the Hitch and Saul Bass scene in Psycho (1960.) Not as complexly cut, but attempting the sort of montage-effect that we saw there.. Specifically one shot was a cut-in to the the murdered person’s hand as it slides down the tiling and out of the shot, just as in Psycho.. The lecturer didn’t seem convinced.

Apparently TV earned the nickname ‘mullavision’ after the 1978-9 Cultural Revolution, since every time the telly was turned on you’d see a Mullah. A cinema was burned down, in which 300 people died.. Cinema was likened to ‘prostitution’ by the new clergy.

‘Islamic Cinema’ was defined by negation – among policies one included that it be ‘neither East nor West.’ The 1982 censorship regulations were very strict. They prohibited films which would lower the taste of the audience, which our lecturer suggested would be pretty useful all around the world. Emphasis here was put on improving production and artistic values which helped to develop Iranian cinema in an auteurist direction, putting the emphasis on directors and writers over actors. But the main point was to effect an Islamization of the country..

There was more I’m sure, which I may perhaps come back to.. tho I’ve done most of it I think. I’ve left out all the details of censorship since I’m sure you can find that elsewhere! Since I was more familiar with the more recent stuff, as will others of you, this doesn’t seem so essential to detail, to me.

Well, just to note about female filmmakers – it appears that before the Revolution there were only three female filmmakers who made one film each. Some point a little while after the Revolution there were many.. It appears many women were getting a good education – an odd stat the lecturer quoted was that 65% of those at university were women. I wondered if I got this wrong and asked him why it seemed that there were more educated women than men in this period. He seemed to misunderstand the question, at least I don’t think he gave an answer, so if anyone out there has any idea it’s something I’d love to know!?

One interesting element that the lecturer brought up from The May Lady was that it contains interesting examples of visual trickery used to avoid censorship. E.g. Since characters that are members of a family are not supposed to touch at all, for fear of giving the appearance of incest, we have at one point, in a darkened room, the son put a blanket around his mother; he holds the blanket in such a way that it looks as tho he is touching her and there is no blanket.. it’s done pretty well..

The strange thing is that this film about a 17-yr-old son who is so attached to his mother that he won’t let her have a relationship with another man is full of stuff which seemed to me deeply incestuous! Censorship has no reason nor rhyme of course.. Admittedly, my impression here may also be in part perhaps due to my not fully understanding the cultural dynamics of the mother-son relationship in Iran.. At one point, for example, we hear of a different son who has sold his mother’s house! The son must have inherited the house from a father who has passed away I assume, as I guess the law prescribes in this heavily patriarchal society..

I’d love to sit here and write my own thoughts about this movie but my bed is calling me, and I know if I start on that I’ll never finish! This is longer than I’d intended anyway.. Good night!

Introducing …

 

 

(King Vidor, 1955)

 

So let’s get started.. This site’s going to be somewhere for me to put some of my tentative musings about cinema and anything else arty etc that strikes my fancy. Nothing heavily analytical or academic, tho if you want to see some of my work of that sort try: www.ayearinthedark.wordpress.com .. That said, I’m not an idiot so it oughta be interesting for anyone with a brain for smart movies! 

 

The title: It refers to the fact that Kirk Douglas plays a man who isn’t a sheriff. Just a tough guy who rolls into town with a chip on his shoulder about barbed wire. But doesn’t want to get involved in violent cowboy rivalries. He reckons you should tear all the wire down and keep the land open and free..

 

Then maybe an hour in he switches. He realises that pulling down barbed wire for a wealthy landowner actually helps her to push out small farmers and he starts putting the stuff up again instead. Sure it’s a nice, healthy dose of anti-capitalist sentiment. But I particularly like the idea that a guy without a star has the right, or the mentality, to flip-flop, where another guy might not..

 

I saw this film a couple of years ago in Paris and it had an absolutely visceral effect upon me. I think it was the moment when Kirk Douglas, wrapped up in barbed wire, was thrown onto the ground- that made me think this was something a little different.. Visceral is good. Cinema isn’t about looking, any mug who tells you that needs his head checked. It’s all about the barbed wire..