Laugh-a while you can, monkey boy (9/11/00)

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Not long ago I happened across the latest paperback release from Elmore Leonard: Be Cool, a sequel to the celebrated novel-turned-to-movie Get Shorty; containing the further adventures of Chili Palmer in Hollywood, and dropping by the way assorted opinions of Mr. Leonard on motion pictures — opinions with which [as you might expect] I almost invariably agree. I took note, accordingly, when during an early lull in the action Palmer pauses while channelsurfing in his living room [an occupation to which, apparently, even the buccaneers of the film industry must occasionally be reduced], and locks in on the Michael Mann version of The Last Of The Mohicans [1992]; remarking that it is a great motion picture, and that he would certainly watch it any time it might happen to be on the television.

I was struck by this observation, since though I had very vivid memories of the theatrical release of the film [which I sat through twice in succession], I’d never been able to watch it all the way through since. The reason was stupidly simple: I thought it was one of the most beautiful pictures I’d ever seen; and that the variously watered-down versions later made available on broadcast television, VHS, and even classical laserdisc were, at best, pathetic travesties of the original. As a result so far as I was concerned the film might as well have been lost; and I regarded any subsequent attempt to pretend it was still extant with impatient annoyance.

This probably requires an explanation.

Even under the best of circumstances, i.e., when a film shot in the classical aspect ratio of 4:3 is transferred to video, at each of the several stages of the process which reproduces the image it is cropped to ensure overscanning. The final result is usually about sixty-five percent of the original frame; when allowance is made for distortion around the edges of the television screen, the so-called title-safe area is really only about fifty-five percent. And this is the best case. When a film is shot in the Cinemascope aspect ratio of 7:3, pan-and-scan truncation removes an additional forty-two percent of the image; at this point, even if the resolution and color quality of the television monitor were equivalent to that of the original negative, no more than a third of the picture need be left. But at this point, of course, one must make allowance for the loss of color bitdepth in the NTSC conversion [a loss of two-thirds to three-quarters; even classical laserdisc is no more than eight-bit color], and, finally, the fact that a television image measures at best 720 by 480 pixels [it would be too much to expect from television engineers that the pixels should be square] and an adequate digital transfer of the thirty-five millimeter frame is generally supposed to require a grid of about 3600 by 2600 [cf. the American Cinematographer’s Manual for details regarding this and related technical issues.] Moreover, at the last minute, adding insult to injury, the interlaced display of the television monitor divides the effective resolution neatly in half. After multiplying all these factors out, you realize that you might as well be listening to the movie on the radio.

But improvements have been made of late: films presented on DVD are usually letterboxed, to preserve the original aspect ratio [though there is some concern that the imposition of the new video widescreen pseudostandard of 16:9 — a figure which bears no relationship to any established convention of feature film — will provide a new excuse for pan-and-scan], and the options of S-video and even three-component output [approximating 16- and 24-bit color] transmit two or three times the previous maximum in color information to the screen; there is also an apparent improvement in [horizontal] resolution, though really fine detail still inevitably disappears. [Sean Young, in a Ridley Scott homage to The Maltese Falcon, smokes what look like handrolled cigarettes in Blade Runner; I have yet to see this detail reproduced on the small screen.]

But it isn’t as bad as it used to be. And, therefore, prompted by Elmore Leonard, I went out directly to look for the DVD; brought it back; and, what can I say, watched it four times in a row. It isn’t all there, of course [this would appear to be one instance — another is the great French arthouse comedy Delicatessen — where some of the atmospheric effects cannot be reproduced in any video format], but enough has been restored to do justice to my memory of the original. — Still [and I remain emphatic on this point]: if you have only seen this on television, you’ve never seen the movie.

This rant discharged, a word about the film.

The story is not unfamiliar: it is a somewhat re-engineered version of the ancient Fenimore Cooper novel — one of a series in which the legendary woodsman the Deerslayer/Hawkeye/Natty Bumpo showed off a woodsy lore more than slightly exaggerated for the benefit of Cooper’s adoring audience of cloistered urban Yankee rubes, each a disconnected series of episodes in which the keeneyed and seemingly omniscient protagonist tracked bugs walking over water, whiffed farts on the wind days after the moment of truth, and shot lice out of the wings of flying birds; the redesign is the work of Michael Mann, a director who made his reputation with a television show about a couple of putative detectives who wore a lot of Armani and seemed fond of striking strong silent brooding poses before the Miami waterfront while throbbing rockandroll music swelled on the soundtrack beneath. Fortunately the whole was somewhat more than the sum of these parts.

The filmed scenario runs as follows: it is 1757, and the French and Indian Wars have commenced on the American continent. The protagonists, the abovementioned Hawkeye [Daniel Day-Lewis] and his adopted Indian father and brother Chingachgook [Russell Means] and Uncas [Eric Schweig] — the last two of the once-numerous tribe of the Mohicans — are discovered chasing a stag through the forest; after Hawkeye drops it with an impressive shot from his long Kentucky rifle, they pronounce a prayer over the carcass expressing their gratitude to the spirit of the deer for providing them with sustenance. Having thus established their pagan religious credentials, they repair to a frontier outpost, there discovering representatives of the British army [the usual clichéd stiffnecked inflexible arrogant redcoat cocksuckers we’ve been rooting against since the dawn of our national mythology] attempting to recruit colonial volunteers for the holy campaign against the Frogs. A local militia is raised, but not without the exchange of harsh words between several of the colonials [our hero in particular] and the always-insensitive Brits. Meanwhile, one particularly tightassed redcoat specimen named Hayward [Steven Waddington] is attempting unsuccessfully to make time with the dazzling Cora Munro [the brunette Madeleine Stowe]; tabling his proposal for the moment, he undertakes the escort of herself and her sister Alice [the blonde Jodhi May] to meet their father Colonel Edmund Munro [Maurice Roëves] at Fort William Henry. Clueless rookies that they are, they have no idea how to find the fortress in question, and take as native guide for their expedition the formidable Magua [Wes Studi] — a really mean-looking dude who predictably turns out to be a French mole with some kind of blood hatred for the old Colonel. In consequence it’s no surprise when Magua’s buddies waylay the party in the deep woods, killing many extras and doubtless steering the story to a premature conclusion, were it not fortuitously the case that Hawkeye and his blood brothers happen across the ambuscade and drive the bad guys off. Taking up the duty of guiding the babes through the enchanted forest, they drop a few hints regarding the dos and donts of life in the American wilderness, and by the time they all arrive at the [now heavily besieged] fortress, to the jealous disgust of Hayward Cora has fallen for Hawkeye, and Alice and Uncas [though somewhat less demonstrative] are pretty obviously making eyes at one another. Slipping through the enemy lines in another demonstration of American native-scout expertise, they arrive within the walls and accept the eternal gratitude of the elder Munro — which, naturally [since he is, after all, a British heavy] lasts no more than a couple of minutes before he tosses Hawkeye into irons for his insolence. But after a brief interval of uncertainty the French triumph in their strategic project and bring their bigger guns to bear, and Munro must surrender his position and, under some peculiar eighteenth-century gentlemen’s agreement, march his defeated army out under flag of truce to transport them back to Europe. Magua and the French commander have, however, a purely twentieth-century discussion about the terms of this surrender, and the British don’t get far before an Indian ambush cuts them to ribbons in what is, without question, the most beautifully-photographed firefight I have ever seen [smoke, confusion, bright red uniforms, brilliant forest greens.] Magua makes good on his promise to cut Munro’s heart out and eat it raw, but Hawkeye has thrown off his irons and he and Uncas and Chingachgook escort Hayward and the two girls away from the battlefield. They then flee in canoes across a lake and down a river infested with rapids with the Bad Indians in hot pursuit; taking refuge, finally, behind a waterfall. Finding that their powder is wet and that they can make no effective defense, they make the traumatic decision to abandon the girls and the disbelieving redcoat temporarily to the pursuers [whose torches, in a memorable image, are seen approaching through the veil of falling water], the better to effect a reversal of fortune. Pledging his eternal troth and vowing his return [this shot always makes the trailers, and it certainly ought to] Hawkeye turns from the never-more-dazzling Ms. Munro and leaps through the waterfall into outer space. — True to their word, our heroes immediately resume the chase, and trail Magua’s braves to a Huron encampment, where the heavy is pitching his plea for justice to a tribal elder of great age and impressive gravitas. Hawkeye interrupts and argues his own case; the resulting Solomonic judgment is that Magua gets to keep Alice for his own plaything and the Hurons get to burn Hayward at the stake, but Hawkeye and Cora are allowed to go free. Running from the encampment to a nearby overlook, Hawkeye takes his loaded rifle from his waiting companions and with a phenomenal shot drills the flamebroiling redcoat through the heart, ending his death-agonies [and finally shutting him up.] — It remains to free the blonde from Magua’s clutches. The four pursue the Huron posse over rocky bluffs to a high, high place; one that seems to overlook the whole of the ancient natural world. Fired by love, Uncas arrives in advance of the others and, in keeping with the relevant conventions [for in these days war had rules], hacks his way with knife and tomahawk alone through the entire party to Magua himself, who guards the girl. But the race of the Mohicans is at an end; Magua cuts Uncas down and he falls, disbelief upon his features, from the bluffs to the valley far below. Magua, curiously humanized by this triumph, now turns to the girl, solicitous, as it seems, for her welfare, and beckons her to come with him. But with a look and a purpose that were, I assure you, never to be found in Fenimore Cooper, she turns away and casts herself from the rocks to join her lover in death. Hawkeye and Chingachgook now arrive, and though the Deerslayer disposes of the remaining Hurons it is the elder Indian who dispatches Magua with a prodigious blow from his tomahawk. The trio of survivors, then, standing on the bluffs overlooking this world now at an end, pronounce an elegy not only for the race of the Mohicans, but, it is clear, for the savage nobility of the natural man and the lost American wilderness. I have never seen anything like it.

There is much that is memorable about this production: the cinematography of Dante Spinotti; the elegiac score of Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman; the casting, particularly the leads. Mr. Day-Lewis makes a very photogenic woodsman, and I concur with Elmore Leonard: every great babe of the silver screen seems to have that moment when her face alone could launch a thousand ships, and this was that moment for Madeleine Stowe; certainly I’ve been in love with her ever since.

But what is most remarkable is the way that it conveys a sort of myth of the Fall: the sense of the loss of the nomadic life, the life of the Indian, of the natural man who lived in harmony with nature and with the divinity that expresses itself in nature; and of its replacement with a soulless mechanistic civilization that must always have been some kind of sick fucking mistake, even from the moment of the first cultivation of crops. — It is, of course, easy to make fun of this idea [as Mark Twain made fun of Fenimore Cooper, and everyone made fun of Rousseau], but there is a real and undeniably deeprooted anxiety that it touches, a primordial unease that is always there and whose expressions are found everywhere in the cinema, which foregrounds such concerns. It cannot be an accident that everything in modern life is about coloring between the lines, and every instinct tells us to rip the book in half; that though the hero rides into town at the beginning of the Western, he always rides out [into a sunset] at its end; that [incidentally] he never seems to need a job, and never wants a wife; that when the village mob marches out in torchlit procession to capture the Frankenstein monster, you’re pulling for the monster, and when the biplanes go after King Kong, you’re pulling for the ape; that it doesn’t seem that Beauty killed the beast, for that matter, but something more like Beauty’s hidden agenda; that Chaplin had it right about the industrialists, Mack Sennett had it right about the cops, and Mel Brooks had it right about the emperors and kings; that every action movie begins by identifying a threat to civilization that will provide an excuse for the hero to ignore every one of its strictures; that thereafter no speed limit will be obeyed, and no window will remain unbroken; that the hero will fuck every woman he finds attractive, and shoot every asshole he finds annoying; that the best line in all three of the Die Hard movies comes when Bruce Willis is driving not simply off the road and on the sidewalk but through the middle of Central Park, and admits to Sam Jackson that, yes, maybe he was trying to hit that mime. — For if man is born free, why is he everywhere in chains?

One might make another, complementary point; a point as it were about the cinema’s original sin.

There’s an interesting compilation that came out not long ago [now available on DVD], called Landmarks of Early Film, a sampler of classic vignettes from the dawn of the art of motion pictures: Edison’s shortshorts of boxers and bellydancers; some footage of presidential candidate William McKinley feigning studied unconcern as he lounged upon his porch, pretending that he still awaited the news of his nomination at the 1896 convention — history’s first staged photo opportunity; the Lumière Brothers’ early microdocumentaries, e.g. the famous platform-point-of-view of a train arriving in a station which is said to have sent people stampeding from their seats the first time it was exhibited; Méliès’ fantastic rendition of Verne’s From The Earth To The Moon [1902]; Porter’s The Great Train Robbery [the first Western, 1903]; and the like. Though all this is great fun to watch, the most striking thing about the collection is that, after a couple of hours of pioneer experiments that look, by and large, like turn-of-the-century home movies, the anthology ends with a one-reel fifteen-minute feature made by D. W. Griffith in 1912 titled The Girl And Her Trust — at that a remake of the somewhat more famous The Lonedale Operator [1911] — a little melodrama about a telegraph operator on the railroad line who is entrapped by thieves intent on a payroll robbery, kidnapped, and carried off on a handcar down the tracks while railroad men on a pursuing engine race to her rescue [and while Griffith’s cameraman, Billy Bitzer, flies along in an open car parallel to the tracks handcranking the chase from a few yards away.] — What’s striking, after all the other amateurish footage, is that this is recognizably a movie: it’s exciting to watch, beautifully photographed, and ends with a terrific chase, skillfully edited to accentuate the action. When you see this so pointedly juxtaposed with what came before it you can’t help but be amazed by how rapidly the modern narrative cinema was invented; and how completely it was the invention of one man.

Indeed Griffith appeared even to his contemporaries to be the veritable Newton of the cinema; the entire art and industry of motion pictures seemed to have leapt fully armored from his brain, like Athena from the head of Zeus. His first experiments were confined, like everyone else’s, to the fifteen- and thirty-minute confines of the one- and two-reel format. But he advanced rapidly to the exploration of longer forms, with his twelve-reel Civil War epic The Birth Of A Nation [1915] — the first and still one of the greatest of feature films, and [after renormalization] almost certainly still the top moneymaker of all time: accounting was fragmentary, and theft on the part of the distributors, systematic, but at the best estimates it may have grossed as much as fifty million dollars — before 1920. Griffith had invented the blockbuster; the distributors had invented gross point participation.

No one had ever seen anything like it — the battle scenes in particular were unprecedented in their verisimilitude — and audience response suggested not a night at the theater but the absorption of some kind of divine revelation: people were absolutely thunderstruck; they staggered out into the streets weeping, and seized passersby by the lapels and tried to stammer out descriptions of what they had witnessed.

Alas, The Birth Of A Nation does not stop at telling the story of the Civil War from the Southern point of view [it is no more objectionable in that regard than Gone With The Wind], but proceeds, in its second moiety, to tell a very unfortunate version of the story of Reconstruction — in which, after the death of the saintly Lincoln [whose noble intentions, says Griffith, no one ever doubted] the dastardly House Republicans [why does this sound familiar?] seize control of the government from more sober judgments and impose a mad scheme of retribution upon the South which results in the legislature, the courts, and the very streets being taken away from good godfearing white citizens by their brainwashed and now strangely agitated former wards and employees; necessitating, as the terminal crisis looms and even the ashblonde virgin goddess Lillian Gish is imperiled by lustmaddened darkies beating down her door, that Griffith, the veritable inventor of the chase, the guy who first contrived the lastminute arrival of the cavalry, launch a climactic Ride to the Rescue by an army of masked riders clad in white — the saviors not merely of the girl but [thus the title] of the Aryan Nation — the Ku Klux Klan. — Griffith, in short, seems also to have invented political incorrectness.

But, contrary to the received wisdom, there is no point in burying this film under a rock and pretending that it was never made; that no one ever saw it and admired it; that those who did, and did admire it [notably the sainted Woodrow Wilson, who had promulgated an identical view of Reconstruction in his very influential history of the American republic] were sports, monsters, freaks, or amoral savages. The very best people show up at lynchings; I’m German, and I ought to know.

In fact everyone ought to see The Birth Of A Nation. — I’m not sure I know how to express it properly, but the point may be this: it is a profoundly liberating experience to be manipulated by the author of a motion picture into cheering on the Ku Klux Klan. Never after that can you believe without question what you see in film or on television; never after that can your perceptions be twisted quite so easily. More than learning not to trust the author, you learn not to trust yourself. This is a difficult lesson, but an important one.

In any case the most disturbing scene of all occurs before the climax; though unfortunately it has not preserved in its entirety [public outcry resulted in extensive re-editing after the first release], enough remains in the surviving prints to make a profound impression. This is a shocking sequence in which the teenaged Southern belle Mae Marsh — not Griffith’s most beautiful nor his most accomplished actress, but certainly his cutest — is confronted by a black man as she walks in the woods alone; pursued to the top of a high bluff and faced with the unambiguous threat of savage rape, she leaps from a cliff to her death. It is utterly appalling.

And what has Michael Mann given us in reply? Jodhi May, who plays Alice Munro — not as cute as the incomparable Mae Marsh, but quite cute enough — steps back aghast from the Indian brave who has slain her lover — an Indian brave who seems for the first time not repellent, not ignoble, but concerned for her welfare, and anxious that she should understand that he has, by the rules of his culture and that of the fallen Uncas, won her hand, fair and square — steps back, considers, and makes her choice: not for the Indian who stands before her, but for the Indian who does not; and casts herself from the precipice — falling, falling; from the heavens to the earth. This is at once homage, and reproach.

So, there it is: a hymn to the American wilderness, a trenchant statement of the myth of the Fall, and an elegant apology for the original sin of the cinema; perhaps the most beautiful movie I’ve ever seen.

And though killing animals for meat must invariably be evil when it is not personal, it’s always a good idea to kill your television.

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The case for Mars (8/8/00)

Ms. Stowe, composed.

Ms. Marsh, distraught.