EW #88: The Dark Knight (2008)

Eighty-eight is my very favorite number. I love the number eight to begin with, then eighty-eight doubles down on the lovely symmetry and orderly vibe of the numeral 8 while also taking the number eleven, another favorite, as a factor. So of course the universe would conspire to place Christopher Nolan's "serious" blockbuster The Dark Knight, a film about which I have decidedly mixed feelings, at the #88 position on Entertainment Weekly's summer 2013 Top 100 films list. Like the film itself, this coincidence, which surely is the outcome of several happy and unhappy accidents, nevertheless feels laden with portent.

My biggest problem with The Dark Knight is that I am not sure how morally responsible it is to make a superhero blockbuster film that purports to treat its subject "seriously," as if Batman existed in a world "grounded in realism," yet that seems so unthinking in its retrograde endorsement of conservative, pro-War on Terror, pro-vigilante ideologies.* It could be that the film's internally contradictory yet palpably right-wing messages are, as Jonathan Lethem puts it, simply a reflection of post-9/11 America's deep confusion about what or how to think about its own recent history:

In its narrative gaps, its false depths leading nowhere in particular, its bogus grief over stakeless destruction and faked death, “The Dark Knight” echoes a civil discourse strained to helplessness by panic, overreaction and cultivated grievance. No wonder we crave an entertainment like “The Dark Knight,” where every topic we’re unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion.

I find these observations insightful. I agree with Lethem that "a morbid incoherence was the movie’s real takeaway, chaotic form its ultimate content" -- this rings true.

It's also true that, Batpod chase and Heath Ledger's performance aside, The Dark Knight is not much fun. As I have said before, I am a huge proponent of fun and comedy in blockbuster action movies, so all of Nolan's trilogy misses the mark for me on a certain fundamental level.

"Waaaahhh! They blew up my World Trade Cent-- I mean, my girlfriend!"

In his review of the recent superhero film Batman vs. Superman, A.O. Scott sums up another facet of the "serious blockbuster" problem:

Intellectual pretension, long an occupational hazard in the superhero business, has been elevated to a creative principle. Christopher Nolan is partly to blame. His “Dark Knight” entries in the Batman saga raised the genre’s allegorical stakes and dialed down the humor to an all-but-imperceptible whisper. Still, Mr. Nolan’s filmmaking skill — above all the coherence of his inky, cruel vision of Gotham City and environs — enabled those movies to carry at least some of their self-assigned thematic weight.

While some (including me) have questioned the coherence of Nolan's vision or at least of his editing and directing skills, I admit that on the level of production design and with respect to the overall look, feel, and tone of the world he evokes, his Batman trilogy is the most effective (if not affective) iteration of a "serious" (or, as Scott calls it, pretentious) superhero saga.* Nolan gets the broad-strokes, big picture stuff right.

In my original introductory post to the EW list, I described The Dark Knight as "as zeitgeist-y as it gets" and "surely culturally significant" but also noted that it is a technically and structurally pedestrian, even sloppy movie. I stand by that assessment. I think the film's two biggest weaknesses -- aside from its right-wing ideology** -- are:

(1) the technical failings, mainly the shittily staged, edited, and filmed fight sequences. I noticed that Nolan doesn't know how to stage satisfying fight scenes back in Batman Begins, where the shooting and editing of Batman's first battle at the docks is completely visually incomprehensible. The weird thing is, Nolan and co. actually got worse at producing these kind of sequences in The Dark Knight. The police convoy sequence has been eviscerated elsewhere by wiser critics than me, but I also nominate the final battle with Batman vs. the Joker and his dogs as being one of the lousiest, hardest to follow "action" sequences I have ever seen. Fuck that shitty sequence, except the part at the very end with the Joker hanging upside down, which is memorable and cool.

When I teach about chaos cinema to college undergraduates, students always ask "Couldn't this chaotic, fast-cutting, close-up-heavy aesthetic be intentional?" and surely it most likely is. The Begins dockside battle may be deliberately shrouding Batman in mystery, taking a subjective or expressionistic approach to the action, purposely never really letting us see him. I am theoretically okay with that, and appreciate it when, say, Kathryn Bigelow uses these subjective, incoherent techniques more sparingly in The Hurt Locker, but it feels out of place and disappointing in The Dark Knight. I want that convoy chase sequence to feel exciting and and look cool, but it's mainly a headache-producing hot mess. I want to see Batman, a superhero known for his martial arts prowess, fight. The climactic Dark Knight interior battle is so badly lit and incoherently staged and edited that I simply cannot tell what's going on at most points during that sequence. I hate that. To me, that's not expressively evocative, that's just bad filmmaking.

(2) the film's lack of pathos or humanity, its lack of emotional resonance. This is director Nolan's biggest Achilles' Heel, one that can be seen across his whole movie career. The Dark Knight tells a (mostly) well-crafted story -- except that inexplicable part when Batman goes out the window after Rachel, leaving the Joker behind in a room full of defenseless rich people, a scene the film never resolves nor explains. Beyond that, the film's deeper ideas are usually interesting, even or perhaps especially when they seem contradictory. For example, the Joker claims to be an agent of chaos and Alfred calls him a man who "just wants to watch the world burn" but in fact his plans are incredibly intricate, precision-timed, and depend upon several amazingly lucky coincidences to boot (such as figuring out the exact route the police convoy would take or, once imprisoned, knowing how to time his two bombs beforehand without knowing when he would be interrogated). Yet these contradictions remain cerebral concepts, stuff other people (like Alfred and Bruce) talk about but don't really emote anything about. The Dark Knight never gets me to feel much of anything about any of these people, except the Joker and possibly Alfred. As Lethem reports of his Dark Knight viewing experience, "after the tide of contradictions had receded behind me I wasn’t stirred to any feeling richer than an exhausted shrug." Same here.

Of course, most every critic, positive or negative, agrees about the excellence of Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker. Ledger's performance stands out so strongly in The Dark Knight not only because he was a world-class actor (see his moving performance in Brokeback Mountain if you don't believe me) fully committing to an interesting and entertaining interpretation of an iconic character. Unfortunately, it also stands out because so little of what happens in this film outside of the Joker carries any real emotional stakes. For example, we're supposed to accept that Bruce/Batman really loves Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal), but there's no real passion or romance there, just two characters reading letters in voice-over and insisting they love each other despite their lack of onscreen chemistry. (This was true when Katie Holmes assayed the role of Rachel in Batman Begins, too, though Bale and Holmes seemed to click a little better than Bale and Gyllenhaal do).

Anyway, all that said, if The Dark Knight possesses greatness, it is not only due to Ledger, though he is mainly responsible for making the film watchable. No, director Christopher Nolan deserves credit for committing to a vision for the world and character of Batman and then really delivering on that central premise, albeit at times clunkily. And if nothing else, The Dark Knight looks really good, and the opening bank heist sequence is just terrific, probably the best part of the whole movie.

I should add that I saw The Dark Knight three, maybe four times during its theatrical run in late summer 2008. Part of that is that the film was a major part of the cultural zeitgeist of that summer and fall -- it seemed to me like nearly everyone I knew (who were, admittedly, mainly English graduate students and Dungeons and Dragons nerds) saw and avidly talked about that movie then. It became a touchstone for discussing the meaning of 9/11 and the War on Terror, the fearful ramifications of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Bush Administration's dumbfounding invasion of Iraq and the lies Bush & co. told to provoke it.

I also saw The Dark Knight that many times because it maddened me, it bedeviled me, it bothered and unnerved me in ways I couldn't quite put my finger on. Despite my repeat viewings, I couldn't really figure out (until I analyzed it from a point of greater critical distance) what the film was actually saying about the War on Terror, the ethics of public surveillance, the role of torture in post-Abu Ghraib America, etc. I was puzzled. As Lethem says, "a morbid incoherence was the movie’s real takeaway."

But maybe "morbid incoherence" is an appropriate tone to set for depicting Bush's America in 2008. Maybe in the end I do not object to The Dark Knight going on a list of "Most Culturally Significant" or at least "Most Culturally Revealing" films of all time. But on a "Best" or "Top" 100 films list like EW's? Probably not.

Director Christopher Nolan on the set of The Dark Knight. 

--
* In a 2015 interview Nolan explains his Batman concept this way: "you had Superman in 1978, but they never did the sort of 1978 Batman, where you see the origin story, where the world is pretty much the world we live in but there’s this extraordinary figure there, which is what worked so well in Dick Donner’s Superman film." Actually it makes me like Nolan more that he gives props to the 1978 Donner Superman film, still one of the best superhero blockbusters ever.
** That said, don't get me started on the total failed pile of crap that was The Dark Knight Rises (2012). You owe me those two hours and forty five minutes back, Nolan!

UPDATE 3/26/2016: Check out Lee Weston Sabo's brilliant analysis of The Dark Knight Rises, in which he accurately notes that the Nolan Batman trilogy's

lessons in Bush era heroism are apparent: it is all right to lie to the public if it is for their own good (and as long as you feel sort of bad about it later); true heroes are willing to let everyone hate them if it means they do not have to suffer any consequences for their illegal actions; and faking self-sacrifice is as good as actual self-sacrifice, especially when it means you get to be loved as a martyr and live a life of unburdened luxury.

Indeed so! And if you want to read an even more nuts-and-bolts take on what's wrong with Rises, focused primarily on its shitty-assed writing and (lack of) story structure, check out this excellent review.
*** See also my forthcoming post on the sinister ideological meanings of The Dark Knight. The short version: the movie is ultimately pro-War on Terror and pro-fascist.

Alternate Top 100: 12 Angry Men (1957)

A few years ago, in 2011, the Criterion Collection released a new DVD edition of Sidney Lumet's classic 12 Angry Men. During a recent online Criterion Flash Sale, I bought said DVD and, once it arrived, joyfully re-watched this amazing film.

Courtroom dramas hold a special place in the American cinema. One of my college buddies, who went on to become a lawyer, was always particularly obsessed with Inherit the Wind (1960), Stanley Kramer's dramatization of the 1925 Scopes trial. Many folks consider the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) to be one of the best such dramas ever made. Other key entries in this category include Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Judgment at Nuremburg (1961), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), A Few Good Men (1992), and Lumet's own The Verdict (1982) starring Paul Newman.* On the comedy side both Adam's Rib (1949) and My Cousin Vinny (1992) are standout courtroom movies.

For me, the original 12 Angry Men (I haven't seen the 1997 remake) stands as the greatest fiction film about the American legal system of which I am aware. It also stands as one of my favorite movies in any genre. I hereby nominate it for inclusion in my "Alternative Top 100," a list of films meant to be added to or swapped into the Entertainment Weekly Top 100 Films list to correct some of its oversights and errors.**

It's pretty much impossible to go wrong with the talented and consistent Lumet's directorial efforts. Indeed, there are other, later Sidney Lumet movies that are at least as good as 12 Angry Men including The Pawnbroker (1964), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), and The Verdict (1982). But like Duel does for Steven Spielberg and Mean Streets does for Martin Scorsese, 12 Angry Men gives us Lumet at his most stripped-down and lean. The film performs the amazing feat of taking a concept that could be boring and then executing it so brilliantly that it turns out to be a gripping, poignant, all-time masterpiece of the American cinema.

From the outset, Juror 8 (Henry Fonda) stands apart from the others -- that's him at the far right of frame, looking out the window. 

The premise: twelve jurors spend the whole film sequestered in a jury room debating the verdict in a trial the viewer never sees. They stay in that one room and mostly talk. Sounds confining, even dull, yes? It isn't.

For one thing, Lumet and his cinematographer Boris Kaufman frame shots beautifully and keep the camera moving in lots of interesting ways. For example, one of my favorite shots is when one juror unexpectedly changes his vote. The camera tracks along the whole table at a high angle until it finally tilts down for a close-up of the guy who says he's changing sides.

Or there's the long take in which Juror 10 (Ed Begley) is ostracized for making inflammatory, bigoted comments. As he talks, most of the other jurors leave the table one by one and then stand around silently, facing away from him. Lumet and Kaufman shoot the scene mostly in wide shot -- in fact, the camera slowly tracks backward as Juror 10 rants, then tracks back toward the table after he leaves it. Having the crestfallen bigot walk into the foreground while the rest of the jurors stay behind, facing away, makes an extremely powerful visual statement without feeling unnatural in the jury room's confined space. Lumet is a master of staging and blocking.

In fact, Lumet's just flat-out great with actors in general. These jurors mostly just talk and argue with each other, yet the dialogue feels very real and natural and all the key players give compelling, moving performances.

Then there's cinematographer Boris Kaufman, the youngest brother of legendary Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Kaufman not only keeps the camera moving in enlivening ways, but also brings a distinct and provocative visual style to 12 Angry Men.

Let's start with the four-plus minute high-angle long take that backs the opening credits and begins the film proper. The shot is a bravura display of both Lumet's ability to block and pace a wordless sequence, and Kaufman's knack for finding the perfect camera placement, shooting from behind an electric fan at one extreme end of the room.

Furthermore, the close-ups and two-shots in 12 Angry Men are unusual, eschewing what cinematographer John Bailey calls the "compressed perspective" of typical Hollywood cinematography of the 1950s. Using wide-angle lenses for his close-ups, Kaufman deemphasizes the background and makes the foregrounded person's face stand out strikingly. As Bailey puts it quite accurately, in 12 Angry Men Kaufman's close-up work "walks that razor edge between it [on the one hand] being arresting and making you feel very present with the shot and [on the other hand] putting you off." ***

Bailey argues that whereas Lumet came from television and large 3-camera studio setups, former documentarian Kaufman was used to shooting close-up to actors, having shown a penchant for tight close-ups in his work with Jean Vigo in the '30s. Therefore much of the film's visual style may be rightfully attributed to Kaufman's contributions.

Nevertheless it is Lumet's amazing facility with actors and his penchant for liberal political advocacy that are most on display here. 12 Angry Men documents more that just a jury room proceeding -- it is a dramatization of the perilous place of hegemonic white masculinity just before the onset of the 1960s. In the 1957 of the film, the women's liberation movements and civil rights movements haven't yet begun in earnest, but the jurors know that their traditional, patriarchal way of life is being threatened.

For example, when Juror 10 goes on his racist tirade, subsequently to retreat into the foreground all alone, his rambling lines "I mean, what's happening in here? I speak my piece and you . . . listen to me. This kid on trial here, his type -- well, don't you know about them? There's a danger here. These people are dangerous" echo the thoughts of a generation who doesn't yet understand that the times are a-changin'. He genuinely expects everyone else to think as he does, to support him, and he is quietly devastated when he realizes his racist beliefs are not shared by anyone else, not when articulated so bluntly.

The anger the film's title alludes to may be superficially about the length of the jury's deliberations, a missed baseball game, or even the kinds of deep personal secrets that emerge over the course of the film. But the jurors' collective anger is really about their being forced to face a changing world in which people of color, like the defendant whose fate they will decide, must be accepted as their peer in a system which still unduly favors white men. The film is, in sum, about structural racism and classism in the American justice system -- a very timely topic indeed.

Lumet scholar Frank Cunningham calls 12 Angry Men "one of [Lumet's] most thematically rich and cinematically evocative films" and writes of the director more generally that

Lumet's union of cinematic technique with literary and thematic moral meaning precisely defines his directorial significance. Lumet may not always move the camera in ways that call immediate attention to his technique, yet his frame is rarely static but usually full, busy with life's detail and flow. Though the camera work is seldom spectacular, its controlled movement is subtle and filled with the movement of human event.†

Indeed, that is the best way to describe it: Lumet's films feel vibrant and alive and urgent in a way that relatively few films do. There is an intelligence and moral purpose behind them, yet they almost never come off as preachy or pedantic. They are tightly crafted, cleverly scripted, and loaded with tension and pathos. They are, in short, gripping films for thinking adults -- the kind of films Hollywood can and should make more often.

As Cunningham concludes,

Lumet refuses to make films that as a group fall easily into categories. Of course, facile categories and theories make headlines, and so the Godards gain more fame than the Frankenheimers, even though work without such theoretical embellishment may possess the greater excellence.††  

I don't entirely agree with Cunningham's pooh-poohing of Godard -- or, by extension, of other directors whose work is genre-based and/or "theoretically embellished" by which I assume he means more self-reflexive and/or formally experimental. That said, I take his point that many critics and cinephiles lavish more attention and praise upon the work of filmmakers with flashier, more easily detectable directorial flourishes. Ultimately, I am in total accord with Cunningham in wanting to laud the work of directors like Lumet -- ones like William Wyler, Michael Curtiz, and Hal Ashby -- who are more subtle in their filmmaking craft and therefore trickier to pin down.

Al Pacino gives a career-topping performance as Sonny in Lumet's 

electrifying thriller Dog Day Afternoon (1975).

Bonus Afterthought: Cunningham places 12 Angry Men alongside Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), Fail Safe (1964), and The Pawnbroker, calling these Lumet efforts "four of the culture's most distinguished films." (p. 1). I agree with him about Pawnbroker, however, for me, the other Lumet essentials beyond 12 Angry Men also include Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), and The Verdict (1982). Of those, I think Dog Day Afternoon is the single most essential and best -- it is a great thriller, driven forward by incredible performances by Al Pacino and John Cazale.

Lumet films I want to see but haven't include his final film, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), and The Fugitive Kind (1960), an overlooked gem starring Marlon Brando discussed at length by John Bailey in the documentary featurette I cited earlier.

Regarding the aforementioned 1997 remake of 12 Angry Men, I've never seen it. It may be very good indeed for all I know. But I seriously doubt it is as technically and dramatically marvelous as Lumet's lean-and-mean rendition.

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* Of course in Mr. Smith the title character is a senator, not a lawyer, and the drama takes place on the senate floor, yet the film's structure and the content of its pivotal scenes aligns it with the courtroom drama.
** I am not engaging upon this "Alternative Top 100" project in a particularly methodical or organized fashion. I am not (so far) generating my own alternative list nor am I numbering the entries. I am simply naming some films that I think should be on any legitimate list of this kind. See my second footnote here if you want an idea about which titles I would cut from EW's list to make room for my alternative selections.
*** Bailey's remarks about Kaufman's contributions to 12 Angry Men can be found on Disc Two of the Criterion Collection edition of the film, in a documentary featurette called "On Boris Kaufman." His comments on 12 Angry Men's cinematography start around the twenty minute mark of that feature.
† Cunningham, Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision (Second Ed.) (U. Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 109, 119.
†† Cunningham pp. 120-1.

EW #12: The Searchers (1956)

The Searchers' Ethan Edwards is "rootless, homeless. Like the Indian corpse whose eyes he shoots out, 'he travels between the winds.' There is no starting over for Ethan, no erasure of the past, no reinvention of self, no America." 
-- Jim Kitses, Horizons West pp. 94, 97

John Ford's The Searchers is one of the best Hollywood Westerns ever made, and also one of the best and most culturally significant American films ever made.* It well deserves high placement on any "Top Films" list including Entertainment Weekly's. It makes sense to me that The Searchers would be EW's (or anyone's) highest-ranked Western. As Owen Gleiberman explains, "That John Ford’s dark Western The Searchers (#12) ended up as high as it did testifies to our feeling that the film’s darkness was ahead of its time – that the movie now seems front and center in the culture more than many older Westerns."

Set in "Texas 1868," The Searchers tells the story of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), a Confederate veteran who returns to the frontier homestead of his brother, Aaron (Walter Coy), Aaron's wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan), and their children, Lucy, Ben, and Debbie. A young man of mixed blood named Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) also lives with the family. We learn that Ethan rescued the infant Martin from a massacre, but now he doesn't like to talk about it and seems uneasy around him. Martin calls Aaron "uncle" and Martha "aunt" but Ethan insists the young man address him as "Ethan" rather than "uncle."

Martha's marriage to Aaron is passionless. Several early scenes -- hell, the film's opening shot! -- clearly show that it is she and Ethan who are truly in love, though this is not (verbally) acknowledged. "Is Ethan punished for his covetousness. or for a sin of omission?" Jim Kitses asks. The film never answers this question or explicates the Ethan and Martha backstory, but Kitses is correct to assert that "this wrong marriage [between Martha and Aaron] inflects the tragic action of The Searchers." **

Soon after Ethan's return, Aaron, Martha, and Ben are massacred and Lucy and Debbie kidnapped by a Comanche war party led by Scar (German-American actor Henry Brandon). Thus the titular search begins as Ethan and Martin spend the whole movie -- seven years -- looking for Lucy and Debbie, tracking the elusive Comanche war band who took them.

I won't reveal details of the film's plot twists or ending, but suffice to say that Ethan goes further and further off the rails as events of the film progress. He is a violent, ruthless man to begin with then actions like barging impatiently out of a funeral service, shooting out the eyes of a dead Comanche, and luring a minor profiteer to a brutal shooting death reveal Ethan to be borderline psychotic.

Scenes depicting community rituals like dances, weddings, and funerals hold a place of special importance in John Ford's westerns . . . 

. . . therefore when Ethan Edwards abruptly storms out of this one, it signifies that he is a lost soul, beyond redemption or recuperation, a quality rare to find in a Ford protagonist.

Ford biographer Joseph McBride calls The Searchers "a film of warring dualities" that "gets to the heart of many of the unresolved contradictions that make the Western genre such a rich field for exploring American history and mythology." I think The Searchers gets at the core of those mythological and historical contradictions partly because it occupies the cusp between the Hollywood western's classical and revisionist phases.

You see, most genres or film cycles move through a succession of three broad phases: the formative, the classical, and the revisionist. (Some theorists like to add a fourth phase, the parodic, but I see the mode of parody as already integrated into the revisionist phase, so screw that.)

The formative phase is when the genre does not yet fully exist -- it is being shaped by a process of certain types of films being released, certain patterns and combinations becoming popular, and more of those types of films being made. Westerns have a long history: since some of the first 1890s Edison actualities were of wild west show stars like Annie Oakley, one could say the western genre was nascent in motion pictures from their earliest inception. The Great Train Robbery (1903), one of the first widely seen multi-shot narrative films, is also a western. Therefore one could say that the western's formative phase was also the formative period of Hollywood narrative cinema writ large.

The classical phase of the Hollywood western coincides with the rise of the sound western. Synchronized sound arrived in Hollywood right at the dawn of the '30s, and John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) is usually cited as the inaugural movie of the western's classical period, which lasts through the '40s and into the '50s.  

John Wayne as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach (1939), the film that launched him to stardom. Stagecoach inaugurates the Hollywood western's "classical" phase. 

Released in 1956, The Searchers is one of the first revisionist westerns -- or at least a proto-revisionist one.

Many film critics and historians cite Ford's own myth-deconstructing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) or Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the first major "spaghetti" western, as the tipping point between the sound western's classical and revisionist phases. I can get behind that. Yet revisionist tendencies are present in certain 1950s westerns including The Searchers, Johnny Guitar (1954), and Anthony Mann's Winchester '73 (1950), The Furies (1950), and The Naked Spur (1953).

Revisionist westerns explicitly refer back to, satirize, rework, deconstruct, and/or sometimes radically break with the conventions established in the genre's classical phase. In revisionist westerns, the protagonists' motives get darker, more ambiguous, and less heroic (as in The Searchers, The Naked Spur, and The Wild Bunch). In revisionist westerns, the callous and brutal treatment of indigenous people is at least sporadically questioned (as in The Furies, Cheyenne Autumn, and Little Big Man). Sometimes women play unexpectedly non-traditional or non-domestic roles (as in The Furies, The Naked Spur, and Johnny Guitar). Most revisionist westerns play the classical conventions knowingly or for laughs in ways designed to parody, question, and/or critique them.

In the end, The Searchers walks a fine line between classical and self-reflexive tendencies. Broadly speaking, I would say it is classical in its aesthetic choices (artfully constructed visual tableaux, beautiful Monument Valley scenery, a symphonic musical score) but revisionist in its deconstruction of the character of Ethan Edwards.

McBride describes as "subversive" the particular way in which The Searchers

turns the concept of Western heroism inside out, showing the lone gunman who acts in the name of nascent civilization as a warped, destructive force. Martin gains in stature as the search progresses, becoming a truly modern man, whereas Ethan is diminished, trapped in the destructive patterns of the past. The man with mixed blood, not the white supremacist, is the 'intrinsic-most' American.† 

White supremacist though he may be, Edwards represents both a career high performance for John Wayne and an important iteration of the American frontiersman archetype. This type originates with James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, best known as protagonist of The Last of the Mohicans. He is a white character who "goes native," appropriating an indigenous ethnicity with which he identifies. He traverses the boundaries between the indigenous culture he appropriates and the dominant, Euro-American culture to which he also belongs. The American wilderness hero is, in ecocritic David Ingram's words, "close to wild nature and to the naturalized values of force and violence it represents" but at the same time functions as "an agent of the commercial development of that wilderness." †† That is, he travels and identifies with indigenous people but sells them out to the white man anyway.

In his appropriation of indigenous culture, his tracking skills, and his ambivalence toward Euro-American civilization, The Searchers' Ethan Edwards resembles Natty Bumppo, James Fenimore Cooper's woodsman hero.

Joan Dagle writes specifically of The Searchers' complex protagonist that

Ethan's knowledge of Indian culture, including Comanche culture, is extensive and allows him to stay on Scar's trail. More interesting, however, is his identification with Indian culture, an identification which complicates the reading of Scar and Ethan as racial antagonists. [Ethan's] intimate knowledge of Indian beliefs is hard to account for. How does he come to know so much, including religious beliefs, about a people he hates? †††

For a guy who hates the Comanche so damn much, Ethan Edwards sure knows a lot about their customs, beliefs, and funerary practices.

By acting out his racially motivated vengeance, Ethan Edwards shows us the ugly, imperialistic violence that underlies the very notion of the Western protagonist, the very notion of John Wayne. Edwards is both the apotheosis and the deconstruction of the Wayne persona.‡ By contrast, Wayne's role as John T. Chance in Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo, while beautifully nuanced, is a nostalgic return to the good old days; his Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a ghost, the last of a dying breed, an elegy for the Wayne/Edwards archetype and its foundational role in building the myth of the West.

I have written before of the "depth and beauty" of John Ford's work. Ford is a director of surprising subtlety and tenderness when it comes to the depiction of human emotions. For all his long affiliation with the western, Ford is fundamentally a melodramatic director interested in the emotions of longing, nostalgia, sadness, and loss (unlike Hawks, who is more action-adventurish and bromance-y). Ford is mainly a visual director and is finely attuned to the nuances of love, affection, and relationships, especially when played out compositionally and gesturally. Hence the tenderness of his love scenes, and the real payoff of any well-made John Ford film: for all their superficial formality, they are emotionally resonant and deeply satisfying.

Beautifully composed shots like this one exemplify John Ford's show-don't-tell style of filmmaking. For me, this composition suggests that for Ethan, finding Debbie (who is running down the hill in the background) is a matter of the head, but for Martin it's a matter of the heart and guts.

I understand that for some of my readers, The Searchers' status as a western and/or the presence of John Wayne in the lead role dampens your interest in seeing it. Yet if I were to recommend only one western for the non-fan to check out, it would be this one, Rio Bravo, or The Naked Spur. So The Searchers is in my top three westerns -- I cannot recommend it highly enough.

UPDATE 5/19/2016: BFI's Christina Newland calls The Searchers the "Best Place to Start" if you want to explore the 1950s psychological western, a grouping that also includes Mann's The Naked Spur and Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar.

Bonus Afterthought: There is an explicit link between The Searchers and Taxi Driver (itself #42 on EW's Top 100 list). Martin Scorsese famously claimed that The Searchers should have included a scene in which we see Scar and Debbie together during their “married” life. When he and Paul Schrader were making Taxi Driver, which borrows many structural and tonal elements from Ford's influential western, they included such a scene between Sport and Iris. Their Taxi Driver "Scar scene" stands out as one of the few in the film that doesn't unfold from Travis Bickle's point of view.

Martin Scorsese discussing Taxi Driver circa 1997.

Film critic Robin Wood says of The Searchers' missing "Scar scene," which would have spelled out "Debbie's relationship to Scar and Comanche life," that

It is a scene Ford could not conceivably have filmed, and Scorsese and Schrader are quite right in implying (I presume) that its absence definitively highlights the cheating, evasion, and confusion that characterize the last third of his movie.  

Wood calls The Searchers an archetypal "incoherent text," a film that does not quite know what it wants to say, a work "in which the drive toward the ordering of experience has been visibly defeated." Yet as Wood says of Taxi Driver and other "incoherent" films of the 1970s, The Searchers is a much more interesting movie precisely because of its ambiguities, abrupt turns, confusions, and contradictions.‡‡

Analogously, Joan Dagle sees The Searchers' circling, non-linear plot structure as integral to the whole point the film is trying to make: that hate and vengeance are inward-focused and self-destructive. Indeed, The Searchers documents Ethan's racism- and rage-fueled spiral into his own personal hell. It ends with him cast adrift, left with nothing once his fury is spent. Ethan -- and the film -- go nowhere.

Yet of course it goes somewhere: deep into the dark recesses of the psyche of a racist, reactionary white man and the community he both saves and plagues. Head-on into the contradictions and incoherences at the heart of the violent American frontier myth. Head-on into America's bloody, racist past (and present).

This guy, whose analysis is otherwise pretty sharp, feels comfortable comparing The Searchers with Taxi Driver in order to declare the latter "simply a better film" than Ford's masterpiece. For me, these two films, while structurally and thematically similar, are far too different -- in period of release, in genre, in tone -- to be comparatively evaluated.

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* My short list of most essential Hollywood westerns includes Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, High Noon, Rio Bravo, The Naked Spur, The Wild Bunch, and Unforgiven. I would also include "spaghetti" westerns like The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West, plus postmodern / revisionist entries El Topo, Dead Man, The Tracker, Meek's Cutoff, and, from what I hear, Slow West.
** Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (New Edition) (BFI, 2007) p. 94.
*** McBride, Searching for John Ford (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2001) p. 558.
† McBride p. 560, 564.
†† Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (U. of Exeter Press, 2000) p. 74. Ingram offers an extended discussion of the American wilderness hero type on pp. 74-77 of Green Screen, acknowledging his debt to Richard Slotkin's work in Gunfighter Nation:The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Atheneum, 1992).
††† Joan Dagle, "Linear Patterns and Ethnic Encounters in the Ford Western" in John Ford Made Westerns, ed. Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein (Indiana Univ. Press, 2001) p. 122.
‡ In terms of film noir, the comparable performance, the one that goes to such extremes that it exposes the grim, paranoid, ideologically retrograde conventions and assumptions underpinning its genre, is probably Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly (1955).
‡‡ Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond (Columbia UP, 2003) pp. 47, 42.

EW #68: Goodfellas (1990)

Sorry guys: this post explains why Goodfellas (1990), which Entertainment Weekly placed at #68 on this list of 100 all-time great films, is actually one of Martin Scorsese's least interesting, most overrated works.

As I have already stated in my post about Mean Streets (1973),

Contrary to its title, Mean Streets is not mean-spirited at all. It is upbeat, funny, and centrally about friendship and loyalty between a bunch of variously incompetent yet basically good-hearted "mooks."

Goodfellas replaces Mean Streets' humanness and nostalgia with cleverness and cynicism. Everyone in Goodfellas is out to screw each other and derives perverse pleasure from doing so. Goodfellas glamorizes brutality and violence, not friendship. And while I have no problem with films that depict how barbaric and misdirected groups of men can be, it is Goodfellas' patina of smug, self-congratulatory cleverness, a wit that pretends to be ironic and deconstructive but actually isn't, that puts me off this film. The film is so in love with its fucked-up characters and its own sense of humor that it cannot achieve a point of view outside of either, the way Heat does or Aguirre, Wrath of God does or even Funny Games does. Goodfellas celebrates and glorifies that which (I think) it means to parody. This is not good.*

When my undergraduate film students write papers about Goodfellas, they discuss it straightforwardly as a "great gangster film," not as a parody of one. Of course, part of that reading is bound up in (most of) those students' ignorance of the long tradition of gangster films upon which Scorsese is drawing here. Yet I argue that the film's rhapsodic tone and love of its despicable characters contributes strongly to this impression as well. As AV Club's Ryan Vlastelica fairly recently put it: "The film is like the cinematic version of a Ferrari: so fun to ride along with that you barely think about the sophisticated workings under the hood." He means that comment as praise, yet I see it as the source of the film's ideological danger.

Unlike Scorsese's own earlier works such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Mean Streets, Goodfellas does not make it clear that we should be critical of Henry Hill's way of life. A key difference between Goodfellas and its superior predecessor Mean Streets is from whose point of view the story gets told. In Mean Streets, it is Charlie (Harvey Keitel), the more mature aspiring wiseguy through whose eyes we see the reckless Johnny Boy (Robert de Niro) inexorably sow the seeds of his own destruction. This allows us to see Johnny Boy -- and by extension, this whole group of wiseguys -- for the cocky, violent idiots they really are.

Conversely, in Goodfellas, we see everything first person, via Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), this film's reckless Johnny Boy figure. Of course, Joe Pesci's Tommy DeVito is thrown in so that there is another even more psychotic and reckless individual around to make Hill seem more measured, but the point stands: Goodfellas transpires from the point of view of the idiot himself, rather than the smarter character who is trying to manage the idiot. This makes a big difference. It also doesn't help that Goodfellas lacks the sinister, tragic, discomfiting tone of, say, Raging Bull. It is, frankly, too much of a good time to effectively function as social critique.

That said, I know this is a subtle matter involving tone and point of view, and I acknowledge the potentially valid counterargument put forward by Matthew Eng, in which he argues that

[Scorsese] doesn’t warrant the blame for the chauvinistic vein in which Goodfellas’ bad fans have appropriated the film’s legacy to fit the superficially cool story they’d like it to be. (And between Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese has infamously seen his share of director-shaming misinterpretations.) Scorsese is, quite simply, far too talented and too intelligent a filmmaker to have made the movie Goodfellas is labeled as.

Is he really? I mean, I see this argument, and I agree that Scorsese is both enormously talented and highly intelligent, yet there is no reason he couldn't have slipped over the line on this film, accidentally lionizing the forms of masculinity he so effectively deconstructed in those other films Eng and I have mentioned. Eng continues:

Even as Goodfellas coats a glittering sheen over most of Michael Ballhaus' marvelously multilayered images, Scorsese delves pretty deeply into the foolishly warped mind of Henry Hill, whom he pegs almost instantly as a craven, class-A manipulator. [. . .] Henry’s relentless pursuit of criminal aims allows him to become the type of made man he deified as a boy, a transformation that is firmly rooted in the heroic images of his departed youth, when he was initially recruited into mob society. In many ways, Henry is the prototypical Goodfellas bad fan. From there, Scorsese and co-writer Nicholas Pileggi are ultimately less interested in creating heroes than in deconstructing Henry and his friends.

It's that "glittering sheen" I worry about. The tone of Goodfellas encourages us to enjoy Hill's madcap ride through his wiseguy fever dream, and ultimately to sympathize with him. Compare this to Raging Bull, in which whatever sympathy we might be able to muster for Jake La Motta (de Niro) is surely undermined by what a colossal, corrupt asshole he has been throughout the entire film. Sure, Bull makes La Motta's time in the ring look "glittery," epic, and aesthetically beautiful -- those fight sequences are some of the very best scenes of Scorsese's entire career -- yet anytime Jake steps out of the ring, he acts like a despicable, violent, antisocial asshole. Raging Bull makes very clear the ironic, even disgusted distance we are meant to impose when looking in on La Motta's disastrous life.

I am just not sure Goodfellas achieves that same ironic distance, despite Eng's noble defense of the film's deconstructive potential. I just don't see it that way, and that's why I find it hard to enjoy it.

Goodfellas is doubtless a technical masterwork, as this video -- which also foregrounds how intensely the film aligns the viewer with Hill's subjective point of view -- demonstrates:

The Discarded Image: Episode 3 - Goodfellas (Scorsese, 1990) from 1848 Media on Vimeo.

But in the end, despite its high level of cinematic craft, I just find Goodfellas to be:

(1) Too clever in a self-satisfied way to function as a sufficiently deconstructive ideological critique of the violent masculinity it displays,

and

(2) A less interesting, less clever, less raw rehashing of characters, ideas, and themes Scorsese already explored with much more finesse in the truly great Mean Streets.

So fuck Goodfellas -- give me Mean Streets. Or give me Michael Mann's crime film masterpiece Heat (1995), which is fifty quadrillion times better than Martin Scorsese's vastly overrated gangster comedy.

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* Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange has the same problem. I think -- I hope! -- it means us to be critical of Alex's antisocial behavior, yet it makes him so likeable and amusing and hard to censure that it may ultimately fail as satire, at least of anything other than the state apparati that attempt to condition the violence out of Alex via torture.

EW #11: King Kong (1933)

King Kong.

As a lover of horror and monster movies, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's masterpiece King Kong (1933) is one of my all-time favorite motion pictures.

Although there are a few silent monster movies that came before it (The Lost World [1925], The Golem [1920]), and although Universal Studios' 1931 Dracula rightfully takes principal credit for launching the horror film boom of the early Hollywood "talkie" era, Cooper and Schoedsack's King Kong nevertheless stands as the most popular and influential monster movie of all time. Even Ishiro Honda's brilliant Gojira (1954) owes a debt of influence to Kong's groundbreaking horror extravaganza. Fusing an action/adventure film with a terrifying "monster on the loose " rampage in New York City, King Kong sets the narrative template and production standard for all monster films ever made in the wake of its release.

To start with, Willis O'Brien's animation work on King Kong is enormously influential and quite magical. 1933's Kong (the creature) is still, for me, the most convincing one. As Entertainment Weekly's short blurb for their Top 100 Films List says, King Kong's "stop-motion effects retain every bit of their magic as Kong the giant gorilla awes, terrifies, and breaks your heart." I couldn't agree more. It is no coincidence that the EW writers and I both use the word "magic" to describe the monster effects in the 1933 Kong. This is an example of "movie magic" at its absolute creative and affective pinnacle.

Willis O'Brien's "performance" of Kong is an amazing feat of special effects artistry. 

Another reason why the 1933 Kong is so great is that it does not waste time. Its hallmark is narrative tightness, smooth flow, and excellent pacing. It runs a lean and mean 104 minutes in total (including a pre-credits musical overture). No subsequent version has really gained anything by being longer. Twenty-five minutes into the 1933 Kong, our protagonists have reached Skull Island and are preparing to go ashore. In Peter Jackson's overlong 2005 version, at twenty-five minutes Denham et. al. are still fucking around in New York City and the Venture hasn't even left the harbor yet. Yawn!

King Kong is also particularly effective (and historically significant) thanks to Max Steiner's innovative musical score. While the singular importance of King Kong's soundtrack has been disputed (or at least complicated) by some film historians (see Michael Slowik's superb article "Diegetic Withdrawal and Other Worlds" in Cinema Journal 53.1), it nevertheless marks a watershed moment during which the cinematic score came into its own in Hollywood.* Especially distinctive in Kong are the ceremonial drums our protagonists hear as they approach Skull Island, which signal to them that the supposedly uninhabited island is anything but. As film critic James Snead writes, those drums serve as a form of subtle (and influential) aural coding that clue us into the identity of the islanders: "Steiner's coding of blackness by 'the drum' founds (in the relatively youthful art of synchronized movie sound) a longstanding cinematic device" which will be used again and again whenever blacks -- especially 'native' ones -- hereafter appear in popular film.**

Mentioning those drums raises the biggest problem I have with King Kong. Like Gone with the Wind and so many other Hollywood classics, Kong is unabashedly racist, sexist, and imperialist. As Snead argues,

In all Hollywood film portrayals of blacks, the political is never far from the sexual, for it is both as a political and a sexual threat that the black skin appears onscreen. And nowhere is this more plainly to be seen than in King Kong. There are very few instances in the history of Hollywood cinema in which the color black has been writ so large and intruded so powerfully into the social plane of white normality.***

Kong's main threat, then, is a sexual one that is coded black. He stands in for the frightening black bogeyman/rapist that has haunted the white imagination for so much of its cultural history. Kong's abduction of Ann (Fay Wray) makes the stakes of King Kong clear: it is a struggle between white masculinity and black masculinity for the erotic possession of the white woman's body (and by extension her reproductive power). Spoiler: In all three versions of King Kong, as in the vast majority of Hollywood films, the white men win.

In case there was any question about the sexual dimension of Kong's obsession with Ann, the scene in which he half undresses her and sniffs his fingers after caressing her body should clarify this point. 

Protecting his highly prized white woman, King Kong pulverizes the shit out of a pterodactyl. 

What is colossally unfair about all this is that Denham (Robert Armstrong) deliberately provokes Kong's abduction of Ann. He brings her to the island with the express intention of placing her in mortal danger for the sake of his adventure film. Writing about the ending, and insisting that King Kong is ultimately "about the motives and effects of Carl Denham's deeds," Snead tells us that

The relationship between Ann and Jack survives only at the cost of an execution. The narrative pleasure of seeing the (white) male-female bond re-established at the end tends to screen out the full meaning of the final shot: the accidental (black) intruder lies bloody and dead on the ground, his epitaph given glibly by the very person [Denham] who has trapped him."† 

In essence, Denham stages a spectacular show in which Kong's kidnapping of Ann justifies white male retribution against the creature, who represents blackness. Thereby, the responsibility for Kong's capture and subsequent death is deflected back onto Kong himself, instead of being laid at Denham's feet where it belongs. This is a classic example of very effective "blame the victim" rhetoric.

Denham: "It was beauty killed the beast." LIAR!!

Denham's explicit role as a film director and cinematographer drives home King Kong's dominant thematic message: that we are all implicated in his visual colonization, capture, and killing of Skull Island's most noteworthy black denizen. As Snead puts it,  

[it is difficult to resist] our gradual implication in Denham's optical colonialism. Even a viewer repulsed by Denham's many negative qualities would have difficulty resisting the pull of his powerful voyeurism [. . .]. The political ideology of the film soon becomes inextricable from the pleasure we take in the very act of seeing.  The power of staging a 'show' (watching a 'girl' scream or 'natives' dancing) is no longer Denham's alone. King Kong, by a rather devious movement, makes us cheer him on. ††

Carl Denham, visual colonizer, capturer, and killer of black bodies.

All that said, if we disqualified racist films from EW's list, it would contain practically no films at all. We live in a structurally racist and sexist society, and so of course our popular media reflect that back to us, both in the historical past and in the present day. King Kong stands as an example of both Hollywood's ubiquitous pro-white-maleness and as a singular apex of its ability to produce narrative, cinematographic, musical, and special effects artistry. Kong is a terrifically fun film and, despite its ideological shortcomings, well deserving of its high placement on this "Top Films" list.


Bonus Afterthoughts: In my view, the 1933 version of King Kong is the best version by a long shot. For me, the versions get steadily worse as they go: the much-maligned 1976 version starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange is second-best, and Peter Jackson's overlong, bombastic 2005 remake is the worst of the three. Having already extolled the many virtues of the original, let me briefly explain why I rank the 1976 version above Jackson's dull, over-inflated remake.

Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin, and Jessica Lange in the 1976 remake of King Kong. 

First, let me confess to two biases regarding the 1976 Kong: (1) it is the first version of King Kong I ever saw, so doubtless it created a stronger impression on me than it would have if I had seen the superior 1933 version first, and (2) I am generally predisposed to like 1970s cinema (as, for example, my reviews of Nashville and The Fog should make abundantly clear).

One of the biggest complaints I've heard regarding the 1976 Kong is about the monster itself: rather than an animated creature, the 1976 version utilizes a man in a gorilla suit. Not only is this choice perceived as a failure of special effects innovation in general, the performance of that guy in a suit is considered to be unconvincing and not very gorilla-like. Indeed, the 1976 embodiment of Kong walks upright rather than hunched forward, making no real effort to conceal his very human gait and posture. Yet, despite my recognition of its cheapness, that guy in a gorilla suit actually works for me -- after all, King Kong is supposed to be a unique creature, "neither man nor beast," so why should he necessarily behave and move exactly as a real gorilla would? Maybe I was just too young and impressionable when I saw this version of the film, but the creature never struck me as unconvincing -- indeed, I always found him scary and, at times, quite sympathetic.

That brings me to one of the greatest triumphs of the 1976 Kong: its overtly environmental message. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 1976 version is the most ideologically progressive version of King Kong. Bridges plays an animal rights hippie who sneaks aboard an oil company ship heading to Skull Island to exploit it. He spends the whole movie critiquing Fred Wilson (Grodin) and his corporation's motives in capturing and crassly exploiting King Kong. Most remarkable in the 1976 version is an extended set of scenes taking place on the ship's return voyage from the island for which there is no analogue in the 1933 or 2005 versions. This sequence depicts Kong entrapped and miserable in the cargo hold of the ship, generating unprecedented pathos for his unjust fate and heavily underscoring Kong's moral superiority to his captors.

The 1976 Kong may just be a guy in an ape suit, yet scenes like this one generate strong viewer sympathy for the unjustly incarcerated creature. 

This progressivism extends (somewhat) to the 1976 Kong's treatment of its indigenous Skull Island tribespeople. Bridges's anthropologist Driscoll says of them that "when we took Kong, we took their god." Sure, this is still a privileged white man speaking on behalf the indigenous "Other" whose point of view we never truly know, yet it is more voice or agency than the Skull Islanders get in any other version of the movie. In 1933 they are infantile idiots to be laughed at, and in 2005 they are murderous horror-film monsters to be reviled. Here, at least, their sufferings are acknowledged.

The 1976 Kong does run a bit long, 134 minutes in total. One especially feels this length in the film's third act, during the New York City sequences, which go on a wee bit longer than they need to. Yet the film does not drag nearly as badly as does Jackson's 2005 remake (187 mins long!), and at least it extends certain portions (as in the return voyage sequences just discussed) in order to bring fresh, new ideas to the table.

As for the 2005 version, Jackson gets the digital design of Kong just right, but then animates him very badly as he moves through cinematic space (scroll down to item #2 on this list). Despite some inspired casting (Naomi Watts and Jack Black are especially good) and a cool-looking gorilla (as long as he sits still), the film is just too long, too slow-paced, and too overstuffed with unnecessary crap that it diffuses any power the film might have over its viewer. 2005 Kong is a prime example of sloppy, over-indulgent filmmaking of the kind late-career Jackson seems to favor. It is boring. No thanks.

Rene Auberjonois sez: "You'd get better mileage filling up your Cadillac with mule piss!"

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* Slowik's fascinating article works to complicate the idea that Max Steiner's Kong score single-handedly "paved the way for the Golden Age of film music (roughly 1935 to 1950)" (p. 1). Obviously, I highly recommend his article. For additional reading, Slowik offers some afterthoughts about his essay here and film composer David Allen offers historical and musical insights into the scores for both the 1933 and 2005 versions of Kong here.
** James Snead, White Screens, Black Images (Routledge, 1994) p. 19.
*** Snead p. 8.
† Snead pp. 16, 15.
†† Snead pp. 25-6.

EW #10: Gone With The Wind (1939)

Vivien Leigh and Thomas Mitchell in Gone with the Wind. 

Film fandom is a changeable, ever-morphing thing. It is a dynamic process that unfolds over a potentially long stretch of time (i.e., a filmgoer's lifetime). Films I revered quite highly in my youth may not resonate as much with me as I get older. As I change, and as the world changes, my perception of and feelings about films I've loved transmogrify and shift, sometimes quite dramatically.

One example of this is my changing relationship to the James Bond films. I grew up loving those movies, especially the Sean Connery ones. My god, I watched the shit out of those things. Yet as I have aged, the politics of those films -- their flagrant racism and sexism -- have become harder and harder for me to bracket aside or reconcile or feel okay about. As I get older and as I deliberately pursue learning all I can about cinema and its aesthetic and thematic possibilities, I find that my appetite for good ol' male-centered action films of all kinds (be they Bond films or superhero films or what have you) has diminished significantly. This is not a judgment about the genre, I know that action films can be great (hell, check out my gushy review of Mad Max: Fury Road) but it is certainly a genre from which I have drifted away over time. I may drift back. Who knows?

My point is that we longtime film fans often find ourselves in a position of loving a thing -- or starting to shift away from loving a thing -- that we do not wish to utterly repudiate or disown, but that makes us uncomfortable as we (and our movie tastes) mature. Gone with the Wind is just such a movie for me. As an exemplar of its genre (period melodrama), as an amazing aesthetic achievement, and as an absolute high water-mark in Hollywood film history, I love this film dearly. Put Gone with the Wind on in a room and I am absolutely glued to it. It is one of the best Technicolor films ever made and from an overall aesthetic point of view probably one of the best Hollywood studio films ever made, bar none. It is female-centered (a plus) and its performances (particularly by Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, Hattie McDaniel, Thomas Mitchell, and Olivia de Havilland) are uniformly superb, in many cases outright iconic. In terms of its historical importance, artistic superiority, and overall yield of viewing pleasure, I would place Wind higher on Entertainment Weekly's Top 100 List than Casablanca, which is romantic and well-crafted and chock full of great performances, yet not actually as good as many other great black and white films of the same period in my view.*

All that said, Gone With the Wind is, like many popular Hollywood mega-hits, morally reprehensible. Like its earlier cinematic forebear, Birth of a Nation (1915), Wind is brazenly racist throughout. The movie views slavery with benevolent nostalgia, and it endorses (or at least excuses) domestic violence and rape as well. So my love of Gone with the Wind as an aesthetic object is at odds with my disgust over the film's ideological messages.

This brings me to a deeper question about "best of" lists like EW's. If one includes Gone with the Wind on the list despite its overt racism and misogynistic endorsement of domestic abuse, why not include Birth of a Nation? Alternately, if one brackets out Birth on moral/ethical grounds, then why include the equally conservative, reactionary, racist, and sexist The Dark Knight (2007)? I don't have ready answers to these questions but I wonder about them.

In any case, for me, Gone with the Wind goes into the same category as the James Bond film Thunderball (which, despite my recognition of its retrograde morality, I love as a perfect piece of action cinema) or George Miller's recent masterwork Mad Max: Fury Road. I know there are some serious ideological (or in the case of Fury Road, environmental) problems with it, yet I love the film itself with all my cinephile's soul.

Particularly given that the white population of the U.S.A. is still largely in denial about the structural racism that pervades our society, it is hard to write about Wind without calling it out for its discriminatory ideas. So let us begin with the film's most subtly sinister scene, the one I call the "Scarlett as benevolent slaver" scene. This comes halfway through the film, when, after the Civil War, Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) is running her own mill and chooses to lease some convicts as laborers. After looking at a lineup of convicts for hire, Scarlett's longtime friend and business partner Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard) raises an objection to her plan, saying:

I do wish you'd let me hire free darkies instead of using convicts. I do believe we could do better.

Scarlett protests, accusing Ashley of being too soft on such people. Then this dialogue ensues:

Ashley: Scarlett, I will not make money out of the enforced labor and misery of others.

Scarlett: You weren't so particular about owning slaves.

Ashley: That was different, we didn't treat them that way.

Oh, I get it now. Slavery was totally fine in Ashley's mind because, at least in his imagined version of it, whites never mistreated their slaves the way Scarlett's foreman whips and starves her newly hired convict labor force. So long as we enslave people NICELY, it's okay, is it? Thanks for explaining that one, Ashley.

An extremely strange and morally backward sequence in which Ashley (Leslie Howard) explains why slavery was actually really good for black people -- so long as it was conducted nicely. 

Ashley's swift glossing over of the multitude of cruel horrors visited upon blacks during the transatlantic slave trading years is not the only way in which Gone with the Wind offends. The even bigger lie here is that the film shows us a line of mostly white convicts. As has been extensively documented in Slavery by Another Name, what actually happened after Reconstruction is that white authorities arrested black folks in great numbers on virtually any pretense, placing them into the prison system, thereby allowing them to be contracted out to various industries for essentially no wages. This was how the practice of slavery was continued even after the formal institution of slavery was abolished in the U.S.

Mill foreman Johnny Gallagher displays his line of white convicts for lease as hard laborers. This sequence glosses over the reality that the majority of leased convicts were black men.

Oddly, then, Gone with the Wind suggests that blacks are somehow better off being slaves than they are being free. Taken together with the film's depiction of blissfully loyal plantation blacks including Hattie McDaniel's famous "mammy" character, plus the deep, melodramatic pathos the film asks us to lavish upon the whites of the postbellum South, the film's pervasive racism is undeniable.

This shot of the tattered Confederate flag flying over the South's war dead succinctly conveys Gone with the Wind's racist ideological sympathies. On the other side of the coin, this shot concludes a breathtaking and technically masterful crane shot involving hundreds of extras, illustrating why Wind was such an enormously popular blockbuster.

All that said, one of the great strengths of Gone with the Wind, as with so many other classic women's pictures, is its foregrounding of an unrepentant, hard-charging heroine who takes command of her own destiny.** Indeed, it is the figure of Scarlett O'Hara that keeps me watching this lengthy film every time. Gone with the Wind is Scarlett's story, and she is one of the greatest screen heroines in Hollywood history, surviving war and impoverishment to rise again via strength of will and commitment to the land (helped by her loyal black servants, of course).

Scarlett's general greatness makes Rhett Butler's (Clark Gable's) callous rape of her in the last act of the film all the more marring and egregious. Presented as a jilted husband's attempt to get his due, the scene in which a drunken Rhett takes Scarlett by force is one of the most disturbing of the film. Maybe the scene is the film's attempt to show how corrupt masculinity is, even in the otherwise noble (if scoundrelly) Rhett, thereby strengthening Scarlett's motivation to press on without him. But I am not sure that reading is supported by what we see. Instead, I am left with the feeling that Wind wants us to view its intramarital rape scene as something Scarlett brought upon herself by rejecting her husband's sexual advances for too long, that her body was Rhett's to exploit and by god he was going to do it. This is a reprehensibly sexist and horrifying message.

Rhett Butler as acquaintance rapist. Like the recent film Gone Girl, Gone with the Wind implies that Scarlett provokes Rhett's violation of her, casting the blame for her rape back on her, the female victim, rather than on the rapist. 

Whatever else it may be, Gone with the Wind will always stand as independent producer David O. Selznick's magnum opus and as one of the most popular and successful big-budget pictures of all time. It is a major landmark in Hollywood history and one of the greatest aesthetic and dramatic triumphs of the Golden Age. And, like it or not, it is accurately reflective of America's extremely conflicted history of race relations. Gone with the Wind may wish white America to feel better about itself by glossing over our ugly history with comforting romanticism presented in lush, three-strip Technicolor. What I hope the film does for us today -- besides enchanting us with its cinematic virtuosity and epic narrative sweep -- is to remind us how far we still have to go to achieve social justice and a discrimination-free society.

--

* Vaguely noirish and/or romantic black and white films of the 1940s I would place above Casablanca include Double Indemnity, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, To Have and Have Not, and probably even Hitchcock's Spellbound. If we include the early 1950s I'd also throw in From Here to Eternity, A Place in the Sun, and Night of the Hunter. I don't mean I would strike Casablanca from the Top 100 list, just that I would rank any of these films higher.
** More great examples of classic women-centered melodramas include the Bette Davis vehicles Now, Voyager (1942), Dark Victory (1939), and Jezebel (1938), Olivia de Havilland in William Wyler's The Heiress (1949), Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945), and Barbara Stanwyk's astounding turn as the title character in Stella Dallas (1937).