Passe-partout

After watching Alexandre O. Philippe's Lynch/Oz (2022), a multi-chaptered film essay that just started showing on The Criterion Channel exploring David Lynch's putative obsession with The Wizard of Oz (1939), I was reminded of Walter Benjamin's observation about the power of allegory: “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.” Allegory eradicates the detail: “it is . . . a world in which the detail is of no great importance.” Hence, for Benjamin, to allegorize is to perform an act of imposture: it replaces a particular detail by another with a similar structure. The appeal of The Wizard of Oz is due to its parabolic (allegorical) drift, meaning its conclusion contains a simple moral lesson: there’s no place like home. In Lynch/Oz, we are asked to believe that if you allegorize, say, a David Lynch film such as Blue Velvet (1986)—which, like The Wizard of Oz, has a character named Dorothy—it concludes with the same moral lesson as The Wizard of Oz: there’s no place like home. Such moments are presented as hard-earned insights, but hardly as enlightening as the filmmakers seem to believe. There are moments of keen insight, but they are few and far between, and there are discussions in which various sequences in Lynch's films are, oddly, compared to films other than The Wizard of Oz.

While it may be that The Wizard of Oz is one of David Lynch’s most “enduring obsessions,” so, too, is Sunset Boulevard (1950), a Hollywood movie (movie about Hollywood) that has been referenced many times in Lynch’s films. As any fan of the Twin Peaks series knows, Lynch’s character is named Gordon Cole, an allusion to the Paramount executive to whom Norma Desmond speaks on the telephone. And, in a strategic shot in Mulholland Drive, we see the street sign, “Sunset Boulevard.” Director Karyn Kusama, in perhaps the best essay in the film along with Amy Nicholson’s, recalls a screening of Mulholland Drive (2001) at New York’s IFC Center. In a Q&A afterward, Kusama reports Lynch said, “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about The Wizard of Oz.” Certainly an over-exaggeration on Lynch’s part, but even if the film inhabits a permanent place in his psyche, his confession provides no passe-partout, or pass key, to understanding his work. Except, of course, by allegorization. In fact, I would argue that Sunset Boulevard is far more important to understanding Mulholland Drive than The Wizard of Oz.

Also, I am surprised that none of the commentators mentioned or discussed the sequence in The Straight Story (in which there is a character named Dorothy!) when Alvin invites the hitchhiking, runaway girl to shelter overnight at his camp. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, who has run away from home in order to protect Toto, happens upon Professor Marvel (Frank Morgan, in yet another iteration of the titular wizard), a charlatan fortune-teller. Like Alvin, Professor Marvel tells the runaway girl to go home because her family wants her and is worried about her. The Straight Story is a road movie, like The Wizard of Oz (if you want to make that argument—not a stretch), and does conclude with a scene extolling the virtues of family. Beyond such broad comparisons, though, the two films are much different. 

In addition to Amy Nicholson and Karyn Kusama, whose contributions are the most interesting and insightful in the movie, the film’s essayists are John Waters, filmmakers Rodney Ascher (Room 237) Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson (The Endless), and David Lowery (The Green Knight).

Showing now on The Criterion Channel.

 

Sideshow Attractions

One of the great myths in the history of the cinema is that late nineteenth-century audiences, upon seeing the Lumière Brothers’ film L’arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) (1896), ran in terror because they confused the moving image of a train with a real train coming directly at them. Although it never happened, the myth persists, in various forms, to this day. Apparently, the myth of the Lumière Brothers’ screening had circulated widely enough so that within a few years it was re-created in a film directed by Edwin S. Porter, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), in which a country yokel, or rube, Uncle Josh, dives for safety when he sees on the movie screen the image of a train speeding toward him.

When it comes to the cinema, it seems that at least some audience members are always running in terror from something. Writing about the preview of Freaks in early 1932, Melvin E. Matthews, Jr. cites Hollywood art director Merrill Pye, who recalled: “Halfway through the preview [of Freaks], a lot of people got up and ran out. They didn’t walk out. They ran out.” (Fear Itself: Horror on Screen and in Reality During the Depression and World War II. McFarland, 2009.) Thus, by the early 1930s, the myth popularized by “Uncle Josh at the moving picture show” had become less a matter of history than a form of “common knowledge,” defined by Robert B. Ray as an “evolving assemblage of myths, half-truths, lies, and approximations” (The ABCs of Classic Hollywood, p. 296).

Too often, “common knowledge” passes as film history. The notion that the appearance of sideshow attractions in a moving picture show “shocked” audiences so profoundly that they fled the theater appeals to the contemporary cognoscenti who believe they are far more sophisticated movie viewers than the rubes who emerged during the Uncle Josh era. But audiences at the time were not as naïve as the above anecdote about Freaks suggests. As Robert Bogdan has shown, freak shows had been a popular form of entertainment across the United States since 1840, in towns both big and small. Dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, “wild men,” fire eaters, microcephalics (“pinheads,” a word that peaked in usage from 1890 to 1940) and other sideshow attractions had been widely known for almost a hundred years before Tod Browning made Freaks. Moreover, the “geek,” or “sideshow freak,” was used as a central image in William Lindsay Gresham’s novel Nightmare Alley, published in 1946, just over a decade after the release of Freaks. The film adaptation of Gresham’s novel (1947) is now considered a classic.

In addition, many (though certainly not all) of the performers in Freaks were known in Hollywood and to popular audiences as well by way of carnival attractions such as Coney Island. For instance, the dwarf siblings who appear in Freaks, Harry and Daisy Earles (actual names Harry and Daisy Doll, members of the German-born Doll family) had been in California since the early 1920s. Harry Doll (“Hans”) had appeared in Tod Browning’s The Unholy Three in 1925, and all four of the Doll siblings would appear a few years later as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Angelo Rossitto (“Angeleno”) had first appeared on screen in the John Barrymore silent, The Beloved Rogue (1927), and the conjoined twin sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton (“Siamese twins”), born in Britain in 1908, were exhibited as children in Europe and were widely known in the United States by the 1920s. The timid, affectionate, microcephalic Schlitze had been employed by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus since the early 1920s, and had made his film debut in Earle C. Kenton’s circus sideshow melodrama, The Sideshow(1928), starring Marie Provost, Ralph Graves, and “Little Billy” Rhodes. (“Little Billy” Rhodes would later appear in the Western spoof, The Terror of Tiny Town (1938), as well as The Wizard of Oz.) Prince Randian, the “living torso,” had lived in the United States since 1889, and was a popular Coney Island and circus attraction for decades.

The word “attraction,” used to refer to something “which draws a crowd, interesting or amusing exhibition,” dates from 1829. As Tom Gunning points out in his study of “the cinema of attractions,” the source of the word “attraction” is significant precisely because it is “a term of the fairground,” or carnival. While Gunning’s primary interest is in the roots of early cinema, he also observes, “The relation between films and the emergence of the great amusement parks, such as Coney Island, at the turn of the century provides rich ground for rethinking the roots of early cinema.” (“The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” 383) I would suggest that the relation of films and the great amusement parks also provides a productive way of reimagining Freaks, and provides a way to get beyond the common knowledge perception of the film as a sort of simple épater le bourgeois. Born in 1880, director Tod Browning’s early life coincides with the invention of the cinema and its rise as a popular entertainment, even as his later life as a carnival barker coincides with the rise of the major amusement parks. A critical reappraisal would have to begin with the assumption that the cinema is a theatrical form of exhibition rather than merely a form of voyeurism.

Schmaltz

In the 1930s, “icky” referred to any popular music (jazz, big band, swing) that was considered overly “sweet.” For someone to dismiss a band’s music as “sweet” was a gesture of utmost contempt, meaning the music was “commercial,” that is, commercially compromised and “schmaltzy.” Decades later, the term “saccharine” had replaced “icky” to describe music that was overly sweet, although the term “saccharine” dates back to the late nineteenth century. The popular meaning of “schmaltz” is used to described something that is excessively sentimental, or “maudlin.” Maudlin, an alteration of Magdalene (as in Mary Magdalene) is used to describe someone who expresses sadness or sentimentality in an exaggerated way, as in a “maudlin drunk,” someone whose heavy alcohol consumption has caused them to be tearful, histrionic, and perhaps morbid. An analogous term for excessive sentimentality is “corn” or “corny.”

To be clear, an expression of sentimentality is not “saccharine.” It is “saccharine” when it is inauthentic, when it is manufactured authenticity. Both movie and music critics tend to disparage sentimentality, for reasons Charles Affron describes in Cinema and Sentiment (1982): “Art works that create an overtly emotional response in a wide readership are rated inferior to those that engage and inspire the refined critical, intellectual activities of a selective readership” (1). But as Affron correctly points out, it is the affective (emotional) power of cinematic narrative that has been responsible for the cinema’s massive popular appeal. “Their [the movies’] promptness to elicit feeling offends those who consider being moved equivalent to being manipulated, victimized, deprived of critical distance” (1).

Affron’s insight applies to popular music as well, which also has based its popular appeal on its affective or emotional power. The sentimentality expressed in songs such as The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” (for example) stands in stark contrast to songs that seek “to manufacture authenticity—to signify belief in the face of unbelief—through intense virtuosity . . . [these songs] create rampant ‘affective inflation’ that subverts its own efforts . . . and become audible expressions of what Lawrence Grossberg calls ‘sentimental inauthenticity.’” (Michael Jarrett, Sound Tracks, 82-83)

 

While I am fully aware that lists are made in order to provoke, I offer the following list only to illustrate the idea of commercially compromised music, of sentimental inauthenticity. Most all of them were commercially successful, but the reasons for that will have to be explored in a future post:

 

The Beatles – Love Me Do

Debbie Boone – You Light Up My Life

The Carpenters – (They Long to Be) Close to You

Vikki Carr – With Pen in Hand

Bobby Goldsboro – Honey

Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You

Cyndi Lauper – True Colors

John Lennon – Imagine 

Wayne Newton – Dreams of the Everyday Housewife

Minnie Ripperton – Lovin’ You

Tommy Roe – Sweet Pea

 

For Further Reading: H. Brook Web, "The Slang of Jazz." American Speech 12: 3 (October 1937), pp. 179-184.

What the Dead Men Say

In Philip K. Dick’s short story, “What the Dead Men Say” (1964), businessman Louis Sarapis dies unexpectedly. According to the terms of his will, his corpse is to be deposited in a mortuary where his consciousness can be immediately (but only temporarily) restored, a post-mortem state similar to suspended animation. Dick termed this post-mortem state “half-life.” He later used the idea of “half-life” in one of his greatest novels, Ubik (1969).

Eventually, the consciousness of those in half-life begins to deteriorate, becoming garbled and incoherent—rather like the dying words of gangster Dutch Schultz, whose delirious non-sequiturs and novel collocations such as "French-Canadian bean soup" inspired William Burroughs to write a screenplay about Schultz's dying moments.

Consider the following songs as occurring during the singer’s half-life, or alternatively, concluding at the moment of death; "D.O.A." is the classic example. There is, of course, a certain degree of self-consciousness in these songs, unlike the last words of Dutch Schultz.

What the Dead Men Say:

Lefty Frizzell – Long Black Veil (1959)

Marty Robbins – El Paso (1959)

Porter Wagoner – Green, Green Grass of Home (1965)

Fleetwood Mac – Blood on The Floor (1970)

R. Dean Taylor – Indiana Wants Me (1970)

Bloodrock – D.O.A. (1971)

Al Kooper – Nightmare #5 (1971)

Fashion

Oscar Wilde reportedly said, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” Typical Wildean wit, perhaps addressed to the smart London world of snobs and social climbers, in which worth and station were not given, but asserted. They were asserted through notions about clothes (“fashion”), but also attitudes toward illness. As Susan Sontag observes in Illness as Metaphor (1978), “Both clothes (the outer garment of the body) and illness (a kind of interior decor of the body) became tropes for new attitudes toward the self.”

Sontag goes on to write:

Shelley wrote on July 27, 1820 to Keats, commiserating as one TB [tuberculosis] sufferer to another, that he has learned “that you continue to wear a consumptive appearance.” This was no mere turn of phrase. Consumption was understood as a manner of appearing, and that appearance became a staple of nineteenth-century manners. “Chopin was tubercular at a time when good health was not chic,” Camille Saint-Saëns wrote in 1913. “It was fashionable to be pale and drained; Princess Belgiojoso strolled along the boulevards…pale as death in person.” Saint-Saëns was right to connect an artist, Chopin, with the most celebrated femme fatale of the period, who did a great deal to popularize the tubercular look. The TB-influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks—at a moment when aristocracy stops being a matter of power, and starts being mainly a matter of image. (“You can never be too rich. You can never be too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor once said.)

Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The look of TB had, inevitably, to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding. “I cough continually!” Marie Bashkirtseff wrote in the once widely read Journal which was published, after her death at twenty-four, in 1887. “But for a wonder, far from making me look ugly, this gives me an air of languor that is very becoming.” What was once the fashion for aristocratic femmes fatales and aspiring young artists became, inevitably, the province of fashion as such. Indeed, twentieth-century women’s fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

For Additional Reading: Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.

 

A Few Songs About Fashion And Self As Image:

David Bowie – Fashion

Lady Gaga – Fashion!

Green Day – Fashion Victim

The Kinks – Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Suede – She’s In Fashion

Kanye West – Dark Fantasy

ZZ Top – Sharp Dressed Man

On the Road to Shambala

As is well-known, James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933) is the origin of Shangri-La, the fictional utopia nestled high in the remote mountains of Tibet. Apparently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt admired the novel—and perhaps the 1937 Hollywood film adaptation as well. In 1942, given increased German submarine activity along the Atlantic coast, the Secret Service, concerned about the President’s safety, requested FDR discontinue his frequent cruises aboard his yacht, the USS Potomac, along the eastern waterways. Seeking a retreat that would not interfere with the President’s medical conditions of asthma and polio, FDR's physician recommended a summer camp for federal employees as well as Boy Scout groups called Camp Hi-Catoctin, located in Maryland’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Upon seeing his mountain retreat in 1942, President Roosevelt named it Shangri-La. In 1953, several years after President Roosevelt’s death, the retreat was renamed Camp David by President Dwight Eisenhower, after his father and grandson, the name it retains to this day.

That the utopian promise represented by Shangri-La (Shambala) captured President Roosevelt’s imagination is certain. Pure speculation, but I wonder whether the film adaptation of Lost Horizon (1937), directed by Frank Capra, was perhaps more influential on Roosevelt in its conception of Shangri-La than the novel. Capra’s adaptation makes several (important) changes to the novel, one of them being to intensify Conway’s internal conflict about whether to stay in Shangri-La. In Hilton's novel, Mallinson is his protégé, vice-consul to Robert Conway’s role as consul in the British diplomatic service, but in the film adaptation he is replaced by George, Conway’s brother. In the film adaptation, there are two women who live in Shangri-La, Maria and Sondra. Maria’s role is similar to that of Lo-Tsen’s in the novel, but Sondra is introduced in order to develop a love interest for Conway. Robert Conway’s love for Sondra makes his decision to leave even more difficult: he is torn between his protective and filial affection for his younger brother and his romantic yearning for Sondra, along with his conviction that he has found his utopia and place in the world. Hence, the stakes for Conway are far higher in the adaptation than in the novel.

Perhaps the most important change in Capra’s film adaptation, though, is the addition of the character of Gloria, who replaces the kind but largely ineffectual missionary, Miss Brinklow. As the terminally ill, cynical consumptive, Gloria recovers her health, an indication of the restorative quality of the (magical) “air” in Shangri-La (mountain cures were a common belief). The magical quality of Shangri-La is represented by the High Lama, who dies at the age of 249. He was originally a Christian missionary monk who became converted to the east, although Shangri-La, with its motto of “moderation,” is ecumenical rather than dogmatic in its approach to spiritual tenets. I believe it was these features of Shangri-La, its restorative, healing powers, and its ecumenicalism, that appealed to the polio-stricken Roosevelt. I am sure this is not a startling new insight. Rather, what it does suggest is the power of Frank Capra’s film adaptation in influencing our (mis)conceptions about James Hilton’s Shangri-La. Certainly we can see it in popular music, such as “Shambala” (1973), in which the healing powers of Shangri-La are invoked: "Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain / With the rain in Shambala / Wash away my sorrow, wash away my shame / With the rain in Shambala."

Here are some other songs inspired by Shangri-La/Shambala (not to mention the 60s pop group, The Shangri-Las):

Shangri-La – Matty Malneck and Robert Maxwell (1946) (covered by numerous artists)

Shangri-La – The Kinks (1969) (from the album Arthur)

Shambala – Daniel Moore (covered by B. W. Stevenson and The Three Dog Night, 1973)

Shangri-La – Electric Light Orchestra (from the album, A New World Record, 1976)

Our Shangri-La – Mark Knopfler (from the album, Shangri-La, 2004)

 

I must not neglect Johnny Mathis’ album, The Wonderful World of Make Believe (pictured, 1964), a collection of songs largely about imaginary, utopian places (Shangri-La, Camelot), the longing for a place in the world (I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, When You Wish Upon a Star), and the hope for everlasting love (Beyond the Sea, Beyond the Blue Horizon) – all fulfilled by a utopian Shangri-La.