IN AN ARTICLE IN A RECENT EDITION OF THE London Daily
Telegraph titled “More Sex Please, We’re Grownups,” Josa
Young, a novelist, writes that “in order to create fully rounded
human beings, and describe their relationships with each other” it
was necessary for her “to tackle the subject of sex” — by which,
the context suggests, she means the act of coition. The implied
syllogism goes like this. Writers of fiction have to write about
relationships. Sex is a key component of relationships. Therefore,
writers of fiction have to write about sex. But if that is indeed
her reasoning — she doesn’t make it quite clear — it masks an
equivocation on the word sex.
Sex as one of the essential attributes of our humanity — or
even our animality — is indeed almost impossible to leave out of
fiction, let alone fiction written about “relationships.” “Male and
female He created them,” says the Bible, and the taxonomy, at
least, would be hard even for Richard Dawkins to disagree with. But
“sex” in this sense is not the same thing as what Ms. Young calls
the “raunchy scenes” that she thinks equally essential to her
fiction. I have not read her novel, titled One Apple
Tasted, so I cannot judge of her own “raunchy scenes.” But as
a general argument, the contention that raunchy scenes are
essential to a realistic account of relationships doesn’t persuade
at all. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is all about
sex, but it contains (as written) no raunchy scenes at all.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the realism quotient
of a work of fiction is almost invariably in inverse proportion to
the number and raunchiness of its raunchy scenes. This is if
anything even more true when it comes to violence. Violence is also
an equivocal word. On the one hand, it still retains some of its
original pejorative sense and so is self-discrediting. All violence
is bad. On the other hand, it is so much a part of our experience
of the popular culture, especially movies and comic books, that we
would feel the lack of it as a deprivation almost on a par with
that of sex. “Violence is the funnest thing you can do at the
movies,” says Quentin Tarantino. “It’s the funnest thing to watch.
I’ve always felt action directors come as close as you can get to
pure cinema. Literature can’t do it the same way. Painting. TV.
None of the other art forms can do it the same way.” That’s
throwing down the gauntlet on behalf of your medium!
But it is just because you can show on film what you can’t in
any other medium that its representations so easily belie reality.
After all, real violence isn’t fun at all — or not unless
you’re mentally disturbed. It only becomes fun by frankly detaching
itself from reality and so giving up what art has traditionally
been understood to offer us, which is a representation of reality.
As a result, even movies that attempt to represent violent acts in
a spirit of moral seriousness rather than fun, movies such as Cyrus
Nowrasteh’s The Stoning of Soraya M., are dragged,
willy-nilly, into Tarantino territory. Mr. Nowrasteh has the
laudable purpose of opposing the treatment of women under Islamic
fundamentalist regimes, but by privileging the visual over the
moral truth of the atrocity at the film’s center, he turns it into
yet another cinematic cartoon, competing on their own terms with
Reservoir Dogs or The Passion of the Christ. Why
did you say they’re throwing stones at that chick? The event’s
meaning is lost in the sensation of its appearance.
WELL THAT’S BEEN GOING ON for a long time now. As I did in the
summers of 2007 (see “The Hero Vanishes,” TAS, September
2007) and 2008 (see “Trash Triumphant,” TAS, September
2008), this summer I presented a series of eight films in eight
weeks at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, this
time on the subject of crime and punishment. As in the past two
years, my aim was to show how the movies, like so many other
things, changed during the 1960s. What came before that doleful
decade was a popular, often vulgar, but also artistically
accomplished medium of entertainment; what came after it was mostly
cartoonish if occasionally artistically pretentious trash. Proper
movie heroes like Gary Cooper and John Wayne gave way to comic book
figures in silly costumes, like Christopher Reeve’s Superman or
only lightly disguised supermen such as Harrison Ford’s Indiana
Jones. Romance may have been artificially heightened in movies like
The Philadelphia Story or An Affair to Remember,
but such movies still treated romance seriously — something that
the post-1960s sex comedies like Annie Hall or When
Harry Met Sally could no longer do. Romance had become, at
best, a sentimental add-on to the serious business of
“relationships.”
The same kind of transformation was visible in the eight movies
about crime and punishment, which started with The Public
Enemy of 1931, the movie that made James Cagney a star, and
then moved on to Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944),
Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1946), George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun (1951), Orson
Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), Arthur Penn’s Bonnie
and Clyde (1967), Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981),
and the Coen brothers’ Fargo (1996). The most instructive
comparison I found was between The Public Enemy and
Bonnie and Clyde, since both deal with poor kids who
become “somebody” by undertaking a criminal career. In both cases,
too, we are expected by the filmmakers to sympathize with the
criminal heroes, although in the former case this was more on
account of Cagney’s screen charisma than any conscious intention of
the director, William A. Wellman.
The difference between the two movies lay in their portrayal of
the criminals in relation to their social milieu. The Public
Enemy, made during the Depression, puts Cagney’s tough-guy act
in the context of the basic decency of those around him, especially
his mother and brother. Bonnie and Clyde, made 30 years
later and with a more or less explicit political purpose, turns the
social milieu into a Marxist caricature: barely human bankers and
cops on one side and their downtrodden victims on the other. The
victims all admire Bonnie and Clyde for the blows they
strike against their common oppressors. As we saw in this summer’s
homage to Bonnie and Clyde, Michael Mann’s Public
Enemies, the idea that ordinary folk in the 1930s looked up to
heroically revolutionary gangsters and crooks has become a
Hollywood commonplace, reinforced by popular historians such as
Bryan Burroughs, on whose book Public Enemies is loosely
based. He claims that, during the Depression, “legions of
disaffected Americans cheered on an army of outlaws who rampaged
through the Midwest, robbing banks and kidnapping
millionaires.”
I don’t believe it. What scraps of evidence Burroughs has to
support his case do not come anywhere near justifying “legions of
disaffected Americans.” Like Bonnie and Clyde and
Public Enemies, his is a retrospective view, strongly
colored by left-wing politics and its understanding of crime. In
The Public Enemy of 1931, the title is not (as it is in
Public Enemies) ironical. Cagney really is seen
as an enemy of the public. For all his cocky bravado and charm, he
himself has internalized the community standard and so is on some
level ashamed of what he does. He doesn’t want his mother and
brother to know. In Bonnie and Clyde, the golden couple
proudly announce, “We rob banks,” while Bonnie’s family keeps a
scrapbook of newspaper clippings about their exploits. Clyde’s only
shame has to do with his impotence, which was an invention of the
filmmakers, and his overcoming that in the movie’s penultimate
scene thus becomes a synecdoche for the shamelessness that Mr. Penn
and the rest were elevating to a high principle.
I think it is this lack of shame that made the movie seem so
revolutionary and authentic in its own time — and which makes it
look so dated and inauthentic in retrospect. Nostalgia junkies may
look back with affection on that period of the late '60s and early
'70s when the throwing off of sexual and other kinds of inhibitions
seemed like a benevolent and revolutionary act-something that, if
repeated often enough, had the power to save the world from war and
poverty. Today, there can’t be many people, even on the cultural
left, who would want to return to those days. But in a way we are
still in them, as the unreality that then settled in and
subsequently became the norm for the movies and for other sorts of
artistic expression has a gravity of its own that we are unable to
escape. Trapped in the postmodern fun house that is the legacy of
Bonnie and Clyde and other movies of the period, we have
to find some way back to reality.
