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CONT'D: Talking Pictures | Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 It's interesting to look at The Straight Story in the context of David Lynch's work. Lost Highway is one of the most amazing pieces of work technically--it's a nuclear noir that's so far out there that it suspends all laws of linearity and cause and effect and goes off on its cackling tangent. And I thought it was just awful, in spite of this incredible vision. I thought that its view of woman and of life in general was infantile and crude and there was this enormous gap between the sophistication of the filmmaking and its worldview. I saw David Lynch burning himself out before my very eyes. Then he turned around and made The Straight Story as almost a challenge to himself to get back in touch with time.One of the topics that came up in your Slate roundtable is the multiplex critic vs. cinephile argument. You know, the idea that critics dumb down their reviews for the public. For example, when discussing The Green Mile, you said that Roger sometimes speaks more like a politician and less like a critic. He doesn't think that those two roles are mutually exclusive. He has a kind of outreach attitude. He would call me an idealist or even--I don't think he used the term--elitist. Certainly others have. He thinks that people don't savor all the nuances in movies, that they just respond to the broad strokes. And the broad strokes of The Green Mile are the story of a saintly black man who is martyred but who manages to leave behind a legacy of kindness and compassion and healing. I thought it was a flagrant racist outrage-not to mention sappy and morally easy-but Roger was full of anecdotal evidence of people in the multiplex crying and coming out uplifted. There's a Milan Kundera quote that illustrates this point. (David gets a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being from his bookcase and reads from it.) "Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says how nice to see children running on the grass. The second tear says how nice to be moved together with all mankind by children running on the grass. It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch." To me, when people respond to movies as tearjerkers or as inspiring, uplifting, and ennobling, they're not really responding to what they see on the screen, they're responding to their own emotions. They're basically in love with the idea that they've been ennobled. Cynical moviemakers or even sincere moviemakers are very good at playing on that--making an audience feel good about itself for crying--for feeling as if somehow they're better people when they walk out. It's ironic that they come out of the movie feeling ennobled, but they're very quick to anger when someone disagrees with them. If this movie ennobled you so much and made you a better person, then why do you have such rage? |
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