Seeing is Believing

If you should ever stop to think about the number of stories or books you pick up and then just lay down, almost in the same sentence as it were---compared specifically with the number of movies you walk out of during the first five minutes---then you may find yourself locked into an unsentimental comparison of the two as Boss Medium, creativewise. Such comparison is not a comfortable undertaking---due to the tremendous amount of prestige-leverage the written word has going in. Who, after all, would be so crassly unconventional as to compare Antonioni with Proust, Fellini with Shakespeare---or even Richardson with Fielding? The approach to understanding, then, is obviously along lines other than simple hero worship; and the most reassuring, I would suggest, is the purely rational or, for want of a better descriptive, that which is known. What we are dealing with in this area (of art and communication) are the empathic sensory perceptions, and what is known about them, while limited, is quite exact. The primary experience is one which involves all the sensory perceptions, and is for that reason unique. Consider the phenomenon of a person who is crossing the street and is hit by a car. There is but one primary experience, and that is of the person who is actually hit. All other experiences of the same instant in time and space are removed---and in the degree to which they are removed, so is the involvement of the experiencers, their awareness, their perception of the experience itself. If the most "engaging" thing is to be hit by the car oneself, the next is to witness it---to see and hear the impact of metal against flesh, the sounds of pain. Seeing, as they say, is believing. And the involvement is nearly unbearable---compared, that is, with reading about it. If it is to be argued that the accomplished writer has means of conjuring up the right images, even those which outdo reality, consider how much more can be "suggested" through the magic of the camera. Given two creators of equal talent, the difference would be like that of two competing chefs---one using flour and water, the other using sirloin and a dozen spices; it's no trick knowing in front who will come off Top Griddle.

According to the conventional aesthetic scheme, a novel was to be more highly regarded than a play, and a play, in turn, more highly regarded than a film. The ultimate effect of television, however, has rattled this hierarchy so severely that theater, for example, no longer exists as a cultural force of any real strength. As a serious art form it survives solely in extremely curtailed off-Broadway circumstances, and there most often through an eccentric playgoers' mystique---or, at its best, as a substitute medium for the tiny body of work ("happenings," etc.) which still legitimately resists cinematic treatment.

It is not simply the existence of television that is responsible for the shake-up, but the fact that about seven or eight years ago the major studios---in order to show a better balance sheet for that particular year---began to unload their back catalogs of feature films onto the television networks. In terms of economic buoyancy, this had effects comparable to those achieved by cutting the cables on an elevator; the already declining movie attendance took an alarming nose dive: Within two years it was down to less than 50 percent of the pre-TV figure. Persons concerned began to notice that the only theaters now making it were the ones showing films that were categorically different from those running on TV---"cheap foreign films." The major studios, however, were reluctant to undertake development of a product whose values were almost perfectly antithetical to those their own work had always asserted. And so, while they feebly pondered on how to create a category of film that was different yet still lousy, independent production was born---and with it came the last twist of the knife for the bloated mogul. New blood and new power were at once in ascendance; the commercial success of such films as L'Avventura, Jules and Jim, La Dolce Vita, The 400 Blows, Last Year at Marienbad, Dr. Strangelove, 81/2, Tom Jones, etc., left the major studios so totally confused that in the end (today) their orientation is the exact reverse of what it used to be. Now they put up money for films without the least notion of what they are doing (except backing winners). They wander the halls of the Irving Thalberg Building, shuffling along like men in an asylum, grotesquely out of place (concluded on page 192) Seeing is Believing (continued from page 95) in their business suits, shaking their heads in dazed obtuse weariness at the brash young blue-jeaned directors, the unshaven writers, hippy producers in shirt sleeves and shades---all young winners high-jiving one another incomprehensibly about "Peeping Tom," the "new eroticism," "cinéma vérité," and so on. Film making, in short, is now wide open.

The fact that movies have entered a radically creative phase is having a profound interaction on dramatic prose in general, and on the art of the novel in particular---the scope and format of which have become comparable to those of a film story. Very few novels appearing these days are as engaging as the best of current films. When one considers the exceptions---such as Naked Lunch, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding and Candy---their common strength becomes apparent---namely, that they are each beyond present cinematic techniques or practices. That is their justification, and that is their worth; there is simply no longer any aesthetic excuse for a novel that could have been created as a film. Going back to the chef analogy, it is like voluntarily cooking on the plate warmer instead of the front burner. What this means in terms of the future of the novel is that the hard-core stylists, the weakkneed pornos, the soft-shell satirists and the no-blowers in general will just have to step down---because no one in his right mind can be expected to lay out a five-dollar bill for the kind of experience he can get for 95 cents at the corner Bijou.

The publishers---except for those with isolated emancipating experiences (Putnam's with Lolita, Fanny Hill and Candy; and, of course, the unique Grove Press with its perennial stable of "bad mothers")---have been much slower to feel the press of events than have the film makers, because they were farther removed from the TV catalyst. In short, publishers could not react until the film makers had reacted. Now that they have reacted, we may look forward to a literary era during which daring new standards will be formed---an intensification of the kind of novel writing that goes far beyond anything previously attempted---and, even more important, beyond anything previously acceptable to the general reader, but which he shall now demand.