Cine-Duck

The most satisfying aesthetic experience I've had, the one in which reality and the work of art most immediately and thoroughly interpenetrated--an eyeful of shadows stuffing my arms, a magic-lantern genie, black-haired, shoeless, asking, "What is your desire?"--occurred midway in my moviegoing career and cost $3.50.

"Three-fifty!" cried the Penguin, flapping his arms. "For a flick? For nothing but a flick?"

"Si. You want gorls, you got to pay another ten dollars more."

"No girls, no girls," said the Pumpkin out loud, and then, growling into my ear, "Tell him, Duck. Tell him to buzz off. We're not interested. It's too soon. It'll ruin the plan."

"How much is the ride out there?" asked the cautious Penguin. "An arm and a leg?"

"One dollar and fifty cents," said the driver as the back door of his taxi--white with a blue top and a blue stripe down the side, a fabled Blue cab, Charon's notorious Dodge, ferrying the children of Los Angeles to hell and night--swung open and sucked us in.

"That makes five each and no nooky," the Pumpkin said.

"Get it out now," whispered the Penguin. "Don't let them see your wallet."

"Move your ass," I told the Pumpkin, afraid he would feel the trembling of my leg through the corduroy on his sturdy thigh. The cab shot forward, made a U-turn on Tijuana's main street and careened onto an unlit, unpaved road.

"Jesus!" the Penguin groaned. "What are we doing here?"

The driver began to sing. "La-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la."

"Quit shaking, Duck. You act like you've never gone to the movies be----" The words died on my friend's lips. Without slowing down, without any warning at all, the taxi swerved across the road to the left and climbed a dirt embankment. It hung for a moment at the top, its headlights casting a last, cross-eyed look in the direction of heaven, then slammed down and began burrowing across a rutted field toward a distant cluster of tar-paper shacks that, even as we watched, lit up, bare bulbs winking welcome at the Blue, lurching and heaving along, tri-tri-la-la-la, with its barnyard of innocents.

The Penguin, the Pumpkin and I had been friends for years and were now drifting apart. I had returned from my first year of college in the East and it was almost clear to me how much time we had wasted in one another's company--set after set of tennis, endless cruising for girls on Hollywood Boulevard, weekends at the beach, lying in the sand, rising occasionally to catch a wave on the prow of our rubber rafts. I think it was because we sensed there could not be much more of this that we decided to seal our summers, and our shamelessness, with what in Southern California had become traditional rite of passage: the trip to T. J., the defloration of the freshman. (continued on page 136)Cine-Duck(continued from page 125) Near La Jolla, we pulled off the road and ran down to the deserted sea. It was not a perfect day; the sun hid behind a hazy milk-white vault, missing pupil of a blinded eye, beneath which we dawdled, the Pumpkin and I discussing the mechanics of pleasure, while the Penguin--aptly named, for he was a dour little man, worried and formal, who moved stiffly about the tennis court, slapping at the ball--waddled near the surf.

"It's all tension and release," the Pumpkin was saying. "That's the only known source of human pleasure. Think about it. Isn't that right? Can you think of any other examples?"

"What about beauty?" I replied.

"Come on. Be serious."

"I am serious. What about the pleasure you feel when you see something beautiful?"

"Would you maintain that the most beautiful thing you ever saw--a Rembrandt or a flower or a sunset--came anywhere near a good shit? Give your opinion and not what they told you to say at Yale."

"The shit wins hands down."

"Of course it does. That's because of the pressure on the colon and the sphincter. And the greater the tension, the greater the release."

"So, according to you, we should go around constipated."

"Spare your wit, Duck. Most people most of the time settle for a little pleasure because they can take only a little pain. But we're in a once-in-a-lifetime situation here and, believe me, the frustration will pay off in all-time thrills. So stick to the plan. A few drinks, a flick starring a burro and a girl, and then, Long Bar! We have to sit right up next to the runway. The Cow said this girl actually dropped her panties on his head! Think of the tension! And she made him smell the juice on her hand!"

"Do you believe that?"

"Take a whiff," he said, holding out his fingers. "Ambrosia!" Then he got to his feet, hooked his thumbs into the brown-and-yellow swim trunks in which he had won every major tournament in California and pulled them down around his knees. He hid his penis between his legs, leaving only a triangular patch of Pumpkin hair to dazzle the eye, and remained that way, in September Morn's awkward S--ridiculed mercilessly by Fisher, my instructor in Art 10--one hand behind his head, the other on his hip.

"Woo! Woo!" cried the Penguin, charging up the beach. "Darling! Throw me a hump!"

The border between the United States and Mexico split the sky; as soon as we crossed it, the thin haze of California gave way to heavy brown clouds that sat like fat riders on the horses that grazed on nearby hills, cracking their backs. Now and then, the late sunlight would radiate upward like spikes of a crown or break through to make the fields greener, browner. Four or five enormous raindrops spread over the windshield and silent lightning raced horizontally in the clouds. Don't touch anything metal, I thought, part cowed by the ominousness of the landscape, into which Tijuana huddled gray as El Greco's Toledo (much praise from Mr. Fisher!), part condescending toward the corniness of the spectacle, this nephological drum roll before the Fatal Step. I switched on the wipers and the entire scene disappeared in concentric streaks of dust and, peer as I might to find the road, I saw only myself, cardboard cacti to either side, high atop a downtown donkey, smiling with wide duckling lips for a cameraman whose head is buried in a hood of time, under-exposed memory of a childhood trip, on which I also acquired a large brass ring in the shape of a skull with ruby eyes; it left a green band on my finger that would not fade.

"It's a trick!" warned the Pumpkin. "Look at all those girls!" The room was full of them, lounging about on chairs and sofas against the four walls.

"Look at him! That one for me!" a pretty girl cried out, causing me to stumble in my tracks, so inconceivable was it that she could have meant either my dour or my cucurbitaceous friend.

"Don't get excited, Duck," the Penguin spat back from the side of his mouth. "She wasn't looking at you."

"She's wild about you, is that it? Lost her heart to the gentleman in the tux, I suppose?"

"Quack! Quack! Quack!" the Penguin retorted and drowsy ladies sat upright all over the house.

The cabdriver led us to a small windowless room with a few chairs and an 8mm projector on a table, which he immediately turned on. A woman of perhaps 40, with dark hair and surprisingly light skin, suddenly appeared on the wall, where she paced to and fro, stamping her high heels in nervous anticipation of what the Cow had led us to believe would be a burro but what, in fact, turned out to be a perfectly ordinary fellow who kept his head turned away from the camera out of a shyness so acute it actually caused the film to snap three times in the act of oral intercourse. Many of that movie's images--a hand pulling a breast out of a dress, sweat flying from the impact of lovers' bellies, a woman kissing her own breast and shoulder, the complexities of genitalia--have been impressed forever on my mind. This has not occurred because the images themselves were forbidden, mysterious, exciting, but because the way in which they reached us--usually dim, often blurred, occasionally trembling off the sprocket or halting entirely, once expanding into a mottled butterfly, motes in a beam of light, flickers, shadows, nothing--was and is itself symbolic of the repressed unconscious working its way toward full exposure. The form and content of the medium and of the psyche that apprehended it had become, each of the other, indelible proofs.

Halfway through the film, the girl who had called out to me ran through the projector's beam and began bouncing up and down on the astounded Pumpkin's lap. "The minute I see you, I say, this one, this one, this one for me!" She was followed a moment later by a redhead who put her arms around the Penguin's neck and began coughing into his ear. My own girl, a woman, really, roughly the same age as the actress on the wall, with the same dark hair and light skin, sat in my lap, too, put her hand between my legs and murmured over and over again, "What kind of job you like? I do any job on you." A fair amount of time passed in such bouncing, coughing, murmuring, accompanied by the soft humming of the driver and the whir of the old equipment, until, abruptly, the Pumpkin stood up, one of his pockets turned inside out, and began to sway back and forth with the bouncer in his arms.

"Pumpkin!" I cried. "What about the plan? What about the tension? The panties at Long Bar?" But he only stood there, the chipped tooth in his smile making him look like a demented jack-o'-lantern, then stumbled forward and tottered out of the room.

"I guess this is it," the Penguin said.

"I guess so," I replied, and we separated, each to his cubicle: a bed, a condom, a piece of toilet paper, a whore. It cost five dollars extra to take off her clothes and my budget was tight; but, barefoot, her dress thrown up over her hips, she looked like a flower and the flower's stalk, with, at the center of the arrangement, an orchid, petals glistening with ambrosia. When I sought to touch it, she cried, "Loco, you loco, you," and she continued to chant, keeping to the rhythm of our intercourse, drowning, nearly, the hacking cough and strange thumping that came over the partition, youlocoyoulocoyoulocoyouloco, while countless dreams came true.

"Duck! Duck! I'm itching! I think I've got the crabs!" the Pumpkin declared.

"What about me?" the Penguin cut in. "I know I've got t.b."

But my pleasure had not ceased. It kept growing to include the girl who had (continued on page 174)Cine-Duck(continued from page 136) not called my name, the girl who had loved the Penguin, the group of pimps who came up to joke with us and slap us on the back, the taxi driver attempting to put a little life into the Blue, everything I saw that moved, even the two friends whom all too soon I would no longer sec. First love.

What the fuck's the matter with this cab?

I've got to get home and wash my dick!

Unheard voices, voices in a dream. No wonder Shakespeare had called the world a stage (English 25, Mr. Hartman) and all the men and women in it merely players. At that moment, illusion and reality, art and life, promise and fulfillment were as intricately joined as my mistress' finger and my own lips, which she had touched in order to reveal the two shining braces on my bottom teeth: "Oooooh! Pretty!" How to repay her? Only by ripping out every tooth in my head to heap mountains of silver at the soles of her make-believe feet.

This experience has remained for me a touchstone by which I measure not only other films but the quality of all art, or, at any rate, that aspect of art that seeks to maintain what Shakespeare called an eternal summer:

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'stin his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thougrowest,

So long as men can breathe, or eyescan see,

So long lives this, and this gives lifeto thee.

The hookers of Tijuana, I admit, have little in common with the darling buds of May, and the entire adventure must, at first glance, seem closer to aging than to immortality. After all, it was undeniably an initiation, a leap from childhood toward ultimate decay, and a sexual initiation, at that: Everywhere, even in Shakespeare's own language ("I am dying, Egypt, dying"), orgasm and expiration are imaginatively equivalent and, in evolutionary terms, the discovery of sexual reproduction necessarily coincided with the phenomenon of death. But on another and deeper level, our experience was less initiation than regression, a journey backward to a protozoan paradise before sex, death and certainly time, an Eden of the instincts, in which the gap between desire and fulfillment had been collapsed, where repression, history, culture had vanished and--white thighs on a white wall spread over sheetless ticking--wish was followed by wish coming true. That is the peculiar magic of the highest art, whose hidden subject has always been death deferred, paradise regained.

Nativity, once in the main of light, Crawls to maturity, wherewith beingcrown'd,

Crooked eclipses 'gainst his gloryfight,

And Time that gave, doth now hisgift confound.

My first memory of film, from the age of three, is of a baby elephant--Dumbo, doubtless--being senselessly separated from his mother. What moved me then was not the plight of the little tusker, an epicene, eye-batting flirt, but the anguish and rage of his parent. The one image left to me is of the world of the circus collapsing around the mighty creature as, rearing on her hind legs, flailing the sky with her trunk, she trumpeted and trumpeted, unbearably, tormentedly, until the scene dissolved in my tears and the sounds were muffled in an avalanche of "Tsk-tsk-tsks" and "Mmmm, mmmmm, mmmmms" from the colored maid beside me. Another image from perhaps a year later is of Bambi, a Disney deer, trembling in fear of a forest fire that raged close enough to singe his spots and but a lick or two behind assorted skunks and chipmunks and owls. More tears and, for the first time (that maid having been replaced by an indubious type in wire glasses), the phrase, "It's only a movie."

The next few years were a dry-eyed revel in the warfare of Donald, Mickey, Porky, Bugs, Tom, Jerry, Woody, Pluto--animals all, as were we, cold-blooded five-year-olds, screeching and roaring, cackling and chattering, yipping and yowling with inborn glee as a dumfounded bear was kicked sky-high by a megaton mule--yay-y-y-y-y-y!--and fell end over end past fluffy indifferent clouds to a final flattening on the earth. Only fairy tales--which we had outgrown--were more violent. Pigs and polecats were our meat: creatures of instinct, barely able to speak without a stutter, their one chance of survival in a world larger than they was to transcend themselves, overcome the conditioned response and--beneath the flashing of an incandescent bulb--learn how to think of a way to steal the cheese. I imagine it was owing to this simple sort of identification that I attended the cartoon festival at the Bruin theater every Saturday--that and the general animism of a child's world, in which, especially at night, discarded Levis become basking crocodiles, a breeze in the curtain a panther on the loose and a lighting fixture a king cobra, hood flared, ready to strike. Hence, in the darkened theater, the child grows gills, slips back a step into the common slime, and the predicate of such films as Pinocchio, Fantasia and The Wizard of Oz--that crickets talk, brooms carry pails of water and scarecrows dance--is as natural as boy gets girl or the U. S. Cavalry wins the war. We went forward, only to go back.

Older, I went to the Hitching Post in Santa Monica. Now the animals--Champion, Silver, Trigger--were ridden; pint-sized ego took the saddle on prancing id. There was, indeed, a hitching post outside the theater--as real, solid, fleshly a manifestation of childhood myth as the half-dressed harlot was of adolescent dream--to which the kids lucky enough to live in the neighborhood tied their bikes and dogs. The house rule was "Check all shooting irons at the box office," and there was invariably a shoot-out in the lobby after the show, as revolvers were packed into the wrong holsters--marvelous affairs with tooled-leather loops for bullets and simulated emeralds, topazes, rubies running halfway down the leg--and interfering nannies were dusted off by the barrelful, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, a technique called fanning the trigger. It was not difficult to smuggle a pearl-handled beauty, small, even girlish, but with the kick of a horse, into the theater; and one always ran the risk that at a crucial moment--when, for example, the Cisco Kid had inserted a stick in his hat and was inching it above the rim of a rock--a whole roll of caps would go off in your ear. Generally speaking, the audience was so caught up in the perils of the Lone Ranger, say, or Lash LaRue, that save for an occasional cheer of encouragement or a gasped warning about the hired gun crouched behind the bar, it offered little comment. Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, though, had the exasperating habit of breaking into song toward the close of their features, and such digressions would be accompanied by cowlike groans, finger whistles, the firing of contraband weapons and the detonation of popcorn bags, punctuated by the concussion of a cupped hand beneath the armpit and the sharp staccato reports of leadslingers breaking wind.

It was at this point in our lives that most of us were forced to deal with death and time. Cartoon animals are resilient. Garroted, exploded, shot, stabbed, devoured, smashed thin as a dime or stretched out on a rack, roasted, electrified, strangled, drowned, stung, flayed, quartered and chopped head to toe, they always snap back, nine-lived. But where there is no instance of unresurrected death in any cartoon, there is no Western without murder. This is not to say we were thrust from paradise (a pasture, a flower, Ferdinand the Bull) without safeguards; in fact, the greater part of the Hitching Post experience was organized to deny the very factor it had introduced into our lives. In the first place, most of the people who got shot in Westerns were villains whose continued existence disturbed the moral order--not to mention the daily life in Tombstone, Arizona--more than their demise. We were inoculated with poetic justice and with predictability. (It was this same coating of predictability, the denial of chance or miscellaneous death, that made war films, soon our regular fare, so palatable; it was easy to see that the nice guy with glasses was doomed; and by the time his buddies got around to cutting off his dog tags and murmuring, "So long, Francis," we had long since erased him from our consciousness.) Now and then, a good person would be killed, but such cases usually involved the young lady's grandfather or, perhaps, a Nestor, creatures so far removed from a nine-year-old's interests that they might as well have been animals. Moreover, such deaths were always paid for, and the unfolding of the elaborate moral code of the West, with its interlocking systems of honor and revenge and its unvarying symbolism (white hat, black hat) of good and evil gave us as much comfort and assurance of an ultimate design as the intricate geometry of swastika, triangle and parallelogram enclosing the funerary scene on an amphora gave to ancient Greeks. The symmetry of the film, the curve of the vase, became the shape of the universe.

But the main thing was that our heroes never grew old. Each Saturday was an eternal return, and it was a quality of timelessness, agelessness that accounted for the great popularity of someone like Gene Autry and especially Hopalong Cassidy, who, with his white hair, striped pants and bank president's face, seemed always in his early 50s, rather seemed nowhere at all, simply lifted by virtue of some timeproof vest outside the processes of caducity and decay that shot his horse out from under him, put others six feet under and worked its way so freely on the face of Gabby Hayes. The eternal return also applied to the serials sandwiched between the double feature at the Hitching Post. Weekday life was on the brink: The needles of boilers trembled past the safety zone, smoking acid seeped beneath the crack in a door, cars tumbled from rocky bluffs and, more ambitiously, forest fires raged, tidal waves tossed octopuses 20 miles inland and the city of New York, composed of nothing but brittle white buildings, trembled and broke into pieces. Because the last image of one Saturday became the first image of the next, time collapsed nearly to zero, to the length of time one could cling to a cliff or hold one's breath, and one grew older casually, without seriousness, taking it as lightly as catastrophe.

Nevertheless, one grew; and in no primitive society studied by anthropologists were the age groups more formally declared and firmly enforced than at the Hitching Post: children in arms, free; under six, 25 cents; six to twelve, 50 cents; twelve to sixteen, 75 cents; adults, one dollar. Through lying and long hair, I managed to pay a quarter till I was nine, and I lost interest in Westerns a year later. Most of the theaters in Los Angeles had a similar system, though, and it was a matter of some prestige among one's fellows never to pay the management what was owed. This led, especially as we grew larger, to a good deal of sneaking in, usually by hanging around under the marquee, examining the fine print on the posters, until the ticket taker was preoccupied, then slipping past into the lobby. Failing that, one could wait until the feature broke and mingle with the crowd going in or, even easier, swim against the tide of those coming out and leap like a salmon through the alleyway exit into a seat. There were always a few discarded stubs on the sidewalks nearby and Howitzer, one of our crowd, had perfected the technique of waving one quickly at the doorman, saying, "Remember me? I stepped outside to blow my nose." The last resort was to pool our funds, buy a single ticket and have Mr. Legitimate open the rear door to a troop of 27. This at least had the advantage of obviating the series of dactylograms (popping the side of the cheek with the thumb) by which we located our scattered forces and drew together to exchange funny remarks. Of course, we were caught--blinding light, stern command, public disgrace. How to explain to the wiry little theater manager that money had nothing to do with it, that even the movie was irrelevant? (Dozens of times, we breached the defenses only to discover ourselves trapped by some such fare as Scared Stiff, The Ten Commandments or Crazylegs, All American, and walked out again; once, however, paying no attention to the screen before me, keeping low and hugging the walls, I made my way to a vacant seat, caught my breath and looked up into the flaming hair of Joan of Arc.) How explain even to ourselves that what we hoped to avoid were the two-bit steps to adulthood and that what we sought--thrust from the dark theater by the scruff of the neck, blinking and squinting against the angel's sword of daylight--was nothing less than immortality?

On dates, however, we were proud to plunk down a mature couple of bucks; we did not wish to live forever, but, in Mr. Hartman's Elizabethan tongue, to "die" in the flesh in the back of a Buick, a feat Howitzer claims to have accomplished when, lights out, burning rubber, he crashed the guardrail of the Pacific Drive-In and was rewarded with Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender and the first plump piece he ever had. I never got so far, having wasted precious years trying to solve the logistics of getting my arm around my date's shoulder. The most elegant solution was to leave it casually, as if it hardly belonged to me, on the back of her seat when we sat down. By the end of the previews, it was totally paralyzed. I couldn't take it away, nor could I snuggle it downward to where those patient beauts heaved and swelled, resplendent in white Orlon, twin brides turned to twin mummies through a long night of desire. This is not to say there were no breakthroughs. It was in the movies that, beneath the marvelous shifting light, aurora borealis of the temperate zone, I first learned how to kiss and be kissed, touch a breast, feel a thigh. On any typically hot, clear Southern California summer day, one would be likely to see Duck, Penguin and Pumpkin lined up at the Elmira theater, dressed in raincoats, escorting three baddies. Once inside, we would separate, spread our coats and have at it, until, from six rows ahead, in a ridiculous Italian accent, I would hear the humorous Pumpkin say, "Will-a da genle-a-mans inna back a-please a-stoppa da trowing da ice-a cream?"

There were leaner years, especially later. I returned to Los Angeles in 1963 for nine months and, lonely, without a girl, with my raincoat long since in tatters, I spent a good deal of time in a theater near Melrose and Santa Monica that showed films like Forbidden Love, Too Much, Too Soon and Blow the Man Down, in which everybody sat six seats away from everybody else. I remember one film in particular, set in a women's gym that three homemade policemen penetrated in search of a killer on the prowl. Amid the usual shots of exercise machines and towel fights among the girls, there was one extraordinary sequence in which the killer threw the bolt on a steam-bath door and started turning up the pressure from an outside valve. We could see the brunette within slowly grow uncomfortable, try to get out and discover the door locked, and we could hear her screams as the heat inside the chamber grew unbearable. The actress beat on the door, on the walls, against her own head; sweat poured off her, her mouth opened and closed, her eyes rolled up; she began to turn in crazed circles, breasts and buttocks dissolving in a mantle of steam; and at last, just as the needle of the pressure gauge reached Danger, she hurled herself, legs and arms extended, against the bolted door. "Ahhhh," the audience gasped, not only at the flattened red tips of her breasts and the dark, damp hair at the center of the clouded glass but at the beauty of an obscure mystery, suddenly clear.

In New York, I used to drop in at the Cameo and the Tivoli (I-lov-it spelled backward, where once I heard the following snatch of dialog: "Sorry? You pissed on my date and you're sorry?"), until, quite recently, before the feature (The Spy Who Came) went on, a solemn voice announced, "The United (continued on page 180)Cine-Duck(continued from page 176) States Supreme Court has declared that nudity is not an obscenity!"--upon which an orchestra played, the screen lit up in Technicolor and we were shown 15 guys and gals playing volleyball in the nude. I have not returned. The necessary ingredients of eroticism--ingenuity, embarrassment, mystery--are gone, probably forever. I can recapture something of the aphrodisiac atmosphere of my Elmira days only when I go to the movies alone and find myself sitting next to a pretty stranger. Is the pressure of that knee deliberate? Was that white mohair meant for me? And, rock bottom, there are the coin machines on 42nd Street between Sixth and Eighth avenues. The images are small, cracked, jumping from nervousness, fogged with the breath and thumbs of hundreds. But now and then, there is a moment of genuine passion--perhaps the actress bites her shoulder?--and I am a child again, a hat low over my eyes, blushing at my buried dreams, measuring out my time in quarters.

• • •

My father was a screenwriter, my uncle still is, and I grew up in a house, surrounded by lemon groves, that we bought from Mary Astor. On Sundays, a lot of actors, writers, agents, directors came up to sit around the pool and eat from the barbecue. I would lie at my bedroom window or crouch among the fig vines that surrounded the yard, watching them flash in and out of the water or run into the cabana with loosened halters, revealing, to my practiced eye, various denominations of sin. I also used to crouch outside the study door, listening to my father and uncle write: One started a line, the other finished, both broke into laughter.

Sometimes I went to the studio to watch them shoot. One of the lots had an enormous outdoor sky painted so much like the real one, with such similar wispy cirrus clouds, that--like one of those Magritte landscapes of an easel standing in a natural setting that may or may not have a painting on it--I had to look for it to see that it was there. Inside the sound stages, one mostly stood around and was told to be quiet. I remember one scene--it must have been from around 1944--in which a pilot of a dive bomber is trapped in his burning cockpit. A cross section of the fuselage rested on sawhorses and the actor's feet were firmly on the ground. Two technicians lay on their backs beneath the sawhorses, one with a flame thrower and the other with a stick. Then the director yelled "Action!," the actor began banging on the inside of the cockpit, the flame thrower shot orange globules against a white-linen background and the man with the stick began striking the fuselage to simulate its state of distress. Eventually, the pilot managed to pry open the cockpit and thrust his head into the jet stream of a wind maker that tousled his hair. "Cut!" The brunette in the steam bath did it better, true, but the scene looked fine to me and I couldn't understand why it took all day to shoot nor why, when I saw the completed film in a theater months afterward, it flashed by so quickly I hardly knew it was there. Whatever the painter's skill, I was learning, no matter how subtle or quick his brush, the painted clouds would never be more than a small piece of the sky.

When my father died, it was decided that my brother and I should not go to the funeral. Instead, a friend of the family, a writer named Marty, took us to see The Lavender Hill Mob--art straining to deny mortality--and we laughed like fools as Alec Guinness made good his escape, spiraling down the steps of the Eiffel Tower, carrying in his hand, like a Magritte miniature or an image in a mirror, a model of the same edifice, cast in purest gold. But at the end of his story, as he stood up in a South American café, we saw that he was handcuffed and reality, ever preponderant, clubbed us over the head. Tearless, we returned to the cartoon: My uncle, my father's identical twin, filled the breach, as if to persuade us that life was double exposure, a retake, and that all losses in it could be redeemed. Yet I did not stir for over a year but kept to the TV, where, against all taste and better judgment, the poor dumb rabbits in Of Mice and Men and a ninth-inning homer in The Jackie Robinson Story forced me to weep.

• • •

I did not discover until I started college that the medium I had accepted as an appendage of myself, as a by-product of my own primary processes, had a history, a life of its own stretching back to trains puffing into stations, husky nudes doing gymnastics and kaleidoscopic horses flying along upon a single hoof. In the late Fifties, Yale had two undergraduate, one law-school and any number of French, Italian and German Club film societies. I saw most of the important American movies I had missed along the way; and while some of them (one or two films each of Vidor, Welles, Flaherty, Huston, Ford, Hitchcock) were impressive, it became more and more clear to me that this country had produced only two geniuses in the medium: Griffith and Chaplin. It was no less clear that it possessed a genius for a kind of folk cinema that--more expressive of social mythology than of individual point of view--manifested itself not in any one figure but in a collective genre: the Western, the gangster film and, above all, the comedy of the Twenties and Thirties, especially those of Keaton, Fields, Laurel and Hardy, Lloyd and the Marx brothers. (Some commentators actually hold the opinion that Jerry Lewis belongs in the company of these men. Jerry Lewis!)

Chaplin remains by himself. It sounds odd, I know, but because I saw his films when I was emerging from adolescence, and because each of them is built upon an almost spastic recoil from the inhuman (poverty and homelessness in shorts such as Easy Street and The Immigrant, the military in Shoulder Arms, power over others in The Great Dictator), they formed for me a definition of manhood. In his greatest work, the dehumanizing forces are harder to define, and dreadful. Yet the alienation that reduces the hero of Modern Times to a twitching automaton is instantly dissipated when the tic is applied to a pair of knockers instead of a set of nuts. In City Lights, the brutality of the boxing match, itself the epitome of the strains of lovelessness that run through the film, is dispelled in the grace of a ballet: similarly, in The Gold Rush, the loneliness of the Klondike cabin, table set for a New Year that never arrives, is abolished when Charlie--it is one of the great moments in art precisely because it reaffirms the primacy of art, the waltz of the imagination infinitely more beautiful than the polka in the boom town below--performs the dance of the rolls. The Gold Rush also provides a kind of theory of cartoons: When Mack Swain gets hungry, that is, when he collapses into, becomes a victim of his instincts, the world becomes animated and Charlie a chicken. Moreover, because all of Chaplin's characters are on the verge of losing their grip, of being reduced to monster, madman, murderer, militarist, machine, the whole of his work is at once the exemplification of Bergson's idea that the perception of the inhuman in the human is the source of laughter and its critique, since the battle to remain a man is usually won and since, in all his films but especially in Limelight, the real struggle is not against the inhuman as much as the unhuman, that decay and dissolution and final darkness waiting, like a bad audience, just outside the shrinking circle of light in which Keaton and Chaplin pound the piano and saw the violin.

Still, I did not become fully conscious of film as film, as a separate art, until I saw works that were foreign, not only to my language, country and experience but alien to that notion of quickness, pace, hurry--Charlie bending to tie his shoe and the seltzer striking the face of the matron behind him, all speeded up by the gears of modern projectors--built into the very word movie. I think the best example of this sort of care for the image itself is the bridge in Ten Days That Shook the World, which rises in my memory as 15 years ago it did to my eye, calmly, silently, massively, while history, a dead horse in traces, slid down the planks, revealed now, the grain examined, the pattern lingered over, so that we should have time to comprehend this wood, its paradoxes--solidity and movement, nature and revolution--and its role: ineluctably to sunder the past. Carl Dreyer, too, took the time to explore his images fully; and so, recently, did Pietro Pasolini in The Gospel According to St. Matthew. What the bridge, the face of Joan and the faces of the Disciples share, aside from this depth of realization, are their inherent grandeur and the scope of the story of which they form a part. When Eisenstein (The General Line), Dreyer (Day of Wrath) and Pasolini (Accatone) turn this technique upon material of less than the greatest epic stature, the results are bathetic, as if shots of grasses waving back and forth could hold any possible interest apart from the power of their roots to gather and split the earth. It is a lesson that, in equal and opposite ways, Hollywood (chariots at a mile a minute, outsized arks) and An-tonioni (snail-paced Ferraris and--Red Desert--mystic scows) have failed to learn.

The post-War Italian films were just beginning to be widely shown when I was an undergraduate and they were even more foreign to me than the grab bag of classics I had thrust my fist into. This was not so much a matter of technique (airplanes flying over nonactors, imperfections in sunlight) as of subject: For these films were always about--not poverty; that was simply a given, not subject to scrutiny--labor, and I was a student who had worked a total of three hours in a neighborhood Orange Julius stand. De Sica, of course, was the great interpreter of livelihood, almost always going at it indirectly--what it meant to be out of work (Miracle in Milan) or about to lose it (Bicycle Thief) or to be retired from it (Umberto D)--and always conveying it in images that juxtaposed the stasis of the dispossessed, lying on a bed, sitting on a curb, leaning, hands in pockets, against a wall, with the anonymous scurrying of those seized with employment. The history of Italian cinema since has been the further development of his impulse. Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, in which a family moves north seeking work, provides a bridge to the best contemporary directors--Olmi, Germi, Monicelli--whose most successful films have been closely concerned, again, with the nature of work. Even Fellini's two best movies--I Vitelloni and 8-1/2s--are about the relationship of experience and labor, in the one case an essentially external study of ordinary men with nothing to do; in the other, an internal investigation of an artist unable to work.

For me, the best films of all were the French movies of the Thirties, from René Clair's charming Sous les Toits de Paris (one scene of which bridges perfectly, though in reverse, the transition from silent film to sound: The characters are all gathered in a bar, disputing in those early self-conscious voices always on the brink of song, when the camera pulls back and farther back, behind the dirty glass window, and suddenly everything is quiet; there are only the dim characters and their gestures and shrugs, exhibits in a museum of the cinema) and A Nous la Liberté (in which everyone does start singing) of 1929 and 1931, through Vigo's Zéro de Conduite and L'Atalante of 1933 and 1934, to the two masterpieces of Renoir that close out the decade--and a larger epoch as well-- La Grande Illusion (1938) and La Régle du Jeu (1939). The latter film, the finest ever made, contains the most subtle performance I have seen, that of Marcel Dalio as the wealthy Jew who has invited a good part of the French aristocracy to his château. At one point, he gathers them all--the wife he is losing, the man who is stealing her away, the dukes and counts who despise him even as they hunt his woods for rabbits and wolf his food--for an evening's entertainment. They sit in a semicircle of darkness while he unveils his surprise, his treasure, his happiness, the largest of the music boxes he is always collecting, winding up and letting tinkle, ignored, behind glass cases. It is a complicated affair, full of little men who beat the drum and blow the horn on cue; and as he sets it in motion, the camera moves in on him, so that we see only his face on the same level as his toy, which now whirs and grinds and--poom! poom!, tsang, tsang, tsang, ta-ta! ta-ta!--makes cheap tin music, a mockery of the usual chimes. The juxtaposition of this gearbox--rigid, dumb, inartistic, dead, finally, despite its gross imitation of the gestures and sounds of life--and the smiling Jew, with his unmistakable display of life, the glistening of the eye, the white handkerchief dabbing at his lips, his finger crooked into his collar, resembles Chaplin's struggle of human and nonhuman forces, except that the conflict is made inexpressibly poignant here by our own sense of the man's desperate need of the machine's success and his growing realization--indicated by a widening smile--of its utter failure. We sit disguised as noblemen, lost in the dark.

The films I have been discussing were shown on university property--fitting enough, considering the college's role as guardian and interpreter of the past, and my own attempts to tell a Sassetta from a Cimabue. But there was another theater in town, the Lincoln, shaped like a barn, its rafters exposed; and in the intervals between And God Created Woman, we saw the best that the world was currently doing in film. It is hard to express what that meant to us. First, not only did we spend most of our time in the study of the past, but even contemporary art seemed dominated by old men from another age: Stravinsky, Picasso, Nabokov, Corbusier, Wright. Suddenly, there were a dozen men, some hardly older than we, who were--I will not say, "speaking to the young," that is an absurd idea--who were fixing a mutual experience, pinning down a mutual world, distilling a shared thought, expanding, expounding a common consciousness. Second, there was the incredible quality of the work being done. It remains true that with the single exception of Stanley Kubrick, Hollywood had ceased to be interesting. But on a world-wide scale, the years 1956--1962 are the richest in the history of film. Here are the third-stringers, just those directors who, relatively new, established their reputations in America during this period, and just those who happened to please me: Kubrick, of course: Lindsay Anderson (This Sporting Life), Antonioni, Cacoyannis (Electra), Mizoguchi (Ugetsu), Olmi (Il Posto), Richardson (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The Entertainer), Visconti (Roc-co and His Brothers), Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds). Doing slightly less than the greatest work, and doing it consistently, were François Truffaut and Satyajit Ray. Above all, of course, stood Bergman, Fellini and Kurosawa, who, in movie after movie, determined the shape of our imaginings.

Perhaps I can make clear what the shaping of imagination means to me by referring to the last scene in the single best film of these three men. In Kurosawa, it is an old man sitting in a park, the snow coming down, swinging back and forth. In Bergman, it is another old man, asleep, bursting into either dream or death. (Or if, as I sometimes think, Through a Glass Darkly is a greater achievement than Wild Strawberries, it is a gray helicopter rising in a gray sky, followed by a young boy saying, "Father spoke to me!") And in Fellini, it is an artist, clearly the director himself, who stands in the circus ring of his past. What the scenes have in common is that they each represent the resolution of the individual's struggle to reach a buried aspect of himself, to break through to that part of himself that crouches behind the barrier of repression. Each, then, is a scene of liberation. The old men of Ikiru and Wild Strawberries have become encrusted by the municipal and academic bureaucracies in which they work; their personalities are such a maze of hallways and corridors, grillwork and rubber stamps that when another person or a feeling eventually gets through, they simply split like ripe fruit and die. Each man's growing relatedness with himself is concretely expressed in his ability to contact the world, to reach and hold another in reality; hence, the repressed unconscious, the love at last, that floods them--and breaks them--rushes into the outside world as well and takes shape before our eyes in the form of Japanese snow and Scandinavian sunlight, pouring down, covering all, merging death and dream. Similarly, when Guido, in 8-1/2, is finally able to relate to the buried figures of his past, to accept them into his consciousness, they dance so wildly in him that they, too, materialize before our eyes and circle about, obedient to the circusmaster. My final point about these scenes is that they are the natural complement of what I saw projected on the whorehouse wall. In Tijuana, the raw material of my own unconscious shot out on the thin pencil of light. Ordinarily, there is a chasm between such images and what life offers us by way of fulfillment. But in this rare case, as I have said, reality and dream, image and object dovetailed; and as the shadows played on one side of the wall, their substance beckoned on the other. This is what happens to Guido and the two old men as their inner lives flow to the world outside them. And, more important, because the films of which they form the core are perfect works of art, because, as it were, they supply all the reality the Mexican movie leaves out, the whole arc of significant and ordered experience, it is what happens to us, the audience, too. That is the nature of catharsis; and the only acceptable, because solely satisfying aesthetic experience is that which offers us--either in palpable form, What kind of job you like? I do any job on you, or in the whole shaping of the imagination--such relief.

It has been all downhill from there. I no longer measure time by the price of admission but by my steady progress from the back of the theater to a myopic position in the first ten rows and by the obvious fact that all too often, I am the oldest person in the Bleeker Street Cinema line. But the medium is aging, too. Every art imposes its own rate of decay: Dramatists, artists, architects tend to improve as they get older and every composer's best symphony is his ninth. But there are no Stravinskys and Picassos in cinema. Every great director ends either in silence, like Keaton, Griffith and Chaplin (A Countess from Hong Kong does not exist), or in travesty. Hence, René Clair makes films like I Married a Witch and The Ghost Goes West; De Sica, the realist, turns to fluff (Marriage Italian Style); Welles folds faster than a Young American Novelist; Ford, Huston, Hawks, Hitchcock parody themselves; and, saddest case of all, Renoir turns out rubbish like French Cancan, in which Jean Gabin can only sit with his cane, beet-red with embarrassment. In the movies, as in lyric poetry, the artist tends to burn out fairly early; there has not been, there will not be, a Bacchae, an Oedipus at Colonus, the last masterpiece making radiant the life and work that have gone before.

The process has already affected the work of the men who meant the most to me such a short time ago. Only Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove, 2001), Anderson (If) and Ray (The Music Room, Mahanagar), working slowly, have managed to escape and even improve. Truffaut has been destroyed. His talent lay in his ability to combine and balance contrary, even self-contradictory emotions and forms. In Shoot the Piano Player, for example, a character for whom we care is about to be shot by someone who, an instant before he pulls the trigger, twirls the gun ludicrously, making us laugh, then suck in our breath as his victim slides, beautifully wounded, down a geometric slope of snow. Or, from the same film, a young man arrives at an audition as a young woman, clutching her hapless violin, departs. We follow her through architectural courtyards, glittering glass, mounting arpeggios, a world that takes into account her failure even as it widens and spins, giddy at her competitor's success. These are such delicate, temporal achievements that, in any case, they could not survive two or three films, and the trouble I spotted at the end of the otherwise admirable Jules and Jim--in which we are forced to feel and told what to think through the superimposition of extraneous images (book burnings and the crematory in which Jeanne Moreau flames like a Polish Jew)--has turned into the simple-mindedness of Soft Skin, Farenheit 451 and Stolen Kisses. Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits was an attempt to remake 8-1/2 but with a woman replacing a man, supernatural froufrou the strategies of a cornered psyche and boredom the struggle to do meaningful work; that Satyricon is at one and the same time completely fascinating and utterly boring is a sure sign that it has been captured by the very decadence it wished to expose. Kurosawa seems in the grip of self-imposed formulas. Bergman withdraws. What are we to make of this? The process of external corruption (usually called "Hollywood") that is continually being blamed for the demise of someone like Eisenstein or Clair is only a trivial manifestation of what may be an internal rule of decay. We're told the universe is speeding up and stars are always slipping out of sight; it may well be that the entire life cycle of the medium is similarly impelled toward oblivion, a CinemaScopic dinosaur a mere half century after its first rapid blinking at the light.

But the real reason the contemporary cinema is in danger is that it suffers from an all-pervasive slackness; and art, as my friend the Pumpkin would say, cannot exist without tension: the recalcitrance of form, the stubborn integument between conscious and unconscious experience, and that seemingly unbridgeable gap between the individual artist and an unsatisfactory world. These barriers are all down. There is no spring to imagination. Any random thought will do. The mind of the director is no longer required to leave its refuge, to journey out--like a primitive's soul in sleep or like the hazarding of the world by Bergman's, Kurosawa's, Fellini's former heroes--into an essentially hostile and disorderly reality. It is just that journey and that struggle, in which the passion of the protagonist engages and eventually dissolves the surrounding circumstance--Dumbo's mother rearing up in a world of flapping canvas and toppling tents; the girl in the steam bath suddenly emerging from a chamber of swirling mist; history breaking up against the planks of Eisenstein's bridges--that informs virtually all the films I have been discussing.

Given a sensibility that finds reality as it stands acceptable, the tension between artist and world is gone and paradise cannot be regained, because the director, busy celebrating, does not know it has been lost. All films become one species or another of cinéma vérité and the screen is filled with waitresses and schoolgirls declaring--without editing or comment--their philosophies of life. There are only two possible attitudes toward the abdication of imagination represented by what the Maysles call Direct Cinema. The first they themselves illustrated when, at a screening of their new film, Salesman, they handed out a quotation from Francis Bacon to the effect that the highest calling of a man is to look closely at reality and report back accurately, without mitigation, what he sees. The second position was expressed by my uncle, the screenwriter, when he got into a cab on Central Park West and asked for Kennedy Airport. As the taxi started crosstown, the driver leaned back and said. "You know, life is a funny thing----"

"East Side terminal, please," my uncle said, and the conversation was closed.

Direct Cinema is only a small step away from the Mod films--that endless parade of Morgans and Petulias and Joannas, with their drooling dedication to the surfaces of things, the shine on a car or the cut of the clothes and their many lessons on the subject of cool--that draw the longest lines. What is contemptible about such films is that they pretend to criticize what, in fact, they celebrate or, rather, advertise, hanging with open lenses upon the texture and appliances of a life style whose content is never open to question. In fact, these films do not know what to think about their subject; their moral horizon is so completely flattened that becoming pregnant is no more serious than having a flat tire (Breathless); coming across a dead body in a photographic negative, less important than a choice of shirt and tie. I have no doubt that if Francis Bacon were alive, he would be a still photographer; and the reason Blow-Up is a landmark in the evolution of the Mod sensibility is that it documents the precise moment at which the values of the snapshot--whatever is is right, if taken at the proper angle--pre-empted those of the film.

We have reached a point where everyone--critic, audience, film maker--is possessed by this sensibility. Z, for example, won the New York Film Critics' Award, an Oscar for best foreign film of the year and immense popular success. When such matters as the looseness of plot (where does the man who is beaten on the truck, and who could explode the whole story, disappear?), the ludicrous-ness of episode (prowling hospital corridors to knock witnesses on the head) and shallowness of character (Irene Papas' wife) are raised, the answer is always, invariably, as if this settled the issue for good, "Well, it really happened." The difference between Z and Pontecorvo's superb The Battle of Algiers is precisely that between a sensibility satisfied with what really happened and an imagination capable of maintaining the strange, melancholy impartiality of history.

It remained for an essentially frivolous man such as Godard to take the randomness of cinéma vérité and the flattened moral perspective of the Mod movie and combine them in the shopworks of a mind convinced that whatever happens to come to it is interesting. I think that in many ways, Weekend is the worst film I have seen, though it is true I saw only ten minutes of Crazylegs, All American. There is one scene in Weekend--easily the longest in the film--in which the camera moves slowly up a long line of cars stalled in a colossal traffic jam. Every now and then, we go by an accident, a burned-out chassis, a stunned family at the side of the road; and this, we have been told, is a metaphor for the human condition comparable with Dante's Inferno. It must be said at once that there is all the difference in the world between a character's and a camera's shrugging off the violence of life, and Godard is not able to make that distinction--because, in an almost psychopathic sense, he is incapable of maintaining a point of view separate from his actors', of taking any stance apart from the raw sense material that strikes his chatoyant lens. Hence, it is he, not the poor humans whose condition his film supposedly portrays, who is casual in the face of death. Moreover, the director has evidently told his actors to improvise some business in their stalled automobiles; and, as his camera dollies down the line of cars, we see people picnicking, arguing, throwing a red ball from sun roof to sun roof (a particularly witty touch), bleeding to death on the soft shoulder. Again, Godard treats each act as if it had the same value and claim upon our attention, which, in aesthetic terms, means the utter annihilation of irony, since character, camera and audience are all reduced to the same level of awareness and feeling.

Compare the total affectlessness of such a scene with the way Truffaut once hurled us from hilarity to horror or with another accident scene: In Clouzot's Wages of Fear, two trucks loaded with nitroglycerin are driven over an extraordinarily dangerous route--a half mile apart, for safety's sake--toward an oil-rig fire that is burning out of control. The entire drama resides in the trucks' struggle for a little more life; and, despite cliffs and collapsing bridges, oily swamps and our own conviction that sooner or later, one or both must explode, they manage to keep moving. Then, in a moment of relative calm, one of the drivers relaxes by rolling a cigarette. Suddenly, the grains of tobacco disappear from the square of paper and, even before we realize we have seen a flash of light, and long before we hear the explosion, we know the other truck has blown. The director's imagination has permeated every aspect of the situation so thoroughly that reality is transformed, bending like light to the pull of a moral dimension: A truck large enough to crush a man (which it does in the course of the film) is represented fully by a few flakes of tobacco hardly heavier than air; and when we arrive at the spot, half a mile distant, there is nothing to be seen. But in the work of Godard, the screen is cluttered with random collisions, molecules banging together, miscellaneous, mindless, idiotic. The quick bright movements of the cinema are at last overcome by a vast entropy; the last energy seeps from the world.

One would think the place to get it back--indeed, the place to repair from any decadent art--would be the underground. The name itself implies a journey to the interior of things, to vital sources of energy, to hell, or the unconscious, the freshets of the imagination. The situation at present is simple. There is no underground. How could there be, when all barriers are down, when the very existence of repression--and, hence, the concept of the unconscious itself--has been called into doubt?

Warhol is to the underground what Godard is to the New York Film Festival. His talent is less but his ego quite as large. Having shot twice as much film as he could use for The Chelsea Girls, and not being able to bear the excision of a single frame that he had taken, he simply divided the footage in half and showed both parts simultaneously, calling the experience aleatory art. The moral affectlessness of Godard is matched by the sexual affectlessness of Warhol and the underground as a whole, since, after all, the idea of a desire that has gone unfulfilled, the notion of the forbidden, the concept that lies behind the word no is preposterous to it. The best example of this mockery of those of us who live outside Eden is the opening sequence of a famous Stan Brakhage trilogy. Vein. The first shot zooms us quickly into an open vagina, then backs out the frame of spread legs, then zooms in again, then out, then in, but with an ever-faster thrust, as if the camera were tumescent, tipped with our bulging eyes. Of course, we're going wild in the audience, until, subliminally at first, we make out the odd detail of sheet, straps and swollen belly. Obviously, Brakhage is not equating childbirth and intercourse in order to eroticize the former but to anesthetize the emotions that accompany the latter. We are left shamed in our seats, a whole system of values, along with that integument between conscious and unconscious experience ruptured, discarded, lying at our feet, candy wrappers, popcorn bags.

The Duck still goes to movies, but less and less for the film that is showing and more and more--as in the days when we sneaked in for the obscure sense of victory--just to be sitting there, my knees up on the back of the seat in front of me, my neck on the rim of my own, the whole back of my head pleasantly going numb. I have been thinking about those scenes in which Chaplin and Keaton and Marcel Dalio clung to their lives by the thread of what was self-evidently a ridiculous art. I remember sitting one afternoon in the nearly deserted Strand theater in Oxford. It was perhaps the third time I had seen Paths of Glory and I was dumfounded to find myself weeping uncontrollably at the final, familiar scene: A German girl, a prisoner, is brought before a crowd of French soldiers and forced to sing. She can barely perform, the soldiers curse and jeer; and yet, as she continues, and persists, clinging to her life on a voice that is largely out of tune, the room grows calm and the hostile world, like a charmed bear, relents.

I believe I understand. These scenes, and the struggle they depict, are really plays within plays, or films within films, a single theater folded within hundreds of others: the Village, the Bruin, the Bay, the Elmira, the Bleeker, the Crown, the Cameo in New York, where I was so frightened by the men who had taken over the men's room to deal drugs that I could not urinate; the theater in Jackson, Tennessee, that we integrated in the summer of 1964 and where the manager whispered to us as we went out, so no one else could hear, "You all come back": the theater in Israel where the screen became an acrostic of quadrupedal subtitles and where one's neck was soon covered with damp sunflower seeds; the auditorium at University High where I saw Viva Zapata in a crowd of Mexicans; and the hole-in-the-wall in Verona that played The Great Dictator to giggling Italian men; the anonymous theater where a young girl screamed and fainted in the middle of The Thing; the Lincoln; and, of late, the New Yorker, around the corner at 89th and Broadway, where I go in midafternoon, when the house is empty and the popcorn machine unfilled, and where I occasionally see a film like Bresson's Balthazar or Murnau's Sunrise, the first about a donkey, the second about the mystery of married love--animals again, folk tales, fairy stories--and I return to my beginning. These theaters are the arenas of our lives, where, in darkness, surrounded by innumerable souls, crooked eclipses 'gainst, our glory fight, and we cling for life to the flutter in a ghost-pale beam of light.